The representation of women in Lauretta Ngcobo's And they didn't die

Abstract

Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die depicts the lives of rural African women who lived

under apartheid rule in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The

dissertation examines Ngcobo’s representation of African women’s participation and their

agency in the resistance struggles against colonialism, settler colonialism (apartheid),

racial supremacy, African patriarchy, and literary and the dominant language systems.

The primary method of analysis involves an examination of the novel which is located in

the political context of the resistance struggles, the social context of patriarchy and the

theoretical context of postcolonial African feminist criticism. By drawing on a range of

feminist theories, the dissertation examines the specificity of African women’s lives in

terms of race, class and gender roles. The dissertation will also examine the different

strategies that women have used to survive and to resist race, class and gender

oppressions.

Ngcobo’s novel provides an apposite framework to explore women’s experiences of

subordination and how they challenged and even overcame the political and social forces

that worked against them. Women’s agency in the liberation struggle has been largely

ignored and undocumented in literary and even in many feminist projects, which leaves

an under-researched gap in African literary studies.

The dissertation examines Ngcobo’s work as a literary activist articulating the challenges

of representation and voice. Representation is understood to mean speaking or acting for

oneself and/or others, while voice is the capacity to speak. It is the key issue reflecting

empowerment and agency. These concepts form the basis for analysis and the

construction of arguments. It is used to examine the challenges faced by women who

have been marginalized in literary discourse, as women and writers.