The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction

Acknowledgements

This work began in 2018 as a doctoral thesis, which I defended in April 2021 at the University of Padua (Italy). I would like to thank Prof. Annalisa Oboe for her supervision throughout this research. I am grateful to Prof. Carli Coetzee, who served on the evaluation committee of my PhD viva and provided a comprehensive report with constructive comments on my work. I wish to thank Peter Lang Publishing for selecting my dissertation as a winner in the “Literature and Culture” category of the 2022 Peter Lang Emerging Scholar Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and for making its publication possible. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Chielozona Eze and Prof. Grace Musila for their generous willingness to endorse this book.

During my doctoral studies, I spent eleven months as a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), where I consulted numerous key sources for my research. I am grateful to Prof. Brendon Nicholls for supervising my work during most of my time in Leeds, for our invigorating conversations on African literature and Zimbabwean women’s fiction, for his constructive feedback on the initial draft of the Tsitsi Dangarembga chapter, and for his intellectual insight, which has inspired me throughout my academic journey. I am also grateful to Prof. John McLeod for his valuable advice and feedback, and for introducing me to the work of Sara Ahmed. I am thankful to Prof. Sam Durrant for his helpful suggestions on the analysis of some aspects of Yvonne Vera’s writing.

After my thesis defence, I continued working on this book while holding postdoctoral positions, first at the University of Vienna (Austria) and later at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), supported by fellowships from OeAD-GmbH–Agentur für Bildung und Internationalisierung and the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. I am deeply grateful to my mentor in Vienna, Prof. Dobrota Pucherová, for reading and providing constructive feedback on large portions of this book, and for our many inspiring conversations on African women’s writing. I am also thankful to those I had the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with during my stay in Vienna: Prof. Rémi Armand Tchokothe, Prof. Kirsten Rüther, Prof. Martina Kopf, Prof. Daniela Waldburger, Elisabeth Knittelfelder, and Ulrike Auer. Special thanks also go to the Institut für Afrikawissenschaften and the African and Middle Eastern Studies Library for providing access to valuable bibliographical resources and a supportive research environment.

I finalised this book during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. I am thankful for the kindness and warm welcome I received there from Prof. Eva Spies, Prof. Rüdiger Seesemann, and Robert Debusmann. I am grateful for the enriching conversations I had with Anthony Okeregbe, AbdulGafar Fahm, Yousra Sbaihi, Christabel Sam, Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué, Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong, Obala Musumba, Jennifer Neal, and Endurance Dissake. I am particularly grateful to Benjamin Kirby for being a valued and trusted friend, colleague, and mentor, and for his thoughtful feedback and unwavering support throughout these years.

I would like to thank Giorgia Riconda for her steadfast support, thoughtful advice, and invaluable friendship. I am also grateful to the many other friends who have accompanied me throughout this journey: Maria Giovanna Campobasso, Lorenzo Sacchini, Carmine Pascuzzo, Serena Bortot, Seda Türkçiğdem, Silvia Pizzirani, Yash Patel, Alessio Mattana, Marco Franchi, and Manuel Galiazzo.

Above all, I thank my family: my parents, Anna Maria and Maurizio; my sister, Beatrice; and my uncle, Michelangelo, for their love and unfailing encouragement over the years. I dedicate this book to them, and especially to my father, who was always my greatest supporter and passed away in July 2024.

Some of the ideas explored in the chapters on Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie also appear in my articles “‘Voicing Creative Uprisings’: Women and the Nigerian Diaspora in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,” De Genere—Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies 7 (2022), pp. 91–105, and “Deconstructing the ‘Single Story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,” From the European South—A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities 3 (2018), pp. 85–98. A longer version of my discussion of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s latest non-fiction book appears in my “Review of Black and Female, by Tsitsi Dangarembga,” Il Tolomeo—A Postcolonial Studies Journal 25 (2023), pp. 335–340.

Bayreuth, 30 March 2025

Abbreviations

Chapter 3 on Buchi Emecheta

JoM: The Joys of Motherhood

ID: In the Ditch

SCC: Second-Class Citizen

HAW: Head Above Water

Chapter 4 on Tsitsi Dangarembga

NC: Nervous Conditions

BoN: The Book of Not

TMB: This Mournable Body

RNEICSR: Report of the Native Education Inquiry Commission of Southern Rhodesia

Chapter 5 on Yvonne Vera

Nh: Nehanda

BB: Butterfly Burning

SV: The Stone Virgins

UT: Under the Tongue

Chapter 6 on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

PH: Purple Hibiscus

HYS: Half of A Yellow Sun

AM: Americanah

WSABF: We Should All Be Feminists

DIFMFS: Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Preface

This study investigates gender and resistance issues and historicises and emphasises the literary legacies and genealogies of Anglophone African women’s writing by analysing the fiction of four notable female writers: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, and Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe. These authors are recognised as prominent feminist voices in contemporary African literature, with their works shaping the literary landscape and receiving critical acclaim and prestigious awards. The twelve narratives analysed in this study—three by each author—were published between 1972 and 2018 and are set in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They span the late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twenty-first century, portraying women who endure multiple, intersecting forms of oppression—including sexism, racism, classism, colonialism, and capitalism—yet exercise their agency and often employ extreme strategies of resistance to subvert such restrictions.

Numerous studies of African women’s literature have been published in recent years; however, none to date has provided a comparative analysis of the aforementioned novelists. The selection of these particular authors and their works reflects my effort to compare four of the most prominent female voices from both Western and Southern Anglophone Africa. These writers have lived and worked both in Africa and in diasporic contexts, and their novels centre on women characters and gender issues, offering compelling examples of female agency and strategies of resistance.

The theoretical framework I employ draws from the ideas and perspectives of Black and diasporic feminists, mainly based in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria, such as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gayatri Spivak, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie. Through a comparative and ethnographic approach, I aim to map a pan-African trajectory connecting different countries and historical periods and highlighting the shared experiences of African women and girls across the continent and beyond. The authors’ life experiences and writing careers are examined throughout the volume. All four novelists have travelled to the West to pursue higher education. Mobility and transnational movement thus emerge as central themes in their writing and as features of their personal agency.

In this volume, I focus primarily on male-female relations and toxic masculinity, especially concerning how these have been shaped by colonialism, and the extent to which they hinder women from thriving and leading ethically and personally fulfilling lives. The central premise of the book is that African women writers contend that gender equality remains largely unattained in many societies across the continent and beyond. Their willingness to explore African womanhood from realistic, personal, and often intimate perspectives can be read as an effort to dismantle male-centred and Eurocentric epistemologies and misconceptions. In this context, writing functions as an act of liberation and an expression of resistant agency, which often prompts them to reinterpret traditional literary forms and genres. This book seeks to foreground the voices of Emecheta, Dangarembga, Vera, and Adichie, tracing the multiple ways their agency is constructed—both in their writings and in their lives—in response to patriarchal and neocolonial realities. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how, through fiction, these authors open new avenues in ongoing debates both within academia and beyond, offering valuable insights into feminist and postcolonial agendas.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to this study. In the 1960s and 1970s, African literature was largely dominated by male authors, and women’s contributions received limited critical attention. The chapter highlights landmark works published between the mid-1970s and the early 2020s. It first examines the initial invisibility of African women writers’ voices and their exclusion from the literary tradition, the ways male authors have often provided stereotypical images of women in their narratives, the cultural and political role of writing for women in Africa, and the historical and cultural contexts, themes, and characteristics of African women’s fiction.

Chapter 2 explores the capacity for agency and resistance of the female characters portrayed in the works of Emecheta, Dangarembga, Vera, and Adichie. I focus on agency expressed through wilfulness (Ahmed 2014, 2017); solidarity (hooks 1986, 2000b, 2003); storytelling (Minh-ha 1989); anger and hatred (Lorde 1984; Ahmed 2004); and love, shame, and (self-)disgust (Ahmed 2004).

Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 offer a detailed analysis of each of the four novelists, arranged chronologically according to their seniority. These chapters should not be seen as four unrelated essays but as interconnected pieces forming a cohesive narrative that illustrates the development of recurring themes, tropes, and styles, as well as the authors’ aims and aspirations. Each chapter begins with biographical details, tracing each writer’s personal, educational, and professional journey. I then examine their literary approaches and situate them within the broader context of Anglophone African women’s fiction. The second part of each chapter offers an analysis of three of the most renowned novels by the respective author. I explore the historical and socio-cultural contexts of each narrative, applying postcolonial and feminist frameworks to scrutinise key themes and, where relevant, provide further insights into their literary genres. Whenever explicitly stated, I compare the authors’ feminist perspectives and discuss the social and political issues they address, which frequently emerge through their narratives.