Introduction

In Botswana today, the biggest challenge facing gender equality and women's empowerment is a patriarchal structure which mediates both our private and public spaces and promotes a hierarchy that vests power with the few, at the expense of the many: particularly of women. Patriarchal power is exercised and maintained through the silencing of divergent voices.

Theatre is a space where verbal language can be challenged by other embodied forms, which enable the exploration of the body and its relation to space. Theatre can provide a safe space, insofar as it is outside of everyday lived reality, and can suggest strategies for people to change their social situations. It can also create space for different voices to speak. Through the process of re-presenting our systems of power we can begin to address issues affecting women's rights and gender equality. Re-presenting means not only presenting in a new way, but also looking at ourselves and our problems differently, leading to empowered thoughts. It is only through empowered thinking that empowered actions can even begin to be imagined.

Un/Skin Mebegan as an attempt to locate ‘myself’ as a black woman in the theatre. Contemporary representations of black women in southern Africa generally have been and remain disempowering, with women often being portrayed as maids and victims, particularly of poverty. These representations are often reinforced by media representations of women which often fail either to give them any voice, or to voice their own life experiences. Instead, international and local media often present an homogeneous black female, who remains an exoticized, sexualized and/ or impoverished entity, often spoken for or about but never speaking for herself. Black womanhood has come to be associated with sex and struggle. This homogenous black female stereotype is the result of patriarchal cultures that continue to objectify and silence women. Un/Skin Meseeks to address these issues by interrogating the use of space, language and the body in the process of re-presentation. I refer to this process as ‘re-presenting’ to signify a move away from existing representations of women which perpetuate negative stereotypes, instead presenting them in a new way.