ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide the contours of ethical agency in African literature. It examines the question of ethics and the politics of the ordinary in literature. Njabulo Ndebele is perhaps the most famous African philosopher and literary scholar to draw attention to the everyday and ordinary in literature as a space for ethical and political intervention. Though he addressed apartheid-era South African writing, his arguments apply to much of African post-colonial writing. The issue of childless marriages has occupied African women’s writing, from the work of pioneer Flora Nwapa in Efuru to an early-twenty-first-century enunciation by Lola Shoneyin in her The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. Nigerian professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Friday Okonofua Ghanaian Professor of Nursing, Ernestine S. Donkor and others have discussed the social and cultural repercussions of childlessness in African societies.
