ABSTRACT
This chapter can but serves as an introduction, or dated postscript, to the many 'in-prints' of the interfolds of African writing and gender. The attempt, nevertheless, is to fashion or re-fashion a narrative of the inscriptions of gender in African writing, a story of ellipses that has its own ellipses and yet remains opportune. The tyranny of a gender differential is thus potentially and historically imperialistic. In the writings of African women, there is a notable disengagement with the isolated elevation of gender as an all-absorbing determinant. Canonically speaking, modern African writing may be said to begin with Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka. In Achebe's writing an interplay between mimeticism and ironic mimicry may already be discerned with particular reference to competing depictions of Africa. Critics writing about Achebe have focused on what Abdul JanMahomed has called the Manichean Aesthetic, that is, the dialectic in which anti-colonialist writers confront and seek to reverse colonialist writing.
