Female Suppression in the Post-colonial Nigeria: Reading Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel

Abstract

This study explores female suppression in Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel in the context of post-colonial Nigeria. This exploration shows how postcolonial and feminist resistance to colonial principles overlooks different kinds of injustice and harassments women undergo in their reassertion of the pre-colonial cultural purity. Post-colonial identity because of its multiplexed nature sways to various vertices of recognition and representation because of the division, interpellation, liminality, and hybridity of different identities. The formation of the category of the Third World women, marking the female body as a cultural repository, and anti-colonialists' regressive steps to traditional ethics, remain invisible until the postcolonial feminism reveals the bias attached with continuation of the pre-colonial cultural history. The pre-colonial tradition is not neutral in itself. Rather, it carries patriarchal normativity pervasively. It puts female issues beneath the suture which is maintained by suturing the gap made by colonial invasion. In the play, Baroka's cultural reassertion overrides contemporary reality and with his patriarchal power he takes over Lakunle's colonizing power and overcomes Sidi's feminist revolt which posits him above the law and morality. Thus, female identity sways from colonial vertex to patriarchal vertex in post-colonial Nigeria as it gets entangled in the conspiracy of traditional patriarchy and its assertion of ethnic and patriarchal supremacy.