African Feminism/Womanism and Gender Complementarity in Ngugi wa Thiong'O’s Novels

This paper deploys the postulations of African womanism/feminism to examine gender  complementarity  in  three  of  Ngugi  wa  Thiong'O’s  novels:  The  River Between, A Grain of Wheat, and Petals of Blood. While the prominent role Ngugi accords his female characters has been acknowledged and explored critically, how he deploys the African feminist/womanist ideology in his writings, and uses his writings to advocate for gender complementarity within the African socio-cultural reality seems to have been ignored. This, however, should not be taken to mean that critics have not at all acknowledged the gender complementarity phenomenon in Ngugi’s works. The problem is that even when they do, it is usually subsumed within  the  framework  of  a  larger  discourse.  The  significance  of  this  paper, therefore,  lies  in  its  elaborate  examination  of  this  subject  in  Ngugi’s  aesthetic universe using the theoretical lens of African womanism/feminism.