In 1958, Chinua Achebe entered the literary scene and challenged the age-old belief that Africa is nothing more than a ‘heart of darkness’ with his ground-breaking novel, Things Fall Apart – a book which re-defined the genre of African Literature and ‘changed the global perceptions and western concepts and theories of imaginative creativity in and from Africa’ (Call For Papers: African Literature Today @ 50). But, sadly enough, even after half a century of critical readings and re-readings of Achebe's works, for most critics Achebe is a misogynist until today. According to most of the Achebe critics, Achebe's women are ‘voiceless’ and ‘virtually inconsequential’ (Mezu Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works: 212), always subjugated/ subordinated by their ‘heavy handed’ masters leaving them in a tight corner, without any scope of emancipation. Challenging the view of some critics like Rose Ure Mezu or Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, to name but two, this article proposes to subvert the most popular view of the Achebe's portrayal of the African woman as nothing more than ‘the weaker sex – a fragile, helpless, passive, idealized, exotic accessory’ (Mezu ‘Womanhood: The European Concept v. the African’) to the African male.

Generally speaking, whenever critics have assessed the portrayal of women in Achebe's works, especially in his novels, they have concluded that in an ‘androcentric’ setting of his novels, the ‘treatment of women … confirms the world of male chivalry and macho heroism’ (Kolawole Womanism and African Consciousness: 111). Another popular view is that the women in the stories are present only to ‘punctuate the men's stories but remain in the periphery of social impact’ (112). A very interesting point regarding this generalized view against Achebe's creation of women figures has been made by Professor Ernest N. Emenyonu in a personal interview1 where he is questioned thus: