African and African Diasporic Women Writing: Voices Against Patriarchy in Africa.

The patriarchal domination of women in Africa is a fact of life based on the archaic assumption that men are naturally superior to women, therefore naturalising men as actors and beneficiaries of cultural practices which oppress women. Cultural practices in Africa which are assumed to be natural are sustained first, through socialisation, second, ‘chattelisation’, which deems female children as male property of their fathers/male relatives, and upon marriage their husbands, and third, ‘patriarchalisation’, the gender-based exclusionary practices foreclosed to women and girls but open to men and boys. The study uses African and African Diasporic women writing to resist, challenge, and disrupt the patriarchal domination of women inside Africa.

Pioneer African men writers’ early work represented in this study, while resisting, challenging and disrupting colonial domination and the erasure of African male agency in colonial fiction, fictionalised men’s domination of women, therefore, erasing female agency in the traditional context. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA), alongside other selected writing including by Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, leads the textual mis/representation of women. Pioneer African women’s writing of Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo and Grace Ogot, are read as resistance to men’s (mis)representation of women through counter-narratives, writing back, projecting women’s voices and perspectives. African women’s writing highlights the persisting institutional patriarchal domination of women into the twenty-first century, suggesting the males’ inheritance of females’ domination.

The study shows how African diasporic women writing in the United Kingdom demonstrate that institutional African patriarchal domination of African women is absent since both African men and women face institutional racial domination. Further, the study argues that African diasporic women writing disrupts African patriarchy through demonstrating that African women’s crossing or crisscrossing of boundaries initiates and forces the transformations of patriarchy over three recognisable stages – Vestiges/Flashes of Patriarchy, Diminishing/Visible Demise of Patriarchy and the Total Demise of Patriarchy, discursively headed as Patriarchal Vestiges/Flashes, Visible Demise, Total Demise.

This study differs from other work on the domination of women in Africa in the breadth of fiction studied, focusing on the examination of the literary representation not only of men’s domination of women but also the domination of men in colonial fiction, and the impact of the latter on pioneer men’s writing and their characterisation of women in fiction. No study has extensively critiqued Achebe’s TFA silencing and demeaning of women as comparable to the work which he vociferously castigates as doing the same to African men, Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness.

The study examines pioneer men’s early writing which depicts the emasculated, feminised, and silenced African men characters to illustrate how the colonially traumatised and subjugated male characters simultaneously subjugate African female characters. The thesis identifies white women, as ‘notional or honorary men’ of white patriarchy who are rewarded with the power to dominate African men who then assume feminine positions as senior ‘notional African women'.

The ‘chattel principle’ underpinned the ownership and practices (chattelisation) which oppressed enslaved African men, women and children. The fiction studied shows that African women’s patriarchal domination pivots on the ‘chattel principle’, which assumes male ownership of females resulting in chattelisation practices discussed as hallmarks of patriarchy including child-marriages and wife-inheritance. The study shows that while the chattelisation of women in the United Kingdom stopped in the nineteenth century, today men continue the practice in parts of Africa. Therefore, the study concludes that African women as a group cannot rely on collaboration with, and approval of, African men as a group to achieve equality due to men’s unreliability and indifference to the needs of African women.

The thesis provides a new approach to reading and interpreting African and Africa diasporic women writing through a critical framework that draws on cultural, historical, political, and literary contexts. It exposes the myth of African men's natural superiority by using the historical events of colonisation and Trans-Atlantic enslavement of African men, as liberatory tools.