Women, Patriarchy and Gendered Representation in Contemporary African Drama: A Feminist Reading of Selected Male-Authored Plays

Abstract

This article examines the representation of women in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ’s I Will Marry When I Want and Ola Rotimi’s Man Talk, Woman Talk, focusing on how male-authored African drama negotiates patriarchy, gender stereotypes, female agency and socioeconomic power. Drawing principally on Marxist feminism while engaging African feminist perspectives, the study adopts qualitative textual analysis to interrogate characterization, dialogue, gender relations, domestic roles and the intersections of gender and class. The analysis demonstrates that the playwrights neither simply reproduce nor completely dismantle patriarchal conceptions of womanhood. In I Will Marry When I Want, women’s experiences are inseparable from class exploitation: Wangeci’s domestic labour and Gathoni’s vulnerability reveal how gender subordination intersects with poverty and capitalist inequality. In Man Talk, Woman Talk, Rotimi transforms gender stereotypes into subjects of comic interrogation by providing competing male and female voices within a quasi-judicial dramatic structure. The article argues that these representations reveal an important transition in African male-authored drama from restrictive constructions of women towards more contested, dialogic and socially conscious representations.

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