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i
GYNOCENTRIC CONTOURS OF THE
MALE IMAGINATION: A STUDY OF
THE NOVELS OF CHINUA ACHEBE
AND NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O
Dr. Amna Shamim
IDEA PUBLISHING WWW.ideapublishing.in
ii
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Printed in India
iii
About The Author
X Dr. Amna Shamim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
English, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at Integral
University, Lucknow, India. She has been teaching Professional
Communication to Undergraduate and Postgraduate students; and
English Literature to Postgraduates. She has authored a book
entitled Colonial/Postcolonial Paradigms in the Novels of Chinua
Achebe (TFA & AOG), and co-authored a poetry book entitled
Lucknow Poetica. She has edited three anthologies: Two poetry
anthologies entitled Feminist Voices Across Cultures: A Poetry
Anthology, and The Global Muse; and a critical anthology entitled
Towards Islamic Feminism. She has got a number of research
papers published in various Journals and Anthologies. She is an
active participant in conferences and seminars and is constantly
working on enhancing her academic credibility. Her areas of
interest are Technical Writing, Professional Communication,
Feminism, and African Literature. She can be reached at:
X
iv
About The Book
X The focus of this book is upon the changing perception of
women in African society and their portrayal over different periods
in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o; the
writers who intriguingly wrote on the constant changing role of
African women in Igbo and Gikuyu clans. The book dicusses the
image of African women entrapped in double jeopardy in both
traditional and modern Africa. There has been a remarkable
transformation in the representation of women from the early
novels to the later novels of both the writers that has been studied
in this book from close quarters. The approach and technique of
the novelists in projecting their female characters has also been
analyzed. The novels of both the writers marked a sea change in
the thinking and perception of Westerners with reference to Africa
and its people. This work is devoted to the exploration of the
image of women in the East and West African societies through
the selected novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
X
v
Contents
X
Chapter 1 Introduction. 1-32
Chapter 2 Women in the Novels of Chinua
Achebe.
33-77
Chapter 3 Women in the Novels of Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o.
79-125
Chapter 4 Women in the Novels of Achebe and
Ngũgĩ: A Comparison.
127-173
Chapter 5 Conclusion. 177-189
Works Cited and Consulted. 191-210
X
Dr. Amna Shamim
1
Chapter 1
Introduction
The African continent which has been described as „The Dark
Continent‟ as also „A Long Night of Savagery‟ is, however, a
country of long and rich cultural legacy endowed with a varied
corpus of literary traditions that was passed on from one generation
to the next through the medium of orality. The orature of Africa
that was preserved by its native people in the form of folktales,
poems and songs, helped in developing and retaining the aesthetic
sensibilities of its population that later paved way for the written
literature. These stories, fables and folk songs were encapsulated in
culturalism and traditionalism that instilled in their children the
ritual practices and traditions of the various clans. Storytelling was
indeed one of the numerous pastimes in the homestead of African
people. Amongst the elders, there were men, besides women, who
abundantly contributed in keeping their culture alive and kicking.
The orature of Africa consisted of both prose and poetry. The
different forms of prose and poetry employed by the natives
consisted of folk songs, praise poems, epic poems, folklore and
work songs. To emphatically elevate the effect these stories and
songs produced on the young and not-so-young minds, the tales
narrated by the professional singers, like the gĩcaandĩ players, were
accompanied by the beatings of the drums and the use of the
instrument called Gĩcaandĩ. The instruments Adungu and Nyatiti
were also used to produce the same effect. The performers made
ample use of proverbs and riddles in their poems that were meant
for the listeners to decode and generally there was an another poet
in competition who decoded the message.
Gynocentric Contours of The Male Imagination: A Study of The Novel of Chinua Achebe and
wa Thion ’o
2
Oral literature is, and was, by far, an integral part of the
African literary tradition. It is impossible to imagine African
literature as a composite whole without mentioning the relevance
of stories through oral narratives that was employed by the natives
during the pre-colonial era. This included the imbibing of the
traditions of the clan in children through the medium of
storytelling. Orality, then, was the only form of passing on the
traditions as African languages were devoid of any script. The
African languages developed a script of their own only after the
incursion of the colonizers who brought with them their script and
education; something that the African people were unaware of. The
fear of the colonizers and the need to compete with them, led the
natives to gain on the educational front. Ultimately, this acquired
knowledge helped them in producing a script for the languages that
they were using to communicate. It was commendable on the part
of the indigenous race to alacritously make use of the newly
produced script in order to preserve their oral literature. The
orature of Africa that consisted of different forms of oral narratives
such as mythical tales, folk tales, poems and songs was then
transformed into literature. This transformation of oral literature
into written form was the result of the education that the native
Africans were compelled to receive from the initial stages of
colonization till the end of the colonial regime. The natives did not
take long to realize the worth of education and became learned one
after the other. Not much later, they started taking help of this
education to narrate their stigmatic journey from colonial to the
post colonial era. According to the facts provided by F. Abiola
Irele, ge‟ez script is one of the oldest scripts of Africa that was
developed in the fourth century. According to John Parker and
Richard Rathbone, ge‟ez script “originated in ancient South
Arabia” and was used by “Ethiopian Coptic Church, one of the
earliest Christian Churches to translate the Bible and to record its
landholdings, its prayers and healing formulae, and the lives of its
saints” (51). Other than ge‟ez, writers wrote in Mali, Swahili and
Dr. Amna Shamim
3
Yoruba, too. One of the earliest examples of African literature,
other than the orature, includes “Epic of Sundiata” or “Epic of
Son- Jara” written in Mali.
It has been observed that nearly all the scripts of African
languages were developed during and after the invasion of Romans
and Arabs on the African land. Romans conquered Egypt and
North Africa in 30 BC. Then came the Arabs, the French and the
British, one after the other, who also aimed at civilizing the
barbaric race. These colonizers brought with them their own scripts
that they taught to the Africans. The earliest invaders of the
African land were the Arabs who taught and preached Qur‟an and
its language. It is true that in the sixteenth century Arabic
chronicles appeared in the south of the Sahara. The first chronicle
was published in 1520 and it was titled “Kilwa chronicle”. This
chronicle was followed by “Ta‟rikh al-fattash” (1655), and
“Ta‟rikh al-sudan” (1655) respectively. The Arabic script was also
used for “the transliteration of three major African languages,
Hausa, Fulfulde and Swahili” (Parker 53). The contribution of the
Arabs with regard to the development of Africa is revealed from
the following passage:
By the 8th century, precious fragments of information on
sub-Saharan Africa begin to emerge from the accounts of
Muslim travellers and geographers- sources that have
proved crucial for recovering the early history of the
sudanic kingdoms and the Swahili city-states of the east
coast. (Parker 51)
The native Africans were uncivilized and heathenish due to
which they were thought of as inferior by the European colonizers.
Although these people were barbaric, they neither had the
resources nor the kind of hatred required to keep other races under
their control. They were concerned with their own traditions and
rituals and they could go to any extent to safeguard it. The history
and the literature of Africa reveal that the African race did not
Gynocentric Contours of The Male Imagination: A Study of The Novel of Chinua Achebe and
wa Thion ’o
4
harm the colonizers until they found no way out of the torture that
was being inflicted upon them. This innocence of the African race
gave others the opportunity to trouble them and use them for their
personal gains. For approximately fifty long years, African men,
women and children were traded like commodities. They were
bought and sold and were made to work as bonded labourers. The
years of torture for Africans began in 1440s when the Portuguese
mariners started kidnapping them and transporting them to distant
lands. The slave trade is said to have ended in 1867. This was the
year that recorded the last voyage in which the native Africans, as
slaves, were sent to America. The Atlantic Slave Trade and the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade are the two slave trades that brought
slavery to Africans and compelled them to bear the brunt of
belonging to an uncivilized race. Their years of suffering have
been recorded by researches through the ages and the detailed
account of their agony is provided in a number of books and other
materials composed by the researchers. One such research revealed
the following information on the Slave Trade:
Sub-Saharan Africa lost over twelve and a half-million
people to the trans-Atlantic slave trade alone between 1525
and 1867. Perhaps as many again were carried off to slave
markets across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. Over forty
percent of captives left from West-central Africa alone with
most of the remainder leaving from the Bight of Benin, the
Bight of Biafra, and the Gold Coast. About one in eight
died on board the slave vessel and many others died prior
to departure and after arrival. Departures were channeled
through a dozen or so major embarkation points such as
Whydah, Bonny, Loango, Luanda, and Benguela, though
many smaller ports also supplied slaves. (“Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade”)
It has also come to light that the researchers, other than
discussing the sufferings of Africans during the Atlantic slave
Dr. Amna Shamim
5
trade, have been able to figure out the other side of the coin. Some
scholars have written in black and blue about the Africans who
took advantage of their own brothers and sisters by acting as
middle men in the selling and buying of the native people. John
Thornton in his book, Africa and Africans in the making of the
Atlantic World, 1400-1800, argues that the Africans, too, were
involved in the slave trade and they were playing an active part in
controlling the terms of the trade. They gained through their
dealings with Europeans and others whereas the victims were kept
under adverse circumstances and were later handed over from one
master to the other. The details of the slave trade and their personal
experiences as slaves were captured and narrated by Olaudah
Equiano in 1789, in his book The Interesting Narrative of the life
of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. In the
recent past, researchers scrutinized Olaudah‟s work and observed
that probably he was not an African. Other than Equiano, one of
the famous African slaves who wrote his biography, detailing his
experiences, was Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. He wrote a
pamphlet titled An Interesting Narrative. Biography of Mahommah
G. Baquaqua, A Native of Zoogoo, in the Interiors of Africa that
was published in 1854 in Michigan. Much later in 1911, Joseph
Casely Hayford published his novel, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in
Race Emancipation which is considered the first African novel
written in English. After this, many novels and plays were written
in different parts of Africa. During the colonial period, natives
gained much on the educational front, resulting in the increased
rate of literacy in the African regions. The natives put into use their
learning by producing umpteen literatures. They not only took help
of the colonizer‟s language to produce their literature but also used
their indigenous languages to do so, doing justice to both the
languages.
African culture was composed of orature that was
employed by the storytellers. The nation had a long tradition of
Gynocentric Contours of The Male Imagination: A Study of The Novel of Chinua Achebe and
wa Thion ’o
6
oral narratives that were later transformed into the written form to
save them from getting lost in times. In written form, poetry and
drama were the first to be read and written. They remained in
vogue until the most popular genre of literature, novel, took its toll
in Africa. Novels gained momentum in the nation as, first of all,
they were the dominant genre in Europe; the hub of literary works
and home to people having the knack of literature. Secondly, they
successfully accomplished the tasks that the narrators did in oral
narratives. The similarity of the novel with oral narrative carved
for it a separate place in African cultural tradition. With the
increased interest of Africans in novels, it did not take them long to
pen down their own experiences and narrate it to the world through
the genre of novels. When Africans themselves wrote of their lives,
there were no chances of misrepresentation of their events and
traumas. With the passage of time, texts written in Africa were
transported to Western nations and were read by the people there.
The texts then gained popularity among the readers of Europe,
leading to the increased interest of the people in the lives and times
of Africans.
Literature as a tool began to be employed by the literary
icons of Africa to put forth their perception of their society. In the
adept hands of the Anglophone African writers, African literature
reached its paramount distinctive shape. Since ages, the writers
from across the globe have employed the lens of literature to peek
at the traumatic life events of people, both common and
uncommon, in the dystopian myopic society. To quote S.Z.H.
Abidi for similar thoughts,
Literature is the most sensitive barometer of the mercurial
society and its subtle day-to-day changes, as also its half-
tones and whispers. It truly reflects them all in its thematic
gestures, technical innovations, emphatic slants, attitudinal
changes and new genres. (Editorial)
Dr. Amna Shamim
7
The techniques and styles of writing used in the ancient
Greek and Roman novels became the source of inspiration for the
modern African writers. African novels were influenced by two
canonical texts of literature: Aethiopica by Heliodorus and The
Golden Ass by Apuleius. The Golden Ass is considered as the “first
modern novel” for the kind of techniques employed in it. The text
is an inter play between fantasy and realism. Whereas the elements
of realism are predominant, the elements of fantasy pose to be the
precursor of “magic realism”; an element that was constantly used
in African prose and poetry, especially in prose. Examples of
African novels that have employed this device are numerous. First
and foremost is The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, a
novel based on mythological tales. The novel talks about a man
who follows the Palm-Wine drunkard and reaches a new land
where he encounters ghosts, magic and demons. Another example
that can be cited is that of The Famished Road by Ben Okri which
is about “abiku”, a spirit child, hailing from an unknown city of
Africa. The novel uses the device of magic realism to narrate the
story that has intertwined real world with the spirit world.
Pepetela‟s novel, The Return of the Water Spirit (1995), translated
into English in 2002, is another example of magic realism. The
novel is set in Angola in 1980s, depicting an event in which the
buildings of the city, Luanda, are crumbling one after the other,
and yet nobody is able to find out the reason of this calamity. It is
named “Luanda Syndrome” (Pepetela 66) which is the punishment
from God for a crime that‟s committed in the city. The crime is
committed by a slave and the people of the city. The slave
develops objectionable relationship with the daughter of his master
and is beheaded for the same. Later it is revealed that the one
responsible for the crumbling of the buildings is Kianda, the
goddess of water in Angolan mythology. African novelists,
through magic realism in their works, tried to capture the minds of
the culturally grounded Africans. As African writers knew the
tradition of their nation and were aware of the beliefs of their
Gynocentric Contours of The Male Imagination: A Study of The Novel of Chinua Achebe and
wa Thion ’o
8
people in the supernatural, it became easier for them to portray the
essence of the nation in the novels and other genres of literature.
With the help of their missionary education, and by using the
colonizers‟ tongue, Africans found it easier to reach out to the
wider audience for giving out the true picture of their nation‟s
culture and traditions. Most of the African works could be seen
dealing with the conflict between the Modern and the Traditional
value-system, the major cause being the rift between the African
people with regard to the acceptance of Christianity by a few and
rejection of the same by others.
The writings in Africa took a toll with the incursion of the
colonizers. The works of African origin were influenced by
Europeans and Arabs alike. The holy texts of both the invaders
played a formative role in the formation of African novels.
According to F. Abiola Irele, “The association of Christian
sentiment with expressive form in the Bible also explains the
influence of Bunyan‟s Pil rim’s Pro ress,…for the construction of
the written novel in Africa” (CCAN 5). On a similar footing was
the Arabic language in Africa as the African novels were also
inspired by the works written in Arabic. Some of its inspirations
were Tayeb Salih‟s (1929-2009) novel, Season of Migration to the
North, his short story collection The Wedding of Zein, and also the
novels of Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), an Egyptian novelist, who
won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel, Season of
Migration to the North, originally titled Mausam al-Hijra ili ash-
Shamail published in the year 1966 was a Sudanese novel in
Arabic. It was later translated into many other languages. The story
in this novel is about the narrator who returns to Sudan after
getting educated in England. In Sudan, he comes across a person
named Mustafa Sa‟eed who is not the resident of Sudan. Unlike the
villagers, Mustafa does not praise the narrator for his foreign
education, but later it is revealed that Mustafa, too, is as learned a
man as the narrator himself.
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