Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves:
African Women & Critical Transformations, 1994

Naomi Nkealah, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

M
olara Ogundipe-Leslie, author of Re-creating Ourselves: African Women &

Critical Transformations, was an internationally acclaimed gender theorist.

At the time she published Re-creating Ourselves, she was one of few African

women from the continent producing knowledge on African gender theory from an

African-centred perspective. Some of her feminist contemporaries were sociologist Fa-

tima Mernissi (born in Morocco in 1940);1 literary scholar Helen Chukwuma (born in

Nigeria in 1942); and the writers Ama Ata Aidoo (born in Ghana in 1942), Micere

Githae Mugo (born in Kenya in 1942), and Sindiwe Magona (born in South Africa

in 1943). Together, these women spoke and wrote about gender based on their first-

hand experiences of women’s empowerment and disempowerment within their Afri-

can societies. Like her contemporaries, Ogundipe-Leslie was an outstanding intellec-

tual whose ideas propose the combination of scholarly, activist, and developmental

efforts in the project of transforming Africa’s cultural, religious, economic, political,

and ethical landscapes for the benefit of women. Evidence of this view is abundant

in Re-creating Ourselves. The book was published by Africa World Press in Trenton,

New Jersey, in 1994 and brings together essays that Ogundipe-Leslie wrote over a pe-

riod of two decades, from the 1970s to the 1990s.2 The essays exemplify her multiple

accomplishments: as a literary critic, a social critic, a women’s rights activist, a founder

of women’s organizations, and an educator.

Born on December 27, 1940, in Lagos, Ogundipe-Leslie (named Abiodun Omalara

Ogundipe at birth) attended universities inNigeria before proceeding to LeidenUniversity,

This work is based on research supported wholly by the National Research Foundation of South Africa
(grant number 136135).

History of Humanities, volume 9, number 2, fall 2024.
© 2024 Society for the History of the Humanities. All rights reserved. Published by The University of

Chicago Press for the Society for the History of the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1086/731865

1. See Nadia Bouras’s essay on Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Mus-
lim Society in this issue.

2. There is only one original publication of Re-creating Ourselves, with 262 pages and ISBN num-
ber 0-86543-412-3. In my research, I could not find a reprinted version or second edition of the book.

369



where she obtained her doctorate degree. Like many of her contemporaries, she worked

inNigeria before joining themigrant labor force of university professors in North Amer-

ica.3 She published Re-creating Ourselves in 1994 as a way of consolidating her scholarly

writing over many years. Several chapters in the book were published previously in jour-

nals and books. For example, chapter 3, “The FemaleWriter andHer Commitment,”was

initially published with the same title in the journal African Literature Today.4 Similarly,

chapter 1, “African Women, Culture and Another Development,” appeared in the jour-

nal Présence Africaine under the name Leslie Omolara Ogundipe.5 Beside Re-creating

Ourselves, Ogundipe-Leslie wrote other books. Working with Carole Boyce Davies, she

edited the two-volumeMoving Beyond Boundaries.6 In addition to her critical writing,

she published the poetry collection Sew the Old Days and Other Poems.7 Nevertheless,

she is most famous for her theory of stiwanism, which she coined based on the acronym

STIWA (Social Transformation IncludingWomen in Africa). At the heart of stiwanism

is the need for African women to drive development in their societies, working in part-

nership with men to do so, so that change can be holistic. These ideas are plotted out in

detail in chapter 18 of Re-creating Ourselves.

Re-creating Ourselves was seen as an important book at the time it was published

because it broke the cycle of male hegemony in scholarship on women’s representation

in African literature and presented an alternative narrative that directly countered the

masculinist views of African male writers in their fictional representations of African

women. Florence Stratton’s book Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of

Gender was published in the same year as Re-creating Ourselves and also served as a

feminist intervention that challenged the proliferation of patriarchal ideas about Afri-

can women by scholars such as Ibekwe Chinweizu.8 Chinweizu was a sexist whose writ-

ings denigrated African women. As Itang Ede Egbung states, “Chinweizu has confined

women to the domestic space because of his perception about women as people who

are bereft of physical strength and mental ability to function in other areas of life.”9

3. Allan, Review of Re-creating Ourselves, 197.
4. Ogundipe-Leslie, “Female Writer and Her Commitment.”
5. Ibid. I noted different iterations of Ogundipe-Leslie’s name during my research. While her name

appears as Molara Ogundipe-Leslie on her book Re-creating Ourselves, she had used other variants of
her name in earlier publications. Thus, it was difficult to determine the exact number of citations she
has garnered over the years. Nevertheless, on Google Scholar, the number of citations for Re-creating
Ourselves was 960 as of September 28, 2023.

6. Boyce Davies and Ogundipe-Leslie, Moving Beyond Boundaries.
7. Ogundipe-Leslie, Sew the Old Days and Other Poems.
8. Chinweizu, Anatomy of Female Power. For a feminist critique of Chinweizu’s book, see

God’spresence, “Chinweizu’s Assumptions of Women’s Power.”
9. Egbung, “Patriarchal Limitations,” 83.

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Stratton’s book challenged this way of writing about African women. It also countered

representations of women in texts by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Wole

Soyinka, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and many others by offering radicalized readings that

exposed the chauvinist subtexts embedded in these works and proposing women’s lit-

erature as an alternative making of African gender relations. As important as it was,

Stratton’s work received criticism on the basis that it failed to analyze male-female re-

lationships from a position of understanding of gender relations in Igbo culture.10 By

contrast, Ogundipe-Leslie’s book, which equally hammered the male guard of writers,

received rave reviews. In a review of the book, Tuzyline Jita Allan noted that “to the

conventional list of colonial and class considerations” that the topic of “Africa’s deval-

uation in the global economy of ideas” had inspired, “Ogundipe-Leslie has added the

neglected category of gender, confident in the belief that the rise of women in Africa

will raise the continent from its current state of dejection and despair to new heights

of resourcefulness and creativity.”11 Thus, Re-creating Ourselves was a remarkable

book of its time because of its role in engineering feminist postcolonial knowledge

amidst a very masculinist body of knowledge.

One of the male writers whose depiction of African women Ogundipe-Leslie boldly

challenges in her book is Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel laureate. In chapter 6 of

Re-creating Ourselves, “The Representation of Women: The Example of Soyinka’s Ake,”

Ogundipe-Leslie praises Soyinka’s account of his childhood life in Ake: The Years of

Childhood (1981) as a boyhood story “charmingly re-created by the adult Soyinka”

but disputes Soyinka’s representation of women in the text, women such as Funmilayo

Ransome-Kuti who led anticolonial protests inNigeria.12 She calls into question Soyinka’s

chauvinist representation of Nigerian women’s political activities between 1947 and 1952

against the colonial government: “Perhaps the greatest historical disservice Soyinka

does the Women’s Movement is to portray it as an unplanned, impulsive, gut reaction

to contemporarymaladministration. Themovement was, in fact, highly organized.”13 It

is obvious here that Ogundipe-Leslie took the patriarchal bull by its twisted horns and

pinpointed the sexism belying Soyinka’s writing about the women’s anticolonial strug-

gles. This is quite a courageous act at a time when many scholars could hardly criticize

Soyinka.

10. See, e.g., Obioma Nnaemeka, “Feminism, Rebellious Women, and Cultural Boundaries.” Ac-
cording to Nnaemeka, Stratton’s book illustrates “the pitfalls of a radical feminist criticism in its full
regalia of arrogance, prejudice, and separatism” (96).

11. Allan, Review of Re-creating Ourselves, 197.
12. Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves, 101.
13. Ibid., 106.

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Ogundipe-Leslie’s outspokenness in addressing matters that had been trivialized or

ignored in existing scholarship sets her book apart from others of her time. One of the

important books that was trending at the time Ogundipe-Leslie published Re-creating

Ourselves is Ifi Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an

African Society, published in 1987. The book is an ethnographic study into gender rela-

tions in an Igbo society in southeastern Nigeria, and the author also looks at how colo-

nialism destabilized women’s power. In a review of a reprint of the book published

by Zed Books in 2015, Kirk Arden Hoppe notes that the book was a politically and

theoretically important book in its postulations of women’s institutional power in pre-

colonial Nigerian Igbo societies but that its limitation was its silence on sexual diversity

matters, thus treating gender in isolation of sexuality.14 In contrast to Amadiume’s si-

lencing of sexuality in her treatise on women in precolonial Igbo society, Ogundipe-

Leslie openly criticizes the “silence and silencing” as she acknowledges that “lesbian

and gay discourses have not yet received earnest attention in African thought.”15 Her

courage to speak about this in her book at a time when the topic of African sexualities

was still a repressed subject signifies her scholarly autonomy, political expressionism,

and social vision.16

Beyond showcasing the writer’s courage, Re-creating Ourselves is a classic of the hu-

manities because it has influenced the feminist thinking of so many African scholars of

different age groups and diverse genders. In the opening chapter of herWomanism and

African Consciousness, Mary Modupe Kolawole engages extensively with Re-creating

Ourselves, arguing that the book disproves claims about African women’s voicelessness.

She notes that Ogundipe-Leslie shows clearly that rural women are speaking up about

their challenges as well as their agency in overcoming these challenges and that it is the

responsibility of critics to listen out for these voices, rather than assuming them

muted.17 In affirming the need for new, authentic terminology for African feminisms,

she draws on Ogundipe-Leslie’s idea of African women “recreating ourselves.” This be-

comes the rationale for launching her own theory of African womanism. Twenty years

down the line, in my own theorization of African feminism based on the South African

literary context, I equally drew on ideas in Re-creating Ourselves to launch my theory of

cameline agency.18 I used particularly Ogundipe-Leslie’s idea of “critical transforma-

tions” to construct cameline agency as a feminist theory of social transformation in

14. Kirk Arden Hoppe, review of Male Daughters, Female Husbands, 499.
15. Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves, 214.
16. The topic of African sexualities has now gained wide scholarly interest as evident in books like

Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader.
17. Mary Modupe Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness, 9.
18. See Nkealah, “Cameline Agency.”

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South African women’s literature. From the perspective of Ogundipe-Leslie’s book, the

women characters represented in my selection of texts critically transform themselves

as well as the spaces within which they operate as “they create social spaces where things

are done differently, in contrast to a past system founded on patriarchal hegemony.”19

Effectively, I borrowed Ogundipe-Leslie’s notion of critical transformation and made

sense of it within a uniquely challenging South African context of women’s subjugation

to racist, sexist, chauvinist, classist, ethnicist, and xenophobic practices.

The example of Kolawole andmyself, whose scholarship has a twenty-year time gap,

clearly illustrates the enduring relevance of Ogundipe-Leslie’s book in the field of Afri-

can feminist studies as it transitions from the veteran scholars to the more contempo-

rary ones. Two other African women whose feminist ideas echo those of Ogundipe-

Leslie are Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. With Ezeigbo

born in 1947 and Adichie in 1977, there is a thirty-year age difference, yet both of them

have expressed feminist ideas that clearly resonate with Ogundipe-Leslie’s ideas in Re-

creating Ourselves. In Snail-Sense Feminism: Building on an Indigenous Model, Ezeigbo

discusses Ogundipe-Leslie’s stiwanism extensively, explaining that it is not an anti-men

theory but rather calls for male-female collaboration in transforming African cultural

practices that oppress women.20 On the basis of this indigenous model of feminism,

Ezeigbo justifies and introduces her own model, which she calls snail-sense feminism.

Ezeigbo’s engagement with Ogundipe-Leslie’s stiwanist ideas in Re-creating Ourselves

goes to show how African feminist scholarship has developed organically over the years

as scholars build on each other’s knowledge to produce new understandings of this

complex terrain called gender. Third-generation Nigerian women writers have been

nourished by this fountain of indigenously produced African feminist knowledge, even

if they do not publicly say so. Adichie has certainly benefitted from this fountain as one

sees in her feminism traces of stiwanist ideas. In her TEDxTalk “WeShould All Be Fem-

inists,”which also exists in book form, Adichie proposes the idea of feminism for every-

one, irrespective of gender.21 The very title of this talk speaks to the concept of feminism

without gender borders. While Adichie’s talk is problematic for inferencing heterosex-

ual men only, it nevertheless strikes one as a direct echo of Ogundipe-Leslie’s words

in chapter 18 of Re-creating Ourselves, in which she states: “I think that feminism is

the business of both men and women anywhere, and in Africa. I think that all men

need to be progressive feminists, committed to a socially just society, wherein a woman

19. Ibid., 123.
20. See Ezeigbo, Snail-Sense Feminism, 17–19.
21. See Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists, 25.

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can realize herself to her fullest potential, if she so chooses.:22 We note here the power

of intertextuality in building knowledge on African feminisms.

The examples provided so far make up only a minuscule part of the body of knowl-

edge that has been influenced byOgundipe-Leslie’s book. Scholars fromall over theworld

researching African women have used this book as a reference point for articulating

knowledge on subjects like women and development in Africa, women’s group activ-

ism, women and democracy, women in politics, women and culture, women and sexu-

ality, women and postcolonialism, and women’s place in religion. Notable scholars who

have cited Re-creating Ourselves in their monographs and journal articles in the last ten

years include Andrea Noorwood, Chielozona Eze, Ange-Marie Hancock, Sylvia Tamale,

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Simidele Dosekun, Cajetan Iheka, and Dobrota Pucherová.23

Significantly, few of these scholars engage with Re-creating Ourselves to contest its

ideas; often, they use the ideas to give theoretical grounding to their own views or to offer

alternative perspectives.

A notable indication of this book’s classical status is that several chapters in the book

have been excavated and reproduced as part of other edited books. For example, the

book Feminism and Race, edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, has a chapter titled “Moving

the Mountains, Making the Links” that is a reproduction of the introduction of Re-

creating Ourselves.24 Similarly, the anthology edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato

Quayson titled African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory includes a re-

production of Ogundipe-Leslie’s chapter 18 on stiwanism.25 That chapters in this book

have journeyed across time and space into other publications points to scholars’ recog-

nition of the enduring merits of the knowledge the book contains.

Ogundipe-Leslie died on June 18, 2019, at age seventy-nine. In a tribute, Adedoyin

Aguoru notes that besides the two biological daughters she left behind, “who bear

the torch of the light she represented, several other daughters of Africa, whom she in-

fluenced with her profundity and Stiwanism, continue to be positively driven and keep

the fire aglow.”26 As one of those daughters, I fully echo Aguoru’s words. Ogundipe-

Leslie may have left this planet, but as scholars in the humanities we are grateful that

she left us with a gift—Re-creating Ourselves—whose value is ageless.27

22. Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves, 230.
23. The publication information for these scholars’ works can easily be accessed by looking at the

citations record for Re-creating Ourselves on Google Scholar.
24. Ogundipe-Leslie, “Moving the Mountains, Making the Links.”
25. Ogundipe-Leslie, “Stiwanism.”
26. Aguoru, “For ‘M.O.’ and the Legacy She Left Us,” 137.
27. For further reading, see Ayodo, review of Re-creating Ourselves; Daniel, “Barren Rivers and Flow-

ery Women”; John, “Culture, Difference and Social Change”; and Mama, “Feminism or Femocracy?”

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