AFRICAN WOMEN’S QUEST FOR SELF-REALIZATION BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY IN

Abstract

Whether or not Buchi Emecheta’s novels hold an articulate feminist ideology has been subject to hot debates among critics. Some views seem to find in Emecheta’s representation of the female experience an attack on the traditional patriarchal values of her society, and hence a call for a complete break with traditions. Others find that traditional African women enjoyed some degree of freedom and autonomy that were undermined by their contact with the West after the colonization of their countries. Therefore, according to them, the motif of her novels is to denounce the colonial oppression of traditional women. The purpose of this dissertation is to evaluate of the female experience in Emecheta’s novels, The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood in an attempt to understand the implications of both patriarchy and colonialism in the shaping of the Nigerian feminine self. It is a study of the representation of the Nigerian woman’s identity as female, black, colonized, and African in order to explain how race and gender were woven together as determinant factors that affected the female experience during the colonial period. Our aim is to explore Buchi Emecheta’s construction of womanhood in terms of the Self/Other concept which was developed by existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and given a feminist dimension by Simone de Beauvoir. This concept will equally inform our study of the colonizer/colonized relation in order the explain the situation of Nigerian women under British rule.