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Abstract
Gender politics has been playing a consequential role in Africa since the pre-colonial era and it saw a pessimistic escalation in gender identities even in colonial South Africa. Different generational women authors took the task of amending the distorted likeness of women as “second class citizens” by evoking gender discriminations which attempt to design women as marginalized folk. Casting of women into sexist roles of daughters, wives, and mothers by African male authorship and preserving the role of women as submissive to norms and customs, male scholarship created male persona as the subject of the narrative while relegating women and children as meek and dependent. This research paper would seek to analyze women authors not as the perpetuators but the creators of female subjectivity by challenging male generated binaries and patriarchal ethics. Present work would examine the novels of two Nigerian women authors, Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie through careful contextualization. Present paper would also investigate and contribute in the comparative study of their works taking the journey towards autonomy and self-identification of women disposition. The paper as such would commit itself towards the concept of “African Womanism” and Womanist desirability of female autonomy and personal fulfillment. Hence, the research paper would employ Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s idea of “African Womanism” as an accommodationist “humanistic feminism”. Novels, with differing Womanist aspirations, would be scrutinized within this framework of Womanist theory and would seek to comment on the commitment of the two Nigerian Womanist writers in order to ferret out whether the female characters find a voice for themselves or fail to vocalize as self-sufficient unconventional entity.