tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/soweto-uprising-29221/articles
Soweto Uprising – The Conversation
2024-01-04T15:31:23Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220558
2024-01-04T15:31:23Z
2024-01-04T15:31:23Z
Peter Magubane: courageous photographer who chronicled South Africa’s struggle for freedom
<p><a href="https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/tributes-magubane-continue">Peter Sexford Magubane</a>, a courageous South African photographer whose images testify to both the iniquity of apartheid and the determination and devotion of those who brought about its demise, <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2024-01-02-peter-magubane-photographer-who-documented-apartheid-dies-aged-91/">passed away</a> at 91 years of age in early January 2024.</p>
<p>Magubane leaves behind a vast archive of extraordinary images, many of which continue to be the signature images of some of the worst atrocities committed by the apartheid regime.</p>
<p>The photographer suffered <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/peter-sexford-magubane">great losses</a> during apartheid. In 1969 Magubane spent 586 days in solitary confinement. In 1976 his home was burnt down. He miraculously survived being shot 17 times below the waist at the funeral of a student activist in Natalspruit in 1985. His son Charles was brutally murdered in Soweto in 1992. </p>
<p>Despite the pain and suffering he witnessed and experienced, Magubane’s photographs testify to the hope that is at the heart of the struggle for a just world.</p>
<h2>Witness to momentous events</h2>
<p>Magubane grew up in Sophiatown, a mixed-race area around 5km from the centre of the city of Johannesburg. He not only witnessed, but also took part in, many of the most significant events in modern South African history. </p>
<p>He was 16 years old when the white supremacist <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/national-party-np">National Party came to power in 1948</a> and he came of age as the state introduced a series of repressive laws implementing the system of apartheid. These laws were to shape the course of Magubane’s life. </p>
<p>They included the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/group-areas-act-1950">Group Areas Act (1950)</a>, which dictated where people were permitted to live based on the colour of their skin, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/DC/leg19500707.028.020.030/leg19500707.028.020.030.pdf">the Population Registration Act (1950)</a>, which classified all South Africans by race, and the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01852.htm">Native Laws Amendment Act (1952)</a>, which required all Black South Africans to carry a “passbook”. Referred to as the “dompas”, the document was used to control and restrict the movement of black South Africans. </p>
<p>In 1955, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/destruction-sophiatown">Sophiatown was demolished</a>, and its 60,000 residents were forcibly removed. Magubane’s family were forced to relocate to Soweto. His images focusing on life in the township were later to form the subject of several of his books. </p>
<p>In 1952 the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/defiance-campaign-1952">Defiance Campaign</a> saw widespread non-violent resistance to the hated dompas across the country. It was in this incendiary political atmosphere that Magubane found his calling as a photographer. </p>
<p>In 1954, Magubane began working at <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/drum-magazine">Drum magazine</a> as a driver. The magazine, founded in 1951 and modelled on picture magazines like <em>Life</em> and <em>Picture Post</em>, was to take the lead in changing how Black South Africans were represented in the media. Within three months Magubane had taken up a position as a darkroom assistant. He soon began to work as a photographer under the tutelage of <em>Drum’s</em> chief photographer and picture editor, <a href="https://www.jurgenschadeberg.com/">Jürgen Schadeberg</a>. Magubane rapidly secured his place as one of the great photojournalists of his generation, alongside <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/alfred-khumalo">Alf Kumalo</a>, <a href="https://baha.co.za/">Bob Gosani</a> and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ernest-cole">Ernest Cole</a>. </p>
<p>By the mid-1950s, it became mandatory for Black women to carry passes and in 1956, 20,000 women, united under the banner of the Federation of South African Women, marched in protest to the seat of government, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/1956-womens-march-pretoria-9-august">the Union Buildings in Pretoria</a>. Magubane documented this march and continued to pay close attention to the central role of women in the struggle against apartheid throughout his career. Many of these images are collected in his 1993 book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Women-South-Africa-Their-Freedom/dp/0821219286">Women of South Africa: Their Fight for Freedom</a>.</p>
<p>Between 1956 and 1961, Magubane took photographs of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/treason-trial-1956-1961">Treason Trial</a>, which saw 156 national leaders tried for high treason after the adoption of the Freedom Charter at the <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/what-happened-at-the-treason-trial-africa-media-online/bQVR8md1REM3Iw?hl=en">Congress of the People in Kliptown in 1956</a>. Among the accused were leading members of the African National Congress and of the Congress Alliance, including Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Helen Joseph, Ruth First and Bertha Mashaba. </p>
<p>During this period Magubane was arrested four times and frequently harassed and assaulted by the police. </p>
<p>He was one of the photographers who documented the immediate aftermath of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/sharpeville-massacre-21-march-1960">Sharpeville Massacre</a> on 1 March 1960. On that day more than 7,000 people gathered outside a police station at Sharpeville, a place not far from the city of Johannesburg, to protest against being forced to carry passbooks. Arriving without their passes, their intention was to give themselves up for arrest. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/david-goldblatt-photographer-who-found-the-human-in-an-inhuman-social-landscape-98984">David Goldblatt: photographer who found the human in an inhuman social landscape</a>
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<p>Police officers opened fire and shot 13,000 bullets into the crowd. Official records stated that 69 people were killed, and over 300 wounded, although <a href="https://theconversation.com/sharpeville-new-research-on-1960-south-african-massacre-shows-the-number-of-dead-and-injured-was-massively-undercounted-217828">recent reports</a> suggest the casualties were much higher.</p>
<p>Magubane’s photograph of a seemingly endless row of coffins receding into the distance, awaiting burial, their dark wooden surfaces almost white in the sun’s glare, conveys the terrible magnitude of the massacre. Alongside the coffins are a priest in white robes and hundreds of mourners dressed in dark suits. A woman in a black dress stands near the mass gravesite and holds a white cloth to her mouth in a gesture of profound grief. </p>
<p>The image is both chilling and portentous – as curator Okwui Enwezor has <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-Apartheid-Photography-Bureaucracy/dp/3791352806">noted:</a></p>
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<p>the events of that day produced the picture of the funeral as one of the central iconographic emblems of the anti-apartheid struggle. </p>
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<p>Magubane’s images of Sharpeville were published in <em>Life</em> magazine and played a key role in bringing the brutality of the apartheid state to global notice. </p>
<p>On 16 June 1976, young people of Soweto <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">rose up in protest against being forced to learn in Afrikaans</a>. Magubane convinced the students of the importance of producing a visual record of the struggle. </p>
<p>Photographs he took that day were published as a <a href="https://www.protestinphotobook.com/post/june-16-the-fruit-of-fear">book</a>, Soweto 1976: The Fruit of Fear, to commemorate the terrible events that took place that day, when the police killed between 400 and 700 protesters and injured thousands more. </p>
<p>Among the many powerful images Magubane made at that time is a photograph of two women walking in a dusty street, their faces displaying signs of terrible pain. One of the women has a large tear in her abdomen, an open wound that forms a dark hole at the side of her body. Her slender hands are beautiful, and their perfect smoothness accentuates the brutal rupture where her skin has been broken. </p>
<p>The immediacy of the image is striking and is all the more remarkable with the knowledge that the bullet that pierced the young women’s body had just narrowly missed Magubane’s face. </p>
<h2>The archive</h2>
<p>Magubane published more than 20 books. In 2018 his work <a href="https://proto.a4arts.org/products/on-common-ground-2018">was exhibited</a> in a major retrospective, On Common Ground, alongside that of another renowned South African photographer, <a href="https://www.plparchive.com/david-goldblatt-main/">David Goldblatt</a>. </p>
<p>In 1999, Magubane <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/peter-magubane-timeline-1932">was awarded</a> the Order of Meritorious Service by President Nelson Mandela, <a href="https://southafrica.co.za/peter-magubane-receives-the-order-of-meritorious-service-silver-class-ii-from-president-nelson-mandela.html">who stated</a>: </p>
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<p>For his bravery and courage during the dark days of apartheid, Peter became a beacon of hope not only to thousands of journalists all over the world but also to millions of people across our country.</p>
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<p>He received <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/peter-magubane-timeline-1932">numerous awards</a> for his work, including the Robert Capa Award (1986), Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mother Jones Foundation (1997), the ICP Cornell Capa award (2010), and several honorary doctorates. He served as Nelson Mandela’s photographer from 1990 to 1994.</p>
<p>Magubane’s indomitable spirit and compassionate vision live on through his work. <em>Hamba kahle.</em> (Go well.)</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220558/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kylie Thomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Magubane’s photographs testify to the hope that is at the heart of the struggle for a just world.
Kylie Thomas, Senior Researcher and Senior Lecturer (Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork), NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/193546
2022-11-14T12:25:56Z
2022-11-14T12:25:56Z
Juby Mayet, legendary South African writer and journalist, remembered through new book
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492798/original/file-20221101-23-skjo9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A young Juby Mayet in Vrededorp, Johannesburg.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Baileys African History Archives/Drum photographer/Courtesy Jacana Media</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African writer <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/zubeida-juby-sharon-davis-mayet">Juby Mayet</a> passed away in 2019 at the age of 82. She wrote her autobiography in 1997 but it has only now been published, 25 years later. <a href="https://jacana.co.za/product/freedom-writer/">Freedom Writer: My Life and Times</a> finally places the spotlight on an outstanding figure in South African journalism.</p>
<p>Mayet was a reporter in Johannesburg from 1957 until 1978, and during those two decades she wrote for important popular and political publications. These included the tabloid newspaper Golden City Post, the famous <a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668">Drum magazine</a>, the UBJ Bulletin published by the anti-apartheid Union of Black Journalists, and the anti-apartheid periodical The Voice.</p>
<p>For Black South Africans, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid society</a> was exploitative, violent and demeaning, which made publications produced by Black writers culturally and politically essential. Blacks saw themselves and their experiences represented in ways they recognised and appreciated by Golden City Post and Drum. The UBJ Bulletin and The Voice dared to publish openly critical reports about the apartheid regime’s brutality.</p>
<p>Starting in the late 1960s, Mayet also became a leading anti-apartheid reporter – she preferred the term “freedom writer” – who used her typewriter to speak truth to power and suffered the consequences.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/journalism-of-drums-heyday-remains-cause-for-celebration-70-years-later-142668">Journalism of Drum's heyday remains cause for celebration - 70 years later</a>
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<p>I first met Mayet in 2018 when I interviewed her about her coverage in the 1960s of prosecutions of “mixed” couples who contravened the Immorality Act, the infamous <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/127/1/159/6573630">apartheid law</a> that made it illegal for whites and Blacks to have sex across the colour line. I quickly realised what an impressive person she was and how significant a reporter she had been. </p>
<p>As a historian, I have long been writing about women whose skilful and courageous efforts to navigate life in patriarchal South African society have gone largely unnoticed. Mayet, too, has been overlooked, in her case by researchers who celebrate South Africa’s rich history of journalism and literature. For example, Drum magazine in the 1950s and 1960s is known for producing iconic male Black writers like <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-themba-south-africas-rebel-journalist-was-a-teacher-at-heart-181126">Can Themba</a>, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/william-bloke-modisane">Bloke Modisane</a> and others. But Mayet, too, was a graduate of the “Drum School of Journalism”. She was there, in plain sight, yet somehow invisible to researchers.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo of a woman with pigtails surrounded by five children of varying ages. She has her hands around them and is smiling." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493858/original/file-20221107-25-6a3ctl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Mayet (centre) with five of her eight children in the 1970s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mayet family archive</span></span>
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<p>Fortunately, her autobiography has now been published, along with an afterword I wrote to provide more details about her achievements. I hope she will now get the public attention she deserves.</p>
<h2>Imprinted by Fietas</h2>
<p>Mayet was born in 1937 to a Malay family, a group categorised as Coloured under apartheid. Her autobiography tells of how she was raised in <a href="https://www.joburg.org.za/play_/Pages/Play%20in%20Joburg/Culture%20and%20Heritage/Links/Life-behind-the-scars-of-Fietas.aspx">Fietas</a>, a neighbourhood near downtown Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub. Originally designated as a Malay location, Fietas was destroyed and rezoned a “white” neighbourhood after passage of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/group-areas-act-1950">Group Areas Act</a> (1950).</p>
<p>Fietas was where Mayet developed her cosmopolitan sensibility. The small, vibrant community was culturally diverse; Malays, Indians, Coloureds and some poor whites co-existed peacefully. She was raised Muslim but, she writes, “as a kid, growing up in slums where people lived together, mixed”, she had neighbours, friends and a sweetheart from different cultural and religious backgrounds. Fietas taught her to look beyond race labels, and its imprint on her psyche helps explain her lifelong hatred of apartheid, which sought to differentiate and distance people from one another.</p>
<h2>Discovering the wonder of words</h2>
<p>Mayet always loved reading and wanted to be a writer. She began composing short stories as a teenager and, remarkably, her first was published when she was just 17. Already she had “long ago made up my mind that I was not going to get married and settle down into the rut that I saw so many women finding themselves in”.</p>
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<span class="caption">From left, Rashid Seria, the late Mike Norton, Juby Mayet, Charles Nqakula, Marimuthu Subramoney and Phil Mthimkhulu at a Union of Black Journalists congress in Durban, 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mayet family archive/Courtesy Jacana Media</span></span>
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<p>Her big break came when she was hired to do freelance work for Golden City Post. She impressed senior staff and the owner of the Post and Drum, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jim-bailey">Jim Bailey</a>, who personally hired her as a cub reporter in 1957. She said she always felt like she worked for both publications because they shared staff and offices, and encouraged a joint readership.</p>
<p>She began by covering social and community events, and writing advice columns for adolescents and women, offering recipes and fashion tips. In the 1960s she worked full time for Drum where, she writes, “I really found my wings” as a writer. She started writing feature articles, opinion pieces, short stories, poetry and more.</p>
<h2>The freedom fighter</h2>
<p>Over time, Mayet’s work became overtly political. Some of the stories she was most proud of were about leading Black anti-apartheid activists who she admired, like <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/robert-sobukwe">Robert Sobukwe</a> and <a href="https://www.ru.ac.za/media/rhodesuniversity/content/graduationgateway/hondocs/Profile_for_Ntsiki_Biko.pdf">Nontsikelelo Biko</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Biko">Steve Biko</a>’s widow.</p>
<p>Mayet became a reporter when journalism was a male domain and sexist profession. The famed literary renaissance of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/sophiatown">Sophiatown</a>, a legendary Black neighbourhood also destroyed and rezoned and of which Drum and the Post were part, had been relentlessly macho. Historian Rob Nixon <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Homelands-Harlem-and-Hollywood-South-African-Culture-and-the-World-Beyond/Nixon/p/book/9781032318806">called it</a> “airlessly male and sometimes misogynistic”. Drum made her a cover girl in 1957, something she did not want to be. She wanted to be seen the way she saw herself, as a serious writer. Almost from the start, she criticised sexist traditions and attitudes that limited girls’ imaginations and women’s life choices.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An older woman with long grey hair smiles as she talks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493791/original/file-20221107-3517-a5795f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Mayet interviewed on TV in 2017 after winning a lifetime achiever award for her journalism.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screengrab/YouTube/SABC</span></span>
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<p>In the 1960s she started mocking and then openly criticising apartheid ideology and laws in her reports, columns and short stories.</p>
<p>She joined the Union of Black Journalists in 1973 and it soon “became my life”. She helped publish the UBJ Bulletin, banned after its coverage of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">1976 Soweto uprising</a>, and then The Voice. In 1978 she was arrested for contravening the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/internal-security-act-passed">Internal Security Act</a> and spent nearly five months in detention without trial. After her release, she was “banned”, making it illegal for her to appear or speak in public and for the press to publish or report her words. These acts of reprisal by the regime caused her and her family intense emotional and financial hardship and destroyed her career.</p>
<h2>Time to remember Juby Mayet</h2>
<p>The fact that Mayet, a self-described “extremely shy” girl of colour from a poor family, had the temerity to pursue her desire to be a writer in apartheid-era South Africa is remarkable. The fact that she succeeded in forging a career documenting the absurdities and cruelties of apartheid in the male-dominated, sexist world of journalism is extraordinary. The fact that she did so as a widow raising eight children on a Black reporter’s paycheck is nothing short of incredible. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A book cover showing a woman smoking a cigarette as she types with one hand on a typewriter." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493859/original/file-20221107-21-b3q1b0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana Media</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her career has been neglected in part because she was severely modest. After writing her autobiography in 1997 she did not try to get it published because, she said, she doubted people would want to read about her. </p>
<p>Thankfully Jacana Media, an independent South African publishing house, has brought her autobiography to life.</p>
<p>Mayet is long overdue for serious consideration as a writer. Hopefully her autobiography will ensure she finally wins the recognition and admiration she deserves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susanne M. Klausen has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada with an Insight Grant (2016, Grant #435-2016-1162), the Gerda Henkel Foundation with a research fellowship (2018, Grant #AZ 36/V/18), and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) with an individual fellowship (2019–20).</span></em></p>
The Drum journalist was a rare woman in a male-dominated world. Her autobiography has now been published after her death.
Susanne M. Klausen, Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/79543
2017-06-15T17:54:46Z
2017-06-15T17:54:46Z
South Africa has failed its young people. What can be done about it
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174077/original/file-20170615-24999-m0p6rz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is more than 40 years since young people, first in Soweto, and then around the country, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">rose up against the apartheid regime</a>. Initially their protest was against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools. But it quickly spread into a general uprising against apartheid.</p>
<p>Four decades later and more than two decades after democracy, what prospects do young South Africans have?</p>
<p>The end of apartheid should have heralded a new South African dream for the generation born at its demise. The “<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27146976">born frees</a>” comprise about one fifth of the population. If the definition of youth is extended to include those between 15 and 34, they make up almost <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P02114.2/P02114.22015.pdf">55% of the population</a>.</p>
<p>The hope was that this generation would be living radically different lives from the young people who rose up in 1976. But that dream is <a href="http://www.ci.org.za/depts/ci/pubs/pdf/general/gauge2015/ChildGauge2015-lowres.pdf">still out of reach for most</a>. <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/sa-children-hardest-hit-by-poverty-2092671">Two thirds</a> of the country’s children live in poverty. About <a href="http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2017/02/14/what-south-africa-can-do-about-youth-unemployment-in-the-short-run">50%</a> of young people are without jobs.</p>
<p>Without doubt, there have been key improvements. Education is now provided to all, and years of schooling have increased; child support grants have made substantial differences to nutrition and wellbeing; the delivery of public housing has helped many secure a home for the first time. </p>
<p>Yet the quality of life and opportunities for young people are still defined, to a large extent, by the legacies of their parents. This also means that young South Africans are in no position to help drive economic growth. The country is missing its <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2006/09/basics.htm">demographic dividend</a> moment.</p>
<p>So what can be done about it? An initiative that connects researchers and local governments, combined with a <a href="https://youthexplorer.org.za/">web tool</a> that draws together detailed local information about young people, could help policy makers take a fine-grained rather than a scatter-gun approach to support youth wellbeing. </p>
<h2>Missed chances</h2>
<p>Life’s chances are determined by the quality of education. And that in turn is determined by the income of parents. South Africa’s schooling systems has failed young people abysmally. Drop out rates are <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/general/149291/shocking-drop-out-rates-where-in-south-africa-the-fewest-kids-make-it-to-matric/">shockingly high</a>, with nearly half the country’s learners leaving the schooling system before they matriculate.</p>
<p>These numbers are dismal enough. But there’s an added twist. Unless a young person passes matric – or gets a tertiary qualification – their chances in the labour market are slim. An employer generally doesn’t distinguish between three years of schooling or six or eight or even ten.</p>
<p>It has given rise to a desperate group of young people known as <a href="http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_343153.pdf">NEETS</a>, which stands for Not in Employment, Education or Training. They can include young people with matric, but all are unemployed and few have prospects for further education.</p>
<p>The government has consistently committed to putting youth development high on its national agenda. It has put a number of initiatives in place, including: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>The adoption of a new youth policy in 2015. More recently, President Jacob Zuma promised that all government departments would prioritise programmes that are critical to youth development. There’s little evidence that the national youth policy and the ones that came before achieved anything.</p></li>
<li><p>In 2014 the National Treasury implemented a youth incentive employment tax to encourage employers to give young people their first foot in the door of an increasingly tight labour market. It’s too early to assess whether this is making a difference.</p></li>
<li><p>The creation of a policy-oriented research project on employment, income distribution and inclusive growth at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to look into the stubborn problems of youth unemployment, among other issues. The youth unemployment project is due to present its findings in the next few weeks.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Clearly more needs to be done. Later this month local governments will be asked to play a more proactive role in youth development. This could be a critical contribution.</p>
<h2>Fresh attempt</h2>
<p>A local approach could be significant because the spatial legacy of apartheid still largely determines a person’s life chances. This means that there are vast differences between young people based on where they live. This includes income, education and employment opportunities. </p>
<p>A web tool, called the <a href="https://youthexplorer.org.za/">Youth Explorer</a> , has been developed to help a host of players, including policy makers, to access information about young people in a particular area. It does this by drilling down into conditions in every ward across the country. </p>
<p>The Youth Explorer also allows for comparisons within provinces and between different rural and urban areas, allowing policymakers to compare one area to the country as a whole. </p>
<p>To illustrate its usefulness, take the <a href="https://youthexplorer.org.za/compare/municipality-KZN286/vs/ward-79800103/">information that’s been put together comparing</a> Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma’s rural home constituency, and Sandton, one of the country’s wealthier urban areas. The profile shows that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>22% of the population is between 15 and 24 years of age compared with just 10% in Sandton, </p></li>
<li><p>Just under 50% of young people aged between 20 and 24 have completed matric or higher. The comparable figure in Sandton is about 88%,</p></li>
<li><p>the NEETS category is about 31% in Nkandla and less than 7% in Sandton,</p></li>
<li><p>76% of young people live in households with no access to the internet in Nkandla, compared with 13% in Sandton,</p></li>
<li><p>more than three quarters of people live in households where there is no employed adult, compared with 10% in Sandton, and </p></li>
<li><p>More than 50% of Nkandla homes have no electricity, hardly any have flush toilets (13% have no toilets at all), and 33% live in overcrowded households (defined as more than two people to a habitable room). In Sandton, only 2% have no electricity, everyone has access to a flush toilet and only 1% live in overcrowded households.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Detailed information like this could lead to focused policy interventions that are in tune with young people’s local realities, and conversations that may be able to break the inter-generational cycle of inequality and poverty area by area. </p>
<p>It could help ensure that the South African dream of the “Born-Free” generation may not be entirely lost.</p>
<p><em>Emily Harris and Pippa Green co-authored this article.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79543/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ariane De Lannoy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The end of apartheid should have heralded a new South Africa for the generation born at its demise. But that hasn’t happened.
Ariane De Lannoy, Senior Researcher: Poverty and Inequality Initiative, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71838
2017-04-27T16:09:39Z
2017-04-27T16:09:39Z
More than an oppressor’s language: reclaiming the hidden history of Afrikaans
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166816/original/file-20170426-2841-jw0hf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Award-winning Hemelbesem is a black Afrikaans hip-hop artist.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Facebook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The language of Afrikaans remains a contested issue in South Africa. The controversy over the <a href="http://www.sun.ac.za/english/Lists/news/DispForm.aspx?ID=4027">medium of instruction</a> at traditionally Afrikaans universities such as Stellenbosch has brought this to the fore again. Should it be in Afrikaans, English, a combination, or a hybrid which will include other South African languages?</p>
<p>The institution has to find ways to continue to advance Afrikaans without the perceptions and experiences of racist behaviour associated with early and ruling Afrikaner nationalist practices. It’s essential to consider the current status of Afrikaans, as well as its history.</p>
<p>Many South Africans of every hue have contributed to the language’s formation and development. Afrikaans also has a “black history” rather than just the known hegemonic apartheid history inculcated by white Afrikaner Christian national education, propaganda and the media.</p>
<p>Afrikaans is a <a href="https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/cll.44/main">creole language</a> that evolved during the 19th century under colonialism in southern Africa. This simplified, creolised language had its roots mainly in Dutch, mixed with seafarer variants of Malay, Portuguese, Indonesian and the indigenous Khoekhoe and San languages. It was spoken by peasants, the urban proletariat whatever their ethnic background and even the middle class of civil servants, traders and teachers.</p>
<h2>Afrikaans more black than white</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/45/willemse_mistra-20151105-2_2.zp80127.pdf">Afrikaans</a> is a southern African language. Today <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Minority-of-Afrikaans-speakers-white-20130422">six in 10</a> of the almost seven million Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are estimated to be black. It’s a figure that will by all indications increase significantly in the next decade.</p>
<p>Like several other South African languages, Afrikaans is a cross-border language spanning sizeable communities of speakers in Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. In South Africa and Namibia it’s spoken across all social indices, by the poor and the rich, by rural and urban people, by the under-educated and the educated.</p>
<p>Yet, when the white Afrikaner nationalists <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">came to power</a> in South Africa in 1948 they brought a set of ideas about society, social organisation, the economy, culture and language. Under apartheid, language was deployed as a tool of tribalism, in the service of this divide-and-rule policy.</p>
<p>One of the undoubted successes of Afrikaner nationalist hegemony was the creation of the myth that they, and only they, spoke for those identified as “Afrikaners”. Also, that their worldview was the only significant expression of being Afrikaans speaking. These nationalist culture brokers suppressed oppositional and alternative thought within the Afrikaner community. They also minimised the role and place of black Afrikaans speakers in the broader speech community.</p>
<p>It’s therefore not surprising that socio-political history often casts Afrikaans as the language of racists, oppressors and unreconstructed nationalists. But it also bears the <a href="http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/45/willemse_mistra-20151105-2_2.zp80127.pdf">imprint</a> of a fierce tradition of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, of an all-embracing humanism and anti-apartheid activism. </p>
<h2>Arabic script</h2>
<p>In 1860 one of the students in a Cape Town madrasah (an Islamic school), a descendant of slaves, copied a prayer in his exercise book. Today the surviving fragments of that book reveals a history that somehow remains hidden to the vast majority of South Africans. The exercises in that book, also called a “koplesboek” (head lesson book), are written in “Cape Malay dialect”, the colloquial language of the time.</p>
<p>Apart from the phonetic spelling, any contemporary Afrikaans speaker would recognise it as near-modern Afrikaans. In this case, written in Arabic script. This is but one example of a well-known tradition of <a href="http://alma.matrix.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AjamiIntroductionFallou.pdf">a'jami scripts</a> produced in the Cape Muslim community in the latter half of the 19th century and well into the 1950s.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166817/original/file-20170426-2855-3b71xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=560&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A South African Muslim man in Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Malay community’s earliest members were slaves brought to South Africa by the Dutch. They are the group that first introduced Islam to South Africa, and were the first to use written Afrikaans.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nic Bothma/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Achmat Davids in his path-breaking <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Afrikaans-Cape-Muslims-Talatala/dp/1869192362">The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims</a> (2011) found a similar “koplesboek” dating back to 1806. To give some historical perspective: this was as early as the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/britain-takes-control-cape">second British occupation</a> of the Cape Colony. It was when <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/king-shaka-zulu">Shaka</a> was only a young man of 19 on the verge of his evolution to a notable military leader, great Zulu king and conqueror. </p>
<p>Arabic-Afrikaans was also used in daily communication, the making of shopping lists and political pamphlets. For the Cape Muslims, a literate community, this language was the bearer of their most intimate thoughts and their religion.</p>
<p>Offshoots of this language community self-identified as “Oorlams”. They disseminated what was called Cape Dutch during the late 1780s and early 1800s to the northwestern Cape Colony, today’s west coast of the Northern Cape and southern <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272915807_Is_there_a_Namibian_Afrikaans_Recent_trends_in_grammatical_variation_in_Afrikaans_varieties_within_and_across_Namibia's_borders">Namibia</a>. They played a major role in its <a href="https://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-uiu/Record/uiu_4468573">establishment</a> as the language of trade, culture and education.</p>
<p>However, not everyone thought that Cape Dutch could express learning, writing or upper middle class culture. It was derided by the upper classes of the Cape Colony, be they Dutch or English-speaking. </p>
<p>The opinion of Chief Justice Lord JH de Villiers quoted in Herman Giliomee’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Afrikaners-Biography-Reconsiderations-Southern-African/dp/0813930553">The Afrikaners: Biography of a People</a>, was that this language was,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>poor in the number of its words, weak in its inflections, wanting in accuracy of meaning. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Simplicity, brevity and vigour</h2>
<p>Around 1870 the first steps towards the battle between various views on the nature of Cape Dutch, or what would become known as Afrikaans, were taken. Some of the leading figures of what would become known as the “first language movement” (1874–1890) strenuously denied the creole nature of the language. For them Afrikaans was “a pure Germanic language” of “purity, simplicity, brevity and vigour” (quoted in Giliomee). </p>
<p>The Genootskap van Regte Afrikaanders (GRA, the Society of True Afrikaners), established in 1875, actively sought to foster a nationalism among white Cape Dutch speakers. “Afrikaans” became their linguistic vehicle and “Afrikaners” their label. They sought to write a nationalist history of oppressors and victims (also Giliomee).</p>
<p>The GRA sought to actively demarcate “their language” to the point of diminishing and stigmatising other speakers’ claim to it. They declared their own version of Cape Dutch as prestige “Burger Afrikaans”, the distinct “white man’s language”.</p>
<p>Doggedly, these early Afrikaner language nationalists and their successors modified, standardised and modernised a spoken language. The racial prejudice and middle class bias underlying many of their choices had far-reaching implications. In denying the commonality of their fellow Afrikaans speakers who were descendants of slaves, indigenous people or simply poor, they were elevating the language to a narrow ethnic nationalist cause. Afrikaans was constructed as a “white language”, with a “white history” and “white faces”.</p>
<h2>Nationalism severely diminished</h2>
<p>In a disastrous policy decision, Afrikaans was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">imposed</a> as a language of instruction on black, non-Afrikaans speakers in 1974. The impact was the point of ignition for the Soweto uprising in 1976 and along with it, suspicion of its speakers.</p>
<p>Afrikaans was labelled “the language of the oppressor”. The slogan was rightly an emotive, visceral response to Afrikaner ethnic, nationalist hegemony and its concomitant coercive state power. However, it also <a href="http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/45/willemse_mistra-20151105-2_2.zp80127.pdf">obscured</a> the experiences, lives and histories of black and non-nationalist Afrikaans speakers. </p>
<p>Today, more than two decades into a democratic South Africa, Afrikaner nationalism has been severely diminished and along with it the standing of Afrikaans in the public sector. Nonetheless, in the private spheres of culture, private education, the media and subscription television Afrikaans has seen an exponential growth.</p>
<p>Yet Afrikaans has a <a href="http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/45/willemse_mistra-20151105-2_2.zp80127.pdf">multifaceted nature</a>, numerically dominated by its black speakers. Rather than viewing Afrikaans through a single lens it is today acknowledged as an amalgam consisting of a variety of expressions, speakers and histories. It’s in this spirit that the debate on the medium of instruction at universities such as Stellenbosch has to be conducted.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited, updated version of an <a href="http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/45/willemse_mistra-20151105-2_2.zp80127.pdf">article</a> Prof Willemse wrote for Mistra in 2015.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71838/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hein Willemse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Afrikaans is very much a black language. The apartheid government’s ploy to construct it as a “white language”, with a “white history”, denied the commonality of the language across race and class.
Hein Willemse, Professor of Afrikaans, University of Pretoria
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62374
2016-07-13T20:57:01Z
2016-07-13T20:57:01Z
Under the influence of … the Black Consciousness novel ‘Amandla’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130440/original/image-20160713-12389-e1910l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Miriam Tlali as part of Adrian Steirn's 21 Icons South Africa project. Date: 15.10.2014
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.21icons.com">Adrian Steirn/Courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African novelist <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">Miriam Tlali</a>’s “Amandla” is one of a handful of Black Consciousness novels that renders in fiction the June 1976 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">Soweto uprising</a>.</p>
<p>Published in 1980 by <a href="http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3781">Ravan Press</a>, it was only the second novel authored in English by a black woman to be published within the borders of apartheid South Africa (her 1975 debut, “<a href="http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/tlali/mukhuba3.html">Muriel at Metropolitan</a>” was the first). Predictably, “Amandla” was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/miriam-tlali">banned</a> upon publication.</p>
<p>“Amandla” offers a richly detailed fictional account of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when the township’s youth rose up against the decision to make Afrikaans compulsory as a medium of instruction in black schools. “Amandla” is written from the perspective of a number of young revolutionaries of the time. </p>
<p>Based on Tlali’s experience as a Soweto resident in 1976, the novel depicts the uprising and its aftermath. It vividly sketches the mechanics of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/introduction-black-consciousness-movement">Black Consciousness</a> ideology in the service of anti-apartheid activism. “Amandla” does so while teasing apart gender relations between men and women activists, and within the larger community.</p>
<p>It is one of four novels considered “Soweto novels”, works of fiction depicting the June 1976 uprising. The others are Mongane Serote’s “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02564710308530320">To Every Birth its Blood</a>” (1981), Sipho Sepamla’s “<a href="https://africainwords.com/2014/02/18/teaching-africa-sipho-sepamla-literary-realism-and-a-ride-on-the-whirlwind/">A Ride on the Whirlwind</a>” (1981) and Mbulelo Mzamane’s “<a href="http://www.mml.co.za/children-of-soweto-review-bookchat">The Children of Soweto</a>” (1982).</p>
<p>These novels are heavily influenced by Black Consciousness ideology. They are also shaped by <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a>’s writings on a unified black populace that would decolonise itself from racist indoctrination.</p>
<p>However, “Amandla” departs from these novels in an unprecedented attentiveness to the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10130950.2013.778620">gender politics</a> of the day. It engages in the mimetic work of reflecting black gender relations in Soweto. The novel also constructs a new vision of black masculinity.</p>
<h2>Why is/was it influential?</h2>
<p>Tlali uses Black Consciousness discourse as a launching point for this vision of masculinity. The novel tracks the life of the student leader, Pholoso, and a range of minor characters.</p>
<p>The reader follows Pholoso as he becomes a leader of the youth. In this role he has conscientising sessions in the cellar of a church with young people active in the struggle. Here Tlali allows him long streams of dialogue. He outlines several position statements from the underground resistance movement on how society should be organised.</p>
<p>Relationships between black men and women is one area where he “instructs” the youth on ethical behaviour. In one scene, Pholoso addresses a room of 22 activists as “Ma-Gents”, making it clear that the room is filled with young men. Within this masculinised space, Pholoso articulates, among other things, a strong position on gender equality and relationships with women.</p>
<p>First, he addresses the absence of women from the “innermost core” of the underground movement this gathering represents. He attributes women’s absence to the high levels of sexual harassment to which women are subject whenever they move around Soweto.</p>
<p>Pholoso names this scourge of molestation as an impediment to women’s participation in political activity. He believes it should be countered through educating the public at large.</p>
<p>Critics such as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/463784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Cecily Lockett</a> and <a href="http://www.english.uct.ac.za/professor-kelwyn-sole">Kelwyn Sole</a> have critiqued Pholoso’s centrality as a student leader. They have also scrutinised the masculine space wherein he operates as reifying women’s subservient positions within the anti-apartheid struggle. <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-34153224/forms-of-resistance-south-african-women-s-writing">Margaret Miller</a> makes the case that Pholoso’s utterances confirm the marginal role women seemingly played in the 1976 uprising in his “patronising and contradictory” speech. </p>
<p>What critiques such as Miller’s ignore are the reasons Tlali may have for recruiting a black man in the role of gender conscientising. He is equated with Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, to disseminate a message of gender parity through the community.</p>
<p>In addressing the “Ma-Gents” on the sexual harassment, treatment and education of women, Pholoso advocates an oppositional black masculinity to counter dominant iterations of masculinity in Soweto. He exhorts the men to “go out and educate the people”. Pholoso is reliant on a ripple effect his message will have as it spreads out in concentric circles among the township’s men.</p>
<p>It is important to note that he is not addressing white men or women and their treatment of black women, but black men specifically. A black man himself, he holds black men as a group accountable for the safety, education and equitable treatment of women. He is gesturing to a time as yet unknown, in the future, when black subjects will be free of the oppression of apartheid.</p>
<p>Pholoso infers that women will not only be instrumental in fighting for this new, racially equitable social order. Black men also need to prepare for this time of freedom by ensuring that women and men are fully prepared and able to partake in its fruits.</p>
<h2>Why is it still relevant today?</h2>
<p>Another vignette from the novel deals with the sexual abuse and rape of young women activists while in detention. Here Tlali chillingly notes that rape and sexual abuse in prison is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the price we have to pay for our liberation. We have to fight hard and free ourselves, otherwise these things will always happen to us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These words seem an uncanny foreshadowing of the high rape and sexual abuse rates women would experience after apartheid. It draws into question whether the revolution against apartheid has been fully completed through overcoming only racial oppression.</p>
<p>It also carries a deliberately ambiguous meaning – while the “we” having to fight hard to free “ourselves” signifies the struggle against apartheid, it additionally invokes black women’s gendered struggle against sexual violence. Here, women are being called to simultaneously fight racial oppression while fighting the sexist oppression that spawns rape and sexual abuse. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Oarkgx4ekb0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A short documentary on Miriam Tlali.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In “Amandla”, Tlali thus negotiates Black Consciousness ideology by producing a critique of apartheid rooted in Black Consciousness. Simultaneously she complicates the discourse by showing the gendered experiences of sexual harassment that are singular to black women during the 1976 uprising. </p>
<p>“Amandla” provides a rich historical rendering of one of the turning points in the anti-apartheid struggle. It also gives an insightful analysis of the gender politics of the time. Given this content and context, the novel has great potential to contribute to contemporary discussions of violence against women, especially within national student movements.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-student-movement-splinters-as-patriarchy-muscles-out-diversity-57855">Disagreements</a> about the role of gender and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) students’ role within the most recent student protests seems to have split the movement. Tlali’s novel provides an instructive critique of the gender politics of Black Consciousness, an ideology that has been forcefully reasserted in these most recent protests.</p>
<p>With its strong position on gender relations within Black Consciousness organising, “Amandla” is worth revisiting by student activists seeking to negotiate an ethical path between economic, racial and gender equity demands. Its didactic aims, instead of being dismissed as aesthetically unappealing, could be well utilised in reframing, for young men in particular, the historical events of the 1976 uprising. It could also be a blueprint for avoiding a repeat of the mistakes then made regarding women’s participation in political movements.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62374/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Boswell is a board member of the Triangle Project.</span></em></p>
A South African novel, published in 1980 and dealing with the Soweto student uprising four years earlier, still provides lessons for students today.
Barbara Boswell, Senior Lecturer, English, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.