When Children Kill the Mothers they (Profess to) Love: Images of Matricide in African Literature

Abstract

Worldwide, matricentric myths and cults have sprung up as a direct response to human awareness of mothers’ indispensability to societal survival. Despite this mother worship, matricide has, since ancient times, been part of human life and traditions. Diverse reasons (didacticism, psycho-analysis, aesthetics and chronicling) are responsible for the transfer of matricide, by artists and myth creators, from the harrowed realm of the unmentionable to the public domain of non-sacred literature. This paper attempts to examine the critical issues of gender, power relations and violence that inform the images of symbolic and direct matricide in African oral art forms and fiction.