Keywords
Abstract
As part of their struggle to bring African women to the fore in the last decades of the 20th century, women writers like Ama Ata Aidoo, Grace Ogot and Buchi Emecheta have transformed the notion of motherhood, which has emerged as essential in the description of African female identities. On the contrary, the role of African fathers seems to remain unaltered in those same works. This article purports to mitigate the lack of studies concerning fatherhood in African women writers’ texts by exploring the failure of fatherhood in Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta’s semi-autobiographical novels Second-Class Citizen (1974) and Kehinde (1994). These novels are distinguished by capturing a new paradigm of motherhood that contrasts with male characters, the fathers of the main characters and the husbands and fathers of their children, whose fatherhood –either fatherhood in a patriarchal traditional context in Nigeria or hybrid fatherhood in the exile– stands out due to its absence or to the negative influence of the paternal role.
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