Traditional Laws and Feminist Trajectory in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

Abstract

Indeed, the need for development in post covid-19 calls for deliberate promotion of genderequality and enabling laws within African societies. In recent times, there has been growingawareness in the development sector of the crucial significance of gender questions and laws forboth understanding and promotion of egalitarian society. Issues surrounding gender and law aretherefore not peripheral but central for all round achievement and development in Africa.Therefore, there should be a paradigm shift in all approaches to harness the potentialities ofwomen. This should serve as a gauge towards achieving complete social transformation,independence, equality, freedom and dignity of the African woman in a highly inhibitivepatriarchal legal system. A feministic approach is used as a discursive and interpretive slate forunderstanding the paradigm shift as regards the nature of women’s oppression and dominationon the one hand and total freedom from subordination and marginalization on the other frominhibitive cultural laws. A panoply of factors and forces (laws) have been noted, if notunderstood by most feminists in their multifarious feminism discourses to be responsible forgender inequalities, oppression and subjugation between opposite sexes around the globe. Itfollows that, in the absence of a holistic, stable, well-grounded, and coordinated strategicparadigm of thought and action to approach and settle womanbeings emancipatory agenda in thepost covid-19 era, the success of women’s collective or individual determination to initiateradical social change and a total transformation of the conditions of their lives fromtraditional/cultural practices remain low in the face of restrictive and inhibitive laws even in ourmodern era. Consequently, this paper makes an attempt to discover and uncover what some ofthese practices are and the different ways, in which they militate against, constrain male/femalerelationships in the African society and the world at large as could be seen in Shona traditionalsociety as portrayed in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. This article advances theargument against the antagonistic reception of post covid-19 feminist trajectory againstobnoxious norms in an African milieu occasioned by colonialism. To this end, such determinismfor radical social change and law transformation by womanbeings is within the ambit of paper.