The African Womanist Vision in Vera's Works

Summary This article analyses the brand/s of feminism depicted in Vera's selected works as articulated in Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994) and The Stone Virgins (2002), in an attempt to determine her feministic vision. Vera's writings foreground female discourse in that the subject of her fiction is gender specific. In Sign and Taboo (Muponde & Taruvinga 2003), the editor suggests that Vera works outside any identifiable literary tradition, and seems to challenge reading models of any attempt to classify her as a specific kind of writer. This article, however, will attempt to place Vera's selected works within the conceptual framework of African womanism, an Afrocentric feminist ideology within the feminist paradigm. Vera seems to adopt the main tenets of African womanism as her selected works show women not only as victims of the patriarchal and colonial order, but also as an essential complementary part within an African family or communal unit. Her works centre not only on gender, but also reflect on nationalism, identity and are steeped in historicity. Much of the criticism of Vera's works by female critics has come mainly from Western literary critics whose perspectives are somewhat different from those of an African womanist. Taking the latter stance in this paper is done with the hope that the reader, as well as the writer of this article, will have a clearer understanding and conception of African womanism as a particular brand of black feminism.