Chapter 4 Stories of life and death: the struggle to speak

Introduction

Masabata Loate was a young woman who spoke too much. After her appearance as a witness in the trial of the Soweto Eleven, Loate was shot in the leg; on her release in 1986 after serving half of her sentence for terrorism, she was murdered. This was an act of silencing. She apparently spoke up openly in opposition to the use of necklacing and was killed by a large group of men at a moment of heightened violence in Soweto. This is one way of interpreting her death. As this chapter will detail, there are others. Hermonie Lee has noted that within biography, or what might be more broadly termed ‘life writing’, ‘we are all fascinated by the manner of the subject’s death … [it] plays a part in the meaning of the life’.¹ What does Loate’s death, just before her twenty-sixth birthday, tell us about her life? Of the many public stories of her death none deals with the personal loss that it must have represented for her family and friends. Masabata Loate was a daughter, granddaughter and sister. She told the court during her 1982–3 trial that her sister Paulina was her closest confidant. It was with her that she had discussed her plans to enrol at the University of Botswana to study business administration – plans which her arrest put a stop to, and which she was never able to pursue. The fact that Masabata’s mother, Maria Loate, was a member of a burial society, the ‘good hope society’ – a detail which emerged at Masabata’s trial – takes on a new poignancy after her death.²

Burial societies were critical in enabling the adaptations of funereal and mourning practices necessitated by life within apartheid’s urban townships. Amidst the dislocations wrought by migrant labour and the pass laws that separated families and wider kinship networks, ‘burial societies became surrogate families’.³ Rebekah Lee has argued that whilst burial societies had their origins within mining compounds, as a means of ensuring migrant miners could return home after their death, by the late twentieth century African women’s burial society membership was a means of ‘consolidating women’s position in town’ (emphasis in original).⁴ Maria Loate’s membership of the ‘good hope society’ was mentioned during her daughter’s trial because the police asserted that it was a political organisation, something Loate denied. A political organisation it almost certainly was not, but this belied the reality that burial had become highly politicised in 1970s South Africa. After 1976, funerals became sites of mobilisation, and often, when they were disrupted by security forces, moments of further loss.⁵ The Soweto Uprisings wrought ‘dramatic’ changes in funerary practices within Soweto, by overturning the exclusion of children from participation in mourning rituals.⁶ From the funeral of Hector Pieterson onwards, it was youth who led the burials of their fallen comrades with songs, slogans, dances and political eulogies.⁷ Those who lost loved ones in the struggle had to negotiate the pain of personal loss alongside powerful public narratives that sought to shape the meanings of these deaths.⁸ For those killed under suspicion of being an informer or collaborator there were few spaces or possibilities of public mourning for their families; instead, grief was experienced alongside a lack of community support and shame.⁹

The story of Loate’s murder is harrowing. She was attacked at night by a crowd of around twenty men, from whom she escaped several times, before being stabbed to death.¹⁰ Some reports detailed that the final assault that killed her was on her grandmother’s doorstep. Maria Loate offered this summation of her daughter’s life: ‘that she had to die this way, after dedicating all her life to the cause of freedom and justice, is heartbreaking’.¹¹ This gives us some sense of personal loss, but already her life and death were contained within the framework of the struggle. Maria Loate was also quoted as explaining her daughter’s death as the result of her opposition to the use of violence; Masabata ‘totally abhorred the “necklace” executions taking place in the townships, and always voiced her opposition to the wanton stoning of people’s cars and the burning down of their homes’.¹² In contrast Casper Venter, spokesman for the Bureau of Information, the official source of news from unrest areas under the State of Emergency, stated that ‘the police don’t regard this as unrest-related. It’s being investigated as a crime’.¹³ Amongst the most chilling details in these initial reports are the lines that describe the public nature of her death: ‘family members said people in the vicinity saw the crowd kill Miss Loate, but no one went to her aid’.¹⁴ The manner of her death remains the same in all the versions that follow. What does change are the meanings and the place within broader struggle narratives that her death is given.

There has been much more written about Masabata Loate’s death than about her life. It is through her death that she appears within two of the principal post-apartheid sites for retelling the past: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and autobiographical memoir. Listening to Loate’s silencing by tracing the circulation of stories of her death enables us to hear the effects of the sanctions on speech that existed for young women within the confrontational and polarised politics of the townships in the late 1980s. The post-apartheid afterlives of the stories of her death show us how the gendered boundaries of speech within the struggle were contested and reshaped during the transition. While Loate was silenced, women’s voices, and amongst them some of her contemporaries, were being heard in new spaces and in new ways. The second half of this chapter considers the stories of three women who came to political activism during June 1976, and how, when and where it is, that their lives in the struggle have been told. Within these moments of voicing, silence remains an important part of their stories.

Speaking up

In her mother’s explanation, Loate was killed because she espoused non-violence within the struggle. How and why might this have led to her death? The initial stories of Loate’s death take us to the heart of speech as an increasingly violent terrain of struggle during the 1980s. One of the central aims of the States of Emergency, declared in 1985 (partial) and 1986 (national) was to halt the circulation of information. Journalists were not allowed to report on the actions of the state security forces and the only information that could be published about declared ‘unrest areas’ was that supplied by the Government Bureau of Information. At the same time the security forces attempted to improve their own access to information from within the struggle. The Detainee Parent’s Support Committee (DPSC), an organisation established, as its name suggests, to support the parents and families of the increasing numbers of people, activists and non-activists alike that were being detained, produced a report on ‘repression trends in the Transvaal area between June and September 1986’.¹⁵ It noted that, ‘what has emerged is a vast increase in the numbers of people held, especially rank and file membership, as well as an increase in the time period for which people are being held’.¹⁶ The report goes on to make the argument that ‘information coming into the DPSC office suggests’ that following a concerted attack within township communities on those seen as ‘collaborators’ in 1984–5 the security forces were ‘using the [1986] State of Emergency in an attempt to reconstruct its informer network’.¹⁷ The report highlights testimony suggesting police attempts to coerce ‘less experienced and less politicised detainees’ into becoming informers and noted a rise in forced confessions,¹⁸ finally commenting that:

The attempt to coerce people to inform isn’t only designed to get information about the democratic movement and activities in the townships. It is also designed to create divisions by sowing suspicion that detainees have agreed to inform. The State wants people to believe that there is a vast network of informers. In this way it hopes to undermine the people’s confidence in their ability to build strong organisation or wage effective struggle.¹⁹

Speaking in 1986 was potentially extremely dangerous. A period in detention, talking as a state witness in court, connections of friendship or family: all could be grounds for suspicion. The edges of the struggle to control speech were messy and dangerous, where police surveillance and activist efforts to resist it percolated into everyday life. Jon Soske has emphasised the ‘relationship between uncertainty and proximity in this period’ and a ‘generalised illegibility of people, of events, of ongoing developments’.²⁰ Within the politics of struggle speech, as in daily life in apartheid townships, there were what Karimakwenda has called ‘unique precarities’ that black women had to navigate.²¹ Necklacing was a form of violence which varied. It often involved the placing of a burning tyre around a person’s neck – hence its name – but those who were necklaced could also be killed in other ways. Such murders were ritualistic and enforced group solidarity.²² According to the findings of the TRC, incidents of necklacing reached their peak in 1986 – the year of Loate’s death.²³ Karimakwenda has argued that necklacing was a deeply gendered practice with three categories of women often targeted: women accused of appearing haughty or cheeky; women accused of not being sexually available to the comrades; and women who were attacked as proxies for men accused of collaborating who could not be found.²⁴ Karimakwenda examines cases of necklacing that happened. The daybooks of the DPSC, who ran advice offices taking statements from detainees and their families, show us something of the ways in which the threat of violence, and particularly necklacing, was employed against women whose speech or silence was deemed inappropriate.

In August 1986, Thompson Ramanala came to the DPSC to report the detention of three women, Catherine (24), Kgomotso (30) and Nomsa (24). All were unmarried and unemployed. They had been detained on 17 June 1986. This was how their story was recorded: ‘According to Thompson the three [arrested] ostracised a woman friend who became friendly with a policeman. She motivated the policeman to take action. The three are accused of intending to ‘necklace’ the woman friend. He is thought to be one of the arresting police’.²⁵ The ostracising of a woman friend for getting close to a policeman was undoubtedly a politicised if not a directly political act in a township in 1986. The threat of necklacing was a fate reserved for enemies of the struggle. Arrest and detention was a fate reserved for enemies of the State. This was an incident deeply entangled with the forms of the township struggle, yet none of the women are mentioned as having political ties, a detail the DPSC was usually keen to find out. It is also a personal falling-out amongst friends and this is how it appears in the DPSC daybooks. Incidents like this hint at the multiple logics by which violence was enacted, often simultaneously.

A fear of getting caught-up in the violence of necklacing is something that pervades the stories of life in Soweto written by the journalist Nomavenda Mathiane, published during the 1980s in the magazine Frontline. In one story, ‘Waiting for the knock on the door’ published in August/September 1987, Mathiane recounts the experiences of a friend, Thoko, who some years earlier had returned home after a period in detention (she had been arrested for her participation in a street committee) and found an altered atmosphere in her home.²⁶ Mathiane and eventually Thoko became aware of tensions within her family and circle of friends based on a rumour that another close friend, Dimakatso and Thoko’s mother, had ‘betrayed her’ in order to ‘get at Thoko’s father who adored her over all her other children’.²⁷ Mathiane explains what she thought lay beneath this rumour: ‘Dimakatso was riding on the crest of fame being a member of the Soweto Parents Crisis Committee. It was quite obvious to me that there were certain personalities who felt jealous of her success and recognition’.²⁸ Thoko rejects the rumour and publicly embraces Dimakatso, thereby neutralising the danger. Yet, Mathiane wonders: ‘How many people have fallen victim to such slander and been necklaced? … in times of necklaces who dared question people telling stories?’²⁹ This kind of fear of speech is omnipresent in the archives of the Emergency years.

In April of 1986, a father came to the DPSC to report the arrest of his son Ike. He described the way in which the police came to the family home, asked for Ike and started to physically beat him. His sister Rebecca intervened, telling them they should arrest him, not beat him, so they turned their sjamboks on her, forcing her to throw her nine-month old baby onto the bed to prevent the child from being hurt. The report from the father adds, ‘They then said that Rebecca taught Ike all these things and that she was cheeky’.³⁰ Rebecca also made a separate statement on the incident:

After they beat me up one of them who I thought was a senior came to me and said ‘Ousi next time you must keep quiet because we, the police are going to necklace you’, not the students because I talk too much. I asked him whether he was serious and he said he meant it.³¹

Women activists have spoken about the dangers of being read as a ‘cheeky’ woman by police: that there was a particular violence that such women would be subjected to when they did not conform to expectations of feminine weakness or submissiveness.³² In the threats levelled at Rebecca Maleka in the spring of 1986 it is also clear that all forms of violence, be they state or resistance, could be called upon to discipline women who ‘talked too much’. That this violence and its ever-present threat served to constrain what was sayable for young women should be no surprise. The idea that Loate might be killed for speaking up against the use of necklacing is entirely plausible in this context.

In her study of a necklace murder, the psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela offers some thoughts on the dynamics of what she terms ‘speaking out’ within instances of group violence. She suggests,

A person who does not depend much on the group’s approval for a favourable evaluation of his or her self-esteem could take the liberty to do something that challenges the group’s perceived solidarity … Speaking out to voice opposition to the violence of one’s group is likely to come from such a person … those who speak out in a crowd therefore are likely to be extraordinary people whose moral sense exceeds the needs that can only be satisfied by being associated with a particular identity.³³

Gobodo-Madikizela offers the example of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his intervention in an incident in 1986 in which he prevented a young woman from being necklaced. We might have Masabata Loate in our minds when she also notes that, ‘people who have the courage of their convictions often sacrifice their self-preservation’.³⁴

Parade of violence

The violence of Masabata Loate’s death was what all the initial newspaper reports focused upon. The most graphic story appeared in the Cape Times, under the headline ‘Anti-necklace ex-beauty queen murdered’.³⁵ That Loate’s past as a beauty queen was recalled alongside a violent description of her death gives this report a sensationalist edge. This tone is one that Emily Bridger and Erin Hazan have identified as marking the descriptions of violence against women within media targeted at township audiences, from at least the 1930s onwards.³⁶ They note the frequency with which reports of rape objectify and sexualise the, mostly, unnamed women victims, with references to ‘shapely’ or ‘curvaceous’ ‘dolls’.³⁷ Most newspaper reports did not refer to Loate as a beauty queen, emphasising instead her identity as a political activist. Beyond its headline, the Cape Times also detailed that Loate was a member of the Soweto Youth Congress and was killed by her ‘undisciplined’ comrades. This story quoted an unnamed family member who revealed she had been ‘on the hit list for some time’ and that she had evaded a previous attempt to find and kill her.³⁸ In these stories, and those told within activist publications, Masabata Loate’s death was widely regarded as an example of the growing problem of youth violence. In a 1987 issue of APDUSA Views, the publication of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), Loate’s murder was discussed in an article on youth violence, titled ‘Freedom fighters or plain killers?’³⁹ The author describes the appearance of what they termed the ‘Fake Comrades’ under the States of Emergency: ‘an anti-social criminal element’ who ‘kill in the name of the liberatory movement’ but who in fact were uneducated, ‘power-drunk’ youth led astray by the forces of reaction.⁴⁰ APDUSA represented an older political generation who viewed the heightened township mobilisation of young people in the 1980s largely through what Seekings has termed the ‘apocalyptic stereotype’ of youth.⁴¹ In this analysis Loate’s murder is listed as an example of a ‘political murder’ and evidence of the wayward actions of the youth. The report detailed simply that, ‘Miss Masabata Loate was brutally hacked to death by some 20 youths’.⁴²

Moving further away from her death in time and location, the violence it was seen to represent became less specific. Where Loate’s death was reported in the international media it came as part of a commentary on the scale of violence engulfing South Africa. Time magazine concluded a report which included her death: ‘the appalling parade of violence is one more sign of a people in agony’.⁴³ Very often Loate’s death was listed as part of a catalogue of incidents; its power to shock came from its position as one of many. United Press International news noted that her death ‘pushed the death toll to 326’ since the countrywide State of Emergency had been introduced on 12 June.⁴⁴ In all these stories her past was foreshortened. For APDUSA she became ‘a well-known freedom fighter’. In Time she was ‘a leader of the 1976 anti-apartheid student uprising’. In the Financial Mail she was described as ‘one of the best-known student activists during the Soweto 1976 upheavals’.⁴⁵ What all these recollections of her role in the events of 1976 do, is suggest that her death signalled something wider had changed within the liberation struggle – that there was a distance that had opened up between 1976 and 1986 in South Africa. The subtext was that the violence of 1986 was destroying the 1976 generation. None of the reports recalled her appearance as a state witness in 1979.

Breaking silence

In 1989 another version of Loate’s death would be told, the only one to be recounted by a woman.

Nomavenda Mathiane, whose story ‘Waiting for the knock on the door’ we considered above, worked as a journalist during the 1970s and 1980s, writing for the Voice before it was closed. She was one of the founders of Frontline, a magazine that began publishing in 1978 and has been later self-described as ‘one of the zillion home-made efforts to contribute to the ending of South Africa’s apartheid system’.⁴⁶ The magazine situated itself as ‘on the side of change, very substantial change. But it does not set out to speak only to those who also want change, it wants to speak as well to those who don’t’.⁴⁷ Frontline was a part of a wider proliferation of voices and spaces within South African print media during the 1980s, often described as the growth of an ‘alternative press’.⁴⁸ These were spaces that were nevertheless significantly structured by hierarchies of race and gender. Mathiane testified at the TRC’s special hearing on the media, in Johannesburg in 1997, and there described the ways in which black female journalists were offered even fewer opportunities than their male counterparts within the white-dominated world of South African print journalism.⁴⁹ Black women reporters were ‘hired to report on domestic affairs such as cookery pages, fashion, health, horoscopes, Dear Dolly columns and church businesses. When major stories in these bits broke out, who would be sent to cover that? Male journalists’.⁵⁰ Mathiane’s reporting for Frontline challenged this in more than one respect. Dennis Beckett, editor of Frontline, described Mathiane as ‘unconventional’, since she would ‘say out loud the things everybody else only mumbles quietly among consenting adults in private’.⁵¹ Mathiane is credited with breaking the story of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) and Winnie Mandela’s alleged involvement in violence and murder, which occurred amidst the call to render the townships ‘ungovernable’ in the mid-to-late 1980s.⁵² This was a time when, as Hassim puts it, ‘the ethical line between violence that enables the end of repression and violence that exists in and of itself was constantly breached’.⁵³ The MUFC was, it seems, formed as a social club for youths that morphed into the personal bodyguard of Winnie Mandela and became involved in the brutal disciplining of those perceived as state informers. Mathiane wrote the first article discussing the MUFC’s behaviour within Soweto. According to Jon Soske, the MUFC tried to necklace her for this but ‘she was protected by her neighbours’.⁵⁴

In a story titled, ‘Living a lie, reaping a whirlwind’, published in March 1989, Mathiane recounts the story of the killing of ‘Masabatha’ as she calls her, as one of the many incidents in which the MUFC were involved, and which bred an air of impunity around their activities:

Another story began back in the days of street committees, when Masabatha was killed near her house on a Friday afternoon by a gang of 21 males, who were openly seen and known to many residents. Masabatha was a model and beauty queen who had also been an activist who had served five years. She was prominent in street committee work and it is widely believed that her committee had aroused jealousies among others who had believed that her street was meant to be part of their territory.

Sometime later a youth, Tholi Kenneth Dlamini, son of a well-known Phomolong family, defected from the comrades he had been associating with to return to school and his previous hobby of ballroom dancing. His brain was blown out a la Al Capone style with a Makaroff machine gun. People around Orlando West were distressed about this whilst also saying ‘while we feel sorry at his death, we have not forgotten that he was one of those who killed Masabatha’.⁵⁵

There is an echo in this story. The suggestion that Dlamini was killed for leaving the comrades to return to ‘his previous hobby of ballroom dancing’ recalls Sarah Makepe’s tale, heard during the trial of the Soweto Eleven, of being elected to the SSRC only to resign, in order to ‘go back to my old procedure that is being an actress’.⁵⁶ Also, Loate’s own claims that, after that trial, and her time in detention, she sought to ‘help my society’ by being ‘involved in its cultural objection’.⁵⁷ In Dlamini’s death we can see the struggle’s increasingly jealous and violent claim to the bodies of young men, not just young women. We also hear that Loate’s death was remembered.

This is the least sensational of the stories of Loate’s demise and connects it to patterns of violence that engulfed Soweto during the Emergency years. In contrast to the futility that would later be attributed to her death, Mathiane argues that ‘Masabatha’ and others she recalls ‘did not die in vain’. She goes on:

They may have taught us lessons: that when we live lies, we reap whirlwinds, and if there is to be order in our land, it will come when the leaders can be called to account by the ordinary decent people who are currently battling to preserve their morality through the disasters which white rule produces.⁵⁸

This version of Loate’s death was published at a time in which women’s voices and writing were ‘emergent’ within reconfigured national public discourses both within and beyond South African borders.⁵⁹ Writing in 1990, a feminist literary critic, Cherry Clayton, looked back on the previous decade and argued that ‘the cultural transformation which is achieved in black (South African) women’s writing in the eighties is the transformation of the black woman as object, interpreted only in the liberal gaze, and previously obscured by guilt or projection, and sheer ignorance, into a speaking subject’.⁶⁰ This was a ‘process of self-announcement, the breaking of the silence of a very marginalised group’.⁶¹ Included in Clayton’s survey was the anthology Women in South Africa: From the Heart, as well as the work of Miriam Tlali, the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa, and Ellen Kuzwayo, author of Call Me Woman. The publishers of the works she discusses are instructive. Women in South Africa: From the Heart was published by Seriti Sa Sechaba, the first book to come from this Black feminist South African publishing house that operated briefly in the late 1980s. Miriam Tlali was published by Ravan Press, a white-owned radical oppositional publisher of literature (poetry and prose) as well as historical and socio-political research, founded in 1971. Ellen Kuzwayo’s autobiography was produced by The Women’s Press, a London-based feminist publisher. Taken together, these various publishing outlets show the contours of the spaces in which women’s voices were being heard in the 1980s – spaces opened up by both internal South African political struggles and wider global social movements. That Loate died at the moment these spaces opened shows us the uneven and partial nature of the opportunity to voice. There is also an irony here: at a time when ‘emergent’ voices were expanding the boundaries of what was sayable in the struggle for women, a series of silences and new prohibitions on speech were beginning to surround Winnie Mandela – and by extension Masabata Loate and her death. Staying with these emergent voices we can hear that they too contain silences within them, which are audible when we consider the ways and means by which women’s voices came to be heard at this time.

Emergent voices

Gillian Whitlock has argued that Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman was ‘germinal … both chronologically and conceptually’ to a ‘threshold moment’ for black women’s autobiographical writing in South Africa.⁶² This threshold was constituted by the links between that writing and ‘woman centred campaigns in the anti-apartheid movement both within and outside South Africa and the beginnings of the reform movement’.⁶³ In 1985 Call Me Woman was the first of a number of black South African women’s autobiographies published by The Women’s Press. In 1981 a South African political exile Ros de Lanerolle had taken over as managing director of The Women’s Press and for the next ten years ‘presided over an important reorientation of the press’ identity towards writing from the developing world’.⁶⁴ In this, it has been argued, The Women’s Press was responding to criticisms that black women (along with working class and lesbian women) were being marginalised within global feminist politics.⁶⁵ As part of this project The Women’s Press aimed to adopt a more collaborative approach to commissioning, editing and marketing.⁶⁶ The editor of Call Me Woman, Marsaili Cameron, has said of the multiple rewrites that produced the final manuscript that editing had been, in this case, a ‘truly shared project’.⁶⁷ In this attention to the dynamics of editing, part of the aim was presumably to avoid the experience of publication becoming one of appropriation that was particularly acute when publishing marginalised authors. By the mid-1980s Miriam Tlali had already begun to speak of her relationship with her publisher Ravan Press with ‘anguished accusations of excision and betrayal’.⁶⁸

After Call Me Woman, The Women’s Press went on to publish another four autobiographies written by black South African women: Caesarina Kona Makhoere’s No Child’s Play (1988), Emma Mashinini’s Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (1989) and Sindiwe Magona’s two volumes To My Children’s Children (1991) and Forced to Grow (1992). The archives of The Women’s Press frustratingly do not contain papers on Call Me Woman but its influence is evident in the decision making on, and promotion of, subsequent autobiographies of South Africa women that the press published. For example, the editorial file for Cesarina Kona Makohere’s No Child’s Play contains the initial impression that the manuscript had ‘All the potential Ellen K’s book had, and more’.⁶⁹ It was de Lanerolle’s aim to encourage new writers through its promotion of black women’s writing: ‘our readers are our writers and our writers are our readers!’⁷⁰ In considering the pathways by which Ellen Kuzwayo, Emma Mashinini, Cesarina Kona Makohere and Sindiwe Magona came to be published by The Women’s Press, the link was not quite this straightforward. As Lewis, Whitlock and others have all noted, Kuzwayo’s book was written directly to readers ‘outside the closed world of apartheid’ and to a certain extent this is also the case with Makohere and Mashinini.⁷¹ However, Dorothy Driver suggests that ‘when Emma Mashinini came out of detention, thinking, “Now, what is left of me?”, she read Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman and felt inspired to write her own story.’⁷²

Reading the acknowledgements offered by all of these authors, together with the correspondence in The Women’s Press archives, points to the significance of the personal connections of white feminist South African exiles, as well as those of the more official links between the ANC in exile and the anti-apartheid movement to the publication of Kuzwayo, Mashinini and Makohere. Magona’s publication by The Women’s Press came about through links with internal oppositional publishers, in her case David Philip, and thus represents a coming together of what were, during the 1980s, relatively separate circuits of publication. For Mashinini and Kuzwayo the link to The Women’s Press came through the film-maker Elizabeth Wolpert – the networks of white South African (feminist) exiles. For Makohere this network was active too through the artist Judy Seidman but also the ANC’s arts and culture department in the person of Barbara Masakela. While The Women’s Press was publishing black South African women’s stories internationally there were initiatives from within the broad-based politics of the UDF and its affiliates to create spaces specifically for women within the internal liberation movement. The cultural wings of the resurgent black trade unions in the 1980s were important spaces for the cultural participation of women and led to the organisation of several women’s initiatives, some of which were explicitly feminist. In 1987 Agenda, a feminist academic/activist journal was established by a collective of women in Durban. Its name signified its stated desire to put ‘women’s issues on the agenda’. The same year Dinah Lefakane left the Black publishing collective Skotaville to found Seriti Sa Sechaba, a Black feminist publishing house.

Feminism as an ideology, or feminist as a label of self-identification, had an uncomfortable relationship with the anti-apartheid movement.⁷³ It was conceived by many anti-apartheid activists, male and female alike, as a challenge to women’s loyalty to the primacy of the national struggle. It was also considered by many black South African women as a white, Western, and imperialist framework for defining women and their issues that was irrelevant, or at worst damaging, to the analysis of black women’s societal position and the advancement of their interests. Shireen Hassim has described this as a situation in which feminism as a set of ideas was ‘dismissed rather than engaged’ by the leadership of the national liberation struggle.⁷⁴ She goes on to suggest however, that this was not the same thing as ‘the absence of feminist consciousness and analysis among the rank and file of the movement’.⁷⁵ There were South Africans who increasingly in the late 1980s and early 1990s began organising as feminists.⁷⁶ These projects, like Agenda, were marked by hierarchies of race and class and were ongoing spaces of dynamic engagement over what, and who, women were, and what they wanted.

It was in response to critiques of the racial exclusions of feminism that The Women’s Press looked for black women writers to publish. What kind of inclusion did this represent? Whilst the publication of black women writers by The Women’s Press was intended to offer a rejoinder to the whiteness of feminism, this was not an aim explicitly articulated through the marketing of these books. One particular edit of the suggested cover for Sindiwe Magona’s second book, a volume of short stories, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night saw the Press step back from a framing of a black South African woman’s stories as a challenge to white voices, although this was clearly a challenge that Magona herself had in mind:

‘My great hope for African Women is that one day they will come into their own. (We suffer from a triple burden, that of class, race and sex. Writers in South Africa are white, therefore the history that will be handed down to our children is a white reality. Even when it is supposed to be a black reality it is through a white perspective.) That is why I chose to write.’ Sindiwe Magona.

‘Jacqui: Blurb Cut! – see above’.⁷⁷

Everything contained within the brackets above was cut, excising the racial context for Magona’s choice to write. Nor were the autobiographies published by The Women’s Press framed as ‘breaking silences’. Indeed, by the 1990s they were being seen by various reviewers, particularly those reading as feminists, as maintaining significant silences around gendered discrimination or abuse within the liberation struggle. In a 1991 review Dorothy Driver argued that ‘Mashinini pulls back. Like Kuzwayo before her, she specifically refuses to “expose dirty linen in public”, a metaphor which neatly conflates women’s domestic and social roles (women in charge of the laundry, women in charge of the secrets of male abuse)’.⁷⁸ Writing a little later, Whitlock argued that ‘Kuzwayo’s silence could be read as strategic but she apparently desires to speak’.⁷⁹ There were tensions between a desire for speaking subjects and the boundaries of the sayable within struggle speech. The experience that all the South African women’s autobiographies published by The Women’s Press in the 1980s did speak about, was detention and imprisonment.

Speaking of detention

As Daniel Roux has identified, prison has enjoyed a ‘privileged status’ within the autobiographical life writings of anti-apartheid activists,⁸⁰ containing as it does ‘an encounter between the life narrative of the individual and the more collective voicing of dissent against an oppressive regime’.⁸¹ Whilst, and perhaps because, this genre of writing was dominated by heterosexual black men, prison was an important ‘authorising’ experience for marginal figures within anti-apartheid activism. Paul Gready has argued detention gave white anti-apartheid activists the authority to write.⁸² It was in detention awaiting trial for treason that Simon Nkoli came out as a gay man to his UDF comrades. In doing so he challenged prevailing ideas of ‘homosexuality being separate from political identity’.⁸³ Whilst he never wrote an autobiography, his prison letters have been an important means by which he has been incorporated into narratives of the anti-apartheid struggle.⁸⁴ For black women in the 1980s, imprisonment was a gendered struggle experience about which women could speak. It enabled women to speak as confrontational subjects. It also tells us about the difficulties of speaking about anything else. During the 1980s a publication like A Woman’s Place Is in The Struggle Not Behind Bars shows how detention and imprisonment was an experience through which women activists’ stories became accessible to an international audience. A Woman’s Place was jointly produced by the DPSC and FEDTRAW and, after being banned in South Africa, was picked up and published in the USA by The Africa Fund and the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid.⁸⁵ The publication contains various stories and testimonies, both direct and indirect, of women active within the liberation struggle and their experiences of detention, torture and imprisonment. There are sections titled, ‘The Women Speak: Being Detained’ and ‘The Women Speak: A Mother’s Cry’. Another section tells the story of Deborah Josephine Marakalla under the heading: ‘A Voice Silenced’. Marakalla was a member of the Tembisa DPSC and worked at the Tembisa Black Sash Advice Office. She was apparently detained for this work; a family member commented: ‘They didn’t like what she was doing at the advice office. They don’t like anyone who speaks for themselves. They think locking them up will keep them quiet’.⁸⁶

Writing an introduction to the USA edition, Jennifer Davis described the publication as a kind of direct line to South African women: ‘Through its pages it broadcasts the voices of South African women themselves, providing a graphic description of the pain and the power of their struggle. Here is the voice that Pretoria has unsuccessfully tried to quell’.⁸⁷ It was through detention and imprisonment that these stories were collected.

Pointing to the way detention enabled the speech of women as activists is not to diminish the difficulties of talking about imprisonment, and the physical and mental abuse suffered by women prisoners. As Emma Mashinini recalled, the trauma of detention was a story she struggled to tell:

For a long time I didn’t talk to my family about my prison experiences. Neither Dudu nor Molly knew about many of the things I had been through until they saw me in Mama I’m Crying, telling of the terrible time I could not remember Dudu’s name. They kept saying, ‘Mom, you never told us about this.’ They didn’t even know about my forgetting Dudu’s name. This book will serve as a living memory of the evil of the apartheid regime. It is an opportunity for me to speak to my children.⁸⁸

In addition to the challenge of articulating trauma verbally, Mashinini’s framing of her book as ‘an opportunity for me to speak to my children’ is an indication of the barriers women faced when speaking about the struggle within their families. Motsemme has suggested that silence within the activist family was about protection; not knowing something meant not being able to talk under pressure. The silence of mothers could also be about trying to assert normality in the face of the intrusions of apartheid repression.⁸⁹ For Mashinini a space outside the everyday, first the film interview and then the writing of the book, allowed her to communicate what she had otherwise been unable to say.

Makhoere in ‘mid-air’

Caesarina Kona Makhoere was twenty-one in 1976, living and studying in Mamelodi (north-east of Pretoria). During the Soweto Uprisings she sought to undertake military training. Despite being arrested before she could leave the country, she was, like many others during 1976–7, tried and imprisoned for the attempt.⁹⁰ On her release, after serving five years, she became involved in the Black Sash advice offices. Makhoere’s autobiography is strikingly reminiscent of the testimonies of former detainees in the DPSC daybooks – it is, like these testimonies, an instance of speaking out. Makhoere documents her imprisonment as a series of confrontations with the prison authorities in which she can assert her sense of self-worth, which was violently assaulted in detention. Prison writing is often read, as Carli Coetzee has noted, as a ‘mode of resistance testimony’ and ‘an attempt at controlling (through narrative) the hostile prison environment’.⁹¹ That Makhoere’s was a ‘prison story’ was used by The Women’s Press as a selling point of the narrative. The press release issued on the book’s publication described ‘this amazing account of a woman’s battle to retain her fighting spirit and her pride, even when helpless in the hands of a powerful enemy’ as ‘destined to become a classic of prison literature’.⁹² This was a framing picked up by all the initial reviews of the book. The Women’s Press linked the promotion of the book to events and campaigns around political prisoners, particularly the International Defence and Aid Fund’s (IDAF) campaign on children in detention.⁹³

In their May 1996 submission to the TRC, Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes argued that ‘where women were abused in the [ANC] camps, this needs to be acknowledged and condemned by those involved’.⁹⁴ They wrote that:

We were unsuccessful in our attempts to speak to women about their experiences in the camps. In an interview with Caesarina Kona Makhoere she expressed an unwillingness to speak about the camps but intimated that her experience had been terrible. She said, ‘At least in prison I knew I was in the enemy camp’.

The retrospective clarity of Makhoere’s prison experience, reiterated here in contrast to her experience of MK camps is, I think, a clue as to the tight focus of her autobiography on her period of detention.

At the stage of publication at which The Women’s Press commissioned readers’ reports, various silences within Makhoere’s text were picked up on, and to an extent endorsed. Her experience within ANC camps was not one of them. One reviewer described by de Lanerolle as ‘a very experienced English editor, who is well read but does not … know South Africa’ who ‘represent[ed] the reader we’d hope to reach with the book’ noted that the account of Makhoere’s imprisonment was set ‘mid-air’.⁹⁵ She went on, ‘I think that most readers would like to know rather more about the author of this remarkable work than they do at present’. In particular, the reviewer wanted more on Makhoere’s family relationships:

Several episodes cry out to be written … one example is the rather disappointing description of her first visit in over 2 years from her mother. She fails to describe her mother or the visit … she also suddenly mentions her son! …

… her FATHER, the black policeman, this rather startling information is treated very matter of factly. Given the present attitude in South Africa towards black collaboration, Caesarine [sic] needs to write more on this subject – both in relation to her own political evolution (she hints at this) and also in relation to her family’s position in the community.⁹⁶

In contrast the ‘silence’ around Makhoere’s torture in prison was judged ‘a very powerful one’. In sending the reports on to Barbara Masekela and Makhoere, Ros de Lanerolle herself commented: ‘some of the information required is more personal, and Caesarina and you will have to decide what you feel is appropriate. I had rather hoped that she would decide to tell the full story of how/why she was imprisoned … is this possible, or is it not?’⁹⁷ The published version of No Child’s Play does include the story of Makhoere’s arrest, and her father’s role in this, and some explanation of her family life and relationships, but relatively brief – only six pages of the book focus on her life before her period of imprisonment. Her trial, which the same reviewer said ‘begged to be described more fully’, is not discussed in detail, beyond describing her father’s reaction.

No Child’s Play ‘sold very well’ but was not published separately in the United States or Canada as had been expected. By 1993, when Makhoere wrote to The Women’s Press about the possibility of a reprint, their enquiries as to the possible market in South Africa met with this response from David Phillip publishers: ‘No Childs’ Play. Difficult to project large sales unless Caesarina is prepared to assist in some form of promotion. Subject matter something many South Africans are wanting to forget – we’re finding it increasingly difficult to sell back list of similar titles’.⁹⁸ Makhoere’s tight focus on her period of detention thus marked it as of a particular moment and her story was no longer guaranteed an audience less than a decade later, despite the emphasis on voices and testimony that the TRC would bring.

From repression to expression

A particular onus upon women to speak up about the past, for the future, was embedded at the beginnings of South Africa’s transition to democracy. The year 1990 saw, in February, the unbanning of the liberation organisations and, in May, the ANC’s statement on the emancipation of women in South Africa. Together, these two public statements marked a new climate for, and indeed called for, the voicing of the political concerns of women. The ‘emancipation of women’ urged, mandated and demanded women themselves take the initiative in leading a national debate on a Charter of Women’s Rights, ‘so that in their own voice women define the issues’.⁹⁹ Such an initiative, the statement claimed, would be ‘a major agency for stimulating women to break the silence imposed on them’. Exactly who had imposed this silence on women was left unsaid. The framing of women’s stories of struggle as ‘breaking a silence’ or ‘speaking up/out’ is ubiquitous from the 1990s onwards across a range of spaces. What work does this framework do in placing women’s stories within broader national narratives of becoming? The critiques that emerged during this period make clear that black women’s struggles to claim voice were formed in pushing back against men’s control over narratives of the liberation struggle and elite, mostly white, women’s control over women’s stories. This was a control, firstly over the spaces within which black women could speak, and secondly, of white women’s virtual monopoly as analysts of the meaning of black women’s stories. In talking back to these two interlocutors, women’s speech often focused on gendered and racialised oppressions separately. Stories of Masabata Loate’s life and death are only glimpsed during this moment of opening.

Within the internal discussions of the newly unbanned liberation organisations the call for women’s voices included criticisms of the masculinity of liberation organisations. In a number of spaces, especially Horizon, the magazine of the re-launched African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) the position of young women within the national liberation struggle was articulated explicitly, by young women. In the early summer of 1991 Horizon included an article titled ‘Isolating Sexism’. It began: ‘The ANC Youth League is strongly committed to fighting sexism. It is committed to affirmative action to ensure that women are able to take their rightful place as equals in the organisation. But we still have a long way to go’.¹⁰⁰ Five women members of the ANCYL Johannesburg branch were invited to speak about their experiences. The comments made by the young women, only identified by their first names as Mpho, Ayesha, Zandi, Hazel and Fikile were frank and damning. For example: ‘Ayesha: Some men think that because we say we are fighting sexism, sexist practices don’t exist in the organisation’; ‘Zandi: What makes me angry is when guys say that women must be liberated, but they don’t even bring their girlfriends to meetings. Sometimes they even have other girlfriends in the meetings!’; ‘Hazel: And men say “you don’t discuss anything important in your meetings. All you do is gossip and drink tea”’; ‘Fikile: They think that they must push women to take leadership positions … They don’t realise it’s because women don’t have the necessary skills or confidence’; ‘Mpho: It’s always the women who do the cleaning and catering’ (emphases added).¹⁰¹ It is also clear from their comments that these were not just issues that they faced in the past. Hazel told one anecdote that suggested attitudes had hardened following the unbanning: ‘The other day I was talking to a male comrade. I told him that if my husband ‘jolled’ [cheated], I would ‘jol’ too. The comrade’s reply was, ‘Mm, it’s because the new South Africa is coming that women are saying such things’. (emphasis added)’¹⁰² The centrality of speech in almost all of these comments is striking. Permission or ability to speak, and political and personal freedoms were intertwined. Also apparent is the treachery of speech. Men can say one thing and do another. The final comment on the enabling atmosphere of the new South Africa contains the idea of women’s speech as disruptive, conditional and momentary, reminding us that a certain degree of ‘backlash’ was present even at this moment of ‘opening doors’.¹⁰³ Indeed, as Helen Moffett, Shireen Hassim and others have argued, the nature of the processes by which women won political rights within the post-apartheid settlement created a strong disjuncture between a public sphere that accorded women full citizenship, and a private sphere in which many were, and are, subordinated and controlled by sexual violence.¹⁰⁴

The early 1990s also saw the vocalising of tensions amongst South African women as they began mobilising to meet the opportunities of the political transition. These tensions erupted into outright confrontation between women at various academic/activist conferences organised in the early 1990s. As Emily Cooper-Hockey has explored, these conflicts over the racial hierarchies within women-led and feminist projects like Agenda were captured and re-circulated through those very spaces. Accounts by various participants at the Women and Gender in Southern Africa conference held at the University of Natal in 1991, and the Women in Africa and the African Diaspora conference held in Nigeria in July 1992, were published in Agenda as competing responses to the conference. In the latter case this took the form of a debate between individuals who came down on different sides of the argument over the participation of white women in a conference on, and in the view of the African-American delegation, what should have been a conference for, (Black) African women. As Cooper-Hockey puts it: ‘Agenda … provided an arena for the translation of heated debates over race, access to knowledge and representation’.¹⁰⁵

Following on from the immediate transition period, Njabulo Ndebele described the public hearings of the TRC’s Human Rights Violation committee as ‘confirmation of the movement of our society from repression to expression’.¹⁰⁶ He went on: ‘Where in the past the state attempted to compel the oppressed to deny the testimony of their own experience, today that experience is one of the essential conditions for the emergence of a new national consciousness’.¹⁰⁷ The TRC hearings that began in 1996, however, revealed that women’s silences were loud and insistent. After five weeks of public hearings it became apparent to some of those watching and participating that whilst the majority of the witnesses who came before the commission were women, they were not testifying to human rights violations they had suffered personally but were instead talking largely about the suffering of (usually male) relatives or friends.¹⁰⁸ In March 1996 the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand held a workshop entitled ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. From this workshop there emerged an official submission to the TRC on the importance of integrating a gendered approach to South Africa’s past into the Commission’s work. The submission argued that the TRC was not doing enough to solicit women’s own stories of oppression when they came to testify.¹⁰⁹ It was argued that with improved questioning, statement takers could uncover women’s stories, and that in closed women’s hearings, testimonies would be given.¹¹⁰ In all of this there was a particular concern that women’s experiences of sexual violence at the hands of the State and liberation movements had not been heard.

In response the TRC re-trained statement takers to ask more ‘probing questions’, the human rights violations protocol was modified to include the reminder to women to ‘tell us what happened to yourself if you were the victim of a gross human rights abuse’, and in June of 1996 the women’s special hearings were instituted.¹¹¹ Further along in the process of the Human Rights Violation hearings the TRC came to a similar realisation as to the lack of ‘youth’ voices that were being heard. In this the Commission was guided by the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which the South African government had signed in 1995.¹¹² In light of the CRC’s instruction of ‘honouring the voice of children’, the TRC decided to give children and youth ‘the opportunity to express their feelings and relate their experiences as part of the national process of healing’.¹¹³ Four children and youth special hearings were held in 1997. As Fiona Ross argues however, these measures assumed ‘testimony would follow naturally’ should the conditions in the hearings be right. What they did not consider was that the reasons for the silences in women’s or youth’s speech may have lain outside of the immediate space of the hearings.¹¹⁴

Ross has argued that following the changes made to the TRC’s processes of statement taking and the institution of special women’s hearings, ‘sexual violence was represented in the hearings and in public discourse as a defining feature of women’s experiences of gross violation of human rights’.¹¹⁵ As Meg Samuelson puts it, ‘woman’s story’ and the story of sexual violence became conflated.¹¹⁶ Women’s silences around experiences of sexual violence are not unique to South Africa, and, as the archives of the DPSC make clear, had a long history. The DPSC themselves acknowledged, in ways similar to the TRC, their problems with getting women to testify to instances of sexual assault by security officials whilst being held in detention. The DPSC prefaced one statement it did receive with the following: ‘Sexual assault and rape of women in detention is known to be a common occurrence. It is extremely difficult to get statements from women on their release. Women are sometimes told that if they tell anyone they will be re-detained, even killed’.¹¹⁷ Yet, we can also hear through the TRC the ways in which women negotiated this conflation and maintained long-held silences. Thenjiwe Mtintso appeared as the first witness at the Johannesburg Women’s hearing on 28 July 1997 and explained that she herself chose to maintain her silences:

The logic, the politics, everything was very clear, Chairperson, but the emotion was not clear. There was that conflict. Even as I tried to draft the other day when your statement-taker came to me, I tried to fill those forms and I said: can I face the consequences? The consequences which I could not imagine had happened, Chairperson because they are known to me.

What I know is that I have sat for years, I have built an armour around that pain. I have nursed that pain, I have owned that pain. I seem to refuse to move away from that pain. I seem to gain strength from the fact that it is my pain.

The women today have gone beyond that stage that I’m still fighting to get beyond.¹¹⁸

For Mtintso it was silence not speech that was a source of her strength and even subjectivity itself. Mtintso reminds us of the emotive intensity of silence itself. She presents her decision to maintain certain silences as an emotional one. For other women, most famously Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, silence appears to have been a political decision – if it is possible to make this distinction. Madikizela-Mandela refused to speak about the accusations levelled against her in connection with the MUFC, before the TRC, in what Ntombizikhona Valela has called ‘silence as self-censorship’, as an ‘intellectual tool of resistance’.¹¹⁹ Shireen Hassim argues that in the 1990s ‘[Madikizela-Mandela] chose silence and refusal, and justified these in the language of radical refusal, of questioning the very terms of the TRC and the post-Apartheid State’.¹²⁰ The TRC should then lead us to problematise any straightforward understanding of the ending of apartheid bringing about the end of restrictions on women’s speech and make clear that women might chose to maintain their silences for both personal and political reasons.

Just over a decade after Loate was killed, a new telling of her death surfaced at the hearings of the TRC’s Human Rights Violation committee. It was one in which her death was told, in passing. The following exchange is from a transcript of the 1997 TRC Special Hearings into the MUFC in which a one-time member of the club, Lerothodi Andrew Ikaneng, was questioned by Piers Pigou, a member of the TRC’s investigating team:

MR PIGOU: Thank you Chair. Mr Ikaneng, I just want to go back to the context of the formation of the football club and ask you whether you agree or disagree with what I put forward to you. Do you recall the death of a Masabata Luate [sic], the sister of Wilson Sebuwane who was also known as Magojo? Was the death of this woman – did this result in tension and fighting within SAYCO [sic], the Soweto Youth Congress Movement of which I believe you were a member at the time?

MR IKANENG: Yes, I do remember.

MR PIGOU: And was it as a result of this fight that the football club came together, that there was a decision to bring people together and find some activities for these people to undertake and that a decision was taken at a meeting that you would play football?

MR IKANENG: Yes, that is true.¹²¹

Commissioner Dr Randera later summarised this particular ‘foundation story’ for the MUFC, which was one which emphasised its origins as a conflict resolution but omitted the cause of the conflict:

… there’s a situation where there’s a clash between SOYCO and other young people and out of this Mrs Madikizela-Mandela intervenes, tries to get people together, opens her house and her office up because she’s a social worker and people are allowed to go and stay in the back of her house and there’s a football club that plays football, okay?¹²²

In the TRC’s final report the story was further pared down: ‘In late 1986 [Winnie Madikizela-Mandela] was instrumental in the resolution of an internal conflict within the Orlando West branch of the Soweto Youth Congress, which resulted in the formation of the MUFC’.¹²³ Loate’s death thus appeared briefly on the stage of the retelling of the nation’s history, only to disappear in the final analysis, displaced by the narrative of another woman, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. A story that was, itself, about the maintenance of silence.

Lists of death

Within the post-apartheid boom in autobiographical writing, Loate’s death has been retold again. There is a brief account of her demise in Rian Malan’s best-selling memoir of his life as a journalist, My Traitor’s Heart.¹²⁴ In 2003 Loate was included in an online AZAPO list of Black Consciousness Movement Heroes and Heroines ‘who died in the fight against Boer oppression’.¹²⁵ Her death was recalled by Andile Mngxitama in 2004 as a ‘brutal necklacing’ which ‘devastated’ Khotso Seatlholo, her co-accused in her 1982 trial.¹²⁶ This is perhaps the clearest expression of the emotional impact of her death. According to Mngxitama, Seatlholo also spoke out against the necklacing of collaborators on his own release from prison in 1990. There still appears to be confusion over her political affiliation. Whilst AZAPO claims Loate as one of its own, Mngxitama recalls her as active within the UDF at the time of her death. What does it mean for Loate to be in so many lists of death? For her own demise to always be a part of a catalogue of horrors and for its specificity to be largely forgotten or confused?

For Rian Malan, Loate’s death is one of those that he wants to ‘pound’ into his reader’s brain. Her death comes in the memoir at the moment of Malan’s dissolution, when he is ‘sick’ of South Africa and has no certainty to hold onto anymore. It comes after an oft-quoted passage in which Malan addresses his reader: ‘Am I upsetting you, my friend? Good. Do you want to argue? … Let’s open my bulging files of tales of ordinary murder. You choose your weapons and I’ll choose mine, and we’ll annihilate the certainties in one another’s brains’.¹²⁷ The second ‘ordinary murder’ Malan relates in this ‘frenzied catalogue’ is that of Loate.¹²⁸

We’re in Orlando West Soweto, outside the home of the lovely Masabata Loate, a beauty queen in a more light-hearted era. She’s what the Western press would call an anti-apartheid activist. She’s just spent five years locked in prison for agitating for the downfall of the apartheid state. She expected to be welcomed home as a heroine, but her politics are out of fashion these days. Here she comes now, running for her life, with a pack of rival ‘anti-apartheid activists’ on her heels. She falls, is stabbed, rises and runs on again, screaming for help. She pounds on the doors of neighbours, but they’re too scared to let her in. She goes down for the last time on her grandmother’s doorstep, where she’s hacked to pieces with pangas.¹²⁹

In Malan’s story she is the ‘lovely Masabata Loate’. Not only does she belong, as a beauty queen, to a ‘more light-hearted era’ but her politics are ‘out of fashion’. There is a hint in these details that Malan regards Loate as somehow not serious enough, certainly not violent enough, for politics in 1986. Malan withholds his own description of her; she is ‘what the Western press would call an anti-apartheid activist’ killed by a ‘rival pack’ of ‘anti-apartheid activists’. Malan’s use of quotation marks seems to suggest that these labels are not meaningful or at least do not convey the truth of these relationships.

Malan’s work was as controversial as it was successful. My Traitor’s Heart has been described by Osinubi as ‘an abusive narrative’ in which Malan ‘deliberately and systematically performs violence on his readers’.¹³⁰ Whilst many have construed Malan’s ‘melodramatic performance of his guilty white self’ as ultimately victim blaming, Osinubi more generously argues that ‘the diverse forms of violence enacted through and upon narrative articulate the complex coming to terms with the discursive formations unleashed by apartheid’s cultures of violence’.¹³¹ Another reviewer writing in 1991 put it like this: ‘In South Africa at present, there are some words one does not mention in polite conversation. VAT, negotiation, Winnie Mandela, violence, negotiation, and Rian Malan’.¹³² My Traitor’s Heart provoked ‘an outcry of scorn, admiration, brutal dismissal and silent envy’.¹³³ That Loate’s death made it into South African public discourse in connection with two of these words that should not be spoken – Winnie Mandela and Rian Malan – is indicative of the uncomfortable space her life and death occupied. Masabata Loate was silenced but not quite forgotten – her death has been seen to speak for itself although quite what it says is unclear. In death, as in life, she was at the boundaries of what was sayable.

‘The documentary history of the youth by the youth’¹³⁴

The ‘proliferation of life histories at a dizzying rate’ within post-apartheid South African public discourse has had gendered dimensions.¹³⁵ Elaine Unterhalter’s count of autobiographies written by participants within the anti-apartheid liberation struggle puts the number published between 1948 and 1999 at sixty-six.¹³⁶ Of these, forty-two were written by men, with African women authoring only nine. Another study, this time of biographies since 1990, notes that of 225 works of political biography the authors identified, only nine biographies focused on women anti-apartheid activists who were not also activists’ spouses.¹³⁷ Biographies or autobiographies of the 1976 generation have also been rare. Of the Soweto Eleven only Sibongile Mkhabela née Mthembu has written a full-length autobiography. In 2001 Sibongile Mkhabela published an autobiography with Skotaville Press, the Black publishing collective with its roots in the cultural politics of the 1980s. Mkhabela’s story is framed as that of a woman and of youth. The quote above describing the book as ‘the beginning of the documentary history of the youth by the youth’, comes from a letter written by Dan Sechaba Montisisi – former President of the SSRC and one of the Soweto Eleven, that is printed at the back of Mkhabela’s text.¹³⁸ The subtitle of the book is ‘Remembering 16 June 1976’. Yet Mkhabela also marks the text as a woman’s narrative. The title, Open Earth, Black Roses refers to the book’s final chapter, which is written as a tribute to her mother’s sister, whom she called Mawe, who raised her after her own mother’s death. The ‘open earth’ is that of the grave of Mawe, and Ma before her, and the ‘black roses’, are Mkhabela herself, her sisters and her daughters. Recalling the women’s autobiographies of the 1980s, the book is framed as a conversation between generations.

The strange clarity of imprisonment is revisited in Open Earth, Black Roses but for Mkhabela the contrast is with the township politics of the 1980s. She describes her arrival in prison after being sentenced for sedition:

As I walked into the prison, following a stern wardress, there had been shouts of ‘Amandla! Comrade!’ from women behind closed doors. I felt at home. Home was now a strange world, because at that moment I did not think of home as being in the outside world, but thought of the time I had spent at John Vorster Square, the police station that had claimed many lives and forced detainees to unite.¹³⁹

Mkhabela recalls herself as having been ‘protected’ in the all-female prison environment from the increasingly acrimonious struggles between liberation organisations that marked the politics of confrontation in the mid-1980s.¹⁴⁰ At this point remembering Loate’s fate reminds us of the menace which lies behind Mkhabela’s description of herself lying awake at night fearing ‘a knock on the door’ from UDF aligned comrades (after her marriage to Ishmael Mkhabela, a member of AZAPO, in 1981 she was considered to ‘belong’ to Black Consciousness). As in Nomavenda Mathiane’s story, ‘the knock on the door’ which usually referred to the arrival of security forces, is inverted and it is Mkhabela’s ‘own comrades’ that she is afraid of: ‘I had no position on the matter. I was pregnant and a mother of a three year old who lived in fear. I had not developed the means or the will to fight my own comrades who had become dangerous’.¹⁴¹ It is in this context that she comments on the detention of her husband:

Ironically, the 12 June 1986 State of Emergency almost provided some relief to the families of activists and leaders for a short time. While Ish was in prison that year, I felt strangely at ease, not because I trusted the ‘system’ more, no, I knew that if anything happened to him, I would know who to blame and who to confront … If he were to fall into the bloodstained hands of comrades, I would never know what actually happened to him.¹⁴²

What emerges from Mkhabela’s writing are the difficulties of finding a language and a political framework for understanding the violence of what she calls the ‘dark 1980s’.¹⁴³ Her own comments on the strange clarity of imprisonment as a space of simple confrontation with apartheid articulates openly what is implicit in the focus of earlier autobiographies upon the experience of detention.

Yet there are also changes over time in the meaning of detention, and for those detained during the 1980s there appears to be a different configuration of the sayable surrounding violence and imprisonment. This is a dynamic that may be seen in Emily Bridger’s recent interviews with former Soweto COSAS activists. Bridger discusses the striking difference between women activists who spoke to her openly about their participation in political violence on Soweto’s streets, including in the necklacing of informers, and male activists who ‘kept obvious secrets’ about their own involvement.¹⁴⁴ Bridger suggests that this is because women ‘cannot keep silent about their past involvement in violence and have their roles as comrades publicly acknowledged’.¹⁴⁵ She also argues that action on the street may have in fact offered more scope and space for the expression of young women’s political commitment than political meetings in which they were ‘silenced’.¹⁴⁶ The relationship between speech, silence and violence is thus inverted here.

Jon Soske has described contemporary South African politics as characterised ‘by public struggles for historical visibility’ and notes the ubiquity of the ‘recuperative gesture’ of claiming space in the powerful mainstream narrative of the liberation struggle.¹⁴⁷ For Bridger’s interviewees this is a gesture performed through laying claim to the street and their role in political violence. Conversely, for this group of women comrades, prison and detention were more difficult experiences to talk about. Bridger describes the way her interviewees created ‘redemptive narratives of their time spent in prison’ but which were visibly interrupted by ‘stalls, silences or stuttering’.¹⁴⁸ She argues that detention was an experience marked by these activists’ gender, and as such, ‘directly challenged’ their identities as comrades and their ‘espousal of struggle femininity and the feelings of empowerment that came with it’.¹⁴⁹ As one interviewee put it, when they were detained and held separately from their male contemporaries: ‘that was when it dawned for the first time ever that I’m a woman’.¹⁵⁰ These changes over time in the silences surrounding violence and detention point us to the ways in which the boundaries of struggle speech and the sayable are reiterated anew in different contexts: how, why and where women speak about the struggle reveal ongoing struggles to talk. These complex and dynamic relationships between speech, silence and violence can also be seen in the changes over time in the stories told by individual activists.

‘Modise has spoken out’

Thandi Modise was seventeen in 1976. She left her home in the Northern Cape after the Uprisings and became an MK guerrilla. Thandi Modise was an MK soldier, commander, political prisoner and, in the post-apartheid period, as an ANC politician she has been Premier of the North-West Province, Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, an MP, and between 2019 and 2022 she was Speaker of the National Assembly. In a series of interviews with journalists and academics Modise has described her life as an MK recruit in military training camps in exile as well as her arrest, trial and imprisonment for sabotage. Her account of the gender relations in MK camps shifted dramatically between interviews conducted in 1989 and 1990 and one conducted in 2000. Raymond Suttner has noted this shift, arguing:

The latter version is more likely to represent Modise’s experience. Having just emerged from prison and instilled in tight military discipline, when she did the first interview (1989/1990), Modise may well have suppressed negative experiences. Given the elapse of a decade before the Curnow interview (2000), she may well have felt greater freedom to speak of what she previously concealed.¹⁵¹

Here we will explore how changing one’s story is read against, or instead of, changes in the spaces and hearings accorded to women’s voices. Are the changes in Modise’s stories really about the feeling of ‘greater freedom to speak’? Were her earlier silences about ‘concealment’? This is not to suggest that Modise did not have personal political reasons for changing the stories that she told, nor that military discipline did not have a role to play, but rather to draw attention again to the notion of the ‘sayable’. The sayable asks us to think about the conditions of Modise’s speech and the subjectivities she could lay claim to within different spaces and moments. In between the interviews she gave there was an important context that both precipitated, and in part constituted, a change in the way women’s stories of struggle were heard. This change was the result of their own struggles to talk and have their political demands recognised, struggles that intersected with the remaking of South Africa in the 1990s. It is important to note that it was in Agenda – the explicitly feminist academic/activist journal founded by a collective of women in Durban – in which Modise’s ‘changed story’ was published. Agenda was both the result of women’s struggles to be heard within the context of South Africa’s transition and a space in which that struggle continued (and continues) to unfold.¹⁵²

The first public interview that Thandi Modise gave about her life as an activist and guerrilla was to the journalist Thami Mkwanazi and published in the Weekly Mail upon her release from prison in 1989. The profile was published in two parts in March of 1989 and began with the following set-up: ‘this remarkable account gives a face and personality to that shadowy stereotype which we so often read about and fear, and which we understand so little: the ANC guerrilla’ (emphasis added).¹⁵³ The coincidence of language here in the description of the MK guerrilla as a ‘shadowy stereotype’ reminds us that where the light falls changes over time – for the Weekly Mail’s readers in 1989, exile and the guerrilla camp was largely an unknown story. For us, Modise can be seen as a ‘shadowy’ figure in another sense entirely than that meant by Thami Mkwanazi in 1989. Even though she is a high-profile politician in the post-apartheid period, what we know about her political participation in the liberation struggle has been shaped in the shadows of struggle speech.

In 1989 she told Mkwanazi that ‘the male comrades respected us for having the courage to be soldiers. They did everything to make us feel their equals.’¹⁵⁴ There were also stories of the ways in which she retained certain ideals of femininity – usually through the wearing of clothing.

On occasions like Women’s Day, the women in the camps wore special uniforms. One was an olive green jacket and a skin with a slit at the back; the second was a grey dress worn above the knee. The latter outfit was nearly discontinued, she said, as it incited ‘wild stares from the male comrades’. But both uniforms ‘gave us a feminine touch’, and the women liked to wear them. ‘We drilled in the short dresses on women’s occasions and we felt like women. The men whistled, but we ignored them’.¹⁵⁵

This picture of ‘mild’ sexual harassment within the camps is what undergoes the most dramatic change in Modise’s stories over time. In 2000 Modise spoke to South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) journalist Robyn Curnow for an interview published in Agenda. Curnow introduced Modise’s biography as revealing ‘more than just the struggles of one woman fighting an unjust system … In her experience she was a woman soldier and a woman political prisoner’ (emphasis in original).¹⁵⁶ Curnow wrote that, ‘her narrative touches on a social reality that many South African women have experienced. The difference is that whilst most have remained silent about their apartheid experiences, Modise has spoken out’.¹⁵⁷

At the time of the interview in 2000, as well as being an ANC MP, Modise was deputy president of the ANC Women’s League. The treatment she described in the camps was compounded by what she saw as a continuing stigmatisation of women who fought in the struggle by their male comrades in post-apartheid South Africa. Modise talked of her time at a camp in Tanzania, as one of six women amongst a hundred men.

Right there in Tanzania there had been an incident, there had been a terrible fight, something, I mean, which before 1990 we had been keeping quiet about. But there had been a fight one night over girls … because there had been a feeling among some men that because there are these five, six women there, ‘why should they be sex starved?’ and there were others who said, ‘No, they are not here to be sex slaves, if they want to have affairs they will have affairs, if they don’t want to, then you are there to protect them’ (emphasis added).¹⁵⁸

While Modise located women’s silence as existing before 1990 she described men’s silence on the issue of sexual harassment in the camps, as a continuing one. She related an incident in which the women cadres at one camp confronted and chased a night-time intruder in their barracks. He was hidden by his male cadres. Thereafter the women were not spoken to by the men, in what was known as the ‘anti-muhlere campaign’ (‘muhlere’ means woman in Portuguese).¹⁵⁹ The men were apparently angered that the women had not ‘dressed properly before going after the suspect’. Modise commented that, ‘up to today, you still can’t find an ANC male in that camp to talk frankly about that incident’.¹⁶⁰ This statement is an interesting reversal of the mantra of the TRC-era that women would not speak about their experiences of sexual abuse. Instead Modise located the silence in male cadres’ narratives. This is an extremely important point. Modise’s comment on men’s continued silence shifts the burden of speech away from women.

There is at least one more layer to this narrative of Modise’s changing stories. The journalist Modise spoke to in 1989, Thami Mkwanazi subsequently became her husband. This was a relationship that Modise revealed in 1995 was an abusive one. An article in the Mail & Guardian reported that Modise ‘is speaking out’ about her experiences despite the fact that a television interview she had given, ‘Women Overcoming Abuse’, was pulled from a scheduled screening by the SABC when Thami Mkwanazi threatened court action.¹⁶¹ Modise told the paper that ‘Women must learn to speak up. People must know that those problems exist, even for former Umkhonto WeSizwe commanders.’ When asked, ‘how can a former soldier, a powerful woman like herself become an abuse victim?’, she replied,

It is very simple. Even if we have some success in life, we are taught to keep quiet. Even women are sometimes not sympathetic to other women who open their mouths.

I find that people are ashamed on my behalf that I opened my mouth, because I am a leader and leaders are not supposed to acknowledge problems.¹⁶²

At this point, Modise described the MK camps as a ‘happier’ space than that of her marriage: ‘At the beginning it was difficult for the men to treat us equally, but as the training progressed we proved that we deserved equality. I became an officer and did not have problems with the men under me.’¹⁶³ Silences and ‘speaking out’ thus move through Modise’s narratives of the struggle, shifting location as the spaces available for speech changed. The instability of her account of the camps reveals how the act of speaking about the struggle is reshaped by struggles to speak gendered subjectivities – for both men and women.

Conclusions

Masabata Loate’s death is the ‘sort of death that South African history knows so well’ and yet her life is not.¹⁶⁴ As Dan Magaziner has argued with regards to another’s untimely and tragic end, this is perhaps in part because ‘deaths such as [this] are so compelling that they exert tremendous power over our capacity to grasp life’.¹⁶⁵ Although many have found something to say in her death, exactly what that may be has changed over time and place. We can see certain patterns. A tendency for her killing to become less a specific violent act and understood more as part of a general horror or turmoil, that whilst it implicates young men, does not necessarily uncover the logics of gender that resulted in Loate’s murder. Her death is seen. It is often recounted in spectacular terms. It was watched, we know, by her neighbours. It is remembered. Emily Bridger and Erin Hazard have noted a combination of ‘surfeit and silence’ within the archive when looking for sexual violence against women under apartheid. They argue that ‘the historian is confronted with an excess of sources about the violence committed to women’s bodies but stifling silences about their identities and subjectivities’.¹⁶⁶ This holds for Loate’s death except that certain details of her life are repeated, that is, that she was an activist of 1976 and that she was a beauty queen. In Rian Malan’s account, the inclusion of these two identities suggests the death, along with Loate, of the possibility of their combination.

The TRC pinpoints her death in an unfolding narrative of the birth of the MUFC and then removes her from its final version of this story – in itself, a deeply controversial one that threatened to tear apart the fragile bargains of the transition period. In this way, killing Loate was an act of silencing an individual but was also part of a wider culture of silence surrounding the violence of the 1980s and perhaps in particular 1986. Nomavenda Mathiane has recalled ‘I found my whole body shaking when reading about the year 1986, which to me was the bloodiest year of my life’.¹⁶⁷ Sibongile Mkhabela similarly describes one night in October 1986 on which Ntate Lengane was killed as ‘the hardest night of our lives’.¹⁶⁸ Ntate Lengane was father of Jefferson Lengane, another of the Soweto Eleven, but Mkhabela recalled, ‘he was our father too … During the trial he had kept us going, giving unselfishly of himself and his family’.¹⁶⁹ His death occurred two nights after that of Loate.

Reading the stories of Masabata Loate’s death alongside the life stories of three of her contemporaries, Caesarina Kona Makhoere, Sibongile Mkhabela and Thandi Modise, enables us to see the shifts in the sayable that continued after her demise. In 2001 Sibongile Mkhabela was able to write what Loate was seemingly killed for saying in 1986. However, it is not that the silences within struggle speech have disappeared – only that they have been reconfigured. This chapter has argued that women’s struggles to claim a voice within the anti-apartheid movement were marked initially by the prominence of imprisonment and detention as an authorising experience. This has continued to shape the public spaces available to women in post-apartheid South Africa. The Women’s Jail, a part of the Constitution Hill complex that was opened in 2005 and houses the newly built Constitutional Court on the site of a former prison, is the only museum space within the vast and expanding South African heritage landscape that is exclusively concerned with telling women’s narratives of struggle. The containment of women’s stories within the jail thus reiterates the longer history of women’s struggles to speak.¹⁷⁰ It is obvious that no narration of the past is complete – be that individual or collective – but the patterns of silence within women’s voices point to specific pressures on their speech within the struggle. That women’s voices have been heard as speaking up from the margins has had fragmentary effects on the voices that do emerge.

Notes

1. 1.  Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 11,

   https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691188607
   .

2. 2.  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, Proceedings, 523. Digitised trial proceedings, accessed July 2019, http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AD2021/R/.

3. 3.  Garrey Michael Dennie, ‘The Cultural Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1884–1990’ (PhD, Maryland, The Johns Hopkins University), 235, accessed 16 April 2024,

   https://www.proquest.com/docview/304348729/abstract/16FF58AFF3F34936PQ/1
   .

4. 4.  Rebekah Lee, ‘Death “On the Move”: Funerals, Entrepreneurs and the Rural-Urban Nexus in South Africa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 81, no. 2 (2011): 228–9,

   https://www.jstor.org/stable/41485275
   .

5. 5.  Dennie, ‘The Cultural Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1884–1990’, 234.

6. 6.  Dennie, ‘The Cultural Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1884–1990’, 239.

7. 7.  Dennie, ‘The Cultural Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1884–1990’, 239.

8. 8.  This is captured by the headstone erected on the grave of Hector Pieterson in 1981, by AZANYU, which read: ‘Deeply mourned by his parents, sisters, and a nation that remembers’. Khangela Ali Hlongwane, ‘Bricks-and-Mortar Testimonies: The Interactive and Dialogical Features of the Memorials and Monuments of the June 16 1976 Soweto Uprisings’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 7: Soweto Uprisings: New Perspective, Commemorations and Memorialisation (Cape Town: Unisa Press, 2017), 208; For an example in which the processes of public commemoration ran up against the wishes of the deceased’s family see the discussion of Neil Aggett’s funeral in Dennie, ‘The Cultural Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1884–1990’. Neil Aggett was a trade union activist and one of the very few white South Africans to die in police custody.

9. 9.  In her in-depth study of a necklacing murder, that of Nosipho Zamela in Mlungisi in December 1985, Gobodo-Madikizela explains that Nosipho’s funeral ‘was attended only by her mother and a few relatives’ and was ‘held almost in secrecy’ in the very early hours of a Saturday morning. After her daughter’s killing, Nosipho’s mother moved away with the rest of her family. When Gobodo-Madikizela met Mrs Zamela she realised that, ‘the trauma of her daughter’s death was still very much on the surface, so much so that I could not pursue the interview’. Pumla Phillipa Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘Legacies of Violence: An In-Depth Analysis of Two Case Studies Based on Interviews with Perpetrators of a “Necklace” Murder and with Eugene de Kock’ (PhD, South Africa, University of Cape Town (South Africa)), 112 and 258–9, accessed 18 June 2024,

   https://www.proquest.com/docview/304663465/abstract/2F0BA56C5C8F463APQ/1
   ; Sabine Marschall calls necklace victims the ‘most significant group of ambivalent victims’ in post-apartheid South Africa. She notes that no public memorial has been installed or proposed to commemorate victims of the necklace. Sabine Marschall, Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-Apartheid South-Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 90–94.

10. 10.  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, accessed July 2019,

    https://apnews.com/0c77c01ccad449910d3a2fa2a4fa97a1
    . Site inactive on 30 September 2024. Screenshot available from author.

11. 11.  Maria Loate gave an interview to The Sunday Star, see ‘Woman Activist Slashed to Death’.

12. 12.  ‘Woman Activist Slashed to Death’.

13. 13.  ‘Woman Activist Slashed to Death’.

14. 14.  ‘Woman Activist Slashed to Death’.

15. 15.  ‘Repression Trends in the Transvaal Area between June and September 1986’, WHP AG2523, Box F.1.2.1–20, 3

16. 16.  ‘Repression Trends in the Transvaal Area’, 3.

17. 17.  ‘Repression Trends in the Transvaal Area’, 31.

18. 18.  ‘Repression Trends in the Transvaal Area’, 31–2.

19. 19.  ‘Repression Trends in the Transvaal Area’, 33.

20. 20.  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), 189–90,

    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79580-1_7
    .

21. 21.  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): 560,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2019.1642646
    .

22. 22.  Karimakwenda, ‘Safe to Violate’, 560–61.

23. 23.  In 1986, of 1,352 deaths the TRC found to be political violence, 306 were necklacings or burnings. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 1998, 2: 389.

24. 24.  Karimakwenda, ‘Safe to Violate’, 561.

25. 25.  Thompson Ramanala, DPSC daybook July–September 1986, WHP, AG 2523, Box G4–G8, 92.

26. 26.  Nomavenda Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines: Truths of Soweto Life (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1990), 36–41.

27. 27.  Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines, 40.

28. 28.  Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines, 40.

29. 29.  Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines, 40.

30. 30.  Matthews Maleka, DPSC Daybook, November 1985–May 1986, WHP, AG 2523, Box G4–G8, 84.

31. 31.  Rebecca Maleka, DPSC Daybook, November 1985–May 1986, WHP, AG2523, Box G4–G8, 87–88.

32. 32.  See for example, Thenjiwe Mtintso who recalled a parallel between the treatment of police and comrades when women did not conform to gendered expectations: ‘you get worse treatment from the Boers because they don’t want you to behave in that manner and you get still worse treatment from your own comrades because they don’t expect you to perform better [than them]’; quoted in Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, May 1996,

    https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/submit/gender.htm
    .

33. 33.  Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘Legacies of Violence’, 92–3.

34. 34.  Gobodo-Madikizela, ‘Legacies of Violence’, 93.

35. 35.  ‘Anti-necklace ex-beauty queen murdered’, Cape Times, 20 October 1986.

36. 36.  Emily Bridger and Erin Hazan, ‘Surfeit and Silence: Sexual Violence in the Apartheid Archive’, African Studies 81, no. 3–4 (2 October 2022): 286–305,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2023.2212606
    .

37. 37.  Bridger and Hazan, ‘Surfeit and Silence’, 290.

38. 38.  ‘Anti-necklace ex-beauty queen murdered’, Cape Times, 20 October 1986.

39. 39.  APDUSA had been formed in 1962, as a non-racial mass-based organisation affiliated to the Non-European Unity Movement, intended to harness the spirit of resistance unleashed by the Pondoland revolts and Sharpeville. Decimated by arrests during the early 1970s it was revived during the early 1980s as activists began to be released from Robben Island. However, it was by the 1980s a small organisation, and many of its activists were absorbed by the UDF in the second half of the 1980s.

40. 40.  ‘Freedom Fighters or Plain Killers?’, APUDSA Views 16 (February 1987): 4.

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

42. 42.  ‘Freedom Fighters or Plain Killers?’, 3.

43. 43.  John Greenwald, ‘South Africa The War of Blacks Against Blacks’, Time Magazine, 26 January 1987,

    https://time.com/archive/6708166/south-africa-the-war-of-blacks-against-blacks/
    .

44. 44.  Brendan Boyle, ‘Two dead in racial violence’, UPI Archives, Oct 19, 1986, accessed June 2024,

    https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/10/19/Two-dead-in-racial-violence/8743530078400/
    .

45. 45.  Financial Mail, 24 October 1986, 57.

46. 46.  See description ‘About Frontline’ at an online archive of the magazine’s stories, accessed June 2024,

    https://www.coldtype.net/frontline.html
    .

47. 47.  Dennis Beckett, ‘Facing the Future as One Society’, Frontline, December 1979, accessed June 2024,

    https://www.coldtype.net/frontline/Frontline.Editorial.pdf
    .

48. 48.  See the two important collections: Keyan G. Tomaselli and P. Eric Louw, eds., The Alternative Press in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1992); Les Switzer and Mohamed Adhikari, South Africa’s Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation Under Apartheid (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000).

49. 49.  Nomavenda Mathiane, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Special Hearings: Media, Session 4, 17 September 1997, accessed April 2024,

    https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/media/media04.htm
    .

50. 50.  Nomavenda Mathiane, Special Hearings: Media, Session 4, 17 September 1997.

51. 51.  Dennis Beckett, Foreword to Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines: Truths of Soweto Life, vii–ix.

52. 52.  Winnie Mandela rose to public prominence after her marriage to Nelson Mandela in 1958, during the ongoing Treason Trial in which Nelson was a defendant. Prior to 1996 she was known as Winnie Mandela. After her divorce from Nelson that year she changed her name to Madikizela-Mandela. I have used these two names before and after this date. As Nelson Mandela’s spokesperson when he was banned and imprisoned, Winnie Mandela built a role for herself as ‘Mother of the Nation’, becoming ‘the voice and image of the ANC itself’, see: Shireen Hassim, ‘Not Just Nelson’s Wife: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Violence and Radicalism in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 5 (3 September 2018): 898,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1514566
    ; Winnie Mandela became an important political actor in her own right, and with an independent and loyal following, particularly among the youth; this was a connection that had first emerged during the 1976 Soweto Uprisings. See: Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘Controlling Woman: Winnie Mandela and the 1976 Soweto Uprising’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 585–614,
    https://doi.org/10.2307/3097436
    . During the 1960s and 1970s she was banned, imprisoned, detained (in solitary confinement) and tortured, to an extent few other women were. In 1977 she was banished to Brandfort for eight years, returning to her Soweto home in 1985. A year later the MUFC was formed. The violence enacted by the MUFC troubled the leaders of the internal and exiled liberation movement and a Mandela Crisis Committee was formed to curb their activities, but the deaths of young people continued. In 1988 four boys were abducted from the Methodist manse in Soweto, amongst them ‘Stompie’ Seipei, a thirteen-year-old activist. Whilst Mandela alleged that the boys were being sexually abused at the manse and the abduction was for their safety, Seipei was later found dead. In 1991 Mandela was convicted of Seipei’s abduction and the coach of the MUFC Jerry Richardson was convicted for his murder. For more on the trial and the homophobia invoked by Winnie Mandela’s defence team see: Rachel Holmes, ‘Queer Comrades: Winnie Mandela and the Moffies’, Social Text, no. 52/53 (1997): 161–80,
    https://doi.org/10.2307/466738
    ; The 1991 trial also concerned the death of Dr Abu Baker Asvat, known as ‘the people’s doctor’, who was murdered in his surgery the month after Seipei’s death. Whilst the 1991 trial found insufficient evidence to link Mandela to Asvat’s murder, ‘many people –including some who knew them both well – continue to insist on her involvement to this day’. See: Jon Soske, ‘Open Secrets, Off the Record: Audience, Intimate Knowledge, and the Crisis of the Post-Apartheid State’, Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 38, no.2 (2012): 61,
    https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2012.380205
    . All of this has made Winnie Madikizela-Mandela a controversial and much debated political figure. For more see: Emily Bridger, ‘From “Mother of the Nation” to “Lady Macbeth”: Winnie Mandela and Perceptions of Female Violence in South Africa, 1985–91’, Gender & History, 1 August 2015,
    https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12133
    ; Shireen Hassim, ‘The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela’, Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no. 6 (2 November 2019): 1151–71,
    https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2019.1697137
    ; and most recently, Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2023).

53. 53.  Hassim, ‘Not Just Nelson’s Wife’, 900.

54. 54.  Soske, ‘The Family Romance of the South African Revolution’, 189–90.

55. 55.  Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines: Truths of Soweto Life, 132.

56. 56.  State vs. W.W.C Twala, Proceedings, 735.

57. 57.  State vs. M.M Loatse, Proceedings, 601.

58. 58.  Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines: Truths of Soweto Life, 133.

59. 59.  The term ‘emergent’ is used by Clayton, whose analysis is discussed further in what follows. Cherry Clayton, ‘Radical Transformations: Emergent Women’s Voices in South Africa’, English in Africa 17, no. 2 (1990): 25–36,

    https://hdl.handle.net/10520/AJA03768902_330
    .

60. 60.  Clayton, ‘Radical Transformations’, 32.

61. 61.  Clayton, ‘Radical Transformations’, 26–7.

62. 62.  Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire (London: A&C Black, 2000), 148.

63. 63.  Whitlock, The Intimate Empire, 147.

64. 64.  Simone Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (London: Pluto, 2004), 6, 45, 71.

65. 65.  Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics, 45.

66. 66.  Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics, 76.

67. 67.  Marsaili Cameron, ‘What the Hell Is Feminist Editing?’, in In Other Words: Writing as a Feminist, ed. Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 125.

68. 68.  Elizabeth le Roux, ‘Miriam Tlali and Ravan Press: Politics and Power in Literary Publishing during the Apartheid Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 3 (4 May 2018): 433,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1450007
    .

69. 69.  ‘New Title Information’, Editorial File Cesarina Kona Makoere: London School of Economics (LSE), The Women’s Library (TWL), The Women’s Press: 6/TWP/Survey/14.14, Box 14.

70. 70.  Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics, 76.

71. 71.  Whitlock, The Intimate Empire, 149.

72. 72.  Dorothy Driver, ‘Imagined Selves, (Un)Imagined Marginalities’, Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 2 (1991): p.345,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/03057079108708281
    .

73. 73.  For a recent reappraisal of this relationship see: Zine Magubane, ‘Attitudes towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990: A Theoretical Re-Interpretation’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 4, Part 2. (Cape Town: Unisa Press, 2010), 975–1033.

74. 74.  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): 61,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180902827431
    .

75. 75.  Hassim, ‘Democracy’s Shadows’, 61.

76. 76.  Whilst the politics of feminism in the book are complex, Diana Russell interviewed some women who laid claim to being feminist in: Diana E. H Russell, Lives of Courage: Women for a New South Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

77. 77.  ‘Cover blurbs for Living, Loving, Lying awake at Night’, Editorial File Sindiwe Magona: LSE, TWL, 6/TWP: 39, Box 39, 39.4.

78. 78.  Driver, ‘Imagined Selves’, 348.

79. 79.  Whitlock, The Intimate Empire, 168.

80. 80.  Daniel Roux, ‘Jonny Steinberg’s the Number and Prison Life Writing in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, 2009, 231.,

    http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/12473
    .

81. 81.  Roux, ‘Jonny Steinberg’, 231.

82. 82.  Paul Gready, Writing as Resistance: Life Stories of Imprisonment, Exile, and Homecoming from Apartheid South Africa (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 274.

83. 83.  Yasmina Martin, ‘ “Now I Am Not Afraid”: Simon Nkoli, Queer Utopias and Transnational Solidarity’, Journal of Southern African Studies 46, no. 4 (3 July 2020): 680,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2020.1780022
    .

84. 84.  Andy Carolin has explored how the marginalised history of Simon Nkoli is represented. In a discussion of the 2003 play, ‘Your Loving Simon’, he highlights the inclusion of display cases at the original performances of the play that contained ‘handcuffs, passbook, a strip of toilet paper documenting prison conditions and a letter (to his lover Roy) stamped by Modderbee Prison’: Andy Carolin, ‘Locating Sexual Rights in the Anti-Apartheid Movement: Simon Nkoli and the Making of Post-Apartheid Protest Theatre’, Critical Arts 32, no. 5–6 (2 November 2018): 43,

    https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2018.1560342
    .

85. 85.  Federation of Transvaal Women, A Woman’s Place Is in the Struggle, Not Behind Bars (Reprinted by The Africa Fund, New York, 1988).

86. 86.  A Woman’s Place Is in the Struggle, 32

87. 87.  A Woman’s Place Is in the Struggle, Introduction to the U.S. Edition.

88. 88.  Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 110.

89. 89.  Nthabiseng Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Current Sociology 52, no. 5 (2004): 918–23,

    https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392104045377
    .

90. 90.  For a discussion of some examples see: Michael Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 195.

91. 91.  Carli Coetzee, Written under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Johannesburg, South Africa: James Currey, 2019), 62.

92. 92.  Press Release, Editorial File Cesarina Kona Makhoere: LSE, TWL, 6/TWP: 14.14, Box 14.

93. 93.  For more on this campaign see: Emily Bridger, ‘Functions and Failures of Transnational Activism: Discourses of Children’s Resistance and Repression in Global Anti-Apartheid Networks’, Journal of World History 26, no. 4 (2015): 865–87.

94. 94.  Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, 29.

95. 95.  Readers Reports for No Child’s Play, Editorial File Cesarina Kona Makhoere, LSE, TWL, 6/TWP: 39, Box 39.

96. 96.  Readers Reports for No Child’s Play.

97. 97.  Letter from Ros de Lanerolle to Barbara Masekela 29 July 1987, Editorial File Cesarina Kona Makhoere: LSE, TWL, 6/TWP: 39, Box 39.

98. 98.  Fax from Bridget Company – David Philip to Mary Hemming Women’s Press, 6 April 1993, Editorial File Cesarina Kona Makhoere, LSE, TWL, 6/TWP: 39, Box 39.

99. 99.  ‘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
    .

100. 100.  Horizon, May/June 1991.

101. 101.  Horizon, May/June 1991.

102. 102.  Horizon, May/June 1991.

103. 103.  Indeed, Helen Moffatt has argued that the new political rights extended to women during the transition to democracy occurred without ‘revising their social subordination’ and thus created a new disjuncture between the public and private realms. This disjuncture, she argues, underpins the increased rates of gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa – as men across South African society seek to discipline women’s behaviour in private, intimate spaces. See: Helen Moffett, ‘ “These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them”: Rape as Narrative of Social Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 32, no. 1 (1 March 2006): 129–44,

     https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070500493845
     .

104. 104.  Moffett, ‘These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them’; Hassim, ‘Democracy’s Shadows’.

105. 105.  Emily Cooper-Hockey, ‘Whose Agenda? The Negotiation of Gender, Race and “Difference” in a Feminist Journal in South Africa, 1987–1993’. (BA Honours Dissertation, University of Durham, 2017), 39.

106. 106.  Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Memory, Metaphor and the Trumph of Narrative’, in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20.

107. 107.  Ndebele, ‘Memory, Metaphor and the Trumph of Narrative’, 20.

108. 108.  After five weeks the TRC had heard 204 witnesses, 6 out of 10 were women. Whilst three quarters of their testimony and 88 per cent of male witness testimony concerned abuses to men, only 17 per cent of the female witnesses and 5 per cent of the male witnesses were about abuses to women. Fiona Ross, ‘Existing in secret places: Women’s testimony in the first five weeks of public hearings of the TRC’. Paper presented at the Fault lines Conference, July 4–5, 1996, Cape Town, 1–32.

109. 109.  Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, 17.

110. 110.  Goldblatt and Meintjes, ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, 34.

111. 111.  Fiona Ross, ‘Linguistic Bearings and Testimonial Practices’, in Discourse and Human Rights Violations, ed. Christine Anthonissen and Jan Blommaert (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 109. Three women’s hearings were held in Cape Town on 8 August 1996, in Durban on 24 October 1996 and in Johannesburg on 29 July 1997.

112. 112.  Karin Chubb, Between Anger and Hope: South Africa’s Youth and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001), 22.

113. 113.  Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 4 (Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998), 249.

114. 114.  Ross, ‘Linguistic Bearings and Testimonial Practices’, 110.

115. 115.  Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (London: Pluto, 2002), 24.

116. 116.  Meg Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), 121.

117. 117.  Introduction to Rose Dimpa, April 1986, WHP, AG2523, Box G24.3.2.4.

118. 118.  Thenjiwe Mtintso, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Special Hearings, Women’s Hearing, Johannesburg, Day 1, 28 July 1997, accessed June 2024,

     http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/women/masote.htm
     .

119. 119.  Ntombizikhona Valela, ‘ “I Am 22 Million”: Reading Winnie Madikizela as the Intellectual Face of Anti-Apartheid Popular Struggle’ (MA thesis, Rhodes University, 2017), 55.

120. 120.  Hassim, ‘Not Just Nelson’s Wife’, 905.

121. 121.  Lerothodi Andrew Ikaneng, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Special Hearings, Mandela United Football Club Hearing, Day 7 Second Session, 30 November 1997, accessed July 2019,

     http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/mandela/mufc7b.htm
     .

122. 122.  Lerothodi Andrew Ikaneng, Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

123. 123.  Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 1998, 2: 555.

124. 124.  Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart (London: Vintage, 1991).

125. 125.  ‘List of BCM Heroes and Heroines’, AZAPO, last updated 5 January 2003; accessed June 2024,

     https://web.archive.org/web/20190511202049/http://azapo.org.za/azapohistory/azanian-peoples-organisation/
     .

126. 126.  Andile Mngxitama, ‘June 16, 1976 in Perspective: Tsietsi and Khotso, brothers in arms’, black opinion, first posted 21 January 2004; reposted 15 June 2016; accessed June 2024,

     https://web.archive.org/web/20160618051602/http://blackopinion.co.za/2016/06/15/june-16-1976-perspective-tsietsi-khotso-brothers-arms/
     .

127. 127.  Malan, My Traitor’s Heart, 330.

128. 128.  The phrase ‘frenzied catalogue’ comes from Paul Gready, ‘The Witness: Rian Malan’s “My Traitor’s Heart” and Elsa Joubert’s “Poppie”’, Current Writing 7, no. 1 (January 1995): 88–104,

     https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.1995.9677949
     .

129. 129.  Gready, ‘The Witness’, 330.

130. 130.  T. A. Osinubi, ‘Abusive Narratives: Antjie Krog, Rian Malan, and the Transmission of Violence’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28, no. 1 (1 January 2008): 115,

     https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2007-059
     .

131. 131.  Osinubi, ‘Abusive Narratives’, 123.

132. 132.  Patrick Fish, ‘Malan, the Movie: The BBC Version of Rian Malan’s “My Traitor’s Heart”’, South African Theatre Journal 5, no. 1 (January 1991): 98,

     https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.1991.9688031
     .

133. 133.  Fish, ‘Malan, the Movie’, 98.

134. 134.  Sibongile Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses: Remembering 16 June 1976 (Braamfontein, South Africa: Skotaville Press, 2001), 129.

135. 135.  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,

     https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2019.1569428
     .

136. 136.  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
     .

137. 137.  Jacobs and Bank, ‘Biography in Post-Apartheid South Africa’.

138. 138.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 129.

139. 139.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 95.

140. 140.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 103.

141. 141.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 115.

142. 142.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 114.

143. 143.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 119.

144. 144.  Emily Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2021), 157.

145. 145.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 159.

146. 146.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 147.

147. 147.  Soske, ‘Open Secrets, Off the Record’, 65.

148. 148.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 165.

149. 149.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 168.

150. 150.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 170.

151. 151.  Raymond Suttner, ‘Women in the ANC-Led Underground’, in Women in South African History: They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 253.

152. 152.  See, for example, the important issue of Agenda that documents the role of womxn activists within the Fallist movements: ‘Feminisms and Women’s Resistance within Contemporary African Students Movements’, vol. 31, Issue 3–4, (2017).

153. 153.  Thami Mkwanazi, ‘Thandi Modise: The knitting needles guerrilla’, Weekly Mail, March 23–30, 1989. Part Two of the interview was published as, ‘The life story of Thandi Modise, guerrilla’, Weekly Mail, 31 March–6 April 1989.

154. 154.  Mkwanazi, ‘Thandi Modise’.

155. 155.  Mkwanazi, ‘Thandi Modise’.

156. 156.  Robyn Curnow and Thandi Modise, ‘Thandi Modise, a Woman in War’, Agenda 43 (2000): 36.

157. 157.  Curnow and Modise, ‘Thandi Modise, a Woman in War’, 36.

158. 158.  Curnow and Modise, ‘Thandi Modise, a Woman in War’, 37.

159. 159.  Curnow and Modise, ‘Thandi Modise, a Woman in War’, 39.

160. 160.  Curnow and Modise, ‘Thandi Modise, a Woman in War’, 39.

161. 161.  Stefaans Brummer, ‘MP abused but not beaten’, Mail & Guardian, 11 August 1995, accessed April 2024,

     https://mg.co.za/article/1995-08-11-mp-abused-but-not-beaten/
     .

162. 162.  Brummer, ‘MP abused’.

163. 163.  Brummer, ‘MP abused’.

164. 164.  Daniel R. Magaziner, ‘Two Stories about Art, Education, and Beauty in Twentieth-Century South Africa’, The American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (1 December 2013): 1406,

     https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1403
     .

165. 165.  Magaziner, ‘Two Stories about Art, Education, and Beauty’, 1406.

166. 166.  Bridger and Hazan, ‘Surfeit and Silence’, 288.

167. 167.  Mathiane was describing re-reading the stories she had published in Frontline for inclusion in the book: Mathiane, Beyond the Headlines: Truths of Soweto Life, xi.

168. 168.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 117.

169. 169.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 116.

170. 170.  See Annie Coombes for the way in which the jail represents the narratives of former prisoners in ways in which ‘we are never allowed to suspend our distance’ from their experiences: Annie E. Coombes, 'The Gender of Memory in Postapartheid South Africa: The Women's Jail as Heritage Site', in eds., Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Transformations, The International Handbooks of Museum Studies Volume 4, John Wiley and Sons, 2015, pps. 207 - 226.