With Lari Williams

As the nation’s women achieve recognition in political and public service, so they should endeavor to contribute to educating the nation through writing. Encouraging women in aggressive competitive sports will destroy family units, feminity, finesse, and the total essence of womanhood, and nation building.

More than half the world’s female athletes have difficulties in making babies and thereby denied the experience of motherhood. Which is very necessary for nation building. Maybe the world population control body thinks it’s one safe way of making a good cut in world population growth rate.

Well, with the addition of female soccer, boxing, wrestling to their efforts, the world should make a drastic cut in population growth. This maybe seen as a great achievement in that direction whereas, we could also see that the world will be losing the graceful gift of feminity in womanhood and would have bred lot of hard women who have no time to bring forth the future generation and teach them that embrace is not a bear hug.

Any athlete, footballer, wrestler or boxer prays to last long in the sport at least up to his or her mid-thirties before motherhood.

Our women should be encouraged towards creativity in the arts. Writing and painting has been a strong endowment of African women though we have had very few successful female writers such as Mable Segun, Molara Ogundipe-Lesley, Zulu Shofola and of course, the grand lady of Africa women writers, Flora Nwapa.

We have very few painters such as Theresa luck who even during the 60s did some great artistic works and mounted fabulous exhibitions.

There are very few women among African writers. Written Literature came to be in Africa soon after the introduction of the alphabets. Then why is it so? Well, a case for the women is that school was for boys.

Now girls are admitted to schools, and they have proved brilliant writers. Such women as Mrs. Flora Nwapa, one of the first African authoresses who wrote two novels with central female characters.

Our women should help keep the artistic flame burning bright, especially at the cradle level, that’s the theatre, where writing is the feeding bottle.

It may be too late to advocate the eradication of such sports especially now that the world has embraced them, but we should not make so much fuss about them, or put too much glamour into them and therefore attract too many young females in that direction ignoring other careers such a teaching, nursing, law or medicine and most important of all, sincere loyalty to the marriage institution and the natural duty of procreation.

Where is the world going, with tobacco snuffing, pot smoking women, operating as lumber-jacks, wrestlers, boxers, footballers, and no mothers? Lovers, dancers, and painters.

We used to ask what will big boys do without graceful girls to fall in love with? The way the girls are going, they will never know the embrace from the bear hug grip and at light out, the feel of two men on the wrestling mat, and love-making becomes a contest.

Braced by the might of education and opportunities, the African authoresses are no more confined to the private feminine spheres. Since the end of the seventies, women writers like Micere Mug from Kenya or Aminata Sow from Senegal have started to deal with general social and political themes.

A sociologist, Ssow tall touches on sore points of Senegalese society in her books. “Le Revenant” and “La greve des battu” without taking sides or indulging in moral censure. She acts as an eyewitness, in an effort to contribute to a process of self-betterment.

I believe that the role of the African women in nation building is heavily laid on the laps of the female writers. Books can be entertaining which is therapeutic. Plays carry moral messages and a cultured nation is built.

A clarion call to awake African women writers to put into play that female endowment of patience and detailed expression of thoughts on paper either in narrating an incident or the bite in the criticism of an opinion.

Since the beginning of the eighties, controversial books have been written by women from strict Muslim families, such as Marima Ba, who wrote a trenchant indictment of Islamic polygamy, and the wide circulation of her book provoked public reflection on polygamy, on it’s modern degenerative forms which may well help to change attitudes on the subject.

We believe that regardless of whether their political, ideological or social emphasis, all African authoresses have one thing in common. They do not seek refuge in aesthetics or confine themselves to children, the church or the kitchen.

They want their share of overall responsibility and are convinced that they have important contributions to make to social development. And in this respect, they are fortunate that due to the accomplishments of women in traditional societies, their voices are today being heard and listened to very seriously.