ABSTRACT
Differences among the world’s feminisms are rooted in diverse historical experiences. For the most part, Western feminism (excluding Black American feminism) refl ects European and Euro-American history, while African women are affected by their historical (but quite dissimilar) experience: slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, debt crises, and food crises, to name a few struggles (Aina, 68, 69).2 These widely separate experiences usually show up in English language children’s books from the Western perspective exclusively. That is, we have found in many cases that novels with African characters are essentially Western feminist narratives unloaded on African terrain. Examples examined in upcoming chapters include Cristina Kessler’s two novels, No Condition Is Permanent and Our Secret, Siri Aang; Joëlle Stolz’s The Shadows of Ghadames; Isabel Allende’s Forest of the Pygmies; and Nancy Farmer’s A Girl Named Disaster and The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. The question arises, therefore, will an expanded background in African feminism serve to reduce cultural (and often race-based) biases?
