This article acknowledges that romantic love is slowly getting more recognition than before in the study of African literature and culture. The Nigerian publisher, Cassava Republic, has been part of this recognition. Their popular romance imprint, the Ankara romance series, presents stylish, sophisticated, urban heroines who negotiate complex social issues through their relationships with romance heroes. Although the Ankara novellas acknowledge and are inspired by the western romance tradition, they also consider questions which are specific to contemporary African cultures. One of the concerns which emerges in the novellas is the social pressure experienced by heroines to bear children. This pressure is exerted by their families, by men with whom they have relationships, by potential in-laws, and society at large. Two of the Ankara novellas published to date, hold a lens to the oppressive ways in which procreation is made an obligation for romance heroines. The titles which will be studied are A Tailor-Made Romance (2015) by Oyindamola Affinnih and Love Me Unconditionally (2017) by Ola Awonubi. These contemporary Ankara novellas will be read against the backdrop of Flora Nwapa’s novel Efuru, a first-generation African novel written by the first published African woman writer. We see that the dilemmas encountered by the Ankara heroines represent the concerns of Efuru, Nwapa’s heroine, with some variation. Nwapa’s novel has elements of the romance plot, but the ending is not the happily-ever-after romance ending. This article suggests that despite the difference in endings, both the popular Ankara novellas and the canonical novel, Efuru, draw attention to the discriminatory and disproportionate way in which heroines are made to bear the burden of procreation.

---

This article focuses on the significance of marriage and motherhood in two novellas from the Ankara Romance Series, published by the Nigeria- and London-based Cassava Republic Press. Oyindamola Affinnih’s A Tailor-Made Romance (2015) and Ola Awonubi’s Love Me Unconditionally (2017) are popular romances set in contemporary African cities that share many similarities with the other eight romances in the series, but are distinguished for the extent to which they foreground questions of marriage, motherhood and childbearing.

---

Often, however, the Ankara heroine’s happiness hinges upon the question of marriage leading to successful childbearing, as we shall see in the discussion which follows, which is different from the focus on single and divorced mothers in international romance fiction.

Topic