The Importance Of Feminism In African Literature

One cannot deny the impact of gender on the writer and critic of African literature. This becomes inevitably significant in Africa in the sense that the earliest writers and critics were males and logically, there was a dearth of feminine representation. Women were therefore marginal to the central themes. According to Kolawole, “Achebe’s world before Anthills of the Savannah was essentially a world of male heroism and female defeatism, male audacity and female timidity”(115). The preoccupation of the predominantly male writers’ vision, struggle and predicament left women in the periphery of events. In the entirety of Achebe’s writings, no female character matches the ferocious stature of Okonkwo or Ezeulu in Things Fall Apart until the emergence

Feminism has assumed a controversial concept in African cultural arena as a result of which many critics, male and female, react to it with suspicion, rejection or outright denigration. At one point, the concept is misconstrued, at another times, it is considered an anathema to the African. Kolawole is of the view

They were followed by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Gabriel Okara, Kofi Awoonor, Ayi Kwei Armah, John Munonye, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Alex La Guma, and Fagunwa. Even with these new entrants, literary creativity in the continent remained single-faceted, fragmentary and incomplete. The men wrote about a variety of themes but did they say it all? Can a male writer feel the debts of a woman’s consciousness, sensibilities, feminity, impulses and indeed her weaknesses? If the answer is no, then they is a lack which needs to be addressed (Chukwuma 102). She further stressed the fact that “even with the firmly rooted tradition of patriarchal supremacy, there has to be a womb for its realization, its nurture and perpetuity” (102). She emphasized the fact that in spite of this greatness, there was no shifting of grounds as male writers did not go out of their way to court female writers. She further use the functional bipartite structure on which the world’s balance and wholeness hangs as an illustration. She said that “there is the sky and earth, day and night, heat and cold, man and woman. She concludes that if this bipartite integral nature is negated in African literature, the literature