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ABSTRACT
It is a common view that since the creation of the universe and life therein, the human community has been functioning as a male oriented society where women have only a subordinate role. Women are generally suppressed, humiliated and often subjected to an inhumane treatment being totally dependent on men. It is imagined that few European countries, first time, empowered women to create a gender balance in the society. Post-colonial writings also suggest that some African and Asian States which happened to be the British colonies had been previously suffering from severe gender crisis whereas the colonization brought them gender harmony. On the contrary African Literature also highlights the existence of a reasonable gender balance in Igbo Society before colonization. The same will be explained through the literary text namely, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe that offers a detailed view of gender stratification of the Igbo Society as existed before colonization and reveals astonishing arrangements existed in the apparently illiterate Igbo Society to maintain a gender harmony.
Keywords: Gender Stratification, Patriarchy, Post-Colonial Era, Pre-Colonized Society
INTRODUCTION
This paper highlights the gender stratification that is the male and female status vis-a-vis the level of their empowerment in Igbo Society that existed before colonization as has been revealed through the text of Chinua Achebe's novel titled Things Fall Apart (2001) and his other writing like No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God (1989).Further, it will divulge that the general concept guided by the colonizing powers that their colonies, being comprised of purely ignorant inhabitants, had been previously adversely suffering from gender disparity, was not entirely based on facts. The African Igbo Society, as is evident from the text, appeared to be the one that had astonishingly been maintaining a substantial gender harmony even before being embittered by the lurid gift of colonization.
RESEARCH BACKGROUND
Chinua Achebe, an African writer, was bom in a Christian family on November 16th, 1930 in Ogidi Easter, Nigeria, roughly after twenty-five years of British occupation that occurred in 1906. He studied in Africa and London and initially wanted to become a medical doctor, however, when he saw that mostly European post-colonial writers did not provide a fair picture of pre-colonized Africa, he felt impelled to represent the historical...