The Nigerian Novel and the Anticolonial Imagination

This chapter focuses on two Nigerian narratives, namely Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru. If the success of the colonial event was premised not only on military incursions but also on the repudiation and elision of African precolonial cultural systems, it makes sense that cultural texts would play a key role in the project of decolonization. This chapter argues that while Achebe’s text foregrounds the epistemic violence of the colonial edifice and the patriarchy of the indigenous communities, Nwapa’s work rewrites the anticolonial text by foregrounding the female script and linking the experience of women to the exploitation of the colonies.