SOURCE: “Feminist Perspectives in African Fiction: Bessie Head and Buchi Emecheta,” in Black Scholar, Vol. 17, No. 2, March-April, 1986, pp. 34-40.

In the following excerpt, Bazin provides an overview of feminist themes in the fiction of Emecheta and Bessie Head.

Bessie Head, born in 1937 in South Africa, has probably received more acclaim than any other black African woman novelist writing in English. Buchi Emecheta, born in 1944 in Nigeria, is rivaled only by Flora Nwapa, another Nigerian, for second place. Other black African women have published novels of distinction in either English or French. However, except for Lloyd W. Brown's Women Writers in Black Africa and a few articles, this growing body of literature has received a minimal amount of attention from critics. As Lloyd W. Brown has said, “Western male Africanists have contributed heavily to an old boy network of African studies in which the African woman simply does not...