WOMEN AND HEGEMONY IN SELECTED AFRICAN FEMALE NOVELS

Abstract

Women’s writings have increasingly focused more on equality, intersectionality, sexual violence and reproductive rights. Women, hegemony and the survival strategies that they deploy amidst hegemonic institutions have not been given significant attention in contemporary African literature. While previous studies have written on hegemony, there is still a dearth of research on the various forms of hegemony and the survival strategies they deploy in combating such structures. This research used a qualitative content analysis to investigate how selected African female writers depict their female characters as victims of hegemony, and demonstrates how the characters eventually overcome the hegemonic structures that dominate them. Three novels were selected owing to their thematic relevance: Panashe Chigumadzi’s Sweet Medicine, Abi Dare’s, The Girl with the Louding Voice, and Chika Unigwe’s on Black Sisters’s Street. The various survival strategies that the female characters adopt made it necessary for the research to adopt an eclectic theoretical framework which comprises: radical feminism, snail-sense, feminism, and nego-feminism. The textual analysis reveals that the economy, patriarchy, western hegemony, culture, and family were the hegemonic institutions that the female characters battled with. Women were also found to dominate other women. In Chigumadzi’s Sweet Medicine, Tsitsi’s survival strategies are sexual compromise and syncretism. In Dare’s The Girl with the Louding Voice, Adunni adopts resilience, defiance, escape and violence as her survival strategies. Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street presents four major female characters who are Efe, Ama, Alek and Sisi, who deploy various survival strategies. Efe’s strategy is hard work followed by Ama who deploy soliloquy. Sisi’s strategy, as well as the others, culminated into emigration to Europe. However, Sisi fails to adopt loyalty as a strategy, which leads to her death. The others eventually succeed because they were loyal. Overall, the study demonstrates that despite the pervasive and multifaceted nature of hegemonic structures, African female characters develop diverse, context-specific strategies that enable them to reclaim agency, assert identity, and navigate oppressive socio-economic and cultural systems.