Tracing A Room of One’s Own in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1929–2019

Abstract

This chapter traces the presence of Woolf in sub-Saharan Africa from 1929 to the present day. The historic trajectory starts with the final decades of the British Empire’s colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Kenya (1929–59); continues through the half-century of the postcolonial era (1960–2010); and concludes with the age of globalisation (2011–). For the first part, I examine how Woolf, through the narrator in A Room of One’s Own, asserts that (white) Englishwomen do not have the same urge as their white brothers to possess and to convert someone into imperial property. At the time she wrote this claim, there were real-life white European women who were walking by and writing about Black women in Kenya. In the postcolonial era, when the English Departments in anglophone sub-Saharan African countries were influenced by Leavisism, Woolf’s works would not have been taught. I show how colonialism and its institutional legacies, including university curricula, libraries, and publishing, militate against Woolf’s broader appeal to sub-Saharan Africa-based writers. Finally, in the present day, through online references to A Room, one can see how Woolf’s idea of a room is transformed, throughout anglophone Africa, into a virtual writers’ workshop.