Man as Axe in Black South African Society: Contextualising Masculinity and Radical Feminism in Tyelele’s Shwele Bawo!

Abstract

South African society, like other patriarchal societies, upholds a gender structure that places the man at the apex of the patriarchal ladder but denigrates women to the subordinate lower rung of the ladder. Gender-sensitive female writers have risen to challenge the multifaceted gender oppression prevalent in the South African patriarchal order. In Motshabi Tyelele’s play, Shwele Bawo! (Grave Injustice!), the worth of men is privileged by the metaphor of an axe, which is a tool women need (to borrow) to stand a chance at survival. The text identifies the centrality of masculinity to gender-based violence and casts men as sexual maniacs that should be eliminated to free women from oppression. Tyelele’s text is selected through purposive sampling based on its portrayal of gender relations in South African society. From the prisms of Black masculinity and radical feminism, this paper accentuates the tropes of manliness, and entitled masculinity as well as the attitude of women to those tropes, within the context of South African patriarchy. This paper concludes that in Shwele Bawo, the author inverts the image of the man to a beast to unsettle the privileged position of masculinity in the Bantu cultural system of South Africa.