writing the motherland from the diaspora

Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.

WRITING THE MOTHERLAND FROM THE DIASPORA:

ENGAGING AFRICA IN SELECTED PROSE TEXTS OF

DAMBUDZO MARECHERA AND BUCHI EMECHETA

Ayo Kehinde, Ph.D

University of Ibadan, Nigeria

1. Introduction

Africa has been variously read by both Africans at home and those in the Diaspora, all

too often as a continent wallowing in neocolonial decadence; hence the popular tag ‘Afro-

pessimism’. Actually, African literature, in general, and the novel, in particular, has always

been a site for the contest of text and context. It is always handcuffed to history, unlike many

other regional novels which have become insular and autolectic. This observation has

influenced the assertion of Aijaz Ahmad (1992) that each third-world literature is a socially

symbolic act, a national allegory.

Over the past two decades or so, African literature in Europe has made a strong

impact on world literatures and cultures. The myriad of Prizes that have been won by the

African writers in Europe and the growing interest in the reception of their works demonstrate

the validity of this claim. Diasporic African fictions (most especially the Europe-based ones)

have taken three principal directions in recent times. One, there is the influence of the

visionary style and picaresque narrative of Latin American magical realists. Such works now

take African fiction into the once uncharted territory. The second variety of African fictions in

exile comprises those that are preoccupied with social and political themes of a kind well

established in African writings. The third category of African fictions in the Diaspora initiates a

new wave of critical thinking; the writers in this camp view their works as an unproblematic


synthesis of the Western and the African modes of fiction writing. This blend of autochthonous

and imported cultures allows the writers to patronize many of the conventions of ‘-isms’ –

postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, cross-culturalism and

feminism. It also lures the writers to write in a highly complex style that looks both outward to

the rest of the world and inward. The threshold of Diaspora is revealed as a zone of

trepidation, whereby the subject (the writer) faces two places at the same time (Arjun

Appadurai, 2001). On the one hand is the memory of home, and on the other, the agonies of

desolation. He thus experiences a form of hyphenated or dual identity.

The African writers of fiction in the Diaspora bring the horrors of their motherland to the

fore in their literary explorations. In order to address the decadence of the neocolonial Africa

and to reconstruct its painful realities, writing becomes an elemental tool for survival for most

of the African writers in Europe. By choosing a permanent home in exile, they occupy an

unstable and complicated position toward Africa, the memory of which, although inextricably

linked to the postcolonial disillusionment, remains a presence in their lives, shaping their

outlook and surfacing always in their works. Hence, Africa becomes, like Salman Rushdie’s

India, a symbol of some sense of loss, relentlessly driving various African writers living abroad

“to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt” (Rushdie,

1991:10). However, the decision to leave Africa, emanating mostly from a choice to relinquish

physically the ordeals of struggling through the excruciating pains of neocolonial misrule,

lends these writers the geographical and temporal distance necessary for an adequate

assessment of personal and communal implications of the neocolonial decadence. Africa, and

specifically the neocolonial betrayal of the emancipatory promises of independence, becomes

a recurring theme directly or indirectly dominating the works of these writers who have been

driven into exile by agonies of postcolonial disillusionment.

One other preliminary remark which should be made about the current trend of African

fictions in exile is that there is just a little element of emotional sense of homecoming in them.

This is informed by the impetus that drove some of the writers into exile. It is saying the

obvious that Africans are leaving their motherland, on daily basis, in great number. This

phenomenon has led to the creation of a variety of new African diasporic communities,


different from the traditional conceptions of ‘the African diaspora’. The motivation for their

leaving ranges from voluntary migration to forced displacement. Actually, why some African

writers have been propelled to go into exile cannot be divorced from the general socio-

political climate of their individual nations; that is, their individual nation’s idiosyncratic

‘troubles’ and the shared experiences of the nations in general. Many African writers have

been forced into exile by need; others motivated by ambition, yet some others were driven

away by persecution. One major side effect of this depressing scenario is the painful

departure of both renowned as well as the little-known African writers from their primary

source –their continent. They flee their home countries in search of greater educational

opportunities, better economic conditions, political freedom and other opportunities.

The African fiction writers in Europe are considered in this paper as belonging to the

emerging New African Diasporas. Isidore Okpewho (2002) describes this relatively fresh

development as the “New African Diasporas” distinguishable from the traditional Diasporas,

who were dispersed from their homeland by a traumatic, even catastrophic use of coercion or

violence. To a great extent, there exist some divergences and convergences in the features

and experiences of traditional African Diasporas and the new African Diasporas. The

circumstances under which the ‘New African Diasporas’ set sail from their homelands and

their general sense of belonging, especially since they still have social and cultural roots back

in their original homelands (Okpewho, et al, 2001) distinguish them from the proto-African

Diasporas who are mostly either excluded from full integration into the dominant host society

or do not intentionally wish to be integrated because the cost in terms of dignity and identity

may be too high.

In this paper, the (re)presentation of the image of Africa and Africans in one variety of

many African diasporic writings is examined. In the main, the focus of the discourse is on

fictions on Africa, which take place in Europe and centre on African identities and neocolonial

decadence. The central thesis of the paper is that exile, as figured in the selected novels,

does not portray a typical retreat from reality. The abandonment of the homeland is not a way

to escape the boarders of a suffocating milieu, a continent being ravaged by a bewildering

amalgam of problems and social ills –poverty, wars, diseases, misgovernance, corruption,


nepotism, ethnic rivalries and unemployment. Actually, one common motif found in African

fictions in Europe is the idea of memory; there is a renewed interest in a broad variety of

socio-cultural discourses. Another theoretical underpinning of this paper is that fiction is a

veritable weapon for the formulation of cultural, political and social identities. African fictions

of exile (in Europe) are held in this paper to have the capacity to capture an image of Africa

beyond cultural-nationalist stereotypes. They provide an alternative vision of the Negritudinal

sentimental temper whereby Africa is construed as a ‘beautiful mother’; what we have in most

of the fictions of Africans in Europe is a counter-discourse to the hitherto popular sentimental

portrait of Africa. The pervading images that populate the works include disillusionment,

planlessness, misgovernance, heartlessness, tension, inequalities, and injustice; in fact, all

forms of dissonance and pain are elaborated in most of the works of African writers in Europe.

Their works constitute a virtuoso performance of double consciousness, more directly

influenced by Paul Gilroy’s articulation of the dilemma of striving to be both Europeans and

black than by the regionally specific context of W.E.B. Dubois’s theory about the

internal/external hybridity experienced by African Americans in the United States. The African

writers in Europe react constantly to their condition of displacement and loss in their works;

they are always trying to negotiate the gulf separating the homeland from an exile location.

African fictions in Europe provide a quintessential paradigm of articulating the transformation

of exile and migration (Wumi Raji, 2003). The same blood flowing in the veins of African

people at home also flows in those of their counterparts staying in Europe.

Although the African writers of fiction in Europe have crossed boarders, their texts are

still expressions of the cultural, social, political, artistic, economic and religious experiences of

the globally dispersed populations of African ancestors. In line with Stuart Hall (1997) and Niyi

Osundare (2002), the African diaspora is hereby approached as a geographic, transnational,

cultural and ideological space. The African writers of fiction in Europe have always taken a

leap forward in the meshing of socio-political concerns with their works. This brings to mind

Adebayo Williams’ view that:

The crisis of governance and democratization in Africa has left a profound mark on its

literature…African writers have played a crucial role in the political evolution of the continent,


particularly in influencing the turbulent trajectory of the post-colonial state in Africa

(1996:349).

Really, African writers in Europe, despite their physical separation from their

fatherland, still attach great importance to Africa, a continent which deserves to be better

understood and appreciated. It is a fact that, sometimes, our national discourse as reflected in

the domestic media is often overheated, frequently sensational and occasionally overly

passionate. In the process, interested outsiders and discerning nationals are at a loss as to

the credibility and real direction of an African Renaissance. Therefore, African fiction writers in

Europe use their works as their contributions to an increased understanding of Africa. Their

specific mission is to capture the spirit of the continent, to reposition the continent in the

minds of Africans and the rest of the world. As a generation of African writers, they have

discovered their mission and fulfilled it. The African fiction writers in Europe considered in this

paper are the Nigerian-born Briton, Buchi Emecheta, and Dambudzo Marechera, the late

radical Zimbabwean writer who lived in London. Through an analysis of these writers’ fictional

works, the paper considers how Africa has been constructed in and by the works of fiction,

that is, how Africa has been used as a topos, a theme, a trope, how in short, it has been

metaphorized. The selected works reveal that in most African nations, self-determination

seems elusive, primarily because of social, political, economic and educational degeneration

under successive military and civilian regimes and administrations respectively.

One excruciating pain of African neocolonial decadence which is a motif in the fictions

of Africans in Europe is that, as a heritage in leadership, the continent has, as a bequest, men

and women with no vision of a better Africa, but an unwavering mission to enrich themselves

in the midst of their look-alike loafers as well as grinding poverty, not only of materials but

also of technological prowess. And, with hindsight, it is obvious that the problems associated

with self-determination will take a miracle for some of the nations to get back on the right but

ingenuous track of meaningful development, a track they veered away from since the early

1960s. Another unfortunate revelation of the trouble with Africa isolated in the selected

fictional works is that, certainly, the task of self-awareness and the unique empowerment of

the individual as well as the advancement of the continent are not going to be lived up to by


our present crops of bad managers, as opposed to genuine leaders that we lack in the

present dispensation. These African writers in Europe enjoy the advantages of a ‘foreign’

land, where there is freedom to write and time as well as space for this aspect of self-

realization and personal development. Not to commit the heinous fallacy of

overgeneralization, this claim applies only to those who can surmount the daily problems of

existence itself. In fact, not all African writers in the Diaspora succeed, but despite all odds,

one or two do triumph in their adoptive countries.

Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, aptly captures the benefit of being an African writer

in exile, most especially during the agonizing period of military rule in some African countries.

Playing on the term ‘brain drain’, Soyinka comments: “Lucky drainees! The brains of their

stay-at-home colleagues will be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in

the stomach linings of African crocodiles and vultures” (1990:112). Therefore, physical

distance from home with its attendant experiences of sorrow, victimization, bitterness,

loneliness, dejection, depression and nostalgia (Tejumola Olaniyan, 2003) may be a painful

and very agonizing experience. However, staying at home, inundated with socio-political and

economic problems, may not be a better and safer alternative. A living exile is far luckier than

a dead stay-at–home. Those African writers in exile have always proved wrong the

hypothesis that the distance of exile kills artistic creativity. Nurudin Farah, a Somalian writer,

who has been in exile since the 1970s, also concurs with the opinion of Soyinka on the luck of

the African writers in exile. He believes that he could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a

prisoner. In his words, “distance distills; ideas become clearer and better worth pursuing”

(quoted from Tejumola Olaniyan, 2003:2). To a great extent, African writers do “more to

reveal the reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars” (Patric Chabal, 1992:8).

The African writers in exile prefer peace and their own peace of mind to any piece of land.

However, Edward Said (1991) asserts that the achievements of exile are permanently

undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. The African fiction writers in Europe,

in order to reconstitute this ‘loss’ referred to by Said and Rushdie, strive in their works to

reconstruct and deconstruct the African neocolonial betrayal by turning their scrutinizing gaze

upon it.


The question remains: how do Marechera and Emecheta engage the dilemma of their

individual motherland? The discussion that follows attempts an exploration of this question. In

the main, this paper confirms the veracity of the basic hypothesis of this discourse that,

although a marked divide separates African writers who remain in Africa at this period of

neocolonial disillusionment from those who have opted to escape the daily traumas by

becoming expatriates, emigrants, refugees and exiles, they still dwell on the same issue: the

critique of neocolonial rulers who have made the emancipatory promises of independence

impossible (Carol Fadda-Conrey, 2003). Their themes are bound by a single entity –Africa in

the throes of neocolonial decadence. I shall link the fictions of Africans in Europe to the social

conditions that inspire them, that is, their continual (and ardent) emphasis on the motherland.

2. Dambudzo Marechera: Venom on Postcolonial Decadence

We cannot gainsay the fact that a people’s literature evolves out of their individual and

communal experiences. This is, perhaps, why literature from Southern Africa is essentially a

literature of commitment. Marechera’s novels, for instance, are replete with violent scenes,

which signify the socio-political outlooks of his homeland. A study of his art, therefore, may

tend to be defective if an attempt is not made to locate his major thematic preoccupations

within the totality of the history of his society. Charles Dambudzo Marechera, a quintessential

subversive writer, was born in Vengere Township, Fusape, in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)

on June 4, 1952. He died in Harare on August 18, 1987. He grew up amid racial

discrimination, poverty and violence. He lived a life of protest –he was expelled from Mission

school (for challenging the colonialist teaching), from the University of Rhodesia (for

protesting racial discrimination), from Oxford (for allegedly attempting to burn down part of the

school), and he had a solo protest march against the government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia

and had to flee the nation.

During his lifetime, he used his creative enterprise and vigour to imaginatively chronicle

the state of affairs in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), especially the war situation. Thus, his

works foreground a background of discontent and disillusionment with the past, present and


predictably the future situations in his continent. Mbulelo Mzamane (1983:203) comments on

the art of Marechera thus:

A new generation of writer among whom the most celebrated is probably Dambudzo

Marechera, author of the prize-winning “The House of Hunger” and “Black Sunlight” is less

preoccupied with early historical theme. They are more concerned with the contemporary

state of affairs, namely the recent war situation in Zimbabwe.

Marechera also had his own personal crisis that influenced what he wrote. For

instance, at the time of writing The House of Hunger, he was in a crisis having just been

expelled from the University of Oxford. He therefore became a “homeless wanderer” (Flora

Veit-Wild, 1992:176). His feeling of total loss and utter despair greatly informed the bitter

venom which he poured on African neocolonial leaders through his works of art. The title story

of the collection (“House of Hunger”) captures Marechera’s brutalized childhood and youth in

colonial Rhodesia. He vividly depicts the township squalor of growing up in a settler-exploited

Rhodesia. In fact, “House of Hunger” relies heavily on a carnivalesque ‘the world is upside

down’ approach and scatological imagery which foregrounds the woes of an underdeveloped

country. The following scene is an apt illustration of this claim:

There’s hungry people out there. There’s homeless people out there. There’s many going about in

the rags of their birthday suits. And they’re all mad. They’s all got designs… There’s clouds of flies

everywhere you go. There’s armies of worms glittering in our history. And there’s squadrons of

mosquitoes homing down the cradle of our future (59-60).

The significance of Marechera’s contribution to the fictional discourse of the issues of

war and corruption in African continent is that he carved out a niche for himself through a

special treatment of such seemingly obsolete theme. What is foregrounded in Marechera’s

fiction, what stands out in sharp relief against the determinate temporal-spatial setting, are the

existential realities of birth and death, pleasure and pain, power and victimization – that is, the

realities of human experience. These problems are treated in a generalized, abstracted

manner, as constant, trans-historical and ubiquitous continuities in human existence.


Therefore, with particular reference to The House of Hunger and Black Sunlight, Marechera

exhibits a passionate concern for human issues which underline the various betrayals of trust,

love, duty and conscience and the inhuman treatment that is often the lot of the many

underprivileged members of the society. He is primarily concerned with man as a victim of

history within the framework of the socio-political structures that oppresses him. A blurb writer

in The House of Hunger captures the preponderance of social realities in Marechera’s fiction

thus: “I don’t know another book about Africa that deals with the whole situation at such a

level, except perhaps Lessing or Head.”

Actually, The House of Hunger captures, as much as possible, the typical African life,

so that the various problems facing the entire Africans, in particular, and the black race, in

general, are made known, even to the ignorant ones, for them to see the need for a better

tomorrow. The peculiar tone of the work may be traced to a certain traumatic influence of his

social background. His life and literary vocation manifest in the context of neocolonial

decadence. This is in support of the assertion of Mark Afadama (1988) that Marechera’s

“imagination, the depth and variety of which are well externalized through his works,

bespeaks a conditioning by experiences acquired in the contemporary South Africa” (27). The

artistic expressions of Marechera are pivoted on two basic concerns: first, on a commitment

to “exploring intensely and ultimately the well–springs of our (African) modern experience in

all its range and complexity” (Abiola Irele, 1981:9); and second, on a quest for and an

accentuation of intrinsic value -properties of literary art.

Although Marechera was in Oxford when he wrote his works, he still dwelt perceptively

on the ‘trouble’ in his motherland. The House of Hunger, for instance, deals with social issues

in Africa, such as oppression, alienation, power lust, its source, social marginalization and

betrayal of trust. All these issues are effectively blended into the story of an individual

consciousness developing in a society, which, in its turn, is battling against many odds. The

anonymous protagonist of the story grows through experience, which can be rightly described

as a “rite of passage”. By so doing, Marechera creates an intense degree of alienation – so

severe that the protagonist occasionally suffers mental disturbances which often develop to

full-scale mental derangement. The traumas of the protagonist’s personal domestic history


juxtapose with his experiences of the dehumanizing agonies of Zimbabwe (nay Africa) to

make him a neurotic person.

Marechera’s nihilism about the conditions of his society, in particular, and Africa, in

general, is not significantly different from those of other African writers who are at drastic odds

with their individual societies. However, his brand of pessimism differs significantly, even

more shattering than what the avowed pessimists like Armah or Ouologuem can achieve.

Narration in The House of Hunger hinges on the intermittent retrospection of a ‘psychotic

mind”. Familiar events, places and persons are recalled and commented upon in an irregular

manner. Marechera, in his search for thematic preoccupations, has often turned his attention

to the subject of oppression in postcolonial Africa, so obvious, so crippling, and so

dehumanizing.

The House of Hunger is, above all, a text that deals with the effects of great events of

the external world on individual people. The issues portrayed take place in the context of war

and racism in Zimbabwe, but Marachera focuses the reader’s attention not on the events as

abstractions, but on their effects on the individual soul and the individual mind, and on

person-to-person relationship. The treatment of sex in the text is an aspect which provides

clues to understanding the nature of life and interpersonal relationship. Its value is more than

literary; it also performs artistic, political and social function. Sex is employed in the story to

signify a sort of assertiveness that can be perceived as a form of defensive mechanism

against life’s total meaninglessness and brutality. In the text, Marechera presents the

protagonist in a number of sexual escapades, ranging from his family, to his dormitory, to the

streets and to the bush. Sex, thus, becomes a metaphor of the socio-political realities of the

novelist’s homeland, which was inundated with wars and many other violent actions at that

time.

It is also revealed that, apart from being a victim of racial machinations, woman in

African also comes under the burden of sexism. Actually, Marechera, in the story, dwells on

gender-violence unleashed as a signifier of neocolonized dichotomy of another generation.

The story opens with a young revolutionary, Peter, whose young woman, Immaculate, “sweet

and childish and big with his sperm,” is flogged night and day until she is reduced to a ‘red


stain’ (2). The brutality inflicted on Immaculate is sexually motivated; she, however, dreams of

a better future because she is pregnant. Again, the relationship between her and Peter

signifies the problem of betrayal of trust which is a pervading social phenomenon in

neocolonial Africa. The story signifies that, in the dichotomy between the colonized man and

woman, the colonized man becomes ‘the coloniser’ in a very specific sense. Therefore, the

budding colonizer (the colonized male) exclusively in his role as oppressor of the colonized

female has vested interest in continued exploitation of the doubly (sexual political) colonized

woman.

Black Sunlight is an expansion of the socio-political problems of Africa already initiated

in The House of Hunger, offering a macroscopic portrait of the black race from a perspective

of the Zimbabwean experience. Using the trope of photography, a press photographer is

depicted roving across the span of a society that is in disorder, giving hasty glimpses of the

chaos. The text is couched in a fragmentary manner, showing that the society he depicts is in

an era of turbulence, anarchy and disorder. In this work, Marechera gives a vivid view of the

new strains and tensions plaguing the African society. In fact, Black sunlight chronicles the

daily experiences in Zimbabwe, in particular, and the entire black world, in general - the story

of the black race under the siege of socio-political intrigues and multiple forms of

institutionalized violence.

In the text, Marechera is disillusioned with the past, present, and deductively, the future

of African continent. The problem of sexism recurs in Black Sunlight. The issue of socio-

political betrayal of women by their men, thus, becomes a motif in Marechera’s fiction. The

experience of colonialism lingers on in the society through the binary dichotomy between men

and women in the neocolonial period. For instance, Susan draws a similarity between her

father and the protagonist, Christian, when he tells her to “shut up” after making love to her.

To Susan, this form of verbal male violence is indicative of her father’s irritation at his own

ignorance. Here, two generations of men have betrayed Susan in curiously similar ways.

Susan recognizes the violence inherent in her chosen task as similar, if not identical, to the

destruction that societies impose on the people they claim to serve.


In Black Sunlight, the views of women, exemplified by Susan, are not as trivial as the

political perception of Immaculate in The House of Hunger. Therefore, gender dissonance in

Black Sunlight is more eloquent and complex than the dream-versus-social-reality dialectic

we encounter in The House of Hunger. In Marechera’s fiction, sexism and capitalism are

portrayed as patriarchal concepts which can be dismantled only by women who are as brave

as Susan. This corroborates the opinion of Helene Cixous that “women… must invent the

impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes”

(1994:256). With courage, Susan is able to wreck sexual and rhetorical partitions in order to

give birth to a new history.

Also, in the novel, Marechera enunciates some instances of man’s inhumanity to man

among the peoples of Africa. He catalogues the sufferings of the downtrodden masses in the

hands of their leaders. The image of the African masses depicted in the text is that of people

being exploited, brutally murdered extra-judicially, hanged or detained. The masses of the

society depicted in the text wallow in poverty, starvation, unemployment and socio-political

alienation. The following scene in the text captures these gory experiences of the masses in

Africa: “The chief, as black as human beginnings, pondered. What new madness had struck

this messenger? White men indeed! The chief removed his fit from my head” (1).

The above signifies the fate of the black masses in the hands of their neocolonial

leaders. This suggests that the burden of the average African man is a double yoke. He was

oppressed by the white colonialists and now by his own brothers and sisters. The chief in the

above quoted scene is so brutal that his throne is lavishly decorated with human skulls and

“he wore nothing but a necklace made of human finger bones” (p6). These are apparently the

skulls and finger bones of his victims. Where, then, is the hope of African masses?

The above highlighted episode suggests that despite his physical absence from his

motherland, Marechera still contributes to the debate on the quest for a viable political

leadership in Africa through his works. A careful reading of his texts reveals that leadership

should be a selfless service devoid of all traces of corruption and brutality. The question to

which Marechera seeks an answer in Black Sunlight is this: “Who can provide this true

leadership?” Is it the traditional rulers (like the tyrant chief in the text!), the politicians or the


military? Marechera implicitly proclaims that the traditional rulers cannot be the desired

saviours because of their brutality and vainglory. He also despises military dictatorship for

being too assuming and over-zealous. Thus, Marechera’s search for political leadership in

Africa is abortive:

Was there a difference between the chief on his skull-carpentered throne and the General who

even now had grappled all power to himself in our twentieth-century image? (13)

The foregoing historicist reading of Marechera’s fiction has revealed that his stories

grew directly out of his socio-political awareness of neocolonialism; even though he was in

exile, he succeeded admirably in bridging the gap between the functional use of literature and

the ability to stir humanity as a whole. His fiction produces a feeling of hollowness. He does

not comment directly on reality; he permits reality to comment on itself. What he has offered

in his prose texts is a unique form of realism; his works are “solipsistic, post-realist texts” (Neil

Kortenaar, 1997:25). Here lies the hallmark of his fiction.

3. Buchi Emecheta: Reversing the Image of the African Woman

Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta was born on July 21, 1944, in Yaba, near Lagos,

Nigeria, to Jeremy Nwabudike and Alice Okwuekwu Emecheta. At a tender age, she was

orphaned, and she spent her early-childhood years being educated at a missionary school. In

1960, at the age of sixteen, she was married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she

had been engaged since she was eleven. After their marriage, Sylvester and Buchi moved to

London. The marriage which was blessed with five children was an unhappy, oft-violent one,

and it hit the rock in 1966. She was conferred with the prestigious Order of the British Empire

in 2005.

Emecheta’s fictional cosmos is on the sexual exploitation of African women and the

‘monster’, the ‘witch’, the ‘mad-woman’ stereotypes that emerge when an African woman tries

to resist patriarchy. In her texts, she engages the trouble with her motherland, including child


slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom. Her thematic leaning towards a

redefinition of African womanhood is purposeful. This is informed by her personal agonizing

experiences of male victimization and the single-mindedness with which she has successfully

countered such hostilities. However, one notices an apparent ambivalent strain evident in her

brand of feminism, especially in her non-autobiographical novels. This is as a result of her

exposure to two cultures –African and European. Lloyd Brown (1981) comments on the status

of Buchi Emecheta as an African woman writer. Says he:

Of all women writers in contemporary African literature, Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria has been the

most sustained and vigorous voice of direct, feminist protest. Only Bessie Head of South Africa

compares with Emecheta in a certain intensity and directness when describing sexual inequality

and female dependency. In Emecheta, we detect an increasing emphasis of the woman’s sense of

self… (34).

Since the suppression of women is a global phenomenon, the African woman is also

on the march towards liberation in the literary sphere. Emecheta appears to be a frontline

feminist, dissipating the message of emancipation of the African womanhood. In most of her

prose texts, we have a depiction of the oppression of Igbo women in connection with the

claim that colonialism, classism and sexism are intertwined in the African women’s

experience of oppression. Writing from outside her native culture offers Emecheta a

conducive atmosphere to dwell on the problem of cultural, economic and gender oppression

that African women are subjected to. Actually, she denounces the negative aspects of her

traditional culture rather than celebrating its positives. She, therefore, exposes the

harmfulness of patriarchy in her communities.

Emecheta’s first two novels, In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen are feminist works

in the tradition of Edna O’Brien and Kate Millet. In addition, her domicile in England has

contributed immensely to her feminist growth. The liberal English setting obliges her to

exercise certain rights. For instance, she was able to obtain a divorce and gain custody of her

children. The African society is predominantly patriarchal and would have greatly inhibited


such actions by a woman. Her field of study, Sociology, further exposes her to the sufferings

of womanhood in various cultures. This heightens her concern for this disadvantaged

subgroup and awakens her urges for politics of the female plight. Therefore, a combination of

factors – her diasporic identity, her personal victimization by the patriarchy and her exposure

to the works of other feminists- sharpen her consciousness. Commenting on her consistent

narration of the woes in her motherland, Emecheta says:

Some people have said that a talk which I gave at the Africa Centre a few weeks ago is unpatriotic,

but I, as a writer cannot afford to tell my people what they want to hear. If I start doing that I would

be betraying my conscience, my profession and my country (1981:2582).

Emecheta does not stop at cataloguing male hostilities; she goes on to fight them. In

reading her novels, one is aware that she is furthering the female cause. Her brand of sexual

politics is not mediocre; she extends it to the emancipation of the males. Emecheta derives

the title of her second novel, Second Class Citizen, from Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase. The

African society is depicted as a patriarchal world where man is the reference point; he defines

woman in relationship to himself. The female has no autonomy outside the male who may be

her father, husband or brother. In a traditional patriarchal society like Nigeria, this concept

strongly persists. This idea is articulated in Emecheta’s The Slave Girl. Hear her:

A girl needed men to guide her: her father, or any man who could represent a father to her, or when

she grew up a husband. So, was not her brother the rightful person to decide the fate of little

Ojebeta? (30).

Consequently, the African women are portrayed as finding themselves perpetually

trapped in this eternal triangle of the patriarchy. They are just what the apparatus decree.

Exposing further the status of the girl-child in Africa, Emecheta, in The Slave Girl, states

through, the narrator, that “a boy is like four girls put together” (p.68). She further muses on

the inessentiality of the female when she observes unenthusiastically, “Titi is only a girl” (71).

The phobia for male children is further heightened in the reaction of Adah’s parents at her


birth. In fact, she was born when everyone in the family expected a male child; her arrival was

such a disappointment that her birth was not recorded. These instances serve to highlight the

disregard which plagues the female from infancy to adulthood in a patriarchal society like

Africa. The Slave Girl is, thus, a critique of the way women are caught in a double bind

between what tradition expects of them and the experiences of the colonial social context. In

this novel, Emecheta attempts to conscientize African women and make Africans redress

their contributions to the subjugation of African women (Sarah Anyang Agbor, 2008).

The fact that the patriarchy regards the female as an object of amusement further

reinforces his conception of her as a piece of property. A man purchases a woman in

marriage as he would any item, such as a piece of furniture, an animal or a slave. Marriage is

usually profit motivated. When Francis, in Second Class Citizen, feels threatened over Adah’s

pay packet, his father reassuringly reprimands him by observing that he should count himself

lucky for ‘possessing’ such a wife. The word ‘possessing’ is significant in the context because

what one normally possesses is a piece of property. In fact, one thing that binds Francis to

Adah is her money. Adah is the breadwinner and, to this effect, indispensable, since Francis

has an aversion to work.

In marriage, the woman takes care of the home and bears children, tasks erroneously

supposed to be fulfilling. Therefore, bearing children is highly valued. Childlessness in African

society results to the type of mental agony and shame NnuEgo, in The Joys of Motherhood, is

subjected to. This novel attempts a denunciation of women’s entrapment between the

expectations of the Igbo traditions and those of modernity. It is with ignominy that NnuEgo

relinquishes her position as the head wife. It is ironic that a father is usually a very active

participant in the drama that enacts the sale and subjugation of a daughter. The actual

marriage negotiation of NnuEgo and Amatokwo is solely conducted by the males of the

family. It is also significant that it is Ojebeta’s brother, Okolie in The Slave Girl, who sells her

into slavery to Ma Palagada. Had Ojebeta’s father, Okwuekwu Oda, been alive, she still

would have been given away in marriage. Either way, they are both versions of slavery

because they impede economic independence and self-expression.


In addition, the female is assessed by either whose daughter or whose wife she is but

never by who she is. Married or single, a woman remains under patriarchal dominance. The

case of Ona in The Joys of Motherhood offers an apt illustration of the selfish paternal love

some women are subjected to in traditional African societies. Her father sees her as a means

through which his desired ends can be achieved. Invariably, marriage is depicted as an

extension of female enslavement. Adah, Emecheta’s persona in Second-Class Citizen,

experiences slavery in marriage in its crudest form. To Francis, her husband, Adah is like “a

yoke-fellow whose labour was crucial if he were to prosper” (14). At this juncture, it is worth

reiterating that Emecheta is a feminist writer as evinced in her autobiographical novels, In the

Ditch and Second-Class Citizen set in London. In dealing with the preliterate African

characters that are not extensions of herself, characters considered from a historical

perspective and placed in a rural context, Emecheta’s feminism becomes ambivalent as in

The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood. However, in Double Yoke, she creates a literate

female who successfully counters patriarchal victimization in the more modern and liberal

atmosphere, thus reaffirming her feminist ideology with which she started. Willful and

persistent Emecheta counters male subjugation and achieves ‘selfhood’.

In her reaffirmation of feminism in Double Yoke, Emecheta creates a “new African

woman”, that is, an emancipated female. Through the metamorphosis of the heroine, Nko, the

double standard morality pervading the African society is exposed. The female questing for

independence is a victim of the duplicity of life. The myth of the “acada” (bookish) woman, as

well as the sexual victimization that some females encounter is also explored in the text. In

addition, Emecheta advocates that the liberated woman grows simultaneously with the

modern African man.

One of Emecheta’s most recent texts, Kehinde, also dwells on the modes of patriarchal

suppression of the female in African society. It also thematizes the issues of community,

kinship, sisterhood, multiculturalism and shifting identities as they affect Nigerians both at

home in the Diaspora. The male characters are portrayed in negative images. This is with a

view to asserting the novelist’s own ‘selfhood’ and extorting other educated Nigerian women

to join the campaign for the liberation of African womanhood. In fact, in the text, Emecheta


dwells on the predicament of African woman in the postcolonial period. Her redefinition of

African womanhood in the text is both positive and radical. This is an appropriate ideological

posture that aims to rock the patriarchal foundation on which the stereotypic female portrait is

set. The text dwells on the ideological conflict between couples. The husband (Albert), an

idealist, is ready to return home on the prompting of his sisters, but the wife (Kehinde), the

eponymous heroine of the text, is more pragmatic and realistic. She does not feel comfortable

in her home country after a long absence: “she found herself once more relegated to the

margin” (Kehinde, 97). She, therefore, prefers to stay behind at her ‘home’, in exile, which she

finds more comfortable and convenient than her original home, Nigeria. Emecheta has lived in

Britain for more than four decades. Thus, her perception is inevitably shaped by her hybrid

consciousness which is a feature of post-colonial writing (M.E.M Kolawole, 1998).

What Emecheta embarks upon in Kehinde, in a conservative patriarchy as African’s, is

a bold and remarkable quest. Adjustment will certainly occur in the consciousness of the male

who eventually will have to accept the “new African woman”. Thus, in Kehinde, Nigeria is

depicted as a nation where dreams and hopes are shattered. The protagonist, Kehinde,

dreamt of visiting a nation (Nigeria) which would not relegate her to the margins. However,

her hope dream is not fulfilled as she is given only a secondary position in relation to her

husband. Kehinde feels isolated and ridiculed during her stay at her father’s household.

Consequently, when she gets back to London, she does not miss Nigeria. London is,

therefore, her home. It is a place where Kehinde’s ‘creator’ (Emecheta) is able to have an

outright rebellion against the traditional and patriarchal values in her motherland. Ana Arce

(2000) comments critically on the possible link between Kehinde and Emecheta, with a view

to arguing that in Kehinde, Emecheta’s narrates herself:

Kehinde’s feelings could be a reflection of Emecheta’s ambivalence towards

Nigerian and English – or Western – societies. She takes what she thinks is the

best for her from both worlds and stays in the transition area. In this way, her

identity is always open and surprising to those who expect coherence from her

(82).


The foregoing exploration of Emecheta’s narration of her motherland from the Diaspora

has revealed that she privileges stories of a world (unmistakably Nigeria) where women face

the problems of poverty and oppression. She also articulates protests against the

overwhelming power of tradition in African societies. Actually, Emecheta offers a biting

critique of Igbo cultural traditions that oppress, marginalize and contrive to enslave women.

She is, therefore, at the forefront of defending the rights of African women. Carole Boyce

Davies (1981:9), Emecheta’s fiction examines African “societies for institutions which are of

value to women and reject[ing] those that work to their detriment”. Akachi Ezeigbo (1996)

also corroborates Davies’s evaluation of the utilitarian value of Emecheta’s fiction. To

Ezeigbo, Emecheta’s fiction “exposes the injustices lined up against women so that society

could be restructured in a more equitable manner”. For instance, Aku-nna, the protagonist of

The Bride Price, rebels against the oppressive tradition of her society by choosing her own

husband regardless of societal rules. Her effrontery to choose Chike Ofulue, an Osu or slave

descendant , an outcast from the society, is Emecheta’s way of exposing on the social foibles

of her motherland.

4. Conclusion

The foregoing discussion has revealed that the prevailing point of view in the fictions of

Africans in Europe is critical and rather pessimistic, but surely not negative. The future fills the

continent with foreboding and apprehension, but it hopes to arrive. One easily notices the

familiar distaste of the writers for the ‘gleam’, delusion and unfulfilled expectations of the

present social period in postcolonial Africa. In fact, the texts examined in this paper, like many

other fictions of the African Diaspora, cast a critical and sardonic look over the social

physiology of the continent. Whatever the influences of the writers may be, they are sensitive

and exciting artists who are not “dancing to receive gifts”, but feel they are fulfilling a social

function. It is our contention in this paper that Marechera and Emecheta’s prose texts do lead

to precisely such a powerful, profound and evocative (re)assessment of the individual author’s

motherland. They transmit a vivid picture of the socio-historical realities of their enabling


milieus and offer an insight into various aspects of the realities. Ayo Kehinde (2008) makes a

similar observation about African fiction: “in the various periods of African literature, socio-

historical and political realities are foregrounded in literary texts through the employment of

certain images and metaphors” (35).

Despite the disparity in individual experiences, what remains unchanged is the

agonizing historical cum political epoch of Africa itself and its inscription in the mental register

of a continent. The narratives of Africans in Europe, although distinctively different from one

another in that they convey different personal experiences of the same neocolonial

disillusionment, are still joined by the need to express such memories and expose the

misdeeds of the African neocolonial rulers to the world. Therefore, African fiction writers in

Europe are truly translating reality into language, and they are meticulously interrogating the

conditions of human existence and (un)recorded history of African neocolonies. Their artistic

mission is to present an image of Africa that is ruined by the rancour of decadence.


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writing the motherland from the diaspora

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