The Travail Of Barren Woman In African Society
[A Study Of Adebayo Abayomi’s and Buchi Emecheta]

1.3 Statement of the problem

African women’s writing has flourished in the 21st century and these writers have interrogated practices and institutions which are patriarchally constructed (Bouziani, 2015). Patriarchy is a socio-political system that insists that males are dominant, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and are endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak, and to maintain that dominance through terrorism and violence (Hooks, 1984, p. 1). Matos (2015, p. 1) indicates that globally, in the period 2010 to 2014 women’s share of the population ranged from 49% to 53% in each country, but in most cases women do not enjoy the same representation of power and equality within the private and public spheres. Through literature women resisted patriarchal settings so that all social classes can have equal representation in the private and public spheres. Many critics have studied and analysed women’s fiction writing, focusing on gender and female oppression.

Gender discourse is an important area of literary criticism with wide spread implications for gender equality and human development across sectors. Increasing attention is being accorded the negotiation of gender relations in contemporary African literature.The study is thus premised on the following propositions:

• Gendered hegemony is more or less mentally integrated in a vast majority of both men and women, commonly allowing patriarchy to remain unchallenged, and even defended by both sexes.

• The gender of a person affects power-sharing and decision-making and this is manifested in men‘s control in families and public offices

• The radical feminist theory and Max Weber ?s Power theory posit that sex/gender difference is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power , as a result, violence is often against the female gender and it is a by product of patriarchy.

• Little attention has been given to the analysis of women‘s writing with the tools that theories of Max Weber and Radical Feminism provide.

1.4 Objectives of the study

This study has the following objectives:

1. To examine the pains of  a barren  woman in Africa tradition context

2. To evaluate how the selected novels promote ideas of equality, immanent value and self- determination.

3. To analyse and interpret how the selected novels employ proofs of persuasion to appeal to the readers.

1.5 Significance of the study

This study adds to the growing number study on the travails and oppression faced by African women . It aims at contributing to the understanding of feminist context and recognises the presence of women who in history, have been ignored. This study hopes that analysing literary works of African feminist fictional writers would help others to construct persuasive arguments on the same topic that help women to redefine themselves and take charge of their own destinies. In addition, this would  also assist men to understand that it is normal for women to have autonomous power to realise their dreams. Readers of this study should understand what effective and non-effective rhetorical strategies are, and how it might be possible for women to be included in all spheres of life. This study contributes to interdisciplinary studies; particularly feminism. Interdisciplinary studies are important in opening avenues for reading and research.

1.6 Limitations of the study

The study is limited to the critical examination of the novels themselves, only of which it could have been beneficial to interview the authors – however due to time, logistical and resource limitations; this is not possible. The results obtained from this might not be generalised to all societies in Africa as the novels could have represented experiences of societies in which they are set.

1.7 Scope and Delimitations of the study

There are many women fictional writers in Africa, who have written against gender inequality, but this study is limited to two selected novels, which are set in Africa. Only fiction written in English is considered, as fictional works written in other languages fall out of the scope of this study. The two novels selected are Adebayo Abayomi's Stay With Me and  Buchi Emecheta

1.8 Methodology

Creswell (1994) defines the research methodology as the system of collecting data for a research project. Therefore, this section presents the methodology that has been used to conduct this research.

Qualitative method was the central point of this study. A qualitative study design is defined as “an inquiry process of understanding a social or human problems, based on building a complex, or holistic picture, formed with words, reporting detailed views of respondants or informants, and or contacted in a natural setting” (Cresswell, 1994, p. 2). This was a desktop study where already published sources were used. Fahnestock and Secor (1990, p. 77) indicate that qualitative is “rather deductive, since we will begin with some assumptions about argument as widely held as possible, which we then test against a body of evidence as representative as we could make it, on the way to some conclusions, as tentative as they must be”. The qualitative research design is concerned with the understanding, experience and interpretation of the social world. It is both flexible and sensitive to the social context in which data are produced (Masson, 2002, p. 3). The qualitative method is used to organise and stimulate the meaning of the content in the novels and draw conclusions from them. This method is also good in gaining in-depth understanding and providing descriptions of how characters bring forth the feminist arguments in connection with rhetoric. According to Mlambo (2013), qualitative methods are also effective in identifying intangible factors whose role in the research issue may not be easily apparent. Therefore, since a qualitative method was used in this study, there has not been any fieldwork, but rather a literary analysis of imaginative short fiction.