The concept of new woman in Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Emecheta's Kehinde

Abstract

The concern of my paper is to analyze and explore the concept of ‘New Woman' in the
novels of Nigeria's well-known writers: Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta. As the focus is
on the life of African women to reveal post-colonial reality, the novels of the above writers
that are set almost in the same age have been chosen. In the struggle of self-fulfillment,
African women reconfigure African womanism, prioritizing female individualization.
Subverting the powerlessness of women to authority, the female protagonists in both the
novels become a new breed of Nigerian women in the making. The emergence of femaleness
and the woman centered endings of Anthills of the Savannahand Kehinde explicitly show
their struggle is not a crusade for sexual and social justice, but a paradigm that articulates a
still unrealized striving for self-expression.

Keywords: postcolonial reality, new social order, sexual and social justice, new
breed of Nigerian women, African womanism, subverting powerlessness of women
to authority.

MARANG: Journal of Language and Literature Vol. 17 2007:pp. 95-103