Women and Economic Independence in Flora Nwapa's EFURU and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's THE LAST OF THE STRONG ONES

One of the challenges faced by the society is the controversy surrounding the status of the female gender. While some describe the woman as the weaker sex, others refer to the female as a second class citizen. Both claims could be said to be rooted in cultural, social and religious orientations. To this end, many female writers have written to debunk these stereotypes and reconfigure women’s identities as part of the needful project to recover the distinctive tradition of African female stories (her stories). Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s The Last of the Strong Ones are two selected literary texts to discuss women and economic independence as they define the role and status of women using a historic and womanist postulations as the theoretical framework. The paper argues that the novels are part of a corpus in African fiction which contests certain images in popular male authored works by offering a perception radically different from the portraits we are familiar with. The paper concludes that women can take responsibility of their lives amid gender biases with examples of remarkable women who transformed their societies through economic self-sustenance via agriculture.