There is a view that the African verbal genre is not literature and its nature does not include bodily performance; it belongs to sociology and not literature because literature is the art that is written while African verbal genre is presented orally. Thus, the present study aims to demonstrate that, despite its oral nature, the African verbal genre is both literature and oral performance that includes bodily performance and that its literary and performative constituents synergize to achieve the purpose of the genre.
Using Violet Barungi’s Cassandra as a stepping-stone, I seek in this research article to analyze how feminism can be an effective weapon against the dyadic straitjacket of sexual harassment on the job and female objectification. The paper argues that male leadership leverage their stranglehold over their female employees to morph them into mere sexual objects. At the root of working women’s subservience to their male guv’nors, the paper contends, lies deep-seated power dynamics heavily weighted in favour of men. The eponymous character’s enactment of a gritty agency geared towards resisting cripplingly sexist practices in the workplace, and hidebound mindset in her society, bespeaks a dismissal of self-pity and discouragement that sometimes characterizes many women to their male-induced marginality.
This research paper is my attempt, through a blow-by-blow analysis of a fictional work of a rising star in postcolonial writing, to grapple with the manifold discontents that attend the event of migration. Migration is an astoundingly painful experience to go through, whose multifaceted toll on the subject may be beyond repair. Using NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New names as a stepping-stone, I argue that migration, albeit a time-honoured phenomenon has picked up speed in the twentieth-century and continued into the twenty-first century with a most heavy human toll. The paper emphasizes that even though the act of migration is underpinned by a hope for betterment, it may turn out to be a damp squid. No end of landmines and hiccups dot the migratory journey. The long-suffering postcolonial subject, hallmarked by the stifling strictures of marginality owing to a long history of race-based oppression that stretches back to the gruesome eras of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization, is on the receiving end of the horrors of migration. I tap into key terms in postcolonial theory cum sociology-informed perspectives to make a valid point about the dehumanizing fallout from the migratory experience.
Ngom, M. A. B. (2018). The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu: A hard-hitting etiological critique of the social and political malady bedeviling contemporary Zimbabwe.
ABSTRACT This research paper sets out to delve into the root causes of the multifaceted woes bedeviling contemporary Zimbabwe through The Hairdresser of Harare by one of present-day Zimbabwe's most talented and celebrated novelist, Tendai Huchu. The article argues that decades of misrule and its attendant downsides of corrupt practices have brought the country pretty much to its knees. The grassroots fell hard done by as they are reduced to living by their wits in order to get by. Tendai Huch's lead character and narrator's repeated flashbacks to the promising beginnings of nationhood and her relentless delivery of strictures on the crass disregard for the law across the board bespeaks a sense of anticlimax over the betrayal of the ideals of the liberation war. TheHairdresser of Harare is a scathing indictment of a deeply failed leadership whose malign backwash effects percolate through every strata of society.
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