Daughteronomy': Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, Domestic Amazons and Patriarchal Assumptions in Children of the Eagle (Essay‪)‬

Preamble The temper and texture of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's feminist discourses in Children ofthe Eagle (2002) seem to have been greatly influenced by the feminist critical outlook in the West of the 1970s, which had sought to expose 'What might be called mechanisms of patriarchy, that is the cultural 'mind-set' in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality" (Barry 2002: 122). (1) This pursuit was to a great extent a critical exertion by female, and/or gynandrist critics whose searchlight foraged for these social and behavioural infelicities largely in the literary outpourings by male writers. By then women writers, particularly African women writers were few and far between. Apparently Adimora-Ezeigbo is not seeking to locate Barry's delineations in any of her works as such; she has instead used her novel to negate certain patriarchal assumptions about women while not missing out on any opportunity to project the hitherto uncelebrated superior facets of female panache and comportment in an otherwise unfavourable climate of mutual social and cultural mistrust. It is writers like Adimora-Ezeigbo who make Carole Boyce Davies (1986: 10) glow with elation when she remarks that these days "African women themselves are beginning to tell their own stories." What the author has done therefore is to fictionalise dimensions of what the female elite complains against male predispositions towards them while applying tropes which seek to foreground these imputations.