The Flip Side of the Coin: Africana Womanist's Post-Apartheid Triple Quandary in Thulani Mtshali's Weemen

Document Type : Original Article

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Women's College for Arts,Science and Education

Abstract

This paper investigates how post-apartheid South African playwrights have used theatre to eliminate the apartheid's legacy and raise people's awareness of women's issues. It accentuates the triple jeopardy from which an African woman suffers; i.e. racism, classism and sexism and emphasizes her struggle to fight these evils as discussed in Thulani Mtshali's Weemen (1998). Although this play was written by a man, he succeeded to stress women's anguish in South Africa. The paper also underscores the cultural restrictions that lead to establishing the masculine supremacy and, as a consequence, cause the wretchedness of women. Further, it underlines the repercussions of colonialism and highlights the poverty and ignorance in which South African people lived in the post-apartheid period. The hegemony of the white and subservience of the black are also highlighted in this paper. Further, this paper emphasizes how Mtshali rejected the hegemonic misrepresentation of African women in Western discourse and presented them as agents of social change. Moreover, this paper presents an Africana womanist reading of Mtshali's play and shows how far the dramatist portrayed a true image of the Africana womanist as Clenora Hudson-Weems portrayed her in the theory which she developed in the late 1980s to enable African women to address their needs and experiences from an Afrocentric perspective and which she differentiated from the other female-centered theories.

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