Transcending the Age of Androcentric Representations in African Women’s Writing

Abstract

African Literature has been the field of male writers and has lacked the feminine lens for a long time. These male writers have depicted the African woman as obedient who obeys man without discussion. However, this unrealistic presentation has been rectified only after the rise of women writers. As more and more African women got educated and started to participate in social and political fields, the women writers started portraying and reporting the changes they have been experiencing in their contemporary societies. As they have been suffering in their patriarchal communities, they could feel the agonies of these women who have been living in subjugation to men since old times. Using Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, the article analyses how African female writers have cleverly and surreptitiously carved out for themselves advantages and immunities which ordinary women and even ordinary men could never imagine. Such statuses were like personal identity cards which neither outlived them nor were reveled by other women during and after their existence.