The concept of new woman in Achebe's <i>Anthills of the Savannah</i> and Emecheta's <i>Kehinde</i>

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