A radical rural woman - Remembering Sizani Ngubane

African Union, Women's Rights

European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 2014

This article treats the various aspects of the resistance mechanisms devised by Ngugi wa Thiongo in order to empower the African women in a male-dominated society. The article shows the wrongs to which women are subjected such as polygamy and wife-beating and analyses Ngugi's firm belief that change is a gradual process as reflected in the novels subject of study. While the early three novels reflect traditional African values of motherhood and are more connected to African feminism, Wizard of the Crow breaks new grounds as women acquire more experience and conquer more fields towards empowering themselves through the resistance devices based on such concepts as sisterhood and female consciousness. In this sense, they managed to prove themselves as superior to men.

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2014

The end of apartheid has opened up new research possibilities into the history of the African National Congress (ANC). Yet the scholarship on the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), remains largely restricted to questions of strategic, political and military effectiveness. The transnational character of the anti-apartheid struggle is mostly absent from nationalist historiographies, while little is known about the daily lives of those who made up the ranks of MK, their interactions with host communities, and the implications of having a large, predominantly male army – with their feelings, longings and frustrations – stationed outside South Africa’s borders for three decades. Morogoro, a small upcountry town in Tanzania, was one of the key sites where relations between South African exiles and Tanzanians were forged. In the early years of exile, relationships between ANC/MK cadres and Tanzanian women were not officially sanctioned by the movement, but from the late 1970s they were increasingly formalised through marriage. In this way, the lives of many Tanzanian women became entangled with the South African liberation struggle. Relationships and marriages between South African exiles and Tanzanian women were not only a significant aspect of everyday life in exile, but also key components of an ANC familyhood, linked in turn to expressions of masculinity in MK and to the making of a national community and imaginary. This article seeks to illustrate the complex implications and present repercussions of these marriages and relationships by tracing the lives of seven Tanzanian women, which reveal a multiplicity of personal and emotional entanglements that are obscured by a narrow focus on military and strategic objectives.

Agenda, 2022

2017

The ANC between Home and Exile. Reflections on the Anti-Apartheid Struggle in Italy and Southern Africa, 2015

Bible in Africa Studies, 2024

BiAS 41/ ERA 15 completes the trilogy of volumes celebrating the jubilee of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (CIRCLE). This third part writes the history of theologian matriarchs in Southern Africa. The resistance from Southern-African women through their work in the CIRCLE affirms the spirt of the Zimbabwean medium and freedom fighter Mbuya Nehanda, and demonstrates the tradition of feminist intersectional liberation theology in the region. The authors encourage women and all suppressed ones to take up the spiritual flame of resistance. The editors & authors CHIFUNGO, Phoebe (Zambia)/ CHIKA, Eze (South Africa)/ CHILAPULA, Mercy (Malawi)/ CHILONGOZI, Mwawi Nyirenda (Malawi)/ CHIRONGOMA, Sophia (Zimbabwe)/ DIBEELA, Cheryl Natalie (Botswana)/ GABAITSE, Rosinah Mmannana (Botswana)/ HARAWA, Chimwemwe (Malawi)/ HEADLEY, Selena D. (South Africa)/ HLATYWAYO, Anniegrace Mapangisana (Zimbabwe)/ KAUNDA, Mutale Mulenga (South Africa)/ KOBO, Fundiswa (South Africa)/ MASAITI-MUKUKA ,Bridget Nonde (Zambia)/ MATUMBU, Faith (Zimbabwe)/ MOYO, Elitha (Zimbabwe)/ MOKOENA, Lerato (South Africa)/ MUDIMELI, Lufuluvhi M. (South Africa)/ MUPANGWA, Terence (Zimbabwe)/ MWALE, Nelly (Zambia)/ NYAWO, Sonene (Eswatini)/ OLOJEDE, Funlola O. (South Africa)/ OSMAN, Mujahid (South Africa/ USA)/ ROBERTSON, Megan (UK/ South Africa)/ SOKO-DE JONG, Thandi (Malawi/ Netherlands)/ TEMBO, Dorothy M. (Malawi)/

2004

IICBA, which is based at UP. She comes from a strong background of teaching and school leadership and has conducted several researches to include an audit of gender mainstreaming in education in two provinces in the RSA that provided technical assistance in the areas of reform implementation and applied research to

Development, 2007

This word defined from the West, it sets with the sun. And so when I looked to the West I could not quite find myself in defining this word. And everywhere I searched in the South, I saw people and people and more people. And these people never left the center.. .. And I rememory [sic] in the footsteps of Toni Morrison that [the African] woman's herstory is itself development. For she has not participated in raping Africa of its resources. She has not participated in creating the corrupt governments that exist on the African continent today. Only when she is on the periphery. Only when she is being used (Mugo, 1999). I begin with these words of Kenyan writer-in-exile Micere Githae Mugo as a means of expressing how profoundly disruptive the experience of the past half century of 'development' has been for African people, and particularly for African women. Not only in the sense of structural upheavals with adjustment policies, heavy industrialization and mono-crop agriculture that have widened the gaps of economic inequity, commercialized communal lands and marginalized the production of subsistence foods. But in the social and cultural dislocations created by silencing the complex systems of science, agriculture,

Agenda ,No 100/28.2 , 2014

Lauretta Ngcobo is a political figure whose engagement with the anti-apartheid struggle predates the birth of the Pan-African Congress, of which she is a founding member and her subsequent political exile in the early 1960s. Her literary works - Cross of Gold (1981), And They Didn’t Die (1990) – can be read as fictionalised histories of the anti-pass of the 1950s and 1960s and their aftermath. Ngcobo’s particular sensitivity to the socio-political and cultural forces shaping the life experiences of Black women and their writing in apartheid South Africa is illustrated by essays such as African Motherhood – Myth and Reality (1988) penned in exile. Her latest offering, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (2012), stems from a deep awareness of the silencing of women’s voices within the post-apartheid liberation narrative. My introduction to the short interview that I conducted with the author at the Miriam Tlali Book Club (Johannesburg, August 18 2010) shows that Ngcobo herself is not immune to the patriarchal representations that marginalise the voices of female anti-apartheid activists. I propose that studying the reception of her work requires an examination of domesticating labels such as ‘struggle wife’ alongside literary descriptors such ‘exile writer’, ‘struggle writer’ or ‘feminist writer’.

The Journal of African History, 1979

Safundi, 2018

This paper examines the ideology of Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala who spent 18 years in the United States from 1912 to 1930. Within two years of returning to South Africa, she founded the self-help group, the Daughters of Africa in 1932. Tshabalala used the Daughters and the widely read newspapers-Bantu World and Ilanga laseNatalto define, construct, and diagnose the African nation she found materially and socially wanting upon her return. Tshabalala's experience abroad and her exposure to African-American women's clubs and her participation at the annual Chautauqua conferences in upstate New York provided the platform for her to conduct her own social service gospel in segregated South Africa. This essay, which argues that religion served as Tshabalala's antidote to all the social ills plaguing the African nation, traces the evolution of her ideology by discussing how she was in conversation with African-American and South African male movements, and also women on the African continent. In 1940, at a meeting in Pimville, Soweto, a crowd of educators assembled to hear Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala, founder of the Daughters of Africa (Amadodakazi aseAfrika) speak on her first visit to the township. Tshabalala discussed the Daughters' formation and its goals, explaining that upon her return from the United States, where she lived for 18 years (1912-1930), she "found [her] nation suffering like a piece of overcooked corn" and "had known then that she I had to do something to rebuild it. " 1 It had seemed to her that African-Americans "were neither advanced nor succeeding, " in spite of the fact, as she explained, that "the Negro woman in the States ha[d] ... followed the ... example of her older sister (Africa) with haste unequaled. " 2 These observations spurred Tshabalala on to start a female organization. Fourteen years after Charlotte Maxeke had started the Bantu Women's League KEYWORDS

2017

2016