The concept of new woman in Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Emecheta's Kehinde

The concern of my paper is to analyze and explore the concept of ‘New Woman' in the novels of Nigeria's well-known writers: Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta. As the focus is on the life of African women to reveal post-colonial reality, the novels of the above writers that are set almost in the same age have been chosen. In the struggle of self-fulfillment, African women reconfigure African womanism, prioritizing female individualization. Subverting the powerlessness of women to authority, the female protagonists in both the novels become a new breed of Nigerian women in the making. The emergence of femaleness and the woman centered endings of Anthills of the Savannah and Kehinde explicitly show their struggle is not a crusade for sexual and social justice, but a paradigm that articulates a still unrealized striving for self-expression. Keywords : postcolonial reality, new social order, sexual and social justice, new breed of Nigerian women, African womanism, subverting powerlessness of women to authority. MARANG: Journal of Language and Literature Vol. 17 2007:pp. 95-103