‘Isifazane Sakiti Emadolobheni’ (Our Women in the Towns): The Politics of Gender in Ilanga lase Natal, 1933–1938

Abstract

In this article we consider the gender dimensions of the public forum that was constituted, mostly in isiZulu, through Ilanga lase Natal at a time when increasing numbers of African women were migrating to and settling in Durban. At the start of the 1930s letters to the editor were still mostly from men who often articulated anxieties about control over women as part of a conversation about their struggle to act as breadwinners under segregatory rule. It was also in the early 1930s that the growing network of African women’s welfare societies entered public politics in Durban, not least through their successful opposition to plans by the municipality to impose a new system of pass laws on ‘native’ women. Exactly at this time the newspaper introduced an English-language ‘Page for the Ladies’ and invited contributions from educated women. At first it attracted no female writers and reproduced contemporary colonial tropes about proper and improper femininity. But in 1938 kholwa women who were active in Daughters of Africa created a new isiZulu language women’s page. Growing numbers of women were also now writing letters to the editor to debate modern relationships and the gender politics of survival under segregationist rule. The women’s page articulated ideas of public motherhood as part of an African nationalist discourse that pushed against narrowly patriarchal conceptions of the New African.

Keywords:

• Gender
• African nationalism
• print culture
• African newspapers
• urbanisation

Acknowledgements

Graduate research that contributed to this project was made possible by funding from the National Research Foundation.

Notes

1 Benedict W. Vilakazi, ‘What writers has this national paper?’, Ilanga lase Natal, 17 March 1933.

2 Throughout this paper we reproduce the early twentieth century isiZulu orthography, exactly as used in Ilanga lase Natal. The same words were also spelled differently by some writers, particularly in letters to the editor.

3 M. du Toit, ‘“Anginayo ngisho indibilishi!” (I don’t have a penny!) The gender politics of “Native Welfare” in Durban’, South African Historical Journal, 1930–1939, 66,2(2014):295.

4 For an account of Lillian Tshabalala and the early years of the DOA, see M. Healy-Clancy, ‘The Self, the Nation, and the World: The Scale of Clubwomen’s Work, 1912–1943’, Southern African Historical Society Conference, June 2013. Other women mentioned by Vilakazi were V. S. Makhanya of Mbumbulu, founder of the Bantu Youth League, L.P. Vilakazi and ‘Mrs J Mqwebu’ of Groutville. See also Du Toit, ‘The gender politics of “Native Welfare”’, 297 for discussion of the Natal participants of a ‘loose network of organisations inclusive of a trans-Antlantic circuit of people and ideas’ that emerged in the early 1930s.

5 See N. Erlank, ‘Gender and Masculinity in South African Nationalist Discourse, 1912–1950’, Feminist Studies, 29,3(2003):658 for a discussion of ‘[t]he importance of suitable wives as participants in the project whereby African men were imagining a new political community’.

6 ‘Eka Female Qwabe’, Ilanga lase Natal, 15 February 1929. Items of writing attributed to ‘Female Qwabe’ seems to have been part of satirical interplay between several pseudonymous authors who as we suggest below were possibly all in fact the creations of R.R.R. Dhlomo.

7 See J. Guy on the history of the ‘Qwabe isizwe’ and the revival of the Qwabe chiefdom in nineteenth century Natal. It is also possible that Vilakazi was invoking Qwabe participation in the Mapumulo uprising. J. Guy, The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion (Scottsville: University of KwazuluNatal Press, 2005). See also E. Jackson, ‘Four Women, Four Chiefships: Case Studies in the Divergent Choices and Negotiations with Power of Amakhosikhazi in Nineteenth Century Natal’ (MA thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2014), particularly her discussion of ‘precolonial African gender relations and forms of women’s power’ and about widowed chiefly women among the Qwabe and Qadi, 1836–1860.

8 Du Toit, ‘The Gender Politics of “Native Welfare” in Durban’, 303–312.

9 H. Mokoena, ‘The Afterlife of Words: Magema Fuze, Bilingual Print Journalism, and the Making of a Self-archive’, in D.R. Peterson, E. Hunter and S. Newell, eds, African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 361.

10 Much of this growing field of research has been facilitated by the digitisation of newspaper archives. Currently, however, Ilanga lase Natal is only accessible in digital, word-searchable form from 1903 to 1922 as part of the World Newspaper Archive (Readex).

11 H. Mokoena, ‘“An Assembly of Readers”: Magema Fuze and his Ilanga lase Natal Readers’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35,3(2009), as cited in P. Nzuza, ‘Gender Politics of Love, Marriage and Modernity in Ilanga lase Natal 1930–1940’ (Honours thesis, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, 2013), 13.

12 Ilanga lase Natal, 24 August 1937.

13 N. Erlank, ‘Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics in the 1920s and 1930s’, Social Dynamics, 25,1(2019):77.

14 D. Driver, ‘Drum Magazine, 1951–9 and Gender’, in S. Nuttall, E. Gunner and K. Darian- Smith, eds, Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 156–159. See also L. Clowes, ‘“Are You Going to Be MISS (Or MR) Africa?” Contesting Masculinity in Drum Magazine 1951–1953’, Gender & History, 13,1(2001):1–20.

15 L. Thomas, ‘The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa’, Journal of African History, 2006(47):461–462.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid, 467–468.

18 M. Healy-Clancy, ‘Women and the Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography’, South African Historical Journal, 64,3 (2012):452.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 455.

22 Ibid., 457.

23 Ibid., 463–467.

24 Ibid., 451. See also the discussion of Healy-Clancy’s analysis by A. Masola, ‘“Bantu Women on the Move”: Black Women and the Politics of Identity in The Bantu World’, Historia, 63,1(2018): 93–111. H. Hughes also discusses the historiography of ‘women’s participation in the early ANC in ‘Lives and Wives: Understanding African Nationalism in South Africa through a Biographical Approach’, History Compass, 10,8(2012),562–573.

25 N. Erlank, ‘“Brought into Manhood”: Christianity and Male Initiation in South Africa in the early 20th Century’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43,2(2017): 251–265. See also K. Mkhize, ‘Fables of Death: Law, Race and Representations of African Mine Workers in Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 22,2(2010):19–36.

26 J. Opland, ‘Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a stranger in town’, in G Furniss and L. Gunner, eds, Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008), 171–173. See also the anthology of her poetry, J. Opland, The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007).

27 Estelle Fay, ‘A Call to the Daughters of Africa’, Ilanga lase Natal, 24 November 1933. As quoted by Palesa Nzuza in ‘The Gender Politics of Love, Marriage and Modernity in Ilanga Lase Natal’, 48.

28 Ibid.

29 Regular fare for readers of Ilanga lase Natal included the column ‘Izindatshana ngezinto nabantu’, which combined social titbits (someone’s visit to to their relatives, sickness, a wedding, a funeral) with snippets of information or comment about a range of happenings related to schools, religious societies and political organisations or even local news such as an outbreak of influenza. Readers also frequently contributed columns of news about particular localities.

30 Ilanga lase Natal, 24 November 1933. By 1933 there were also short mentions of meetings of Daughters of Africa, for example Ezase Married Quarters, 1 December 1933.

31 Ilanga lase Natal, 6 October 1933.

32 I am here drawing upon Erlank’s discussion of how readers were able to insert themselves into the pages of Umteteli. ‘Umteteli wa Bantu and the constitution of social publics’, 93.

33 For a history of Inanda Seminary, see M. Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013).

34 D. Peterson and E. Hunter, ‘Print Culture in Colonial Africa’, in African Print Cultures, 10. See also K. Barber’s chapter in this volume on ‘Experiments with Genre in Yoruba Newspapers of the 1920s’, 151–178.

35 Peterson and Hunter, ‘Print Culture in Colonial Africa’, 8–9.

36 Erlank, ‘Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics’, 81–85.

37 Research on Johannesburg-based newspapers and the complex dynamics involved in the constitution of black South African social publics and political communities through multiple linguistic registers is as yet fairly limited, with Erlank’s work on Umteteli waBantu and its interrelationship with a range of print publications as an important exception. In ‘Brought into Manhood’ she also discusses a wide range of vernacular and English-language publications besides Umteteli. In ‘Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics’ she characterises conversations in the newspaper as ‘polyglot’ in the 1920s but as increasingly giving way to English in the 1930s (95).

38 The Native Administration Act of 1927 had consolidated African women’s status as perpetual minors. M. Chanock explains the differential status of African women in the Cape Colony, where they attained majority status at the age of 21, compared to Natal, where an ‘African woman could never be a legal major, falling under the guardianship of her father or other household head, husband or husband’s successor’. The ‘Natal Approach’ was endorsed by the Natal and Transvaal Division of the Native Appeals Court after 1927 (336). As quoted in M. du Toit, ‘Mothers’ Pensions and the “Civilised” Black Poor: The Racialised Provision of Child Maintenance Grants in South Africa, 1921–1940’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44,6(2018):977.

39 ‘Umteto Oswelekile’, Ilanga Lase Natal, 3 February 1933.

40 C.Z. Biyela, ‘Yini Imbango Yokwonakala Entsheni Yesifazana?’ Ilanga lase Natal, 1 December 1933. As quoted by P. Nzuza in ‘The Gender Politics of Love, Marriage and Modernity in Ilanga Lase Natal’, 48.

41 Ibid. Compare the discussion by J. Soske, albeit focused on the 1950s, of the public debate that took place in the aftermath of the ‘1949 Anti-Indian pogrom’, and that included IIanga lase Natal, Indian Opinion and Inkundla. In ‘“Wash Me Black Again”: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu Natal, 1944–1960’ (PhD Thesis, University of Toronto, 2009), 28–135.

42 P. Nzuza in ‘The Gender Politics of Love, Marriage and Modernity in Ilanga Lase Natal’, 48.

43 J. C. Danibe, Ilanga lase Natal, 13 April 1934.

44 Ibid.

45 M.J. Mkwanazi, Ilanga lase Natal, 15 June 1934.

46 Ibid. See also P. La Hausse, ‘The Message of the Warriors. The ICU, the Labouring Poor and the Making of a Popular Political Culture in Durban, 1925–1930’ in P. Bonner et al., eds, Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press and Ravan Press, 2001). The chapter includes discussion of the ICU’s militant ‘Women’s Auxiliary’ which was active at this time.

47 Ilanga lase Natal, 15 June 1934.

48 Du Toit, ‘The Gender Politics of “Native Welfare” in Durban’, 293–296. See also G. Vahed, ‘Control of African Leisure Time in Durban of the 1930s’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 18(1998),68–70.

49 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Isifazane Sabantu Namadolopa’, 11 January 1935.

50 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Umthetho Omusha Wesifazana sabantu eThekwini’, 15 March 1935.

51 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Durban Town Council and Native Women’, 12 April 1935.

52 Ibid.

53 A.C Maseko, Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Ukuganana kwabantu nelobolo’, 22 March and 26 April 1935. See also Nzuza, ‘The Gender Politics of Love, Marriage and Modernity in Ilanga Lase Natal’, 52. Articles by the same author appeared on 19 and 26 April 1935.

54 Ibid.

55 Ilanga Lase Natal, ‘The Latest Class Legislation’, 15 March 1935, ‘Impi Ezayo yama Ntaliyana’, 19 August 1935.

56 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Communist Propaganda against Natives’ and ‘Impatho Entsha Yabantu’, 10 May 1935.

57 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Terribly Amiss’, 29 March, 1935;‘Empire Day’, 24 May 1935.

58 The Natal Mercury, 30 August 1935, ‘Native Villages in Reserves. Yesterday’s Evidence Before Urban Areas Committee’. See Du Toit, ‘The Gender Politics of “Native Welfare”’ for a more detailed discussion of the memorandum presented by the Durban Bantu Women’s Society, which included a call for more inclusive state social welfare and criticised the policies that failed to accept the interdependence of the ‘the Native townships which are springing up’ in urban areas and nearby ‘native reserves’. The women also argued that ‘the low wages paid to the Natives’ forced wives as well as husbands to look for work, thus also causing problems with ‘parental control’.

59 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘The Emancipation of Women and What has Resulted From It’, 17 May 1935. This address was also printed in The Bantu World. Healy-Clancy provides more biographical details about Pumla Ngozwana, who was Fort Hare graduate. See ‘Women and the Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography’, 461. See also Masola’s discussion of Ngozwana in ‘Bantu Women on the Move’, Historia, 63,1(2018):93–111.

60 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘The Emancipation of Women and What has Resulted From It’, 17 May 1935.

61 Durban Archives Repository, TBD, 3DBN, 1/2/12/1/3, Native Advisory Board Minutes, 20 May and 11 June 1936; 3DBN, 4/1/3/1635, File 359c, V1 (Proposed Compulsory Registration of Women. January 1936 to May 1946). Letter from Councillor Kemp to the Town Clerk, 12 June 1936. He was writing after the meeting with the Native Advisory Board, held the previous evening.

62 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Umhlangano waBantu eThekwini. Wokukhuza Umhlolo Wamapasi Kwabesifazana Uma Beza eThekwini’, 11 July 1936.

63 Ibid.

64 Ilanga Lase Natal, 2 January 1937, ‘Umhlangano wamadodakazi aseAfrika eThekwini’. Report on the meeting held by Daughters of Africa on 17 December 1936 at the Bantu Social Centre. Bantu World, 20 February 1937.

65 Here I am drawing on Erlank’s discussion in ‘Umteteli wa Bantu and the constitution of social publics’. Umteteli’s ‘promiscuous’ layout ‘included the casual and irregular intermingling of social and personal news with all the other paper content’. Readers’ contributions appeared as part of a composite textual space that foregrounded ‘black modernity and social achievement’ (4–6).

66 Banners to indicate a sports page and a page for letters to the editor were also now appearing. At first these pages also featured miscellaneous items.

67 Ilanga LaseNatal, 19 December 1936.

68 Ibid., 9 January 1937.

69 Ibid., 16 January 1937.

70 Thomas, ‘The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa’, 467.

71 I. Hofmeyr, ‘Introduction: World Literature and the Imperial Textual Commons’, English Studies in Africa, 57,1(2014):1–8. See also Hofmeyr and Peterson, ‘The Politics of the Page: Cutting and Pasting in South African and African-American Newspapers’, Social Dynamics, 25,1(2019):22. They discuss newspapers’ participation in the vast ‘textual commons in which exchange editors worked’. Little exploration has yet been done as to how Ilanga lase Natal participated in such practices.

72 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Nxa Ingane Isizakufika. Izeluleko koMam baBantu’, 30 January 1937.

73 Ilanga lase Natal, 16 January, 6 March and 20 March 1937.

74 Ilanga lase Natal, 30 January 1937. Advertisements for herbal products and medicines had sometimes targeted women in the 1920s and early 1930s, but a far wider range of household products were now advertised.

75 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Umhlangano waMadodakazi aseAfrika eThekwini’, 2 January 1937.

76 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Insolo Esinqumweni saMadodakazi’, 16 January 1937.

77 Durban Archives Repository, TBD, 3DBN 4/1/1625 file 359c, v1. To the Town Clerk, from S W Shepstone, NWO, 9 March 1937.

78 Du Toit, ‘The Gender Politics of “Native” Welfare in Durban’, 293.

79 Ibid.; Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Izindaba ezisemoyeni. Ukusina kwe ICU eTekwini’, 6 December 1929.

80 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Amapasi Esifazane eThekwini’, 13 March 1937’; also ‘Happy End of Procession’, 27 March 1937. On the latter date, the report in English appeared on the front page. A report in isiZulu, ‘Udwendwe Lwesimame eThekwini’ was printed inside the newspaper. Up to this point (and ever since the paper’s launch in 1903) the front page had been entirely devoted to advertisements.

81 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Amapasi nabesifazana eThekwini’, 3 April 1937.

82 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Amakhosi Nesifazane Sakithi, 24 April 1937.

83 Ibid.

84 Ilanga lase Natal, 20 March 1937.

85 llanga lase Natal, ‘Ophendula Isifazane’, 15 May 1937. On the same day, a letter by Ntombisaka Meyiwa was also published. She also wrote as a woman who opposed the practice of polygamy, and to advise about how to instill morals into the young.

86 Ilanga lase Natal, 1 May 1937.

87 15 May 1937. The editor of the Bantu World, R.R.R. Dlomo wrote a letter in protest at this perceived criticism on 5 June and Swazi Wizard replied (Ilanga lase Natal, 12 June).

88 Ilanga lase Natal, 25 September 1937.

89 Ilanga lase Natal, 9 April 1938.

90 Ilanga lase Natal, 2 April 1938. See also her column on ‘Women’s Activities’, 9 April 1938, where Daughters of Africa is mentioned.

91 Ilanga lase Natal, 2 April 1938.

92 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘A Kind Word’, 21 April 1938.

93 Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in colonial West Africa, ‘Introduction: Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and the Question of Agency in Colonial West African Newspapers’, 13.

94 In 1928–9 Ilanga lase Natal’s pseudonymous writers included ‘Umfana we Sangoma’ (written in isiZulu), ‘Rollie Reggie’ (who wrote in English) and Amicus Homini Gentis. The texts were variously published in the format of social columns about kholwa activities (with snippets of social and other local news), letters to the editor and even a prayer by ‘Female Qwabe’. There was also so much playful argument and jibes directed between texts attributed to different pseudonymous authors. See for example Ilanga lase Natal, 28 June 1928, 17 August 1928, 22 December 1928 and 5 February 1929. See also C. Sandwith, ‘Well-seasoned talks: the newspaper column and the satirical mode in South African letters’, Social Dynamics, 2019:103–120, in which she discusses Rolfes Robert Reginald Dhlomo’s satirical writing particularly in The Bantu World during the 1930s.

95 Sandwith, ‘The Newspaper Column and the Satirical Mode in South African Letters’, 116.

96 Ibid., 113.

97 Girls were named ‘Nomabhunu’ at least from the middle of the nineteenth century and the name is current today. One of Mpande’s daughters was apparently called Nomabhunu.

98 T. Waetjen and G. Vahed, ‘The Diaspora at Home: Indian’ Views and the Making of Zuleikha Mayat’s Public Voice’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 81,1(2011):23–41. See also L. Havstad, ‘Multiracial Women and the African Press in Post-World War II Lourenço Marques, Mozambique’, South African Historical Journal, 68,3(2016):390–414, for analysis of ‘Pagina para a Mulher’, the women’s pages that appeared in O Brado Africano from 1948 to 1958.

99 Ilanga lase Natal, 23 April 1938

100 Ilanga lase Natal, 30 April 1938.

101 Ibid.

102 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Ezimbizeni. Amaqanda-ekudleni’, 23 July, 1938; ‘Ezimbizeni. AmaLemon Asiza Kokuningi’, 30 July 1938.

103 Ilanga lase Natal, 18 June 1938, ‘Impilo Yethu. Izingozi Zobusika’, 25 June, ‘Impilo Yetthu, Imikhuba Yabantu emibi empilweni Yabo’; Impilo Yethu. Isifuba’, 30 July 1938; ‘Ezimbizeni. Okungadliwa Nsukuzonke Ngemali ephansi’, 1 October 1938.

104 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Impumelelo’, 2 July 1938.

105 Ibid.

106 Ilanga lase Natal, Nomabhunu, ‘Ukungesabi’, 18 June 1938.

107 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Inthuthuko’, 30 July 1938. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau visited South Africa in 1938 together with her husband who was Deputy High Commissioner for India.

108 Ibid.

109 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Abokunakekelwa’, 16 July 1938.

110 Ilanga lase Natal, ‘Imihlangano Yabesifazane’, 4 June 1938.

111 H. Hughes, First President: A Life of John L. Dube, Founding President of the ANC (Cape Town: Jacana Media, 2011), 227. Hughes mentions that Angelina Dube and Bertha Mkhize visited mission stations as part of their work for Daughters of Africa.

112 Hofmeyr and Peterson, ‘The Politics of the Page’, 13.

113 Ilanga lase Natal, B. Mkhize, ‘Abona Ngehlo Elisha Amadodakazi Ase Afrika. Amazwi ka President emaBomvwini’, 18 June 1938. The meeting had been on 30 April 1938 and was held at ‘Bomvwini’, rural Natal. The article reported among others such as teachers and church ministers, attendance of three chiefs, including ‘Chief Njengabantu’.

114 Ilanga lase Natal, 5 and 12 November 1938.

115 Hofmeyr and Peterson, ‘The Politics of the Page’, 16.

116 Newell, A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa, 62. See her chapters in this book on ‘Printing Women: The Gendering of Literacy’ (122–158) and ‘Nominal Ladies and “Real” Women Writers: Female Pseudonyms and the Problem of Authorial Identity in the Cases of “Rosa” and “Marjorie Mensah” (159–169).

117 Waetjen and Vahed, ‘The Diaspora at Home’; Havstad, ‘Multiracial Women’.

118 Healy, ‘Women and the Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography’, 460; ‘The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women’, 844.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marijke du Toit

MARIJKE DU TOIT is teaching and learning specialist for the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape. Her earliest research and publications are focused on histories of gender, nationalism and state social welfare in early twentieth-century South Africa. Her interest in photography and urban histories of segregation and apartheid resulted in several exhibitions and a co-authored book, Breathing Spaces: Environmental Portraits of South Durban (2016). Her current research includes a focus on African print cultures and the materialities of paper archives.

Palesa Nzuza

PALESA NZUZA is an MA student in History at the University of the Western Cape. Her research project is on the gender politics of love, marriage and modernity in Ilanga lase Natal, 1939–1945.