Conclusion: shadow histories

Image and word

Silences and shadows are often thought of as representative of one another. A shadow is a silent presence. In The Combing of History, David W. Cohen argued that ‘there are critical areas in the shadows, critical silences in the social worlds we study’ and urged historians to pay attention to the ‘quiet eddies of potentially critical materials that form’ at the same time, and through the same processes by which the ‘visible wake of the past’ is made.⁸ There can be few more obvious examples of the ‘visible wake’ of the apartheid past than the photography that captured moments of protest and the responses of security forces. Sam Nzima’s photograph of 16 June 1976, and the circulation and afterlives of this image, offer one example of the processes Cohen describes. Critical reflection on photography within the history of the struggle can offer a way into exploring the simultaneous making of voices and silences.

Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool have urged historians to interrogate our use of photography and not simply accept images as ‘filling the gaps’ left by history’s absences.⁹ Taking photographs of struggle during the struggle was not a neutral act of observation – just as talking about the struggle was not. Indeed, many of the same dangers were attached to ‘seeing too much’ as ‘speaking too much’. Santu Mofokeng, the South African artist who worked as a photojournalist during the mid-1980s for New Nation, recalled in 2000: ‘I was once nearly “necklaced” by comrades at a night vigil in Emndeni (Soweto) after being branded an informer simply by asking permission to make pictures of the proceedings’.¹⁰ The moral questions which faced the photographer, taking a picture during a moment of violent oppression, is an issue which appears within the fiction authored in the aftermath of 1976 by black writers. In Mongane Wally Serote’s 1981 novel To Every Birth Its Blood, a disillusioned newspaper reporter called Tsi questioned his colleague about the purpose of his photography:

‘I mean, I feel there is something about being there taking pictures while a fight, a clearly unbalanced fight goes on.’

‘Unbalanced, what do you mean?’

‘Morongwa could be locked up, purely because she is black, fighting a white person – and you know the price of that.’

‘Well, I have a clear stand on that. I am a black photographer and that is how I fight.’

‘What if she was killed?’

‘I have recorded it.’

‘What do the records help? Who believes them?’

‘Records are not to be believed, but used, that is how I look at it.’

‘Used? By whom? How can you use a thing if you do not value it?’¹¹

Debates like this over the purpose and meaning of photography within the liberation struggle can help us understand the desires and anxieties that compelled the various archives of the struggle.¹² The making of these archives of struggle were painfully self-conscious and dangerous. The consequences of speech and silence in detention and on trial were fatal for many. There were also risks attached to speaking out through organisations like the Detainee Parent’s Support Committee (DPSC). A 1986 report published by the American-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights suggested that ‘some who have spoken to the DPSC’ had subsequently been visited by the army again.¹³ In her testimony to the Johannesburg TRC youth hearing, one of the founders of the DPSC, Audrey Coleman, related the experience of a young man Sithole Edblumo, who appeared in a film made by the DPSC called Children under Apartheid and who was then interrogated by the Security Police and found dead four days after his release. Audrey Coleman suggested a direct link: ‘I know because I was in the office myself when he came back from having been interrogated, that that was the reason for the questioning, the Children under Apartheid’.¹⁴

The photographer Gideon Mendel, a member of the Afripix collective who made some of the most widely circulated images of the struggle during the 1980s, told Patricia Hayes in a 2002 interview of his confusion over the purpose of photography during that time: ‘I mean who was struggle photography for?’¹⁵ Mendel describes a situation in which photographers might not have known why they were present at particular moments but they felt a need to be there. In light of this, Hayes draws our attention to the act of photographing itself as a ‘component part of photography’.¹⁶ She urges us to think ‘beyond’ the ‘final product’ of a photographic print that goes into circulation to consider the ‘dynamic aspect of a growing presence of photographers with cameras’ at moments of protest and in particular at political funerals during the 1980s.¹⁷ Focusing on the photographer at political funerals, Hayes argues that they became a part of the rituals of such occasions – their presence with its invocation of an external audience could heighten emotions and tensions with the police – but also that the act of taking the photographs was itself important. Hayes argues that during the 1980s many reels of photographs were taken at funerals that were never developed. She points to these unseen photographs as ‘images out of bounds. They constitute the boundaries of taste and judgement of what should be seen in their time’.¹⁸ Considering these unseen photographs prompts her to ask, ‘is it necessary for things to be visible in order to shape our political and historical consciousness?’¹⁹ The way in which Hayes thinks about photographs and photography is instructive for thinking about acts of speech and the recording of voices. The seen, like the sayable, was constructed and contested. Do we need to start to think about the presence of academic researchers, seeking interviews during this period (and later ones) in the same way that Hayes thinks about the photographer – as part of the picture?

Telling stories differently

Visibility and audibility have a complex relationship in the archive. They are often simultaneous but also occasionally they become separated. In these instances, the presence of one can make the absence of the other all the more acute. This is the case with the main protagonist in this book: Masabata Loate. She emerges from the archive in glimpses and through interpreters. We cannot see and hear her through the same means. In the visual record of South African life that is contained within the society pages of South Africa’s township edition newspapers Loate is a smiling, Afro-ed beauty queen. In the records of the apartheid court system, she is a state witness and later as a defendant herself, she is an ambiguous activist. In the written records of the anti-apartheid movement, she is a political prisoner and a martyr. In post-apartheid struggle memoirs, she appears as an emblematic loss to meaningless violence. These are all outlines of a young woman – a shadow that can be glimpsed moving through the records.

Where does the impossibility of Loate’s story leave us if we are interested in young women’s participation in the anti-apartheid movement and particularly its youth formations? I hope it can make us think again about the way we hear and reconstruct stories of activism. Head’s description of Kuzwayo as writing a shadow history is typical of the ways in which women’s stories are often framed as running alongside, behind or beneath a master narrative. As Emily Bridger has noted in her groundbreaking work on young women’s activism within COSAS – it is not enough that we simply add young black women into the story of South Africa’s youth. She argues that her own research provides four challenges to existing historical understandings of the struggle.²⁰ Firstly, female COSAS activists demonstrate that women could be mobilised and participate politically outside discourses of politicised motherhood and wifehood. Secondly, the lives and stories of these young women activists blur the boundaries between public and private, personal and political – narratives that struggle histories often uphold or unquestioningly reproduce. Thirdly, the difficulties and challenges of being and becoming activists that young women faced complicate any straightforward heroic picture of participation in the struggle. Fourthly, she argues that young women’s narratives of their activism disrupt the temporal conception of ‘the end of apartheid’. In these ways Bridger frames the young women of COSAS as ‘talk[ing] back’ to histories of the liberation struggle.²¹ There is clearly much to be gained from eliciting stories of struggle from those ready and willing to share their experiences. Loate’s story confirms all of these challenges and adds another: that we acknowledge the deep entanglement of what we know, with how we know it. Gendered narratives of the liberation struggle were integral to the waging of that struggle, and how it has been remembered. This we can hear and see in the dynamics of struggle speech.

Part of my aim in writing this book has been to try to work out if there is another way to position ourselves as historians and hear women’s stories. Or to put it even more broadly than that, to open possibilities for telling stories of the struggle differently. I am borrowing the precise phraseology ‘telling stories differently’ from the work of Clare Hemmings. In Why Stories Matter Hemmings unearths and then dissects the common narratives of the development over time of feminist politics and philosophy that are found embedded within the work of feminists.²² She reveals the shared assumptions, blind spots and omissions that underpin feminists’ own understandings of the history of feminism as well as the emotional relationships and responses that are constituted through those narratives. She shows the ways in which different versions of the same story of feminism’s history are implicated in various projects of (re)making its future. However, rather than simply telling a different story of feminism that tries to correct these assumptions, blind spots and omissions, Hemmings urges us to try to experiment with telling stories differently.

Hemmings’s work is part of a recognition from feminists that the assumption of a ‘linear move from silence to voice’ as an ‘unproblematic liberatory potential of research’ is flawed.²³ A critique of voice has long been central to the theoretical contributions of postcolonial feminists and feminists of colour who have argued for the ‘unspeakability’ of certain deeply traumatic pasts like slavery.²⁴ In questioning whether the subaltern could speak, Gayatri Spivak argued that ‘if in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’.²⁵ Drawing on Spivak, Hemmings argues that ‘Western feminist theorists need to interrupt their presumptive status as subjects to alter the grammar of the subject’ and that the key to this is a ‘consideration of how one might figure in another’s history’ (emphasis added).²⁶ For the historian of apartheid South Africa, the beginnings of a different way of telling stories of the past might lie in considering how the historian figured within the lives of the young men and women who mobilised politically against the State. Hemmings also suggests the importance of resisting making others ‘fully readable’ and thereby refusing to resolve the limits of self-knowledge, or knowledge of the other.²⁷ In the South African context, Jon Soske has suggested something similar, I think, in his insistence on aiming for ‘an unusable image of the past’.²⁸ This insistence emerges from an acknowledgement of the politics of access (to interviewees, archives and so on) that are underpinned by the ‘potential assimilation of the research process into political battles fought for ends that differ considerably from the researcher’s own intellectual goals’.²⁹ This is perhaps particularly acute in a context like post-apartheid South Africa in which politics is shaped by ‘public struggles for historical visibility’.³⁰ However, as we discussed earlier in relation to Hayes’s focus on the photographer and the act of photography within the liberation struggle, this focus on the place of the historian or researcher within a political field could and should also be applied to the recent apartheid past. I want to suggest that the value of the fragment as a fragment is the attention it draws to the process by which we come to know, since we must continually acknowledge what we do not (yet) know. It is for this reason that I have not yet added to the archives about Loate, by interviewing surviving family and friends. That is another project.³¹ My aim here has not been to render as full a portrait of her as might be possible, but rather to focus on the structures of knowledge that her shadowy presence is found within. So, what do the lines of fracture that splinter Masabata Loate’s story tell us? Where do we see and hear her and why is that important?

The fragment

Loate is visible in the historical record as a beauty queen, a reminder of the particular space afforded to young black women within South Africa’s urban modernity – one in which their bodies and appearance were up for scrutiny and read as carriers of cultural meaning. These glimpses of Loate should remind us of the lenses through which young women were viewed. In the 1978–9 trial of the Soweto Eleven we first heard Loate as a student activist turned state witness whose body the presiding judge felt free to pass comment on. She was heard as one of the young feminine speakers that rendered the youth anti-apartheid protests of the Soweto Uprisings as masculine. At the same moment Sibongile Mthembu (as she was then) was glimpsed as a rare exception in this male world and one whose own appearance, demeanour and religious belief were asserted as a sign of the respectability of the Soweto students in the face of the prosecution’s attack on them as seditious revolutionaries. In the late 1970s young women student activists spoke but they were not accorded a voice – we heard how doors were closed on them, how they turned away from politics, but not how it was that they were there in the first place, or how they negotiated the emotionally fraught and dangerous crossing of (gendered) boundaries that their political participation entailed.

Chapter 2 argued for a nuanced understanding of the relationship between speaking about the struggle and political participation more broadly. I suggested that thinking about who speaks and when within the historical record can help us understand the dynamics of political practice. At the interface of political activism and the apartheid criminal justice system, young women were not silenced but spoke under multiple pressures. I showed the ways in which young women’s presence and speech were central to both state and anti-apartheid depictions of youth politics as masculine within the courtroom during the trial of the Soweto Eleven. By considering what was sayable for young women we refocused our attention on the production of gendered narratives of struggle. Acknowledging the production of gendered narratives of struggle can dissolve the apparent contradiction between the portrayals of political participation that emerge from speaking about the struggle and other evidence like photographs or arrest statistics. We also saw the ways in which speech about the struggle was a part of the continual negotiation of gendered relationships that shaped political participation. The ‘intimacies’ of anti-apartheid politics shaped both, the daily practices that constituted that politics, and what it was that was (and is) said about those practices.

Young women experienced a struggle to speak because speech was so central a site of the struggle. In Chapter 3 I showed that struggles over speech intensified during the 1980s and that the life and death of Masabata Loate can help us to see the ways in which the sanctions for women who ‘talked’ or who spoke up, or out, became more violent during the 1980s. Recognising the importance of control over women’s speech, as well as their bodies, is vital for unpicking the gendered dynamics of township struggle and the nature of the historical record and legacies it left. The States of Emergency created conditions under which decisions to speak were those of life and death. We heard Masabata Loate again in this context, as a defendant on trial as the alleged secretary of SAYRCO. The possibilities for Loate’s ambiguous anti-apartheid activism to exist narrowed over time. Loate’s ambiguity is central to her importance for struggle histories. Loate’s story was not one that was sayable within struggle speech. Her version of her place within the anti-apartheid activist world that was told during her trial in 1982 was dismissed by the presiding magistrate as simply not credible. We might agree, in which case, the decision of her defence team to mount a line of argument that reiterated her earlier appearance as a state witness seems oddly ignorant of the risks of such a strategy. George Bizos judged her as a ‘confused young woman’ but we might instead suggest she was and is, confusing: she crossed boundaries of political affiliation and between the worlds of politics and urban social life that struggle speech tried to fix and uphold. She had the space to speak as a political defendant on trial but little of what she said in 1982 conformed to expectations of this position.

The story of Loate’s death is a story of silencing and the erasure over time of the specificity of her murder; why she was killed remains obscured in the various versions of her death that have surfaced in newspaper reports, activist commentaries, the TRC and post-apartheid autobiographies. The stories of her silencing suggest the multiple logics of her murder and, by extension, the violence of the Emergency years in Soweto. In Chapter 4, and the book as a whole, I have argued for the potency of silence for unpicking the gendered dynamics of political participation and the historical record it leaves us. Reading the story of Loate’s silencing alongside the strange clarity of imprisonment as a site for the articulation of a black, female, anti-apartheid activist self, shows us the contours of women’s struggles to speak. Chapter 4 explored women’s speech in the struggle during the 1980s and 1990s, as it was accorded a new set of potential meanings: that of breaking silences that had upheld or symbolised gendered oppressions. The circulation of black women’s stories through domestic and international feminist spaces has had the effect of rendering ongoing silences as a barrier to knowledge of women’s gendered experiences. However, reading silences within women’s autobiographical projects can tell us a lot about the ongoing production of gendered narratives of struggle.³²

Each chapter was centred on an archival appearance – a different glimpse of Loate. These fragments are separate from one another but also entangled. Narrating any one of these moments in Loate’s life necessitates drawing on the others. Most obviously, Loate’s second appearance in court, was all about her first. Holding the fragments against one another enables us to see each more clearly, since light and shade fall differently within the fragments, but they cannot be joined. Her story is splintered by the way it was recorded. The threats to Loate’s physical safety after her testimony as a state witness are mentioned in her second trial but how this was connected, if it was, to her death and the way she was ‘hunted’ by her youth congress comrades in 1986, we do not know.³³ The threads are broken – by the time of her death, her appearance as a state witness is no longer remembered publicly. However, the two fragments do tell us she was subjected to a recurring risk of violence and her acts of speech, be that talking in court or speaking up within organisations, were what placed her at risk.

Shadows are present everywhere that there is light. Seeing shadows is dependent, not on their existence as such but on the orientation of the observer. There is always a danger that in trying to examine a shadow, an observer might step too close, and in the end see only the shade that they themselves are casting. In writing this book I was driven by an impulse to reckon with the refusals to speak that I, and others, had encountered. The shadow that I have drawn of Masabata Loate is indeed overlaid by my own and those of other historians and researchers; we are a part of this history. Yet I hope I have demonstrated that a persistent and recurring set of silences like those of young black women who were engaged with anti-apartheid politics are made, re-made and broken at different historical moments and by many different people, organisations and processes. It is not as simple as a failure to ask or a refusal to speak. Silences are made by many voices.

The shadows are a space with potentially negative connotations – a space of the unknown, the frightening. When we speak of people becoming a shadow of themselves, we usually mean they are diminished in some way, no longer what they were. I borrow something of this meaning when I speak of my biography of Masabata Loate as a shadow portrait – for I am indeed suggesting the limits to my knowledge. However, I am also drawing on an idea of darkness as a refuge and space of creativity. Reflecting on a real darkness, that of load-shedding hours during the #RhodesMustFall occupation of Azania House, at the University of Cape Town, Thuli Gamedze has reworked the idea of darkness as a space of potential for finding a full sense of self: ³⁴

… this darkness has provided a new kind of safety for a diverse group of some of the best people I have ever met. Intersectionality gives us a key into finding each other in this darkness, and feeling each other out without having to carry with us the burden of inhumanity, which comes with the ‘perspective’ offered by colonial lighting. When we discover ourselves in this dark, invisible, mysterious space, I cannot begin to imagine the inventive languages and visualities we will use in our struggle towards re-defining black humanity in the larger South African space.³⁵

With this in mind, I do not want to imply that Loate languishes in the shadows. She lives there. She is alive, with a fullness that we cannot grasp. She is beyond our ability to see her clearly, but neither is she fully lost to us. She was there – her shadow is what she has left behind.

Notes

1. 1.  Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (London: Women’s Press, 1985), xiii.

2. 2.  Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire (London: A&C Black, 2000), 147–8.

3. 3.  Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Call Me Not a Man / Mtutuzeli Matshoba (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979).

4. 4.  See for example: Jeremy Seekings, ‘Whose Voices? Politics and Methodology in the Study of Political Organisation and Protest in the Final Phase of the “Struggle” in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 7–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582471003778300; Hilary Sapire, ‘Township Histories, Insurrection and Liberation in Late Apartheid South Africa’, South African Historical Journal 65, no. 2 (1 June 2013): 167–98, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2013.777089; Arianna Lissoni et al., One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012).

5. 5.  For the former see, Seekings, ‘Whose Voices?’ and for the latter, Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014).

6. 6.  In this I have been inspired by the call from Woodward et al. for approaches that examine the ‘processes through which gendered subjects locate and relocate themselves in the world: how they move between being vocal and mute, between centre-stage limelight and the shadowy wings’: Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley, Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), xxv.

7. 7.  This phraseology is borrowed from the insightful discussion of biography in Nancy J. Jacobs and Andrew Bank, ‘Biography in Post-Apartheid South Africa A Call for Awkwardness’, African Studies 78, no. 2 (3 April 2019): 165–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2019.1569428.

8. 8.  David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 118.

9. 9.  They ask the evocative question, ‘where does history reside and power hide in this image?’ See: Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Photography with a Difference: Leon Levson’s Camera Studies and Photographic Exhibitions of Native Life in South Africa, 1947–1950’, Kronos, no. 31 (2005): 192.

10. 10.  Santu Mofokeng, ‘Trajectory of a Street Photographer’, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 2000, no. 11–12 (1 May 2000): 45, https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-11-12-1-41.

11. 11.  Mongane Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 106.

12. 12.  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

13. 13.  Helena Cook and Diane Orentlicher, The War against Children: South Africa’s Youngest Victims (New York: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1986), 52.

14. 14.  Audrey Coleman, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Special Hearings, Children’s Hearing, Johannesburg, Day 1, 12 June 1997, accessed June 2024, www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/children/acoleman.htm.

15. 15.  Patricia Hayes, ‘Political Funerals in South Africa: Photography, History and the Refusal of Light (1960s–80s)’, 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), 304.

16. 16.  Hayes, ‘Political Funerals in South Africa’, 305.

17. 17.  Hayes, ‘Political Funerals in South Africa’, 302.

18. 18.  Hayes, ‘Political Funerals in South Africa’, 303.

19. 19.  Hayes, ‘Political Funerals in South Africa’, 302.

20. 20.  Emily Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2021), 221–3.

21. 21.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 222.

22. 22.  Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011).

23. 23.  Róisín Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill, eds., Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, Transformations: Thinking through Feminism (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 2.

24. 24.  Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, ‘The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror’, in Gender and Catastrophe (London: Zed Books, 1997), 171–84; see the insightful discussion on trauma and silence in Nthabiseng Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Current Sociology 52, no. 5 (2004): 914–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392104045377.

25. 25.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Carry Nelson (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 288.

26. 26.  Hemmings, Why Stories Matter, 214.

27. 27.  Hemmings, Why Stories Matter, 223.

28. 28.  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): 68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23267796.

29. 29.  Soske, ‘Open Secrets, Off the Record’, 67.

30. 30.  Soske, ‘Open Secrets, Off the Record’, 67.

31. 31.  There are very few leads to follow. The most recent and promising was a 2020 public recollection of Loate by one of the surviving Soweto Eleven, Thabo Ndabeni, who was jailed for refusing to testify at Loate’s 1982 trial, at a June 16 commemoration: ‘Masabata shouldn’t have died the way she did. For someone who sacrificed as much as she did and to die in an undignified way. Necklacing! That was the worst that could befall a soldier for the revolution such as her.’ The author of the blog post, Veli Mbele, who reported this comment, also expresses a wish to ‘hold a proper and dignified memorial for Masabata’. Veli Mbele, ‘June 16 Uprising and the Untold Story of Masabata Loate’, Culture Review, accessed June 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20201030135628/https://culture-review.co.za/june-16-uprising-and-the-untold-story-of-masabata-loate.

32. 32.  Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’.

33. 33.  This chilling description comes from the report that ‘her comrades allegedly came out of a street committee meeting to hunt her’ in ‘Anti-necklace ex-beauty queen murdered’, Cape Times, 20 October 1986.

34. 34.  ‘Load-shedding hours’ refers to periods of electricity black-outs when demand for electricity outstrips supply available to the government-owned national power provider, ESKOM. Since 2007 in South Africa this has become a frequent problem, so that power is rationed by shutting down sections of the supply grid on a pre-set schedule. For the history of electricity supply in South Africa see: Faeeza Ballim, Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, New African Histories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2023).

35. 35.  Thuli Gamedze, ‘Azania House Intersectionality as a Catalyst for Black Imagination’, The Johannesburg Salon (The Joannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism) 9 (2015): 123.