Clandestine, unsafe abortion is a frequent topic in African feminist novels of the s and s, and the paper proposes that historians should wonder why. It first provides a review of the medical and social scientific literature on induced abortion in Africa, showing how the problem went from one virtual ignorance in through two explosions of research and concern, one gynecological and popular from the late s; another social scientific and epidemiological from the late s.
A close reading of five African novels as artifacts about abortion follows. Each represents abortion as a personal trial inextricably entangled with relationships; and most speak to an individual desire to terminate a pregnancy as an aspect of self-realization.
The paper argues that we need a history of girls seeking modernity in Africa and knotted links among this seeking, fantasy and desire, and their resorting to abortion. These novels should be read and taught not as reflections of the social, but as constitutive objects, posing selves in formation. Historians have much to learn from interrogating fiction as modes of textualization that enable us to rethink form, structure, sequence, and anachrony in historical writing.
If it does not end in death, then there is a danger of infection, sometimes leading to sterility [. The high rate of criminal abortion is probably due to the fact that our African women are marrying much later. Parents do not approve of family planning, especially for young girls [. And his final words were in close alignment with ideas circulating in vernacular chapbooks in market towns in West Africa Eric n.
The vulnerability of teenage girls to botched abortion and preying sugar-daddy figures have become front-page news in the West, more fodder for those moved by images of desperate, poor, and victimized Third World women perhaps, though still an indication of the greater sense of urgency in the global health field about what to do about the high mortality rate from unsafe abortion. Fernande Ake tried to abort a pregnancy with a concoction of wine, nearly frozen Coca-Cola, and sugar.
