Gender, Liberated Signs, Deepened History

Muponde, Robert and Mandi Taruvinga (eds). 2002. Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare: Weaver Press; (2003) Oxford: James Currey. 236pp.Newell, Stephanie. 2002. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life.” Manchester: Manchester University Press. 242pp.Woodward, Wendy, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds). 2002. Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Cross / Cultures Series, 57. 356pp.The three books considered in this article are accounts of revisiting the past, in fiction and in fact, and of finding alternatives to the currently dominant views of power, agency and gender that circulate in postcolonial studies. All three rely on a theory of fiction which accounts for its capacity effectively to revise our understanding of historical circumstances and events; this is that fiction’s unstable, liberated signifying system allows writers and readers a speculative scope in which to imagine alternative interpretations of what happened. Such revisioning – of the place of women in history, for example – occurs in the novels of Yvonne Vera. A challenge to historians who unfailingly allocate the agency which created African polities to European powers is also within fiction’s scope, as in Bessie Head’s semi-fictionalised account of Botswana in the late nineteenth century. An empirical approach to the ‘facts’ of history and postcolonial cultural studies can also be liberating: Newell’s research into the uses of literacy in early colonial Ghana has yielded just such a challenge to accepted views of cultural transmission for she finds that the ‘scholars’ (non-elite men and women) who formed reading clubs in the early twentieth-century Gold Coast were not cowed by the coloniser’s alien culture. This article argues that Newell’s findings about the interpretative practices of recently colonised readers complement, or could inform, some of the questioning of conventional cultural dichotomies that is now happening in South African research, and that of all the concepts that are theorised in the Woodward and the Muponde collections, gender is the one that is most likely to challenge overly settled habits in thinking about postcoloniality