Patriarchy vs Feminism: The Dialectics of Social Norms, Gender, and Character Delineation in Selected Anglophone African Fiction

Abstract

African societies are predominantly patriarchal. It is also a fact that the earliest writers of Anglophone African fiction were men. Since the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart—credited as the first African novel—in 1958 (Killam, 1969), a discernible pattern has emerged in which most male writers, by centralizing male characters, tend to tilt towards patriarchal ideals. In response to this narrative, new female voices have arisen to write women into relevance. This paper interrogates these trends and their implications for literary scholarship. The four novels selected for study are representational, and they are: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964), Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s House of Symbols (2005), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (2025). The research methodology is qualitative, examining the first two novels for patriarchal bias in character delineation, while the other two are analyzed by highlighting efforts at writing back by female writers. Social realism theory (1862) and Judith Butler’s performative feminism theory (1990) serve as the analytical tools for the research. The paper demonstrates that most male writers project male characters and marginalize female ones, while female writers, in an effort to change the trajectory, produce ‘protest’ fiction that relegates men to the background. Ultimately, the paper argues that both patriarchal depictions and the consequent feminist “writing back” phenomenon expose biased perspectives that appear to present most African fiction by writers of English expression as lopsided.