From subversive othering to Utopian imagining: gendered vision and revision in Vincent Egbuson’s Womandela

Abstract

The article examined the representation of the African woman in a twenty-first century Nigerian novel, Vincent Egbuson’s Womandela. Critical attention is shifted from the popular feminist reading of African literature which privileges areas of immediate discomfort for the African woman, that is, domestic/marital, cultural and economic issues. My critical lens focused on the issue of political empowerement of the African woman. The article acknowledged the fact that African women in pre-colonial era enjoyed great political power in varying degrees in different communities, it then proceeded to analyse how Egbuson subverts the contemporary political emasculation of the African woman by drawing on the legend of the late South African President, Nelson Mandela to produce an African female political amazon. The analysis revealed the use of Othering, syntactic deconstruction of some nominals and pronominals, myth reversal and onomastic neologism as strategies of relocating African women from the margin to the centre, specifically to the political centre.

Keywords: Other, Othering, the African woman, Vincent Egbuson, Womandela, Subversion