Commodified liberation: post-apartheid masculinities and coloniality of power in Phamotse’s Bare: The Blesser’s Game

Post-apartheid freedom in Jackie Phamotse’s Bare: The Blesser’s Game is depicted as a terrain characterised by colonial hierarchical legacies, rearticulated through seductive, market-driven forms. This study interrogates the reconfiguration of elite post-apartheid masculinities, with particular attention to the contradictions and exclusions that structure post-liberation identity. It contends that the ‘blesser’ projects a historically specific form of masculine authority that deploys economic capital to assert sexual, symbolic, and ontological power. In this sense, the blesser stands as a complex, polysemous figure that represents liberation as a project mediated by gender and class, rather than a genuinely collective achievement. Using Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, together with Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s and Mignolo’s works on the coloniality of power and being, the article traces the continuity of colonial epistemes within post-apartheid social imaginaries. Phamotse depicts masculinity as a performance maintained by conspicuous consumption, intimate control, and the commodification of desire. The blesser economy replicates earlier regimes of valuation, discipline, and social control. It substitutes juridical racial segregation with neoliberal class-stratified privilege. Masculine selfhood in this economy remains precarious, dependent on continual acquisition and public performance. Examining masculinity at the intersection of economic power, colonial legacies, and intimate life, this study argues that post-apartheid freedom has developed selectively, reinforcing the advantages of men who were privileged from the outset. Seen in these terms, Phamotse’s novel presents a sharp critique of triumphalist liberation narratives and opens fresh reflection on black masculinities under conditions of incomplete decolonisation.