The privileging of man in African societies has involved an erasure of identities and subjectivities of many women, holding them to an assumption of female inferiority.

Adichie’s prose is herein appraised as a literary space within which varied socio-cultural trajectories and gender inequalities in particular are expressed in a postcolonial context. The analysis positions Adichie’s prose as one that falls within the ambits of contemporary literary works that project women confronting and contesting hydra-headed manifestations of patriarchal repression, its attendant practices and ideologies, and gender inequality.

Reliant on the postcolonial feminist theory, this chapter analyses some of Adichie’s prose works, namely Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and The Thing Around Your Neck to foreground appropriation of her feminist manifesto. To instantiate her opposition to this practice, Adichie accords authoritative roles and voices to her female characters, despite their living under repressive and constraining spaces. Adichie’s fiction mainly presents (Black) women as constantly living in patriarchal and repressive spaces characterised by multifaceted discriminations, marginalisation, abuse, commodification and censorship, all of which are protracted by the notion that femaleness should live in total subjection to maleness. This chapter reflects on how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in multifarious ways, projects and confronts a nuanced (and blatant) exaltation of maleness over femaleness in her fiction. The title of the novel, 'Purple Hibiscus' may refer to a particular sort of flower, but it also emphasises the triumph of the innovative suggesting that the unusual is not necessarily bad as the subversion of genders aims to bring equality among the sexes promoting new awakening. Her novel suggests women empowerment through social transformation by which the different forms of oppression, exploitation, exclusion and silencing are confronted by women promoting gender equality. Adichie's approach to subvert male oppression confirms that despite the struggles, women assert themselves in a world dominated by men through education and female solidarity.

Kambili's, the young protagonist's life represents a coherent response to the challenges of life in a postcolonial African nation as the novel pays attention to the different forms of oppression in the lives of women in postcolonial Nigerian society. It offers a reading of Adichie's novel, Purple Hibiscus as a quintessential African feminist novel, negating female aesthetics of suffering and upholding the aesthetics of women empowerment. This article focuses on the first novel of contemporary Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003).

Chimamanda purple hibiscus