Tradition, Modernity, and the African Woman: The Writings of Buchi Emecheta and Bessie Head

European colonization has been a double-edged sword for Africa. While it has undermined and controlled political autonomy on the continent, it has also brought modernization, which in itself has proven to be as equally problematic, particularly when the issues of traditional African values come into play. Many novels and long poems written by African writers address the issue of modernization and its affects on those traditions. Yet the complexity of these issues are not fully addressed until it deals with the subject of female subordination within traditional African societies. 

Two authors who do address this problem are Buchi Emecheta and Bessie Head. Both Emecheta and Head, in their works The Bride Price and "Snapshots of a Wedding," respectively, look at the conflicts that arise when modernization clashes with traditions from a feminine perspective, addressing particularly how modernization has opened up new options for African women, but at the same time created fissures between those new models and old ones.

In order to understand how those conflicts come about, it is important to look at the contradictions in both modern and traditional roles for women. The role women play in traditional African societies is that of subordination to their male counterparts. While African women can attain certain degrees of power and wealth within their communities (for instance, in many villages, women control the marketplace and are able to generate great wealth and power), their role within the village and home is still to support and be secondary to men.