A Feminist Reading of Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah

In addition, Things Fall Apart extends the novel’s sociological narrative. This is because the story drew a delineation between the colonizers and the colonized, and featured a lead character who was tragically disappointed by his people’s abandonment of their pre-colonial traditions when they chose to embrace and side with the colonizer. Finally, the ‘post-colonial literature’ label finds justification in Achebe’s village of Umuofia, where the colonized people provide the cultural norm that is violated while the colonizer is the outsider, whose marauding influence is the knife that severed the bonds that held the community together. Consequently, its centre could no longer hold.

Patriarchy is the ideology that governs interpersonal relationships in the society of Umuofia. It is a social construct in which men hold primary power and dominate in political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of authority; patriarchy implies patrilineal inheritance and the effectual silencing of women in society. In this sense, Things Fall Apart features an ‘alpha male’, Okonkwo, who is the poster image of the patriarchal Igbo society of Umuofia. The failure to recognize and acknowledge the agency of female characters within the patriarchal landscape of Umuofia is understandable, given the dominance of male critics in the literary review profession, coupled with largely unacknowledged feminist literary theory. However, this failure inspires and necessitates a rereading of Achebe’s texts beyond Things Fall Apart. I, for instance, have found it necessary to make an imaginative reinterpretation of selected female characters in two novels by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah; asking what it means to read the novels through a feminist lens and against patriarchal ideology.