Exploring Female Voices through Soyinka and Bâ Anonymous College

Influential African novelists have long focused on tackling difficult issues occurring in their respective countries. One enduring issue that writers have explored is gender. Common questions are: how are gender norms established? Why are women relegated to restrictive roles? How do women enact societal change despite their limited freedom? What does it mean to be a feminist? Two prominent African authors grapple with gender roles in their texts with varying degrees of attention to female gender roles and female agency. While Wole Soyinka’s 1975 play Death and the King’s Horseman primarily focuses on a Nigerian man named Elesin facing opposition from colonial authorities who prohibit his decision to commit ritual suicude, Soyinka portrays women as background characters, giving insight into gender roles in Yoruba culture and English colonial society through the several unnamed women that exist on the periphery of Elesin’s life.

Published just four years after Soyinka’s play, Mariama Bâ’s 1979 novel So Long a Letter approaches gender roles from a drastically different perspective. Bâ tells the story of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese Muslim woman who encounters the harmful effects of gender inequality when her husband marries a second...