MaryEllen (Ellie) Higgins, Pennsylvania State University, McKeesport
Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2006), 307-322

Amidst debates regarding the assumption that European and American feminist organizations are the ultimate sources of knowledge about how African women ought to progress, this article explores the possibilities for women’s solidarity through an analysis of Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995). The story of a Ghanaian woman’s emigration to Germany, Beyond the Horizon represents relationships between women that cross cultural, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries and in the process exposes the contemporary inequities that exist in the relationships between Ghanaian men and women, the realities of domestic and international violence, the abuse of women in the transnational sex trade, and neocolonial practices in Africa. This article argues that Darko’s work underscores failed solidarity but does not view these failures as inevitable. Her work provides a model for transformative women’s movements, which offer an alternative to those feminist projects that seek to empower relatively few women through equal access to already existing spheres of power.