ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the use of Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus as pedagogical strategy within a feminist paradigm to enlighten understandings of gender issues on a social justice program at a teacher education faculty in South Africa, where content is typically presented in an uncritical way—an apartheid era legacy. The novel’s core feminist arguments, which are voiced by the main protagonist, were revealed by studying its speech and thought representations, and lexical clusters. Student teachers of English were prompted to de-link from abyssal thinking and to confront their own coloniality. Course feedback reinforced the conclusion that correlating feminist authors’ views with their own experiences of sustained gender inequality in today’s South Africa opened students’ eyes to the disjuncture between their own espoused values and enacted values. Strategically formulated prompts led students to reflect on how and why they would apply critical pedagogy in their own classrooms. The conclusion is that an ideological shift and a degree of reflexivity were achieved.
