Muting and Re-Voicing: A Muted Group Theory Reading of Barclays Ayakoroma's Dance on His Grave

Success Ebipade Perefagha; Tarimoweni Justline Egule; Oghenerume E. Okitiakpe

doi:10.56201/rjhcs.v12.no7.2026.pg11.21

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Muting and Re-Voicing: A Muted Group Theory Reading of Barclays Ayakoroma's Dance on His Grave

Success Ebipade Perefagha, Tarimoweni Justline Egule, Oghenerume E. Okitiakpe

Abstract

This study investigates the representation of women in Barclays Ayakoroma's Dance on His Grave through Muted Group Theory , a framework well suited to showing how female characters achieve voice through theatrical performance and cultural storytelling. The reading traces how female characters contest male dominance through symbolic action, emotional display and collective organisation. The method is a close reading of the play, attentive to the ways the playwright's dramaturgy exposes both the political subjugation of African women and their capacity for collective renewal. The analysis shows that female characters are muted from the opening movement but gain voice by the play's close through an alternative communication system that includes ritual performance, collective display and organised withdrawal from domestic and sexual labour. These adaptive strategies convert an inability to speak within the dominant idiom into an alternative and forceful mode of address, and convert the experience of oppression into a basis for collective agency. The study argues, further, that the play's resolution, in which the patriarch dies by his own hand rather than by argument, complicates any straightforward reading of the ending as a vindication of the women's strategies, and that this complication is itself significant for how Muted Group Theory should be applied to African dramatic texts. The study concludes that Dance on His Grave functions as a work that stages social conditions with precision while equipping African drama with a resource for contesting the very structures it depicts, and it recommends that playwrights, critics and theatre practitioners treat ritual, song and collective withdrawal as legitimate discourses of protest rather than as folklore incidental to a play's central argument. Key Words: African Drama, Collective Resistance, Muted Group Theory, Subjugation, Voicing.

Keywords

African DramaCollective ResistanceMuted Group TheorySubjugationVoicing.

References

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Muting and Re-Voicing: A Muted Group Theory Reading of Barclays Ayakoroma's Dance on His Grave

Abstract

Keywords

References

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