ABSTRACT
Childbearing and motherhood have paradoxical meanings in African societies. On one hand, they demonstrate women’s power in ensuring the survival and continuity of their communities; 1 on the other, they are the source of intense anxiety, conflict and contradiction within the communities themselves. As cultural concepts, they encode notions of sexuality that are continually negotiated from different personal and contradictory situations. Such negotiations have been explored in traditional literature and in the work of male writers, but it is the writing of African women that succeeds most in revealing their complex political and gender ramifications. Because women’s art often abolishes divisions between public and domestic spaces, it is able to politicise these concepts in ways that interrogate the very foundations of cultural knowledge. Its struggles with elaborating new meanings and re-inventing language make it the most convenient source for probing issues of gender and politics.
