Challenging hierarchies in Anglophone Cameroon literature: women, power and visions of change in Bole Butake's plays

摘要

Through an in-depth analysis of selected texts, this study engages with the ways in which theudAnglophone Cameroonian playwright, Bole Butake, interprets questions of gender, sex andudfemale power. The study traces the evolution of Butake’s vision of women from his first playudBetrothal without Libation (1982) to his latest play Family Saga (2005). The analysis focusesudon how women construct power in the imaginary worlds of Butake’s writing and how, inudturn, power is constructed through them. Questions of femininities and masculinities areudprobed in an effort to determine the writer’s ideological leanings. Using a feministudframework, particularly that postulated by acclaimed scholar Florence Stratton (1994), thisudwork engages with Butake’s nine published plays with the simple objective of deconstructingudthe different layers of meanings embedded in the dramatic narratives’ construction of powerudpolitics within urban and rural spaces.udThis study aims to critique not only Butake’s use of imagery, allegory and other narrativeudtechniques in his creative imagining of women’s identities, but also the gender implicationsudof hierarchical formations within the worlds of Butake’s plays. Essentially, the thesis looks atudButake’s constructions of female power and women’s agency and the implications these haveudon feminist discourses.