Limitations in the Feminine Impulse of West African Fiction: A Study of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Mariama Bȃ’s So Long a Letter

Abstract

From the onset of human existence till just recently, only men were going outside to meet challenging situations. Women were staying indoors so as to attend to the sick, be with the children and cook food since they are the weaker sex. This situation gradually led to the marginalization of women who in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America started protesting in order to have equal rights with men. Their movement known as feminism has yielded positive results in those places where it originated but not so in the West African sub-continent. When this feminist philosophy is presented in literary works, the women are portrayed in such a way that they are well educated and trained in different fields of human endeavours. But a deeper study of texts from West Africa shows that the impact of feminism is at a limited level due to the educational standard of the people and their religious and cultural inclinations. In order to arrive at this conclusion, the researcher had to make use of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Mariama Bȃ’s So Long a Letter. When the content of these texts and the critical works on them are compared with the theoretical works on feminism, one can discover that there is a chasm between the working of the philosophy in Europe and in West Africa.