Journey to New Values: Changing Masculine Attributes in Nigerian Children’s Prose Fiction

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Masculinity, a configuration of gender practices negotiated over time, ideology, and culture, is dynamic. This highlights the evolution of what is accepted as masculinity within a specified society across different periods. Nigerian children’s literature, with its rich repertoire of cultural gender practices, depicts these changes. However, existing studies on masculinity in Nigerian children’s fiction have focused on its exhibition in specific periods, neglecting a mapping of changes across different periods in the nation’s socio-cultural milieu. This study, therefore, examines transmutations in the representation of masculinity across periods in Nigerian children’s fiction through the analysis of male characters in Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Passport of Mallam Ilia, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Tambari, and Chigbo Ugwuoke’s Ogadimma: The Diary of a Housemaid. The texts are chosen based on their date of publication and representation of masculinity. R. W. Connell’s masculinity theory is deployed as a framework in the textual analysis of male characters in the selected texts. The juxtaposition of the depiction of identified male characters in the texts shows that the parameters defining acceptable masculine attributes progressively changed across identified periods, from the exhibition of surplus violence and aggression to the exhibition of kindness and academic brilliance and, more recently, financial success