JOURNALS

ABSTRACT

The black woman has always been seen as one who should not have the liberty to be on her own rather, she should be possessed by either a man or a spirit/ deity/god/. She has suffered this ordeal from the inception of the world. Man, and spirit continue in their struggle to ensure that the African woman remains under their dominance or in their custody. Efforts made by certain national and international bodies have not borne significant fruits as the African woman still suffers under the hegemonic influence of obnoxious traditional practices. Some African novelists, in their works have tried to make it a point of duty to loudly present this ordeal and culturally imposed marginalization of the African woman. Our aim in this paper is to critically analyze the relationship that firmly attaches the African woman to the African tradition and thus review the aspect of the African tradition responsible for the reduction of the value of the woman. To effectively achieve our aim, we have chosen as our corpus two novels: Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Izuchukwu Emeam's wife of the gods. Given that both authors come from the Igbo region [Eastern Nigeria] in Africa and that both books have their setting in the same part of the country, we would like to narrow our analysis to the Igbo woman who incidentally is the black African woman. Also giving that the African tradition plays an important role in our analysis, we shall make use of the culture theory to achieve our goal in this paper.