Introduction: the shadow of a young woman

Young women in the liberation struggle

In the ten years between 1976 and 1986 Loate’s life followed the arc of youth politics in South Africa as it evolved in the aftermath of the Soweto Uprisings. The fragments of her life that we do have are the result of the State’s concerted attempts to contain the challenge to its authority that had emerged from within the Bantu Education system in the 1970s.¹⁹ Whilst young South Africans were certainly not apolitical before 1976 and university students had been organising explicitly anti-apartheid actions in the early 1970s, the events of 16 June mobilised those as young as ten, and to an extent never before seen, across the country.²⁰ It was after 1976 that ‘the youth’ as a defined constituency within the liberation struggle became visible politically, the subject of popular discussion, and of academic studies.²¹ Those who had acted in June 1976 were widely perceived to belong to a new political generation. Their politics were something new – combining the repertoires and ideas of the national liberation movements that preceded them with the ‘philosophy of African self-reliance’ that had emerged on black university campuses, known as Black Consciousness.²² The inspiration that many of the school students drew from Black Consciousness was read variously as a marker of their political distinctiveness and/or a certain political immaturity by some.²³ The South African Students’ Movement (SASM) that had been involved in planning the 16 June march, and the Soweto Students’ Representative Council (SSRC) that led the ensuing uprising, were banned in October 1977. At the same time, so were the Black Consciousness organisations that had come before them (the South African Students’ Organisation, the Black People’s Convention, Black Community Programmes), and The World, the newspaper that had documented the movement and its rise.²⁴ As the trial of the Soweto Eleven drew to a close, the question of what would happen after Soweto loomed large.²⁵

Many young people involved in the Uprisings left the country. Some 6,000 to 10,000 students went into exile and whilst many joined the structures of the older liberation movements – the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan African Congress (PAC) – there were those, Khotso Seatlholo and Masabata Loate amongst them, who persisted with attempts to organise young people separately from those political traditions.²⁶ By the time of Loate’s death those attempts had largely ceased. New organisations were founded, notably the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) in 1979. COSAS was open to all students (secondary and night-school students) irrespective of political affiliation and was initially, Anne Heffernan has argued, ‘a relatively permissive space for diverse ideological engagement’.²⁷ Within a few years that space had narrowed. Support for the ANC through the adoption of the 1955 Freedom Charter as the blueprint for a future South Africa, described as ‘Charterism’; ‘Africanism’, which signalled dissent from some key aspects of the Charter; and ‘Black Consciousness’, became ‘sharply delineated points of self-identification’ during the 1980s, within what has been characterised as ‘a politics of enmity’ (rather than clear-cut ideological differences).²⁸ COSAS declared its support for the Freedom Charter in 1980.

If the politics of the 1980s saw a widespread realignment away from the ideas of Black Consciousness that had suffused the 1970s, towards the non-racialism of the Freedom Charter, then it seems Loate may too have followed the direction of these currents. One account of Loate’s death suggests that on her return to Soweto in 1986 she had become involved in the street committees that were taking control of urban areas, as the official local governance structures collapsed in the face of sustained insurrection.²⁹ These street committees underpinned the work of the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF). Yet she is also listed online by the organisation founded in 1978 as the custodian of Black Consciousness, the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO), as a Black Consciousness Movement heroine. The historical record is unclear on her political affiliation – and yet this was a time when affiliation to one or other strand within the liberation struggle – the Congress tradition, Africanist or Black Consciousness – could be a matter of life or death. Soweto in the mid-1980s saw open conflict between rival organisations over recruiting members and areas of influence. According to the TRC’s final report, tensions between AZAPO and UDF-aligned activists erupted in Soweto in 1985 and the resulting conflict ‘involved abductions, kidnappings, killings, bombings and attacks on homes’.³⁰ Violence was inculcated and encouraged by state security forces and their network of informers and askaris.³¹

Young people were central to the sustained urban opposition to apartheid in the 1980s. Alongside worker and community or civic organisations, ‘youth’ groups played a central role in many localities, with young people operating in a loose (and at times fraught) affiliation with the new nationwide organisations like the UDF and the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM).³² Beginning in the late 1970s, over the course of the 1980s and into the 1990s, ‘youth’ accreted very particular meanings in South African politics.³³ It was always a racialised term: writing in the early 1990s, David Everatt of the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) project introduced a sociological study, Black Youth in Crisis, by commenting that ‘South Africa has white teenagers but black youth’.³⁴ ‘Youth’ is a relational term, referring to a space in between childhood and adulthood. In late twentieth-century South Africa, youth was an identity sometimes imposed and rejected, at other times embraced or aspired to, by people, not all of whom were necessarily young.³⁵ As Chapter 1 explores, the ‘youth’ of 1976 were also implicitly male, a phenomenon which became explicitly noted as young black men were increasingly visible, and visibly violent, within the township uprisings of the 1980s.³⁶ The form of violence that was used to kill Loate in 1986, perpetrated by a large group of young men, has been explained by some as a result of a ‘fusion’ of youth political culture with that of urban gangs – in which young women’s bodies were viewed as an extension of territory, to be controlled and fought over.³⁷

Masabata Loate was not typical or representative of young activists who joined the liberation struggle in 1976 – indeed, as I will argue, she was in many ways very unusual in combining her political activism with a career as a beauty queen and in her apparent willingness to speak in contexts that others, and particularly young black women, did not. Yet I suggest that the ways in which the speech, voice and silence of Masabata Loate have been recorded and recalled is emblematic – emblematic of the processes by which gendered narratives of the liberation struggle have been made. The fragments of her life caught in the archive can help us to reappraise our understandings of political participation in late twentieth-century South Africa. If Loate was a member of the 1976 generation, hers is not a story which aligns comfortably or closely with the powerful public histories of this watershed moment in South African history.³⁸ She is a liminal figure, in the sense that she exists – we can hear her voice and see her body – at the edges of identities and categories in formation. Masabata Loate emerges as a shadow within the narratives of the masculinised politicisation and mobilisation of the youth – a shadow that throws these processes into sharp relief. Hers is a shadow that appears more than once, and in multiple archives. From Loate’s appearances and disappearances we can learn what has rendered so many of her contemporaries more fully invisible and silent.

Loate’s voice and silence do not stand in for others but can show us how the ‘ensemble of relations’ that was South Africa’s liberation struggle created certain patterns of knowledge about the past.³⁹ Over the course of the liberation struggle young women could be, and were, mobilised as women, as workers, as youth and as community-based activists – they had no specific organisational home. As a result, amongst the many voices of the liberation struggle, a collective voice for young women is rarely found. The existing historiography points to the liminality of young women within both youth organisations and women’s organisations. If youth groups were dominated by young men and women’s groups by older women, young black women were, in the words of one activist, ‘in limbo’.⁴⁰ In 1991 Suzi Nkomo wrote as a member of the South African National Students’ Congress (SANSCO), active on the University of Witwatersrand campus in the mid-1980s:

So we, as black women activists, remained in limbo. On the one hand we could not claim a space for ourselves politically in the way that men had on campus. On the other our association with the Federation of Transvaal Women (Fedtraw) defined for us the ‘legitimate’ women’s concerns. The problem was that a programme geared for older community women, did not cater for a constituency of young women, who were arguably not triply oppressed, or in fact mothers of youth, but youth themselves. We could not even rely on constant debate within the non-racial alliance with the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) women to develop a critical analysis of the role of young women in the struggle. In a sense we were a disempowered grouping.⁴¹

Nkomo’s experiences, recounted here, point to the ways in which the making of collective voices of ‘youth’ and ‘women’ left no space for young black women to ‘debate’. Her race, gender, age and identity as a student all jostled and ultimately acted to exclude her from one space after another. The desire for ‘constant debate’ is significant – it was space to speak that Ncomo felt she, and others, lacked. That the archive captured Masabata Loate’s speech between 1976 and 1986 – as filtered, mediated and coerced as it was – is relatively rare.

Jon Soske has argued that the anti-apartheid struggle was ‘a family affair’, in the sense that many of those involved ‘saw family and gender (either through their radical transformation or their restoration to a Christian or precolonial ideal) as central to national liberation’.⁴² Shireen Hassim notes that the ‘familial’ structure of the ANC as well as the codes of address in the movement – ‘father’ or ‘uncle’ for older men, ‘mother’ for older women and ‘buti’ (brother) and ‘sisi’ (sister) for cohorts – simultaneously created a positive ‘sense of nurture and belonging’ and a ‘conservative acceptance of gerontocracy’ that reinforced patriarchal masculinities.⁴³ Young women had a particular place within these imaginaries.⁴⁴ According to Elleke Boehmer, within narratives of post-colonial nationalism the figure of the daughter is a ‘non-subject’ who is ‘if not subordinate, peripheral and quiet, then virtually invisible’.⁴⁵ If this was the case, it has not always remained so.

What place South African nationalism has offered to young women post-1994 has arguably never been a more urgent question. I first began researching the material that underpins this book during 2006, when the rape trial of then former deputy president, later to be president, Jacob Zuma, hit the headlines. For many, the trial, in which Zuma was acquitted, became not only a test of this one man’s guilt, but of South Africa’s commitment to the gender equality enshrined in its post-apartheid Constitution. Amongst the issues that it brought to the fore was that ‘sexual violence was the dark shadow of political conflict in South Africa’.⁴⁶ During the trial, the personal history of Zuma’s accuser ‘Khwezi’ was used as evidence to discredit her, including three incidents where she had been raped as a child when living in exile during the 1980s. Her story prompted discussion of young women as silenced victims of the liberation struggle. One woman wrote to the Sunday Times telling them that she too had been raped in exile as a young woman but that ‘she was afraid that if she spoke out, her trauma would have derailed the process of attaining freedom for South Africa’.⁴⁷ The opprobrium directed at ‘Khwezi’, who regarded Zuma as an uncle due to his close relationship with her father, a fellow ANC comrade, revealed that her public accusation of Zuma broke with established hierarchies of gender and age.⁴⁸ As one female supporter of Zuma put it: ‘this young girl is crazy and does not respect older people’.⁴⁹

Since then, rates of gender-based violence have continued to rise and, whilst young women are not the only victims, the dynamics of what Pumla Dineo Gqola has memorably called the ‘fear factory’ has profound impacts upon girlhood and young womanhood.⁵⁰ This has been visibly and vocally challenged by South African women.⁵¹ Most recently, within the Fallist movements that emerged on South Africa’s university campuses in 2015, young Black womxn argued for the importance of intersectionality within Black liberation as part of their critique of South Africa’s ‘transformation’ as incomplete.⁵² Black womxn were integral to organising the Fallist movements and theorised their own position within it. The #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) Mission Statement of 2015 seemingly addressed the very problem Suzi Nkomo had earlier expressed:

We all have certain oppressions and certain privileges and this must inform our organising so that we do not silence groups among us, and so that no one should have to choose between their struggles. Our movement endeavours to make this a reality in our struggle for decolonisation [emphasis added].⁵³

In one spectacular instance of using the power of gender to disrupt, at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2016, three Black womxn activists bravely used their ‘nude’ bodies to halt the violence being enacted on protesting students.⁵⁴ As Hlengiwe Ndlovu, one of these womxn recalled, ‘we took off our tops and charged towards the policemen who were our target … They stopped shooting at that moment’.⁵⁵ However, these womxn’s experiences have also shown that the repertories of political action available (still) did not adequately address their oppression. As Mbalenhle Matandela puts it: ‘although womxn are visible, recognised and have voice in the context of the #RMF movement, they still experience physical, spiritual, sexual, linguistic and psychological violence from both the opposition and the culture of Black liberation politics’ [emphasis added].⁵⁶ ‘Still’ is central to these understandings, which are based upon a (re)appraisal of the gendered politics of Black Consciousness thought that Fallism draws upon, as well as an analysis of present-day lived realities. ‘Still’ names this as a problem of the past. What I want to do with this book is unsettle the picture of the past we have, by focusing on how it has been made.

Picturing the struggle

In tracing the appearance and disappearance of Masabata Loate’s voice in the archives of struggle this book shows how the making of collective voices – of masculine youth and public motherhood – did in fact involve young women and indeed at times, relied on their presence and participation. They are hiding in plain sight in these archives. Quite literally when it comes to the photographic record. To take one example, the combination of visibility and silence that we noted as marking Masabata Loate’s first court appearance can be found writ large in the story of young black women’s participation on 16 June 1976. Photographs of the march that day are full of large numbers of young women and men alike. However, as Helena Pohlandt-McCormick notes, the accounts of many young men participants, on 16 June and in the subsequent uprisings, ‘would have us believe’ that young women were merely ‘in the background’.⁵⁷ This contradiction is noted in one of the volumes of the South African Democracy Education Trust’s huge project to (re)write the history of South Africa’s liberation struggle, The Road to Democracy, which focuses on reinterpretations of June 1976. At the very end of a chapter on the ‘Anatomy of the Crowd’, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu includes a photograph that shows the body of a young woman lying face down on the ground next to a police vehicle, whilst a number of white, armed police officers stand close by, nonchalantly ignoring her presence, and her dying or recent death.⁵⁸ It is a chilling image of white indifference for a black life. It is included by Ndlovu as symbolic of the silence of young female participants in the march. At several points in the chapter he notes the significant presence of young women in the photographic record of that day, alongside what he calls the ‘failure’ of historians to ‘record, narrate and publish the liberating stories of these extra-ordinary unsung heroines’.⁵⁹ In concluding the chapter he notes the numbers of young women detained in the aftermath of the march and that they were amongst the dead before noting ‘we cannot recover the voices of those who were silenced by death’.⁶⁰ In Ndlovu’s account of 16 June 1976, this image of one young woman killed that day speaks for the silence of many others on their participation.

There is, however, another way of depicting the relationship of young women with 16 June. Consider the image on the front cover of this book. The photograph was taken in 1990 in Soweto, following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. I do not know the name of the young woman who is central to the image but the joy on her face is palpable. Her raised fist is accompanied by a wide smile. She is wearing a T-shirt. It is a little hard to make out, but I think the image on the T-shirt is the famous Sam Nzima photograph, taken on 16 June 1976. The words above the image, ‘Soweto Massacre’ are clearly visible. Ruth Kerkham Simbao has written about this iconic photograph that shows the dying Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubu, with Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, running alongside, as an image that contains shadows and silences.⁶¹ She argues that during the 1980s, at the height of anti-apartheid mobilisation, the photograph became ubiquitous and was reproduced in countless contexts as an image of resistance, on T-shirts, posters and placards. This young woman’s T-shirt is one such reproduction. In these processes Kerkham Simbao argues that the image was flattened, and the trio’s shadow was removed, thereby simplifying the picture in more than one respect. For Simbao, the shadow in the Nzima photograph represents the ongoing silences that exist within narratives of 16 June and the contested and multiple views of the past that can, and should, be allowed to emerge in the ongoing post-apartheid moment.⁶² But what might it mean for this young woman to wear this photograph in 1990?

In her hand the young woman holds a sign that says ‘Viva the Spear of the Nation’ written on cardboard – a reference to the fact that Mandela’s release was unconditional, and that amongst his first acts he reiterated that he did not renounce the armed struggle.⁶³ There was no straight line linking June 16 to the release of Mandela, but this young woman carries the one historical moment into the other – on her body. For me, this photograph captures the way in which the Soweto Uprisings framed youth political action in the years which followed, and it shows us a young woman inhabiting that history. It shows us her, clothed in that history. This is what I seek to focus upon: the way young women move through gendered narratives of the liberation struggle, some of which even deny their presence. It looks as though she has paused, to pose in front of the photographer. I do not think it is a coincidence that the photographer was a woman, Sue Kramer. This too, is part of what I hope to capture in the book, the processes by which we come to know about women in the struggle, and how often this is the result of the work of other women.

The extent to which the youth politics that followed on from the Soweto Uprisings offered a space for young women’s voices has been disputed. The 1980s were shaped by the National Party’s simultaneous attempts to provide limited openings for political participation within the apartheid system, such as the Tri-Cameral Parliament that offered ‘representation’ within the national legislature for Asian and Coloured communities, or the ‘independence’ offered to the Bantustans, alongside the increased securitisation and militarisation of the white State.⁶⁴ New alliances and co-ordination between sites of struggle – trade unions, civic organisations, human rights campaign groups, and women’s and youth organisations – emerged under the UDF, initially founded to oppose the Tri-Cameral Parliament. The township uprisings of the mid-1980s, triggered by the material realities of urban life for black South Africans, were crucibles for the political language of ‘People’s Power’ and millenarian beliefs in the end of apartheid.⁶⁵

For many years the most widely cited interpretation of the gender politics of township youth groups of the 1980s was Jeremy Seekings’ study of the Tumahole Youth Congress, which was conducted in early 1986. Seekings noted that when he spoke with them, ‘young male comrades dismissed the idea that women could be involved in any political activity despite the extensive involvement of women in rent protests, student organisations and even the youth congress one or two years before!’⁶⁶ Thus, Seekings argued that the mid-1980s saw the marginalisation of young women from such youth organisations through an increasing use of violence that was rooted in a ‘crisis of masculinity’.⁶⁷ However, this picture has been challenged by studies based on more recent interviews that evidence young women’s active participation in violent political activity.⁶⁸ Organisations like COSAS could, as Emily Bridger has shown, offer young women possibilities for participation throughout the 1980s. One former COSAS member, Florence, told Bridger in a 2014 interview: ‘with COSAS I felt I had a voice; as a human being, as a South African, and as a woman’.⁶⁹ Post-apartheid interviews offered these former COSAS activists a chance to assert that experience of finding voice again. The importance of oral evidence in establishing both pictures of youth politics, points to an important reconfiguration of women’s voices within the liberation struggle that unfolded in the years after Loate’s death.

Women were leaders in the development of political opposition to apartheid and formed an important constituency within the struggle. Yet they often had to fight for inclusion within the liberation struggle and for recognition of the ways in which their gender identities shaped that inclusion. As Natasha Erlank has noted, early African nationalism was ‘saturated’ with language ‘calling for the reassertion of a denied manhood’.⁷⁰ African women were not allowed to apply for formal full membership of the ANC until 1943. Organisational inclusion, when it came, was often predicated on a particular framing of women as mothers. For many years historians have been divided over whether ‘motherhood’ was an inherently socially conservative basis for political mobilisation or if, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, it became ‘militant’ in ways that offered women chances to challenge prevailing gender ideologies.⁷¹ Neatly side-stepping this issue, Meghan Healy-Clancy has recently argued that we instead notice the ‘multivalent’ possibilities of ‘public motherhood’.⁷² According to Healy-Clancy, for activists of the multi-racial Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), founded in 1954, and operating most actively until 1960 when its major affiliate the ANC Women’s League was banned, public motherhood was a ‘strategic discourse’. She argues women could invoke public motherhood ‘in order to make themselves legible as social actors, both to agents of the white-controlled state and to allies in South Africa and across transnational networks’.⁷³

This is a compelling argument. Even as a strategy however, it places young women in a particular relationship with women’s movements. Writing about the militancy of some women within UDF structures in Natal under the 1985 State of Emergency, Beall et al. noted that ‘while mothers are creating space for themselves’, through the articulation of radical motherist demands, ‘they may be limiting it for their daughters’.⁷⁴ The ways in which age shaped the relationships within women’s organisations has rarely been the focus of study, but what can be gleaned from the details in existing scholarship is that younger women often found themselves in tension with older women activists with socially conservative views about what it was appropriate for women to wear, say and do in public.⁷⁵

The space for women’s voices to be heard was transformed by two developments: women and queer activists, organising within and outside the liberation movement that highlighted the heteronormative masculinity of the struggle; and the wider centrality of ‘voice’ within South Africa’s transition to democratic governance. The emergence of new women’s organisations in the 1980s was interlinked with the creation of some explicitly feminist spaces – for example, Agenda, a feminist journal founded in 1987.⁷⁶ This process has sometimes been mapped onto generational struggle within the women’s movement – with younger women seen as leading these developments.⁷⁷ The importance of these ambivalent and contested spaces as sites for the articulation of women’s voices is explored in Chapter 4. Most women’s organising was not overtly feminist. Sheila Meintjes has recalled, ‘feminism was what we did, but not what we spoke’.⁷⁸ However, women’s voices were accorded a new status in the transition years. In May 1990, the ANC issued a ‘Statement on the Emancipation of Women’, over thirty years after the Freedom Charter, in which it called for a new Charter of Women’s Rights, ‘so that in their own voice women define the issues’ [emphasis added].⁷⁹ Such a charter would be according to the ANC ‘a major agency for stimulating women to break the silence imposed on them’.⁸⁰ The ANC’s National Executive did not delineate exactly who had imposed silence upon women but this framing of women’s speech as ‘breaking silence’ was ubiquitous in the early 1990s. That women would take a prominent place within South Africa’s post-apartheid political settlement was seen as one of the most important breaks with the apartheid past. As Shireen Hassim puts it, ‘women came to occupy a peculiar status as the proving ground for the extent to which the new order would be inclusive, participatory, and permeable to socially excluded groupings’.⁸¹

Meg Samuelson has questioned the claim that in the early 1990s, the end of apartheid and the transition moment ‘provided an opening in which previously silenced female voices [could] be heard’.⁸² Similarly Fiona Ross has pushed back against the rhetoric which surrounded the TRC, that what preceded the Commission was ‘voiceless-ness and silence about the apartheid past’.⁸³ The TRC was a quasi-judicial body established by the Government of National Unity in 1994, tasked with helping the new South Africa come to terms with the apartheid past through collecting testimony of human rights abuses suffered, some of which were given in public hearings, applications for amnesty for abuses committed and the writing of a report. Ross points out that much ‘was already known about apartheid’, ‘told in diverse genres’ and that the TRC was just a new formalised structure for voices to be heard in.⁸⁴ However, the dominance of voice and speech as the way in which the past can be known in the post-apartheid moment has important and ongoing consequences for the writing of histories. It is to voice, speech and silence as ways of knowing the past, that we will now turn in Chapter 1.

Notes

1. 1.  Supreme Court of South Africa (Transvaal Provincial Division), State vs. W.W.C. Twala and Ten Others, case K/P 282/78; WHP: AD1450: Box 5: Record of Proceedings, 1084.

2. 2.  The historiography on 16 June 1976 is voluminous. For accounts that stress the importance of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools as the issue motivating student protests see, in particular: Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare …’: Doing Violence to Memory, The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/index.html; The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 7: Soweto Uprisings: New Perspective, Commemorations and Memorialisation (Cape Town: Unisa Press, 2017).

3. 3.  Jonathan Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle; Policy and Resistance in South Africa, 1940–1990 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1999), 150–65.

4. 4.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Record of Proceedings, 1085.

5. 5.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Record of Proceedings, 1096.

6. 6.  I have used the lower-case black in this instance, whereas at other points in the book I have used the upper-case Black. This is a position based on the accepted practice in South Africa and the arguments that whilst Black gives appropriate status and recognition to an identity claimed by Americans of African descent it may obscure more plural ways of being black outside of North America and the global north. In 1970s South Africa, Black Consciousness thinkers argued that ‘Black’ was an identity that belonged to all those oppressed by apartheid, dissolving distinctions made by the Population Registration Act (no. 30 of 1950) between ‘African’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Coloured’. Where a capital has been used by an individual, I have retained its usage, but I have not imposed it upon anyone. Here using lower case is a way of signifying that in this instance black is how Loate was seen by others, not necessarily a claim she was making for herself. Masabata Loate did appear to lay claim to an identity as Black during her testimony in her trial in 1982, when she stated, ‘I am aware that a black man in this country is oppressed’. The ambiguities of this statement are discussed in Chapter 3. For more on using upper and lower case for black see: ‘To cap? Or not cap “Black”?’, Who We Are, posted 8 August 2021, https://www.who-are-we.online/article2.html.

7. 7.  Lisa Lowe, ‘The Intimacies of Four Continents’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, American Encounters/Global Interactions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 208; Jean Allman describes such an approach as ‘agnotology’, the study of what we do not know and why we do not know it. Jean Allman, ‘The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History’, Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 3 (11 September 2009): 13–35, https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.0.0096.

8. 8.  Biography is by far and away the most popular genre of non-fiction in post-apartheid South Africa. For a discussion of this phenomenon see: Nancy J. Jacobs and Andrew Bank, ‘Biography in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Call for Awkwardness’, African Studies 78, no. 2 (3 April 2019): 165–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2019.1569428; As Ciraj Rasool has argued, auto/biographical practices held an enduring place within the liberation struggle, and in particular international solidarity campaigns, beginning with the biographies of the defendants at the 1956 Treason Trial produced by the Treason Trial Defence Fund. Ciraj Rassool, ‘Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography’, South African Review of Sociology 41, no. 1 (April 2010): 28–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/21528581003676028.

9. 9.  As Elaine Unterhalter has noted, when reading the autobiographies of struggle participants, it is impossible to disentangle the ‘personal political narrative’ from the ‘material and discursive forms of the anti-apartheid struggle’. In Loate’s case the fragmented narratives of her life that we have are embedded in the material and discursive forms of the anti-apartheid struggle. Elaine Unterhalter, ‘The Work of the Nation: Heroic Masculinity in South African Autobiographical Writing of the Anti-Apartheid Struggle’, European Journal of Development Research 12, no. 2 (December 2000): 160, https://doi.org/10.1080/09578810008426770.

10. 10.  Orlando West is one of the oldest parts of Soweto. It was established in the 1930s, intended as a ‘garden city’ to house Johannesburg’s African population then largely residing in inner-city areas that authorities regarded as properly ‘white areas’. Noor Nieftagodien and Sally Gaule, Orlando West, Soweto: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/orlando-west-soweto/3C379146F2C62F49B9EC6EF41C0DCE4C.

11. 11.  ‘Orlando stayaway goes on’, Rand Daily Mail (Township Edition), 22 June 1977, 1.

12. 12.  For two examples see: Rand Daily Mail (Township Edition), 3 August 1979, 16, and 28 August 1979, 26.

13. 13.  Tshepo Moloi, ‘Youth Politics: The Political Role of AZANYU in the Struggle for Liberation: The Case of AZANYU Tembisa Branch, 1980s to 1996’. (Research Report, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2005), 106, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/39664456.pdf.

14. 14.  What is known about SAYRCO is, as Toivo Asheeke has put it, ‘scant at best’. It was an organisation formed, primarily by former members of the SSRC, to fight an armed struggle against the Apartheid State. Asheeke’s work gives us the fullest account of the organisation yet available. Khotso Seatlholo was central to the organisation, serving as its first President and persuading Nosipho Matshoba to return to Botswana from the United States to help establish the organisation. According to Matshoba, SAYRCO was fiercely independent: ‘people did not want to go through the ANC … they did not want to go through the PAC … so the only way to do this was to form a different political movement’. See: Toivo Tukongeni Paul Wilson Asheeke, Arming Black Consciousness: The Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition and South Africa’s Armed Struggle, African Studies Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 3 and also 146–50, and 158–9. Khotso Seatlholo, despite his leading role in the SSRC (he was the second President in 1977–78) has not received much historiographical attention. He was released from prison in 1990 but did not regain political prominence. When he died in 2004 his wife reportedly refused to allow his funeral to be ‘glamorised’ by politicians claiming his legacy, stating ‘why should he be treated like that after his death when he was neglected while he was alive?’ See, Thami Nkwanyane, ‘No lavish funeral for Seatlholo, icon of ’76’, City Press, 21 February 2004, https://www.news24.com/citypress/southafrica/news/no-lavish-funeral-for-seathlolo-icon-of-76-20100614; For more on Tsietsi Mashinini, the first President of the SSRC, see: Kealeboga J. Maphunye, ‘Legacy Underplayed or Ignored? Tsietsi Mashinini: The Forgotten Warrior of South Africa’s Liberation Struggle’, African Historical Review 49, no. 2 (3 July 2017): 22–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/17532523.2017.1414675. Schuster’s account of Tsietsi Mashinini is based in part on interviews with Seatlholo. Lynda Schuster, A Burning Hunger: One Family’s Struggle Against Apartheid (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006).

15. 15.  State vs. Mary Masabate Loatse and others, case: 41/4115/81 Magistrates Court, District of Johannesburg; WHP: AD2021: SAIRR Security Trials 1958–82. Boxes 19–20. Digitised trial proceedings, accessed July 2023, http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AD2021/R/.

16. 16.  Maria Loate gave an interview to the Sunday Star. For a summary drawing on the stories published in various South African newspapers see: Laurinda Keys, ‘Woman Activist Slashed to Death’, AP News, 19 October 1986; as of 24 July 2019, https://apnews.com/0c77c01ccad449910d3a2fa2a4fa97a1. [Site inactive on 30 September 2024. Screenshot available from author.]

17. 17.  On the controversies and contestations of necklacing as a form of political action within the liberation struggle see: Riedwaan Moosage, ‘A Prose of Ambivalence: Liberation Struggle Discourse on Necklacing’, Kronos 36, no. 1 (2010): 136–56.

18. 18.  For the gendered nature of necklacing see: Nyasha Karimakwenda, ‘Safe to Violate: The Role of Gender in the Necklacing of Women During the South African People’s War (1985–1990)’, Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no. 3 (4 May 2019): 559–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2019.1642646.

19. 19.  The Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953. It replaced a system in which the majority of African children attended state-aided mission schools, with one in which all schools had to be registered with the State and were run by a central Department of Education. A separate curriculum was introduced, designed to ensure that Africans were educated to be ‘hewers of wood, and drawers of water’. There was widespread opposition to Bantu Education when it was first introduced but teachers and schools had few choices but to comply and outright opposition had dissipated by 1960. See: Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle; for more on the nature of Bantu Education in Soweto see: Clive Glaser, ‘Soweto’s Islands of Learning: Morris Isaacson and Orlando High Schools Under Bantu Education, 1958–1975’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 1 (2 January 2015): 159–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2015.991573.

20. 20.  Julian Brown, ‘An Experiment in Confrontation: The Pro-Frelimo Rallies of 1974’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38, no. 1 (1 March 2012): 55–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2012.644978.

21. 21.  The events of 1976 became the lens through which the subsequent involvement of young people in the 1980s was interpreted. For example, analysing the role of young people during the township uprisings of the mid-1980s, Colin Bundy argued for a theory of ‘generational units’ as actors within history in 1976 and the 1980s. Colin Bundy, ‘Street Sociology and Pavement Politics: Aspects of Youth and Student Resistance in Cape Town, 1985’, Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 3 (April 1987): 303–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057078708708148; For Shaun Johnson, the classroom boycotts of 1980 were almost ‘an action replay of Soweto’, Shaun Johnson, ed., South Africa: No Turning Back (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 108.

22. 22.  Anne Heffernan, ‘Blurred Lines and Ideological Divisions in South African Youth Politics’, African Affairs 115, no. 461 (1 October 2016): 667, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adw052.

23. 23.  For three early responses to the Uprisings that attempted to analyse the students’ motivations see: John Stuart Kane-Berman, Soweto: Black Revolt, White Reaction (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978); Baruch Hirson, Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution? (London: Zed Press, 1979), 195. Hirson was critical of the revolutionary potential of the SSRC, commenting ‘a student council, fighting for student rights is inevitably something different from a council that is directing the population in revolt’. Alan Brooks and Jeremy Brickhill, Whirlwind Before the Storm: The Origins and Development of the Uprising in Soweto and the Rest of South Africa from June to December 1976 (London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1980).

24. 24.  Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 183.

25. 25.  The academic and activist Frank Molteno put it like this in a 1979 article: ‘During 1976 it was popularly believed that things would never be the same again – nor are they. And yet, what precisely has changed?’ Frank Molteno, ‘The Uprising of 16th June: A Review of the Literature on Events in South Africa 1976’, Social Dynamics 5, no. 1 (June 1979): 55, https://doi.org/10.1080/02533957908458236.

26. 26.  Such numbers are estimates. These particular numbers are drawn from Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle, 168.

27. 27.  Heffernan, ‘Blurred Lines and Ideological Divisions’, 671.

28. 28.  Heffernan, ‘Blurred Lines and Ideological Divisions’, 675.

29. 29.  Nomavenda Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines: Truths of Soweto Life (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1990), 132.

30. 30.  Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 3 (Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998), 669.

31. 31.  ‘Askaris’ in the South African context were former members of the liberation struggle armies who changed sides to work with apartheid security forces. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission noted, in South Africa contra-mobilisation of security forces by the State involved ‘the fostering of conflicts’ between organisations within the liberation struggle, along ethnic and ideological fault-lines. See: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 2, 299; volume 3 of the TRC’s final report details the few cases from this conflict that came before the Commission. Two mothers of sons killed in the conflict between AZAPO and the UDF in Soweto testified before the Human Rights Violation Committee: one whose son was allegedly killed by AZAPO activists, the other by UDF activists. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 1998, vol. 3, 669; For a first-hand account of this period see: Sibongile Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses: Remembering 16 June 1976 (Braamfontein, South Africa: Skotaville Press, 2001); See also: Monique Marks, Young Warriors: Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001).

32. 32.  Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); Ineke Van Kessel, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Franziska Rueedi, The Vaal Uprising of 1984 and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2021).

33. 33.  Jeremy Seekings, Heroes or Villains? Youth Politics in the 1980s (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1993).

34. 34.  David Everatt and Elinor Sisulu, eds., Black Youth in Crisis: Facing the Future (Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1992).

35. 35.  Rachel E. Johnson, ‘Making History, Gendering Youth: Young Women and South Africa’s Liberation Struggles after 1976’, PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2010: 19.

36. 36.  The principle study of the gender politics of youth politics was for many years that of Jeremy Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980s’, Agenda 10 (1991): 77–85, https://doi.org/10.2307/4065458; The picture Seekings drew has been challenged in recent years, most thoroughly by Emily Bridger, see: Emily Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades: Gender, Youth and Violence in South Africa’s Township Uprisings, 1984–1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 4 (4 July 2018): 559–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1462591; Emily Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2021).

37. 37.  Clive Glaser, Bo Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 189. See also: Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective’, African Studies 61, no. 1 (2002): 27–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180220140064.

38. 38.  For some important publications see: Khangela Ali Hlongwane, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu and Mothobi Mutloatse, eds., Soweto ’76 (Houghton: Mutloatse Arts Heritage Trust, 2006); Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’; The Road to Democracy in South Africa; for work that situates 1976 within a wider context of student politics in South Africa see: Anne Heffernan et al., Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa before and beyond Soweto ’76 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006).

39. 39.  The phrase is Luisa Passerini’s. She uses it in relation to the idea of an Italian working class not ‘fixed in a still image’ but an ‘ensemble of relations’: Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11.

40. 40.  Suzi Nkomo, ‘Organising Women in SANSCO: Reflections on the Experience of Women in Organisation’, Agenda 10 (1991): 10–15, https://doi.org/10.2307/4065449.

41. 41.  Nkomo, ‘Organising Women in SANSCO’, 12.

42. 42.  Jon Soske, ‘The Family Romance of the South African Revolution’, in Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa, ed. G. Arunima, Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021), 178, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79580-1_7; in developing this argument, Soske draws upon the work of Lynn Hunt, in Lynn Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 1992), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315003306.

43. 43.  Shireen Hassim, ‘Democracy’s Shadows: Sexual Rights and Gender Politics in the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma’, African Studies 68, no. 1 (1 April 2009): 63, https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180902827431.

44. 44.  For one example, see a profile of Lindiwe Sisulu in the ANC’s journal in exile, Sechaba, subtitled ‘daughter of the struggle’, in which she is described as ‘a slim wisp of determined womanhood, eyes bright with the courage of the freedom fighter, though shadowed with the pain of the ordeals she has undergone’. ‘The Torture of Lindiwe Sisulu’, Sechaba, 1978.

45. 45.  Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, Knowledge Unlatched (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 106, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt155j4ws.

46. 46.  Hassim, ‘Democracy’s Shadows’, 65.

47. 47.  Letters Page, Sunday Times, 26 March 2006.

48. 48.  For discussion of Jacob Zuma’s rape trial and what it meant for post-apartheid South Africa’s gender politics see: Mmatshilo Motsei, The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma (Sunnyside: Jacana, 2007); Vasu Reddy and Cheryl Potgieter, ‘ “Real Men Stand up for the Truth”: Discursive Meanings in the Jacob Zuma Rape Trial’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 24, no. 4 (2006): 511–21, https://doi.org/10.2989/16073610609486438.

49. 49.  M. Tolsi, K.Sosibo, T.Makgetla and M. Dibetle, ‘This mama is speaking lies’, Mail and Guardian, 24–30 March 2006.

50. 50.  Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare (Auckland Park, South Africa: MF Books Joburg, 2015), 78–79; see also Bridger’s discussion of sexual violence and its impact on girlhood in South Africa in Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 38–42.

51. 51.  For a rare discussion of the history of rape within South Africa see: Emily Bridger, ‘Apartheid’s “Rape Crisis”: Understanding and Addressing Sexual Violence in South Africa, 1970s–1990s’, Women’s History Review 33, no. 2 (23 February 2024): 265–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2219535. Bridger sets out the responses of South African women, including the founding of feminist anti-rape organisations in the 1970s, women organisers within trade unions and the township anti-rape marches of the 1990s, alongside the responses of police and vigilante groups.

52. 52.  I have used ‘womxn’ within my discussion of the Fallist movements since this is the term preferred by participants. Matandela explains the term thus: ‘womxn refers to a definition of womanhood that aligns itself with decolonial theory, which is inclusive of the LGBTI community and challenges the dichotomy of “man” and “woman” … [it is] therefore a revolutionary term for understanding how gender has been challenged in the times of Fallism’. See: Mbalenhle Matandela, ‘Redefining Black Consciousness and Resistance: The Intersection of Black Consciousness and Black Feminist Thought’, Agenda 31, no. 3–4 (2 October 2017): 11–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2017.1402410.

53. 53.  As quoted and discussed in: Matandela, ‘Redefining Black Consciousness and Resistance’, 15.

54. 54.  I used ‘nude’ in quotation marks, as one of the participants herself does in her theorising of the moment, as a way of signalling its controversial status as an act of protest. See: Hlengiwe Ndlovu, ‘Womxn’s Bodies Reclaiming the Picket Line: The “Nude” Protest during #FeesMustFall’, Agenda 31, no. 3–4 (2 October 2017): 68–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2017.1391613.

55. 55.  Ndlovu, ‘Womxn’s Bodies Reclaiming the Picket Line’, 74–5.

56. 56.  Matandela, ‘Redefining Black Consciousness and Resistance’, 27.

57. 57.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’, chapter 4, 10.

58. 58.  Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, ‘The Anatomy of the Crowd’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 7: Soweto Uprisings: New Perspective, Commemorations and Memorialisation (Cape Town: Unisa Press, 2017), 77.

59. 59.  Ndlovu, ‘The Anatomy of the Crowd’, 49.

60. 60.  Ndlovu, ‘The Anatomy of the Crowd’, 77.

61. 61.  Ruth Kerkham Simbao, ‘The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings: Reading the Shadow in Sam Nzima’s Iconic Photograph of Hector Pieterson’, African Arts 40, no. 2 (1 July 2007): 52–69.

62. 62.  Prominent amongst those ongoing silences is the unknown fate of Mbuyisa Makhubu after June 1976, when he left South Africa. Simbao, ‘The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings’, 65.

63. 63.  As he put it: ‘The factors which necessitated the armed struggle still exist today. We have no option but to continue. We express the hope that a climate conducive to a negotiated settlement would be created soon so that there may no longer be the need for the armed struggle’. See Nelson Mandela’s address to rally in Cape Town on his release from Prison, 11 February 1990. Verbatim transcript, accessed June 2024, https://atom.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/za-com-mr-s-16.

64. 64.  At the centre of the apartheid project was the idea that races and ethnic groups should be physically separate from one another. In apartheid theory only whites belonged in South Africa, Asians and Coloureds should be contained within their townships in urban areas and Africans should only be in white areas to support the white population – otherwise they belonged to ethnically defined homelands or Bantustans, made up of the land allocated to ‘Natives’ by the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. By the 1980s the National Party attempted to channel black political aspirations by offering these Bantustans ‘independence’ and providing representation to Asians and Coloureds in a reconstituted parliamentary system. In both cases ultimate power remained within white hands. The white chamber of Parliament outweighed the other two chambers combined. All of the ‘independent’ Bantustans were economically dependent on South Africa.

65. 65.  For two examples of studies that take seriously the beliefs of participants in township uprisings see: Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Rueedi, The Vaal Uprising of 1984.

66. 66.  Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics’, 82.

67. 67.  Seekings, Heroes or Villains?, 84.

68. 68.  Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades’; Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid; Marks, Young Warriors; Janet Cherry, ‘ “We Were Not Afraid”: The Role of Women in the 1980s Township Uprising in the Eastern Cape’, in Women in South African History: They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 281–314.

69. 69.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 48.

70. 70.  Natasha Erlank, ‘Gender and Masculinity in South African Nationalist Discourse, 1912–1950’, Feminist Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 653–72, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178733.

71. 71.  For a summary of this debate see: Cherryl Walker, ‘Conceptualising Motherhood in Twentieth Century South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 3 (September 1995): 417–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057079508708455.

72. 72.  Meghan Healy-Clancy, ‘The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women: A History of Public Motherhood in Women’s Antiracist Activism.’, Signs 42, no. 4 (2017): 851, https://doi.org/10.1086/690916.

73. 73.  Healy-Clancy, ‘The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women’, 844.

74. 74.  Jo Beall et al., ‘African Women in the Durban Struggle, 1985–6: Towards a Transformation of Roles’, ed. G. Moss and I. Obery, South African Review 4 (1987): 102.

75. 75.  For work on an earlier period that tackles the relationship between generations of women, see: Deborah Gaitskell, ‘ “Wailing for Purity”: Prayer Unions, African Mothers and Adolescent Daughters 1912–1940’, in Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930, ed. Shula Marks and R.J.A.R. Rathbone (Harlow: Longman, 1982), 383; The following include details of tensions between older/younger women activists. For example, Cherry, ‘ “We Were Not Afraid”: The Role of Women in the 1980s Township Uprising in the Eastern Cape’; Shireen Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 66, especially her profile of the Natal Women’s Organisation (NOW) in which she notes, ‘older women were wary of the younger women who belonged to NOW, often considering them to be disrespectful and “too westernised”’. See also the suggestion that in the Western Cape, ‘although it was never openly discussed, younger women (below 35) were encouraged to join the youth groups … often younger women felt they were not taken seriously’ in the United Women’s Organisation and its successor the United Women’s Congress: Gertrude M.N. Fester, ‘Women and Citizenship Struggles: A Case of the Western Cape, South Africa 1980–2004’ (PhD, Gender Institute LSE, 2007), 272.

76. 76.  For an overview of women’s mobilisation both within and outside the mainstream liberation organisations see: Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa.

77. 77.  This is suggested in Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa.

78. 78.  As quoted in Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa, 77.

79. 79.  ‘Statement of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress on the Emancipation of Women in South Africa’, Agenda 6, no. 8 (1 January 1990): 23, https://doi.org/10.2307/4065629.

80. 80.  ‘Statement of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress on the Emancipation of Women in South Africa’, 23.

81. 81.  Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa, 161–2.

82. 82.  Meg Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), 120.

83. 83.  Fiona Ross, ‘On Having Voice and Being Heard: Some After-Effects of Testifying before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 327, https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996030033005.

84. 84.  Ross, ‘On Having Voice and Being Heard’.