Abstract
This chapter looks at two formally distinct Nigerian novels, Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. It begins by looking again at Fredric Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ thesis in order to formulate an allegorical method for reading these two texts. Despite their many differences, both texts present postcolonial Nigerian history as an unfinished struggle between dictatorship and radical democracy. Both novels stress the essential relationship between national liberation and the liberation of women. They construe liberation not as an abstract political programme but as the combined result of individual initiatives and resolutions, in the process illustrating the genius of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’.
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