One of my favorite contemporary authors, Pearl Cleage, centers her novels on the interaction of women's lives with the decay of black masculinity instigated by the consumerist, racist era in which we live today. Babylon Sisters, my least preferred of her novels, contains the statements that aptly capture this dynamic.

But the paradox gets even better. The fundamental importance of women's lives to society is articulated by B.J. Johnson, a middle-aged man who re-unites with the love of his life, Catherine Sanderson, after 17 years. The two had parted after graduating from college. B.J., now a journalist, returns to Atlanta, where Catherine lives, to conduct research for a report he hopes to write on the labor and sexual exploitation of Haitian women refugees in the United States. In their first meeting in several years, he tells Catherine that he had initially intended to write about the general impact of refugees on African-American populations, but he eventually decided to concentrate on the plight of the women refugees. Catherine asks him why.

"Because in any population the treatment of women and children always reflects the true values of that community," he replied. "It hits people closer to where they really live." Surprised by his brilliant answer, Catherine remarks that she couldn't have said it better, to which B.J responds, "That's because you said it perfectly the first time."

The "first time" refers to when both B.J and Catherine were students and Catherine was taking a class in feminism that spurred debates between the two. Almost two decades later, B.J. quotes verbatim the words of the younger and passionate Catherine. He says, "I respect the narrative of women's lives..." in reference to debates between the two during which Catherine lamented "men's inability to recognize and respect the narrative of women's lives" to a then skeptical B.J. Obviously, 17 years of experience and life had made him mellow down.

The brilliance of Pearl Cleage's novels is their demonstration of how women's experiences - both the pleasant and the painful - point to the very heart of the African-American community. As her female characters navigate the culture of sexual exploitation of black women at the symbolic level by popular culture and at the physical level by the black men they love, they challenge the male characters come to terms with their collective deterioration and even inspire the main male characters to take responsibility for not only themselves, but also their brothers and the entire community. My favorite of her male characters is Blue Hamilton, who appears in several of her novels. Inspired by an ancient myth of himself as an emperor in a previous life who lost his power when he abandoned his duty to protect women in his own community, Blue is committed to protect the West End of Atlanta by ensuring that men behave as men by respecting women. This commitment comes at a great cost and involves carrying out actions which would unsettle many people's moral sensibilities. And perhaps my favorite of her female protagonists is Joyce Mitchell, an idealist who appears in Cleage's first two novels. Joyce educates young women to value their lives and challenges the men to do the same for the younger men, sometimes locking horns with the men who sometimes feel that she excludes them or even get angry that she expects to much from them. Despite her sometimes naive idealism, she ends up inspiring people to take responsibility to transform their lives as individuals and members of the community.

Pearl Cleage's books, which I read over and over again, challenge me to do what I still lack the courage to do: to see the narrative of my life as a reflection of the world in which I live. I grew up in the excessively puritan environment of the East African Revival that was fading in the late 1970's, and which suppressed not only African traditions, but our humanity, and for women, our femininity. What we wore, how we did our hair, how we spoke and to whom we spoke were always a subject of conversation for men in the public sphere, but a similar conversation about men could only be conducted by women alone in the private sphere.

At every turn, society and the church affirmed that women's lives were inconsequential to the larger destiny of the nation. The few of us girls who were able to attend high school were reminded that our destiny was a choice between getting pregnant and dropping out of school on one hand, and completing school to get married on the other. The great distrust of girls would exercabate in the 1980's and 90's when several high school girls lost their lives because they could not escape rape or fire in the buildings in which they had been locked up from the outside. Those of us young women who lived in the city, went to school and were not rural farmers were constantly reminded that we were not "authentic" African women, even though our illiterate grandmothers were proud that we had opportunities that they were denied and which they worked hard to avail to their daughters, our mothers. Meanwhile, the "authenticity" of women in the rural village seemed to be affirmed by their silence and exclusion from the sphere of public discourse, or worse, by the male leaders and politicians who allegedly spoke on their behalf.

Personally, I can only relate to these women through empathy, sympathy and the knowledge that had it not been for to my parents, their parents, and women predecessors worldwide who have enabled me to get to the point where I can study the world in which I live and comment on it, I would be as silenced as they are. But even as I write each commentary on this site, I am not sure that I have a voice. I find myself replicating the habit I acquired as a young woman, which is to make a deliberate effort to obliterate my own experience, to suppress my personality as much as I can. Before I post the commentary, I wonder if I have the courage to be vulnerable after exposing my thoughts to the world through my words. I anticipate the odious and not uncommon day when someone uses my work to judge me rather than the issues I write about. Or worse, when they judge how my writings reflect my father who happens to be a public figure in Kenya (although Ken Saro-Wiwa's autobiography consoled me that I am not the only one who lives in my father's shadow). Or worst of all, when they condemn me for failing to meet the requirements of the non-existent African woman who perfectly balances making herself available for everyone's needs and remaining invisible.

I thought I was alone in experiencing this turmoil until last month at a panel of African women writers at the African Literature Association Conference in Macomb, Illinois, in which women confessed that before publishing, they sometimes feared that their relatives and acquaintances would accuse them of exposing the private lives of themselves and their relatives to the public, presumably because women are considered to be the guardians of the private sphere. That fear, which I share, comes from the fact that despite all the ado about African and African-women over the past decade, our narratives really don't matter. They are expected to affirm the opinion of whomever wants to use them, not to propose a new way of looking at institutions or humanity as a whole.

By contrast, I am amazed at the confidence with which I see African brothers use their personal narratives to inform their opinions about public issues. They are able to articulate how mundane experiences such as a walk in the park or having a meal informs how they view events even in places as far from Africa as Russia and China.

African women do not enjoy such liberty in the public sphere. Instead, leadership for them seems to require abandoning values and norms ascribed to women and challenging men in their own territory, rather than using a distinctly woman's perspective as a platform for leadership. Ever since she received the prize from white folk in Stockholm, Prof. Wangari Mathaai seems to have lost her ideological direction to her political ambitions. Meanwhile, Martha Karua, the Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs could arguably be considered Kenya's Condoleeza Rice - a woman who plays the power game by men's rules as well, if not better, than men themselves. Charity Ngilu also seems to have lost some ground ever since she made the first significant presidential bid by a woman in Kenya in 1997. At the time, Kenya's press and the public criticized her for sticking out her neck in public issues. A photo of her running away from a demonstration broken up by police had people debating on the decency of women being seen in public because her dress rose above her knees. No one questioned the decency of the police. Now Ngilu has retreated into the shadow of the male politicians who make ceremonial gestures to women because the donors are watching, but whose power actually depends on marauding young men willing to burn their country, rape women and abandon children in exchange for money and at the expense of our country's national pride, unity and integrity.

Prof Miriam Were, who recently received the Hideyo Noguchi prize for her astounding work in public health provides an alternative model of women's excellence because of her continued socially-oriented focus on the community and her work outside the murky waters of politics, but how well Kenyans will embrace her is yet to be seen. Voters apparently prefer as leaders women who rival men in belligerence, as the choice of Bishop Margaret Wanjiru as MP for Starehe indicates. In other words, women's rise to respect and prominence in Kenya seems to rely on women adopting flawed masculine and distinctly anti-women and a-social politics.

In addition, Kenya's concessions to women, especially within the political realm, are largely influenced by donor conditions and a desire to endear themselves to the "international" - read American, British and German - community, rather than out of profound horror at the rape, exploitation and mental abuse of women, the desacration of their humanity, and what this desecration says about flawed humanity of Kenyan men. And few notice that while the banking community's trust in women may be flattering, it also reveals the failure and greed of men who fail to honor their financial commitments, and worse, the likelihood that those who do honor their financial commitments are able to do so because their wives do the agricultural work that helps repay the loan or relieve their husband's financial burden by meeting the household expenses and even paying children's school fees. But more than that, loans tailored for women raises the ethical question about African women being affirmed through a capitalist lens that reduces people to their labor and economic contributions.Within such conditions, our mundane experiences as girls and women remain of little importance to our communities, even though they speak loads about the state and values of our societies and black people worldwide.

In the literary world with which I am more familiar, African women have made personal narratives about their childhood, marriages, work and friendships reflect African societies in their entirety. Unfortunately, these narratives - especially those written in colonial languages - have been usurped by the academy to accuse African men rather than as an opportunity to take a candid look at who we are as human beings and as Africans. White women scholars use our narratives to gloat over how their pathetic situation is much better than ours and to exercise authority over black men. In philanthropy, the West uses our stories to confirm the racist myths that seem to run in its blood. I am still trying to figure out where African men stand in all this, but I sense that the general trend has been to feel guilty and go into a self-defense mode, rather than to see women's narratives as a tool for introspection and understanding of the world. And faced with this devaluation of our narratives, African women are torn between cynically asking for donor money as payment for enriching the world with our labor and experiences, and admirably deconstructing the paternalism of those who occupy a higher status than us on the racist and sexist hierarchy.

Thus, despite all the hype about African women within diplomatic, political and academic circles, our narratives are still restricted to telling stories about women alone rather than about the world, and worse, those stories are retold to support agenda that are not originally ours. The fate in American academic circles of Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter, which exposes through marriage the alienation of the African bourgeoisie in the years of despair following formal national independence, stands as a classic example of the devalorization of African women's voices in the name of valorizing them. At the same conference forum in Macomb, Illinois, Guinean writer Mariama Barry, lamented that her novel La Petite Peule had been celebrated in France for its tackling of female genital mutilation even though the issue had been secondary to the main story of narrating a woman's life.

And so, while each of my entries on the Zeleza Post seem to be written with boldness and conviction, they hide anticipation of the devaluation of my ideas or even of my personhood. At the height of the violence in Kenya last January, I was shocked when an acquaintance of my parents sought their opinion about my commentaries. I was also hurt to read of yet another scholar who called me a "Kibaki-intellectual" rather than respond to the issues I raised. In both cases, I was insulted that grown and educated Kenyan men would not think of me as capable of voicing and defending my own opinion. Worse, I was saddened that a Kenyan man could launch a personal attack on me in a public forum which was read by an international community, leading me to wonder at how unaware he was that he was exposing his own insecurity in public by attacking a female compatriot and professional colleague.

His apparent oblivion reminded me of the 1987 debate in the journal New Literary History between African-American critics Joyce A. Joyce on one hand and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston A. Baker Jr. on the other. The two male critics mocked Joyce's concerns about their theoretic approach to African American literary criticism, which led Joyce to make the argument that they should have at least had the decency to respect a woman from their community rather than subject her to ridicule. Despite my knowledge of this precedent, I quickly retreated and withdrew the initial version of my entry "The Misadventure of the Kenyan Intellectual" and sent a note to Mwalimu Zeleza explaining my fear. He was understanding and sympathetic, and his encouragement led me to later post a toned-down revision of the same article.

And so proceeds my struggle to insert my narrative as an African woman in the larger narrative of humanity. I have tried to be brave, as I noted in my response to Alice Walker's endorsement of Barack Obama. But I still do not consider myself brave; rather I am someone who writes despite her cowardice. My deepest gratitude goes to Mwalimu Zeleza for asking me to join the bloggers of Zeleza Post despite my reservations that I might be writing my social death warrant, and for giving me courage along the way. And to the friend who asked me why I write more about race than gender, leading me to confront my ambiguity about what African womanhood means to me.

In the meantime, I reserve great admiration for women such as Pearl Cleage who write women's lives as a reflection of humanity, as a moral indictment of capitalism and racism, and also as a challenge to black men to aspire to be politically conscious, morally responsible and better human beings. In every novel, poem, story, play that she and others such as Nikki Giovanni, Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Barry, Lauretta Ngcobo, Margaret Ogola write, black women's narratives are inserted into the larger human narrative. And women's lives, including mine, are affirmed. I only pray that human beings would embrace the delicacies which black women bring to the banquet of humanity.