In his 1988 introduction to the poetry anthology Voices from the Fringes published by the Association of Nigerian Authors, Harry Garuba remarked that there was “a significant literary renaissance taking place all over the country, especially in the genre of poetry” (xv). While a new generation of poets came to dominate the literary scene in the late 1980s and the output of playwrights did not slacken (Adesanmi and Dunton 2005, 8–12), the “sense of renewed energy and commitment” (Hewett 74) took longer to extend to the novel and the short story after nearly three decades of military rule (which ended in 1999) during which some writers were imprisoned and Nigerian publishing houses collapsed or struggled to survive (Umezurike 215). Once under way, the revival significantly opened up spaces where the voices of women writers could resonate, as epitomized by the publication in Lagos in 1996 of Breaking the Silence, an all-female anthology of short stories edited by Toyin Adewale-Nduka and Omowunmi Segun. This renewal and broadening of the scope of anglophone Nigerian literature at the end of the twentieth century signaled a reconfiguration of the literary landscape which had been marked by the important contributions of previous generations of writers in the aftermath of decolonization, the construction of the nation-state and the disillusionment that followed.
In the second half of the twentieth century and after the independence of Nigeria in 1960, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ken Saro-Wiwa, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo or Christopher Okigbo, among many others, explored the legacies of colonization and of post-independent regional, ethnic and religious tensions (leading to the Civil War of 1967–70 and several military coups), while female authors like Flora Nwapa or Buchi Emecheta portrayed the struggles of women trying to extricate themselves from the patriarchal constraints of traditional Nigerian society…