GENDER IN CHINUA ACHEBE'S THINGS FALL APART

Chinua Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart published in 1958 accounts forthe experience of women within nationalist discourse. It shows how the dominantmasculine nationalist tendencies are countered. It lays emphasis on women's concern.It describes the dual-sex institutions of Igboland which have shaped the identity of menand women in Igbo societies. Judith Van Allen mentions “Igbo Societies functionedaccording to a system of social organization that thrived on diffuse authority, fluid andinformal leadership, shared rights of enforcement, and a more or less stable balance ofmale and female power”. (171) The Igbo sociologist Kamene Okonjo has also arguedthat in both the “democratic village republics” and “constitutional village monarchy”systems of pre-colonial Igbo society, authority was so “dispersed” between the sexesthat “each sex generally managed its own affairs and had its own kinshipinstitutions”.(47) Challenging what she considers a conventional stereotype on theidentity of Igbo and Nigerian women, she contends that: