Challenges of writing African women's histories

Abstract

This chapter is a discourse on the challenges of writing African women history. Scholars of women history are faced with quite a number of challenges when documenting women history. The challenges range from problems of cultural difference, patriarchy, paucity of sources on women histories, language barrier, financial constraints, unwillingness by some women to divulge information, insecurity and threat to life, poor power supply, equipment failure, dissuasion from third parties, and infrastructural difficulties. The long neglect of women's history in mainstream works on African history due to the above challenges created a documentary gap that partly led to women's history, both past and present, often appearing as anthologies. These challenges have contributed a lot to the poor documentation of African women histories overtime especially in the precolonial and the colonial period thereby leading to the distortion of African history in its entirety. However, in spite of these challenges bedeviling scholars of African women history, writing the history of African women must be encouraged because it is a vital and successful field of study, and because it has implications for the way African history is documented, understood, and interpreted.