gendered blind spots of the previously received narratives in which nationalism is
constructed almost exclusively in masculinity. That is, whether in his account of the
struggle with respect to sacrifice, and commitment, or his response to the present
dispensation as well as the contemplation of the future as framed inevitably by drift, the
centrality of women is kept in view in a manner that is consistent with the ethos of gender
equality and social equity. This brings us to the question of how we may approach and
address the texture of African contemporary epics as looking back to much older
traditions like those of Sundiata Epic , the Nwido Epic and the Ozidi Saga , among
others.^84 As epics predating colonialism, the way they centralize women goes to give
cogency to African feminists’ assertion that the exclusion of women from the dynamics
of power–economic, social and political– began with colonialism when the chauvinistic
epistemology of Europe was imposed on Africa.^85 Besides, rather than remember and
amplify exclusively the immortalization of only the official heroes after whom various
institutions and sites have been named, Serote also celebrates and immortalizes many
ordinary heroes of the struggle men and women whose names may never feature in
the official account of the struggle. Moreover, in comparison with the western epic
tradition and its unstable narrative essences over the ages having shifted focus from the
heroic public figures in Homeric tradition to something of a personalized venture in
which the poet also assumes the hero as advocated by the Romantics (Paul Cantor 2007:
375) African epic tradition, especially as advocated in Serote’s poetry, continues to
centralize social equity. Thus, the African epic still remains consistent in the way it
adopts a broad-based approach with a view to accommodating all the dynamics that
account for social and historical transformation. Speaking in specific terms about the
values of this approach in Serote, David Attwell (2005:155) remarks that such formal
84
Tony Voss (2006:449), feeding into the existing prejudice against the existence of epic in Africa
contends that the genre is not as developed in Africa because “indigenous black history has not, to a
sufficient degree, generated the imperial or state-making energy that can drive the epic poet.” But it is
important to counter that the kingdoms and empires with which names like Shaka, Sundiata, Ozidi, among
others were associated, in each case, were much larger than some of the largest states that western
imperialist history claimed to have generated. And just as the configuration of these kingdoms and empires
appropriated the complexities kingdom and empire structures so were the epics they generated, comparable
those of the most acclaimed in the European tradition. 85
See Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London:
Zed Books, 1987.