And their voices were everywhere: Myesha Jenkins and the Pan-African feminist performance strategies of liberation

ABSTRACT

Feminist poet, editor, and anti-Apartheid activist Myesha Jenkins brought – possibly for the first time on South African public radio – a deliberate feminist agenda that validates poetry as political action. This paper documents and analyses her amplification of poetry on public radio and the feminist collectives that came before it, with specific focus on Jenkins’ Pan-African feminist imagination and movement building. I suggest that Jenkins’ body of work – particularly Poetry in the Air (PitA) – provided wider access to the featured poets as well as a place for self-writing and self-representation. I argue that PitA, along with Jenkins’ other work building feminist poetry and performance collectives, made important contributions to South African women’s performance strategies of liberation, in a country (and world) that actively (re)produces the ‘Female Fear Factory’. As a co-creator with Jenkins on some of these Pan-African feminist poetry collectives and productions, I use the oral histories that I conducted with her between 2016 and 2017, the transcripts of PitA, and the social history of contemporary South African feminist poetry collectives to examine her legacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry in the Air (PitA)
• Pan-African feminist poetry
• radio
• Female Fear Factory (FFF)
• Myesha Jenkins
• feminist poetry collectives

Disclosure statement

I am indebted to the feminist poets whose work continues to animate my research. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalia Molebatsi

Natalia Molebatsi is a Pan-African feminist poet, writer, editor and performer from South Africa. She is the author of two poetry collections, Sardo Dance (2009) and Elephant Woman Song with paintings by Tiziana Pers (2017). She is the editor of two poetry anthologies We Are …: A Poetry Anthology (2008) and Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems (2021/2022). Natalia is a PhD student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University (USA).