The spiritual journey to becoming a history-keeper of South African liberation movements

ABSTRACT

The editors of this collection reflect on the ways that studying the anti-apartheid liberation movement is a consciousness raising process. We consider the cosmological, spiritual, and affective impact of tarrying with liberation histories. From Vincent Harding’s (1981) conceptualisation of a ‘deep river’ and Cedric J. Robinson’s (1983) notion of a ‘Black Radical Tradition’ to the ‘endarkened feminist storytelling’ offered by Cynthia Dillard in 2000 and 2012 and elaborated upon by Venus Evans-Winters and Bettina Love (2015) and S.R. Toliver (2021), there are a set of devotional and spiritual practices associated with being hailed by and becoming a carrier of the historical memory of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Contributing authors reflect on the pivotal personal life experiences, and definitive exile journeys, that shaped their families and communities. These early, formative, and mostly non-organisation-based consciousness-raising experiences have been understudied in the historiography of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Nevertheless, these are vital pathways to internationalism, as a set of contemporary research practices, movement and organisation strategies, and political identities. Our goal has been to make sacred ways of being salient in the historical research on the anti-apartheid liberation movement.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-apartheid liberation movement
• cosmology
• Sangomas
• devotional histories
• consciousness-raising
• soul work
• pathways to international research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The description of the organisation can be found here: https://www.ipsa.org/profile/african-association-political-science. The organisation’s journals can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/publisher/aaps.

2. For more discussion of these ideas, see the following article: Alburo-Cañete et al. (2022) ‘(Dis)comfort, judgement and solidarity: affective politics of academic publishing in development studies’, Third World Quarterly, 43:3, 673–683, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2022.2039064

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center (USA).

Notes on contributors

Martin L. Boston

Martin L. Boston is Assistant Professor of Pan African Studies and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento State). He holds a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), and also taught at DePaul University, UC San Diego, and Washington State University before joining the Ethnic Studies Department at Sacramento State. Boston’s research focuses on South Africa’s exile period (1960–1994), US-South African comparative history and liberation movements, apartheid and segregation, and Black South African and Black American cultural producers.

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an American academic and author who is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Professor Extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa. Willoughby-Herard’s research focuses on Black political thought, Black radical movements, Black feminist politics, feminist pedagogy, South African politics, youth politics, political education, and queer and trans sexualities.