Acknowledgements

This book has taken me a very long time to write and has therefore relied on the patience and continued support of many of my family, friends and colleagues. It had its beginnings in the research I conducted for my PhD thesis, undertaken at the University of Sheffield between 2006 and 2010. For inspiring me in that process, my first ‘thank you’ must go to Ian Phimister: I would not have thought to start out on this road without your encouragement. My thanks to Ian Phimister and Marion Wallace, who supervised that initial project and to Deborah Gaitskill and Henrietta Moore for examining it. It was during my viva that Henrietta Moore asked me if I knew anything more about Masabata Loate. At the time, I knew only of her first court appearance and her death. Thank you for that prompt to go looking for more.

For the writing of that thesis and this book I owe an unpayable debt to those women who spoke to me about their activism as young women in apartheid South Africa and, in equal measure, to those who refused to speak to me, or more accurately, spoke with me, but not about the past. As I describe in the introduction which follows, those encounters were so important in shaping the approach I take here. It took me a long time to work out what to do with those refusals. This is my considered response. My profound gratitude to Ntombi Mlakalaka for first introducing me to Soweto and to everyone in South Africa who has always made me feel so welcome there. I am acutely aware that I write about a painful past in this book and that this past belongs to real people. I have taken the responsibility of writing about shared life-stories very seriously and I have always tried to research, and write, with respect and sensitivity. My aim has been to restore a place for Masabata Loate, and other young women, within histories of South Africa’s liberation struggle. In doing so I hope I have not misrepresented, or caused further pain to, anyone who was involved in the stories I retell.

Thanks must go to the staff at the archives in South Africa and the UK who made this research possible. In particular, I thank the National Archives in South Africa, the Historical Papers Research Archive at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics. Special thanks go to the latter for enabling my access to the Women’s Press material that had not yet been fully catalogued.

There was a long period, after the PhD, when I did not consider this book a possibility. Post-doctoral projects with Georgina Waylen and Shirin Rai took me in new research directions, even whilst they kept me focused on, and returning to, South Africa. Thank you, to you both. I am so grateful for those opportunities. I learnt so much from those projects and the people whom I was able to meet and work with, not least the ability to speak across disciplinary boundaries and to see, time and again, how much South Africa’s history offered to theories of gender and politics. It is in this spirit that I have written the book – looking upwards and outwards – always conscious that I am not of South Africa and am distanced from the experiences I write about. I am hopeful the practice of history in other times and places is enriched by what South Africa has taught me.

It was the time and space of a job in a history department that gave me the opportunity to imagine this book. A job at Durham has included not just the stability of an open-ended contract and the proximity of my family but the chance to work with an amazing group of colleagues, particularly the members, both past and present, of the Durham University Centre for Contemporary African History (DUCCAH) including Justin Willis, Cherry Leonardi, Jacob Wiebel, Anne Heffernan, Bryan Kauma, Laura Channing, Nikki Kindersley, Ade Browne, Matt Benson, Gemma Barkhuizen, Neal Achary, Aida Abbashar and Chimwemwe Phiri. Teaching with you, talking with you, and learning from you since 2014 has been an enormous privilege. To my friends in the attic over the years – Helen Foxhall Forbes, Matthew Johnson, Jennifer Luff, Cathy McClive, Kevin Waite and Ana Diaz – thanks for all the corridor chats, lunches and friendship.

Some colleagues, both at Durham and beyond, have been instrumental in helping me formulate my ideas. Special thanks must go to Justin Willis for mentoring me through the book proposal and to Anne Heffernan and Julie-Marie Strange for invaluable input to that proposal. Two people in particular stand out for their unwavering support and interest in my work – Emily Bridger and Hilary Sapire. I am grateful that you read the thesis and found value in it. Thank you to Emily for reading an early draft of Chapter 2 and for always asking me when the book would be finished. I am extremely grateful to the newly formed ‘History on Margins’ cluster at Durham for letting me take over our first meeting and to Natalie Mears, Amanda Herbert, David Minto, Julie Marfany, Rebecca Clifford, Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Liam Liburd and Barabara Crosbie for reading the introduction for me in such a generous and thoughtful way. I want to thank Ruhan Fourie for translating from Afrikaans into English the extremely long, and long-winded, judgement from the case State vs. Mary Masabate Loatse and others – making sense of this without your skill would have been impossible for me.

I have been lucky enough to teach the material on which this book is based for the last two years, in a third-year undergraduate module called ‘Voice and Silence in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Liberation Struggle’. I am grateful to the students who joined me on the module in 2021–22 (Olivia Bothamley-Dakin, Dylan Cresswell, Lily Ellis, Minna Erith, Peter Firbank, Louisa Hanton, Ben Hovey, Grace Hutchinson, Philipp Jiang, Ned Kearton, Charlotte Styles, Max Taylor, Aoife Walter and Florence Ward) and 2022–23 (Scarlett Bedford, Lucy Chapple, Zarah Drummond, Dan Fitch, Joseph Furness, Cressida Harbottle, Cian Hutchinson, Issy Jackson, EJ Lord, Chloe Marsden, Molly Oglethorpe, Hannah Schultz, Oscar Scott and Alisha Tait). Your insights and enthusiasm pushed me to widen the scope of my thoughts and your ideas and research challenged and inspired me. I think many of you will be able to see the way our discussions influenced the book’s final form.

I am enormously grateful to all those at the University of London Press and the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives book series who saw the potential in that original book proposal. Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers for their insight and feedback in the project’s initial stages and to Annie Coombes for reading so generously a full draft of the manuscript. Throughout the process Elizabeth Hurren, co-editor of the series, has been extremely supportive and offered helpful and constructive advice and feedback at every stage. All of this has improved the book immeasurably – any remaining shortcomings are obviously entirely my own. I am grateful for the expert help, enthusiasm and patience of Emma Gallon at University of London Press. Thank you to Kate Dearlove at Africa Media Online for facilitating the use of Sue Kramer’s beautiful photograph on the book’s cover.

One of the reasons the book has taken so long to write is the birth of my two daughters in the midst of the process – Myra Jean, born 2017, and Sylvia Merle, born 2020. You two have taught me how to be in the world, in a whole new way, and so, you have also taught me how to be a historian anew. Without you, the book might have been finished sooner but I would not have valued the privilege of writing it in the same way. Mum and Dad – your emotional, practical and logistical support have made this possible. To the ever-widening Johnson and Saha families, thank you all for being there. And finally, to Jonathan Saha, always my first and last reader, in this, as in everything we do together, I cannot imagine how I could have done it without you. Thank you.

Durham, United Kingdom

June 2024