SOURCE: “The Woman of Black Africa, Buchi Emecheta: The Woman's Voice in the New Nigerian Novel,” in English Studies, Vol. 64, No. 3, June, 1983, pp. 247-62.

In the following essay, Solberg examines Emecheta's conflicted feminist perspective and the representation of African women and contemporary social themes in her fiction. According to Solberg, Emecheta's harsh criticism of male chauvinism is tempered by her respect for traditional African culture.

The changes that have taken place in sub-Saharan black Africa during the hundred odd years since the ‘scramble for Africa’ are probably more profound than one can readily comprehend when looking at things from Western Europe. Colonialism unsettled a number of well-balanced mechanisms in almost every sphere of the traditional society: ecologically, socially, politically, and not least concerning the roles of the sexes.

In most traditional African societies there was a fairly well-defined pattern of duties and responsibilities shared by males and females...