Women in Post Colonial Society

Historically, women are an oppressed people not by birthright, but by baptism. “Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence and spray of semen. It is profitable for the colonizers to confine our bodies from our own life processes… (Clarke, Cheryl “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance,” pg 128-137)” Societies often create for women a false duplicity, where they are the creators, but also the unclean. Women in mythology appear as deceivers and tricksters; Judeo-Christian tradition’s Eve, the first woman, is not only responsible for man’s fall from Eden, but also for all mankind’s toil. What more powerful statement of the male’s supremacy than to create in woman the image of evil, weakness, and temptation? No more is this more painfully expressed than in post-colonial societies, where the nations recovering from an infection of foreign ideas purge themselves, violently, of all things alien – self and other – and thus unwanted. Women’s rights are among the first irritants to be regurgitated, and this social sickness appears strongly in the literature of these nations. Women in these novels, trapped by social and religious obligations, as well as the cycle of domestic abuse, are usually the most tragic and most invisible victims of de-colonization. In particular, Tsitsi Dangarembga espouses the role of women, both physical and symbolic, in works such as Nervous Conditions.

The confusion of women’s role in society was never more chronic than in states undergoing changes in political structure. “In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued” stated Aung San Suu Kyi to the NGO Forum on Women, China, early September 1995. In nations such as Rhodesia, where foreign invaders are “treated like minor deities (Nervous Conditions 103)” it is difficult to maintain a sense of self worth. Further complicating social hierarchies a…