The Changing Roles of African Women: 1800 to date

I once remarked to my friend who teaches at my old college, "Oh, I would love to come and deliver a guest lecture" and he has taken me up on it. The subject? The Changing Roles of African Women: 1800-1990. My rection "Oh, no", "I do not have the time", "I need months to research".

The conclusion? I am delivering the guest lecture this Friday mainly because I think it's a worthwhile thing to do - it presents herstories to young people - and it's a subject which I am very interested in (but need to do a whole lot more research on). I was also inspired by the motivation of the teacher who is leading this class and it is simply that there is not enough taught about the history of African women.

Putting together this presentation has reminded me of the importance of documenting our own stories and in this day and age putting that information into cyber space. There were some women i googled (Madam Tunubi and Madam Efunsetan - who were women who had taken part in the slave trade although the trade as a whole was carried out by men)and what I got back was minimal. I did get the impression that some information about these women were in books BUT this information needs to be online. Online is where a lot of people go to for research.

What are your thoughts? Is online research the future or is it for lazy people who cannot be bothered to read books? What else needs to be done to document the stories of African women? I think we all need to take responsibility for the latter. I am currently interviewing my grand aunt with the goal of writing her biography.

Nana Sekyiamah
Programme Officer
Fundraising & Communications