Theorizing an Africana Womanist’s Resistance to Patriarchy in Monyaise’s Bogosi Kupe

Introduction

A depiction and representation of African women characters by African male writers in the context of African novels in South Africa is a polemical issue and a locus of intense literary analysis. A motley array of strongly articulated views percolates into and characterizes the scholarly discourse in this regard. Of such views, the dominant ones are those couched in the feminist and womanist orientations, decrying how women characters are portrayed and appropriated in certain African novels written, especially, in indigenous languages such as isiXhosa (see Mtuze, 1980; Peter, 2010), Xitsonga (see Machaba, 2011; Mathye, 2003), Setswana (see Makgato, 2005; Mereeotlhe, 1998), and Sesotho (see Ngcangca, 1987) by African male writers. Of course, there are similar acerbic views articulated in respect of other African literary genres and in novels written in other parts of Africa. One example of the former scenario is Mtuze’s (1996) feminist analysis that highlights and critiques a stereotypical representation of women in three isiXhosa poems, one of which is Mema’s “Umfaziwokwenene.” And one example of the latter scenario is Bentahar’s (2012) analysis of Mariama Bâ’s Ben Unesi Longue Lettre and of Leila Abouzeid’s Ām al-fīl. A further example is Mutunda’s (2009) critique of masculinity in francophone African women’s writings. Similarly, Savitt (n.d.) delineates female stereotypes perpetuated by and permeating some of Latin American writings. In the process, all the astringent feminist views articulated by these critics attempt to expose patriarchal depictions of women characters within the respective literary works with a view to critiquing such stereotypically gendered depictions and the lacunae attendant to them.

One relevant instance of a feminist analysis that offers a no-holds-barred critique of the blasé depiction of woman characters in four Setswana novels is Mereeotlhe’s (1998) work. The four novels in question are Monyaise’s Ngaka Mosadi Mooka and Marara and Lebethe’s Morabaraba and Mosele. Mereeotlhe’s treatment of these four novels provides a feministic reading of these oeuvres which, she contends, are regarded as magnum opuses that quintessentially embody the Setswana novelistic zeitgeist. Counterpoising the vitriolic feminist views of a patriarchal typecasting of women characters stereotypically and phallically are conformist views that tend to be celebratory and commemoratory of such prosaic characterization of women. Two examples with reference to Setswana are Lesete (1994) and Pilane (2002). The former’s analysis of Monyaise’s Bogosi Kupe, which is one of Setswana classic novels, valorizes symbolism as a literary technique despite subliminal or latent stereotypes embodied in this device in representing a woman protagonist, Matlhodi. The latter’s analysis of the construction of the Batswana cultural identity in selected Setswana literary texts tends to slew to a somewhat celebratory and mundane construction of Batswana cultural identities in these texts in lieu of problematizing this cultural identity construction.

Against this backdrop, this article seeks to investigate the character, Matlhodi, a woman protagonist in Monyaise’s Setswana novel, Bogosi Kupe. In this case, building on Mereeotlhe’s (1998) work, it appropriates self-defining and resistance, framed within Africana womanism and Africana critical theory (ACT), respectively, as some of the conceptual devices through which to analyze the manner in which Matlhodi navigates her world in this novel. It, thus, contends that it is through her self-defining and resistance that Matlhodi succeeds in warding off the patriarchy to which she is being subjected. In addition, the article employs Africana womanism (see Kasun, 2009; Mangena, 2013) and ACT (see Bassey, 2007; Pratt-Clarke, 2012; Rabaka, 2003, 2009) as a theoretical canvas within which it situates and frames its argument. In this instance, the choice of Bogosi Kupe as a locus of analysis for the article is informed by its woman protagonist, Motlhabi, who seems to be a larger-than-life figure transcending the confines of her novelistic universe and exhibiting adrenergic attributes.

The Africana Womanist Framework and ACT

This article utilizes Africana womanism (see Dove, 1998; Hudson-Weems, 1993, 1997; Kasun, 2009; Mangena, 2013; Mungai, 2015; Reed, 2001) as its theoretical lens through which to embed its argument. The Africana womanist framework as employed in this article borrows heavily from Hudson-Weems’s (1993, 1997) Africana womanism. The latter, as theorized by Hudson-Weems, is antipodal to permutations of feminism such as African feminism and Black feminism. It is also not an appendage of Walker’s womanism espoused by certain African women scholars. Rather, it is a stand-alone theory invented for every woman of African lineage and founded on African culture with its attendant polymorphic geographies, struggles, experiences, desires, and needs. It is an Afrocentrically self-defining and self-naming postulate, salient features of which encompass self-naming, self-defining, strength, ambition, wholeness, adaptability, flexibility, respect, spirituality, authenticity, recognition, mothering, nurturing, family-centeredness, genuine sisterhood, and male-compatibility. To this inventory, can be added visibility and challenging and resisting all forms of (male) oppression and domination (Blackmon, 2008; Gaines, 2013; cf. Pratt-Clarke, 2012). In this regard, Africana womanism investigates cultural practices engendering the subjugation and subalternization of women (cf. Mungai, 2015). Embracing men, Africana (ethnicity) womanism (gender) entails and pursues an ideological agenda that critiques colonialism and neocolonialism, and the racist and neopatriarchal residues inherent in the hegemony of Western feminisms. One might add here, the critique of the racist and neopatriarchal residuals still persisting in different guises of cultural chauvinism, postcolonialism, and postfeminism (cf. Dove, 1998; Mungai, 2015; Rabaka, 2009; Reed, 2001). However, other scholars such as Alexander-Floyd and Simien (2006) impugn Africana womanism for dismissing Black feminism and for valorizing race. Despite these reservations, Africana womanism lends itself well as a theoretical and analytical framework for the current article. Most of the features embodied in it, especially strength, ambition, adaptability, and flexibility, are personified, the article contends, by Matlhodi as a self-naming (Mandende, 2009) and self-defining woman protagonist. The article also argues that Matlhodi tends to challenge and resist cultural chauvinism, and display visibility in the face of this cultural juggernaut.

Again, this article appropriates ACT as part of its theoretical and analytical framework. ACT is a critical, oppositional, and emancipatory theory. Despite its German Frankfurt School rootage and notwithstanding some of its tenets which are writ large in the oeuvres and views of the classical critical theory (cf. Agger, 1991; Habermas, 1984, 1987), it impugns a Eurocentric worldview and challenges domination and hegemony while effecting praxis into the lived-experiences engendered by these twin concepts (cf. Bassey, 2007; Pratt-Clarke, 2012; Rabaka, 2003, 2009). Indeed, Rabaka (2003) concurs that ACT is critical of discrimination and domination characterizing diasporan and continental African lived-experiences and life-worlds. In addition, he argues that ACT differs from Eurocentric and Marxist class-conflict oriented critical theory as it privileges, among other things, race, racism, white supremacy, gender, sexism, patriarchy, and colonialism (Rabaka, 2009). In fact, ACT also challenges classism, homophobia, and many other -isms (Pratt-Clarke, 2012). At its core is resistance to all forms of domination and hegemony, and to all types of negative, discriminatory, and degrading -isms.

One scholarly aspect in which ACT is still lacking as identified by Rabaka (2009) is dialoguing with Africana women’s studies, especially with Black feminist and womanist theory. It is this area, particularly the nexus between Africana womanism and ACT, that the current article wishes to establish. In this regard, one of the common denominators that both Africana womanism and ACT have which is germane to this article, albeit in varying degrees, is challenging and opposing domination, hegemony, gender, sexism, patriarchy, and classism. To this effect, it is the manifestations and the workings of domination, hegemony, and patriarchy, in the form of both patriarchal hegemony and familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony, especially as they affect Matlhodi as a woman protagonist in Bogosi Kupe, that this article intends exploring. The article also characterizes and analyzes the way in which Matlhodi, as an Africana womanist, tries to subvert, challenge, and resist the proscribing hegemonic cultural conditions of her novelistic milieu.

Self-Defining Africana Womanist Resisting Patriarchal Hegemony

Patriarchal hegemony—or its variants thereof—typifies certain societies (certain African societies included), and can be embodied by and actualized through multiple patriarchal practices. Such practices may vary from society to society. At times, patriarchal practices become so entrenched that they crystallize into what Fairclough (1989) and Thompson (1984, 1990) refer to as common sense assumptions. Common sense assumptions refer to taken-for-granted beliefs, practices, or conventions that get naturalized in quotidian social interactions. As such, they are hardly questioned or contested (see Chaka, 2006). One such practice is the way in which boys and girls are differentially socialized—a practice informed mainly by gender and cultural stereotyping. Two other practices common among most Black African societies of Southern African are arranged marriages and lobola, ¹ a point extensively dealt with by Chaka and Mniki (2003) and in part by Mandende, Chaka, and Makgato (2017).

Different aspects of these two customary practices—and of others—are explored as a fait accompli in most Setswana novels, of which classic examples are Monyaise’s Ngaka Mosadi Mooka and Marara and Lebethe’s Morabaraba and Mosele (see, for example, Lesete, 1994; Makgato, 2005; Mereeotlhe, 1998; Pilane, 2002). For instance, in Bogosi Kupe (a Setswana novel written in 1967 and set in apartheid and colonial South Africa), Matlhodi’s mother (MmaMatlhodi) chooses a partner for her daughter because she does not want Modimoeng, a poor man that her daughter, Matlhodi, loves, to marry her. Here, Matlhodi is a woman protagonist whose vicissitudes in life lie in the hands of her mother (MmaMatlhodi) and her younger brother (Tukisang). Both her mother and her younger brother are torchbearers of Batswana patriarchal and cultural mores and ethos. However, as argued below, Matlhodi resiliently subverts, challenges, and resists these patriarchal and cultural mores and ethos arrayed against her. Mosehla (2000) poignantly captures MmaMatlhodi’s views regarding her daughter:

MmaMatlhodi o kgatlhanong lo lerato lwa ga morwadiagwe Matlhodi le Modimoeng, monna yo o mo ratang ka pelo yotlhe ya gagwe. O thibela lenyalo la bona gonne a setse setso morago. O pateletsa Matlhodi go nyalwa ke Oshupile monna wa Phiritona yo a mmatletseng ena. Maikaelelo a ga moganetsi, MmaMatlhodi, a a sa siamang a tswelediswa ke Tukisang, kgaitsadia Matlhodi. ² (pp. 35-36)

MmaMatlhodi’s views about which man should marry Matlhodi and her uncompromising and authoritarian stance to unilaterally have her married by Oshupile (the man Matlhodi does not love), and not to Modimoeng (the man Matlhodi loves so much and who has impregnated her), highlight that she is not only a traditionalist par excellence but also a traditionalist ad nauseam. In this sense, her views epitomize a patriarchal hegemony to which she subjects her daughter. In her, deep-seated patriarchal Batswana customary practice of choosing a man and of arranging a marriage for a girl, finds consummate embodiment. Mereeotlhe (1998) waxes rather feministic about this customary practice and others woven into the African cultural tapestry: “In most Black cultures a woman has to assume a submissive role . . . [a] woman is confined to the role of homemaker and excluded from main stream [sic] politics” (p. 20).

In one enactment of a dramatic irony symptomatic of works of drama, Modimoeng intimates the following to MmaMatlhodi:

Mma, ke moeng mo fatsheng leno, mme ke letlhogonolo la me e re ke ise ke bee lesago fatshe, ke bo ke setse ke bone molekane. Ke ne ke tla lala ke fetile; jaanong ke tla nama ke sa tlhotse malatsinyana mono go bona molekane yo, le go rulaganya mafoko. ³ (Monyaise, 1967, p. 31)

Yet, in another dramatic irony enactment of her own, MmaMatlhodi responds to Modimoeng by counting numerous spinsters in the village, Magogong, whom she thinks he can marry without knowing and realizing that Modimoeng wants to marry her own daughter, Matlhodi. In saying and doing so, she lords it over both Modimoeng’s and Matlhodi’s private personal lives, effectively dictating what should happen to them. Again, by doing so, she assigns herself an enviable role of being a proxy mother lode of Batswana patriarchy. She is aided and abetted in her role as and in her intentions to be a Batswana cultural and patriarchal incarnate by Tukisang (her son and Matlhodi’s younger brother), and Oshupile’s parents (Matlhodi’s in-laws) (see Mosehla, 2000). Tukisang’s role as MmaMatlhodi’s abettor in her missionary zeal to upend Matlhodi’s moves to do what she likes about her personal life occupies pride of place when, later on, he accuses Matlhodi of being a major cause of Oshupile’s death and coerces her to confine herself to her home (to be at home) as a sign of mourning her husband’s (Oshupile’s) death. This coercive move and other motives he has for wanting to control and constrict Matlhodi’s personal life—à la MmaMatlhodi—set him on a collision course with Matlhodi and consign him to being both a MmaMatlhodi incarnate and a champion lode of family patriarchy. This is ironic in that it is a person like his father—and not him as Matlhodi’s younger sibling—who should be seen to be playing that role. It is a behavior attesting to the fact that patriarchy knows no age limit as long as it is embodied in a male member of a family.

Pointedly, MmaMatlhodi’s actions and views not only entail a semblance of dramatic irony, per se, they also embody an aura of situational irony and an element of self-defining on the part of Matlhodi. The first scenario is exemplified by the fact that even though she (MmaMatlhodi) is impetuously averse to Matlhodi’s being married by Modimoeng, this duet ends up, in the final analysis, being together—à la fate—thereby playing their pas de deux as husband and wife thanks to Oshupile’s death. Ironically, in this case, Oshupile’s death serves as a deus ex machina to her. In this regard, Matlhodi tends to be self-defining—defining and determining her own ambitions and her own destiny—post Oshupile’s death. The second scenario is instantiated by the fact that the very eventualities (that Modimoeng should not marry Matlhodi at any point at all, and that Matlhodi should not spare any love for Modimoeng) MmaMatlhodi works so hard to prevent are the very ones that, ultimately, win the day. These eventualities underscore both Matlhodi’s male-compatibility (she wants to have a man, but a man of her own choice) and family-centeredness (she desires to have a family and a marriage, but a family and a marriage of her own choice). In this way, she becomes authentic to her own self and not to her mother’s choices.

What are Matlhodi’s prospects of surmounting the odds that are so heavily stacked against her, especially when the raison d’être for them are her own mother and her own sibling? In fact, through her depiction in the novel, not only is she up against odds spawned by her own family, but she also has to wrestle with personal circumstances which, in the eyes of her community, are perceived as social stigmas. First, she is a 30-year-old spinster at the Magogong village. Spinsterhood is a social stigma that in her community is equated with an unmarriageable girl or a girl having no prospects of being married anymore and who should not be seen in the company of younger girls, lest they follow her spinsterhood curse. She is, then, salvaged from her social stigma of spinsterhood by an old man, Oshupile (from Phiritona), who marries her courtesy of her mother’s forcefully arranged marriage (see Mosehla, 2000). Mosehla (2000) crisply encapsulates Matlhodi’s spinsterhood as depicted in the novel:

O [Monyaise] simolola ka botshelo jwa Matlhodi kwa Magogong moo a neng a batlile a fetoga lefetwa go fitlhela a ntshiwa ke Oshupile mo leganong la tau ka lenyalo la go pateletswa. ⁴ (p. 10; also see Note 9)

There are two instances of family patriarchal domination in the preceding paragraph. The first instance of family patriarchal domination relates to the fact that Matlhodi has to surmount the odds that are foisted on her by two of her quintessential family members: her mother and her brother. Thus, for her, the locus of her crisis is her own family which, in endeavoring to uphold its community’s incontestable patriarchal practices, turns out to be an epicenter of her personal subjugation and subalternization. There is no gainsaying that a manifest lacuna in Matlhodi’s family equation is her father and the views he could be espousing vis-à-vis those of her two duplicitous carbon copy family members. Actually, it is another form of family patriarchal domination that Matlhodi’s family’s patriarchal ethos is zealously foisted on her by her mother in the absence of her father—and this not only as a common sense assumption but also as a deep-rooted practice. The second instance of family patriarchal domination concerns the fact that Matlhodi is redeemed from her spinsterhood by the very man she does not love (Oshupile) in lieu of the one she loves (Modimoeng). This situational discrepancy gives rise to a dominational subtext: marital subjugation. That is, Matlhodi finds herself entangled in a marriage of unreciprocated love or romance to which she gets subjugated. Mosehla (2000) opines that Matlhodi consents to marrying Oshupile so as not to disappoint and disgrace her mother (also see Makgato, 2005). However, in doing so, Matlhodi ends up disappointing herself, thereby adding to her personal subjugation. This last point foregrounds a fleck of subalternization on her part in the face of family pressure as she subjects herself to emotional mortification for the sake of the ennoblement of her family’s patriarchal vicissitudes.

However, viewed from an Africana womanist vantage point, and particularly factoring into the equation the relentless pressure her family brings to bear on her, it can be argued that Matlhodi is a self-defining defiant Africana womanist who, resiliently and flexibly, resists her family’s patriarchal hegemony. First, she sets out to define her love life by choosing to fall in love with Modimoeng, much against her family’s expectations. She keeps this love affair clandestine as long as she can since she knows that once it becomes public, it will disgrace and stigmatize her in the eyes of her mother and in the panoptic gaze of her community. Nonetheless, she continues it even after is forced to marry Oshupile. In this way, she appropriates a flexible stratagem to resist an overweening family patriarchal hegemony manifesting itself through an equally patriarchal practice of choosing a partner/husband and arranging a marriage for a girl. And she authentically and conveniently leverages her chosen stratagem as she is bent on pursuing her clandestine love affair with Modimoeng to the very bitter end. To this effect, the night before her traditional wedding to Oshupile, Matlhodi goes and meets Modimoeng at a secret tryst. This is how this undercover love affair together with its related shenanigans is depicted:

Maitseboa a tsatsi la bofelo a fitlhela a mo letile fa marakanelong, ya re a tswa molomo a re o itheetse a re ga a kitla a tlhola a tla; mme fa a ne a satla, pelo e ne e tla nna botlhoko gonne o batla go tsamaya a mmoleletse nnete. O batla gore a itse fa lenyalo la gagwe le Oshupile e le la batsadi, gore Oshupile o nyala sebele sa gagwe, e seng pelo—yone o e tlogela le ene, mme a e somarele go fitlhela Modimo a ba kopanya, gonne o tla ba kopanya; o rata dilo tse dintle. ⁵ (Monyaise, 1967, p. 89)

Second, in the course of her clandestine love affair with Modimoeng, Matlhodi falls pregnant and chooses to keep her pregnancy equally surreptitious as she gets into a forced marriage with Oshupile. Being impregnated by one man and, then, getting married to another at the same time, is a form of defiance that entails a dual social curse: it is a social disgrace and a social stigma in the eyes of one’s community. This is a position in which Matlhodi finds herself in relation to her family (especially her mother and her brother) and her in-laws and her husband (Oshupile), and in relation to the two village communities (the Magogong and Phiritona village communities) of which she is now part. Importantly, it is something that lends itself as an axis of malicious gossip about and gleeful ridicule toward her. In addition, it is an episode that is sure to make her the devil incarnate and turn her into a blackguard and pariah to all and sundry. One form of gossip and ridicule directed toward her comes from her in-laws who have this to say:

E ne e le kgwedi ya borobong mogatse a le mo motseng, mme e le gone bontsi bo simololang go mmona sentle; ngwana wa rona o tsamaile molema jaaka kgomo; a ga se kgwedi ya borobong a le mono, mme go a reng, kgotsa o bopegile jalo? Mme ntlha o tla bo a bopegile maswe, matlho le mmele! ⁶ (Monyaise, 1967, p. 5)

But above all, Matlhodi knows that her being impregnated by Modimoeng will reveal her fornicatory and promiscuous sexual tendencies, and expose her as a blackguard. This constitutes another form of self-defining. Thus, she attempts to keep her pregnancy and the identity of the man responsible for it secret. However, this endeavor on her part has a boomerang effect as the above-cited quotation illustrates. She is already a locus of malicious gossip and gleeful ridicule by her in-laws, something reflecting a semblance of misery in her marital circumstances. Nevertheless, much as this is the case, Matlhodi seems to be utilizing her pregnancy as a convenient but authentic ruse to both defy and resist the patriarchal subjugation and the family subalternization she is being subjected to, first, by her own family and, now, by her in-laws. That is, by having been impregnated by a man she loves and not by the one who has been foisted on her, she manages to carve an Africana womanist role for herself in which she authentically challenges the very patriarchy that is intended to render her powerless and voiceless in matters pertaining to her romantic and marital affairs. By so doing, she turns patriarchal hegemony on its head, something unlikely to endear her to any patriarch, let alone her brother and her mother. Matlhodi also seems to use her pregnancy as an instrument to show all and sundry (patriarchs, matriarchs, oligarchs, and commoners) where her romantic and marital loyalty genuinely lies: it reposes in Modimoeng and not in Oshupile. It is, therefore, not surprising that later on when her husband dies, her brother, Tukisang, accuses her of being the cause of his death (see Makgato, 2005; Mereeotlhe, 1998; Mosehla, 2000; cf. Machaba, 2011; Mangena, 2013; Mathye, 2003).

Third, Matlhodi employs Oshupile’s (her husband’s) death as a weapon to undermine and challenge a deep-seated cultural practice—common among most Black African societies in Southern Africa—in which a widow has to mourn her husband’s death. After her husband’s death, Tukisang admonishes and forces Matlhodi to stay at home and mourn Oshupile’s death. However, Matlhodi opposes this move. Instead, she wants Oshupile to be buried instantly, and she stubbornly presses ahead with doing so, brashly arguing that this is how she is mourning her husband’s death. Mosehla (2000) aptly drives this point home:

Morago ga loso, Matlhodi ga a eletse go nna kwa gae a re o a ikilela. O batla go ya kwa masimong go ya tsweledisa pele temo. Kgaitsediagwe o sa ntse a mo ganetsa gore o tshwenetse go nna fa gae go fitlhela diaporaro tsa Oshupile di tsokodiwa. ⁷ (p. 23)

So, after Oshupile’s burial, Matlhodi does not want to stay at home; instead, she prefers to go to the family’s tillage. Again, Tukisang is against this, but she defies him. Thus, by so doing, Matlhodi resents paying homage to and observing mourning rituals for her dead husband as is customarily expected of an African woman. Through this action, not only is she resenting a hegemonic customary practice that requires a woman to pay homage to her dead husband, and not only is she refusing to observe mourning rituals for him, but she is also unwaveringly resisting and challenging the patriarchal ethos behind it. In this way, she manages to carve a niche for herself as a self-defining Africana womanist authentically resisting patriarchal hegemony.

The Body as an Africana Womanist Site to Resist Familial, Cultural, and Ideological Hegemony

There is a body of work that has explored and investigated the female body as a locus of research and analysis. Among those who have investigated this area—in varying degrees and from disparate theoretical perspectives—are Bisschoff (2009), Dahl (2012), Guenther (2010), Machaba (2011), and Mutunda (2009), to mention but a few. For example, Dahl (2012) theorizes the female body from a critical femininity as a speculum that has to be understood beyond its antithesis, the male body, and beyond subordination, sexualization, objectification, and narcissism. Invoking Foucauldian notions of biopower and epistemic disciplining, she contends that “the femininity of consumption and the consumption of femininities, the labour of femininity and the feminization of labour” (Dahl, 2012, p. 63) must be critically interrogated. For her part, analyzing Luce Irigaray’s and Marcel Proust’s works from a different perspective, Guenther (2010) opines as follows concerning the classical duality attributed to male and female bodies:

By locating both sexes in a single body, rather than in the morphologies, rhythms, or imaginaries proper to distinct bodies, Proust can be read as mixing or confusing the sexes and so betraying or effacing sexual difference, as in Irigaray’s condemnation of nameless androgynes . . . This approach to sexual difference is consistent with Irigaray’s early insights into the general economy of feminine pleasure, its exploitation by a phallocentric model of lack and compensation, and the reduction of women’s bodies—especially our reproductive body parts—to commodities . . . (pp. 34-37)

In the foregoing quotation, Guenther appropriates both Luce Irigaray’s and Marcel Proust’s works to discredit the essentialist view of male and female sexes—and by analogy, the essentialist view of male and female bodies—and, the classical binarism often attributed to them as all-time universal antipodes. Moreover, Mutunda (2009) highlights how power is exercised to control the female mind and body in Philomène Bassek’s La Tache de Sang. He points out that Same Hanack, the chief male protagonist in Philomène Bassek’s La Tache de Sang, is an archetype of such power. Finally, Machaba (2011) argues how women—including their bodies—are at times portrayed in stereotypically demeaning ways in some Xitsonga poems and idioms.

With reference to Matlhodi, the article argues that she appropriates her body as a site of resistance against a triple familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony percolating through the porous walls of her family, and to which she is being subjected by her mother, MmaMatlhodi, and by her younger brother, Tukisang. So, she deploys her body as a launching pad to defy and challenge this triple hegemony which, in a way, serves as an axis of evil to her. At the same time, she uses her body to subvert a stereotypical typecasting of an Africana woman that unproblematically and incontestably fits into a mainstream patriarchal paradigm. Bisschoff’s (2009) contention highlighting this stereotypical representation of African women, especially in filmmaking by male African filmmakers, strikes a similar chord here:

[Their works] . . . explore . . . the lived realities of the majority of African women who are still subjected to patriarchal systems of oppression and control, through representing the micro-politics of women’s lives and focussing [sic] on the quotidian activities of women’s lives. (p. 44)

In the same breath, the article maintains that Matlhodi engages in the micro-politics and the micro-physics of her body to ward off the biopower politics aimed at her by familial, cultural, and ideological forces that have their rootage in patriarchy and cultural chauvinism.

First, she does so by dint of a secret love affair. A love affair is a quality spawned and nourished by human emotions, whose seat is both a human heart and a human mind, and both of which have the human body as their receptacle. Matlhodi utilizes a secret love affair—whose seat is both her heart and her mind—to determine her love life and to decide who she loves so as to defy the patriarchal precepts she is being forced to observe and obey. How ruthless some of these patriarchal precepts are to her, and how insouciant they are to her romantic needs and interests, is reflected in the following quotation:

A ise a ke a bone Oshupile le fa e le ka leitlho, a sa itse kwa o yang. A le masome a mararo, a dinyaga ka nako eo. Lefetwa! Le fa a ne a ise a ke a bone molekane wa gagwe, a saitse kwa o isiwang gone, le mororo a ka se rerisiwe, a ineela go tswamo kgobong ya batho ba Magogong. ⁸ (Monyaise, 1967, p. 4)

It is this ruthlessness and indifference that Matlhodi employs her secret love affair with Modimoeng to challenge and subvert. She is able to do this as such a love affair is encased in her mind and body: thus, it is invisible to and untraceable by the human eye, let alone a patriarchal eye. Effectively and unflinchingly, she engages in the micro-politics of her body to deny love to Oshupile. In this case, her unreciprocated love serves as a ruse to deny him access to her romantic feelings embodied in her body and to unsettle the familial, cultural, and ideological ethos as championed by her mother and her brother. In the end, this ruse succeeds as Oshupile dies of a heart attack from depression and neglect spawned by a sense of being unwanted and unloved. In fact, Matlhodi says this emphatically and heartlessly:

Ke itse gore ke go lomeleditse ka dilo di le dintsi; kana go botlhoko jang fa monna kgotsa mosadi agolaganye ka nyalo le yo o mo itsang go rena! Ke go lomeleditse. Ga ke a dira matsapa ape go ka go ithuta; ga ke a leka go go itse. Ka dipaka tsotlhe go ne go ikgopotse nna fela. ⁹ (Monyaise, 1967, p. 11)

In this way, she successfully appropriates the micro-politics and the micro-physics of the power of her body, as a speculum, to render patriarchy powerless; she dismantles the superstructure (culture and ideology) sustaining the patriarchy, and the infrastructure (the family) on which it is founded. Thus, it can be said that in this particular instance, Matlhodi manages to both deploy her body as a site of resistance against a triple familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony, and utilize it as a launching pad for waging an emotional and somatic warfare against Oshupile through a secret love affair with Modimoeng. In so doing, she tends to enact an all-time marital dictum: till death do us part.

Second, Matlhodi channels and launches her resistance against familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony through her pregnancy. Her pregnancy—also encased in her body as its seat—as an instance of her femmebodiment (Dahl, 2012), becomes a highly contested but delicate terrain through which she wages an emotional and psychological war not only against Oshupile but also against her own family and Oshupile’s family. Thus, her body, which carries her pregnancy; her future child (an illegitimate child); and her romantic and marital future serves as a frontline arsenal in her war against the triple familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony nourishing patriarchal hegemony to which she is being subjected. This triple hegemony also constitutes an axis of evil against her: the evil tripartite archal alliance in the form of oligarchy, patriarchy, and matriarchy. Above all, her pregnancy is proof positive of the types of micro-politics and micro-physics in which she engages her body in her attempt to navigate through the meandering contours of her family patriarchy typifying her sublunary life. Moreover, her pregnancy underscores the politics of pregnancy as the man who has impregnated her is not the one she is forced to marry, but the one she is denied to marry.

Later on after is married to Oshupile, Matlhodi falls pregnant with Oshupile’s child. During her pregnancy, Oshupile advises her not to engage in arduous daily household chores and tedious hoeing at the family’ tillage, lest she endanger her fetus and put her pregnancy at risk. However, she ignores Oshupile’s advice and does precisely what she is being advised against doing. In the process, she miscarries Oshupile’s child as encapsulated in the following: “Mmaagwe o ne a itheeditse ditlhabi tsa go boela morago ka kgwedi tse tlhano. . . Go bonala gore a kubuga ka bonako thata, fa a tlhaga ka kgoro ya mogwaafatshe a utlwa a se monate” ¹⁰ (Monyaise, 1967, p. 2).

Here again, we see Matlhodi being on a warpath in which she employs her pregnancy to defy and upend a familial, cultural, and ideological practice of looking after her would-be Oshupile’s child. In a way, she appropriates her body—and the pregnancy it is carrying—to emotionally and psychologically frustrate Oshupile, her own family, and her in-laws. In so doing, she again simultaneously deploys her body to challenge and resist the familial, cultural, and ideological ethos sustaining the patriarchy she is constantly being subjected to. Part of her emotional and psychological war targeted at Oshupile, especially, is evident in the quotation captured in Note 10. In a different but related context, Dahl (2012) poignantly depicts the micro-politics of the female body thus: “Equipped with differential consciousness and attending to both pleasure and pain, we might lose the (academic) masculinity complex and use our speculums beyond narcissism and alienation and instead revisit, reinhabit and renarrate the dark continent of femininity” (p. 63). In the case of Matlhodi, this politics resonates with and is related to the hidden continent of her pregnancy.

Third and finally, as highlighted earlier on, Matlhodi appropriates Oshupile’s death to resist familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony. Even though death is embodied in a deceased person’s body, and not in a surviving spouse’s body, Matlhodi, nonetheless, uses her (surviving) body as a site of resistance against a familial, cultural, and ideological practice of mourning her deceased husband’s death. She resists being confined to a homestead to mourn her husband’s death. Instead, she breaks the cultural shackles associated with mourning by continuing carrying out her daily chores as usual. In so doing, she refuses to have her body—and her femmebodiment—spatially confined. Most significantly, for her, Oshupile’s death serves a conduit that unites her body with Modimoeng, the man she has chosen for herself. Thus, all her efforts in the novel, however backgrounded they may be in terms of their depiction, cast her as an Africana womanist who is clandestinely but unflinchingly bent on resisting the patriarchal hegemony of her family and of her community in all its multiple fronts and in all its multiple permutations.

Conclusion

This article has investigated the life of Matlhodi, a woman protagonist, and her reactions and resistance to patriarchal practices she is constantly subjected to by her family and by her in-laws in the novel, Bogosi Kupe. It has done so by employing Africana womanism and ACT as its theoretical and analytical framework. Confronted by an imposing patriarchal hegemony—quintessentially and persistently nourished by the cultural and ideological practices of her novelistic zeitgeist, and perennially sustained by her own family—Matlhodi, the article has argued, reorganizes and recalibrates herself as a self-defining Africana womanist who authentically and resiliently resists this hegemony. As such, patriarchal subjugation gets to be personified by her mother, MmaMatlhodi, and by her younger brother, Tukisang; the stratagems she employs to challenge and resist this dual subjugation seem justified, notwithstanding their comeuppances. Such stratagems include choosing a man she is to marry in the face of the one foisted on her, a clandestine love affair with Modimoeng, and using her body as a site of resistance to patriarchy her husband’s (Oshupile’s) death. In addition, the article has argued that Matlhodi deploys her body—and her pregnancy as a femmebodiment of her body—as an Africana womanist site of resistance to a triple familial, cultural, and ideological hegemony. This triple hegemony, the article has further argued, also constitutes an axis of evil against Matlhodi: it is the evil tripartite archal alliance manifesting itself as oligarchy, patriarchy, and matriarchy.