Lara foot newton’s Tshepang : the third testament and Danai Gurira’s eclipsed : a theatre of war and hope

Abstract EN

The aim of this paper is to delineate misogyny, violence and war against women in Africa.

Whilst staging misogyny and elaborating a gender discourse of war in their theatres, African women playwrights give attention to the cultural, material and economic conditions that ferment injustices experienced by both women and men in a range of circumstances.

The paper also examines how African women playwrights emerge triumphant despite the atrocities by inviting all human beings to participate in their dilemmas of fear and violence through a humane critical lens and an empathy that allows the acceptance of otherness and the transformation of women‟s victimization into a human condition of brutality.

Thence, hope arises in the future of a unified horizon of understanding and agency for the rights of all .

Danai Gurira‟s Eclipsed (2010) gives an account of political factions fighting for power in Liberia.

The play elucidates how sex and servitude are exchanged for survival in a performance that draws attention to the victimization of women.

Violence against women becomes a strategy for the masculine practices of governmental and non-governmental militias .

Lara Foot-Newton‟s Tsephang: The Third Testament (2003) is based on the actual 2001 rape of a nine month old baby, Sisie, by her Mother‟s lover.

The playwright highlights the fact that the socio-psychic consequences of years of social economic and political oppression have left people without agency, seeking oblivion in wine, sex, sleep or death.

Both men and women have been brutalized by the socio-economic conditions of apartheid .

In her essay, “Women and War”, Alexis Greene draws attention to the rise of a generation of women playwrights who “deconstruct the concept of war time heroism, draw a connection between violence in battle and violence in the home, and further investigate the age-old connection between war and sex”.

Africana Womanist theory, Queer theory and postcolonial theory are applied to demonstrate Africana sisterhood, to deconstruct femaleness and maleness and to sabotage a post-colonial agenda of marginalized agency and lack of freedom of choice for Africana people.

Indeed, both Danai Gurira from Zimbabwe and Lara Foot-Newton from South Africa address the social and political status of African women, experiencing violence and witnessing brutality, in order to revise a canonized narrative of war that excels heroism and naturalizes war‟s horror.

Both playwrights document the local to touch on the global.

Both playwrights raise hope by inviting the full humanity of each and every human soul on earth to recognize others as human too, despite previous inhuman experiences