Decolonisation and the Postcolonial Urban Woman in Luangala’s (Luangala, 1991) The Chosen Bud

Abstract

In this paper, we deconstruct decolonisation discourse set on the idea of returning to pre-colonial culture, particularly the image of women. We contend that such a move inadvertently restricts the image of the urban woman and its decolonisation to a dichotomised rural-urban narrative together with fixed Western universalised feminist notions of the urban woman. We unpack the discussion using postcolonial and Afro-feminist scholars (Adichie, 2017, Tamale, 2020; Mbembe, 2021) who argue that the liberation of African women should be based on context rather than Western feminism or any other fixed narratives. Luangala’s (1991) fictional women in The Chosen Bud assist in deconstructing the rural-urban dichotomy as a way of establishing whether decolonizing the postcolonial urban woman is simply a linear reversal of colonial rural-urban migration. In addition, the chapter explores how urban immigrants such as Esineya and others in the novel identify both with the rural and urban areas. This assists in establishing whether the making of the postcolonial urban woman slavishly mirrors universal Western feminist rural-urban narratives in the context of decolonisation.  Analysis of the female characters in The Chosen Bud reveals that there are more complex and contextual ethnic, personal, and socio-economic aspects that have to do with how urban women identify. Furthermore, the choices urban women make about identity have nothing to do with prescribed fixed rural-urban dichotomies or universal feminist entities but with diverse contexts and circumstances.   Hence, this paper calls for a decolonisation agenda that engages the case of postcolonial urban women, within the contextual and fluid dialogue on African terms.