At the time that ‘‘The Green Leaves’’ was published in the early 1960s, not many published African writers were women despite the growing international reputations of African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. The dearth of women writers in Africa has been ascribed to the lack of opportunities for women to be educated during the colonial periods as well as women’s traditional roles that often placed them in the home as mothers and homemakers. However others have argued, particularly African women writers and critics, that women writers have been overlooked because they are unworthy of publication and critical study. In her 1987 article in Women in African Literature Today, ‘‘Feminist Issues in the Fiction of Kenya’s Women Writers,’’ Jean F. O’ Barr claims that ‘‘No major anthologies of African literature include selections of works by female writers and the few that are organized by topic rather than by author make only fleeting references to women writers.’’ Often when women are written about in critical works, they are misread or dismissed as not being interesting enough. Ghanian writer Ama Ata Aidoo reveals in her article ‘‘Literature, Feminism, and the African Woman Today’’ that the many misrepresentations and misreadings by both African male and Anglo feminist critics that occur are due to the lack of understanding of African women’s experiences:

they [African women] do not fit the accepted (Western) notion of themselves as mute beasts of burden, and they are definitely not as free and as equal as African men . . . would have us believe.

In an article titled ‘‘The Woman Artist in Africa Today: A Critical Commentary,’’ critic and writer Micere Mugo admonishes critics for not taking African women writers seriously enough to write critically about them and then reveals the important dimensions of writing for women, both politically and personally. Despite the discriminations, difficulties, and prohibitions that African women writers undergo, African women have responded increasingly to seeing themselves misrepresented or ignored by picking up the pen themselves and creating a women-centered poetics that explores and highlights the impact of colonialism and its aftermath on race, nationality, and gender. In Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, Florence Stratton notes the differences between African men and women writers as being one of accommodating multiple perspectives: ‘‘whereas the tendency in male literature is to counter colonial misrepresentations with valorization of indigenous traditions, women writers are as critical of those traditions as of colonialism.’’ The many approaches that African women writers take in their work demand a different lens for reading. As critics Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido in ‘‘African Women Writers: Towards a Literary History’’ remark, ‘‘an acceptance of different conceptions of what African writing is and how it should be approached is needed to comprehend some of the experiments that women writers are making.’’

Although Ogot’s work has been denigrated as having an ‘‘uninspired, rather pedestrian style’’ by critic Lloyd W. Brown in his book Women Writers in Black Africa, her use of fables and myths of the Luo people contribute to reclaiming a traditional African women’s art form, that of orature, within the short story genre. Ogot’s work has been completely overlooked due to her relatively small output (her move into politics as well as writing in her first language has contributed to this slight output) and her location in East Africa, a region that has not gained as much international literary acclaim as West or South Africa. Most of the criticism of her work focuses on her 1966 novel, The Promised Land , which critiques both traditional and...