ABSTRACT
Drawing on the global feminist movement and its manifestations in northern and sub-Saharan Africa, this chapter compares the use of space in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) to discuss the formative influences of the environment on the female subject during decolonisation. The chapter supplements and undercuts the networks of the British Empire across Africa by juxtaposing them with shared oral and spiritual traditions, and institutional modes of reading north and south of the Sahara. It elaborates on the way feminist movements in Africa have reworked these oral traditions to construct united “biological” nations for their own purposes.
