Dear Chimamanda, Are We To Be Gender Inclusive Or Just Feminists?

My letter to you is about three things; to regard you in respect of your online story published by the Granta Magazine, the story is entitled Jumping the Monkey Hill .Secondly, your fifty pages talk , now published as a book, under the title; We shall all be feminists, and thirdly in the last, your categorical invasion on the Western psychology as an African writer , and the way the Western culture has as well counter-invaded on your psychology as an African in a post-colonial struggle to prove your worthiness in cultural representation of the broad African society.

My question to you is based on the themes you discussed in the two books or writings cited above. The books are overtly for the voices of African girl child and African Lesbian. You have presented them as the most endangered, oppressed and un-privileged member of the African society. Your incisive portrait of the troubles facing an African girl-child and African lesbian is reported in the Rainbow-online to have even provoked the Swedish Women Lobby organization to translate one of the books, We shall all be Feminists into the Swedish language as Alla Borde Vara Feminister and it is now to be distributed free of charge to the Swedish teenagers; lesbians and un-queered in orientation. This is good, but it is also questionable.

Why are you gender exclusive in you literary adventures by choosing to put on the blinkers and hence be comfortably blind to the plagues of the African boy child and African gay? More concern is this; are deriving your literary popularity from an opportunity in cultural controversy between the North and the South, where the southern cultures are anti- homosexual while the Northern cultures are pro-homosexual, but with ulterior motives of achieving subversion of the status quo of the good family values inherent in the South?

Have you chosen to be a contradiction to the African community like Alexander Sholenystsin and Ayn Rand, they chose to be intellectually capitalists against the socialist cultural forces of the native Russian society for the sake of being recognized easily by the West or like Charlie Chaplin, whose musicology was redolent of Soviet ideology against the current trends in his American society for easy of recognition in the soviet world and its satellites?

The subversions were called intellectual opportunism by the scholars of that time. Are you ready for the label? My suggestion to you is that also write to present Africa as a totality, not Africa as a dehumanized creature, the way you have already dehumanized Africa by arguing that English is an African language, that girl child rights and lesbian rights are the imperative agenda for Africa in your book Jumping the Monkey Hill. Think about these concerns as you keep on writing.

(Alexander Khamala Opicho,
Kenya)