Slaps at/for Dignity: Hope Keshubi's Rebellious Legacy of Social Transformation

This paper addresses two 1997 epistolary novels, To a Young Woman and Going Solo, by late Ugandan author Hope Keshubi, which offer a programmatic reading of Uganda's contemporary problems. Keshubi's primary agenda in these novels is to promote dialogue on the following social and political issues concerning women: sexual health, sexual maturation, domestic violence (wife battery and paternal abuse), subjugating traditions, discriminatory inheritance laws, and social relations between mistress and wife. This paper examines how Keshubi deftly works against patriarchal constraints on speech and actions, which have real and harmful consequences on the lives of Ugandan girls and women. Keshubi's texts show women they can triumph over discrimination and taboos, surviving physically and psychologically in the Uganda of the 1990s. This paper examines current denigrating literary reception of Ugandan women authors and asks why Keshubi did not experience demeaning reception a decade prior. In Keshubi's works, it is the private act of a female narrator writing to a female addressee that constitutes agency and her contribution to society, keenly shown in To a Young Woman and Going Solo, provides a new social vision of emotional transformation through prior unimagined dialogues. This paper presents hereto-unknown information about Hope Keshubi.