FEMINIST DISABILITY NARRATIVES AND THE SILENCED SUFFERING OF INVISIBLE CAREGIVERS IN OLA ROTIMI’S HOPE OF THE LIVING DEAD

Abstract

Critical scholarship on Ola Rotimi’s Hope of the Living Dead (1988) has thoroughly examined the play’s representation of leprosy, the political agency of disabled characters, and the intersections of ableism with postcolonial governance. Despite this rich body of work, one group remains conspicuously absent from scholarly attention: the female caregivers whose unacknowledged labour sustains the institutionalised lepers and makes their collective resistance possible. This article addresses that critical silence by mobilising Feminist Disability Studies (FDS) as a theoretical lens, enriched by African feminist perspectives on care and social reproduction. Through close textual analysis informed by feminist care ethics, existing scholarship on invisible labour, and original quantitative analysis of speaking turns and stage time, the study examines how female characters-Hannah, Mama Musi, the Hospital Matron, and others-endure what the article distinguishes as diegetic silence (limited speech within the playworld), narrative silence (the text’s refusal to represent interiority), and critical silence (scholarship’s failure to attend). The findings demonstrate that these women perform not only physical and emotional care but also essential political and organisational labour, including mediation, translation, collective motivation, and direct confrontation with colonial authority. Nevertheless, the play’s dramaturgical architecture systematically marginalises their experiences, producing a condition of “invisible visibility” in which their labour is essential yet their suffering remains unvoiced. By recovering these silenced narratives, this analysis makes an original contribution to the emergent field of African feminist disability criticism and advances an intersectional understanding of care, dignity, and resistance in postcolonial African drama.