Grace and The Townships Housewife: Excavating black South African women's magazines from the 1960s1

1. This Focus draws on research completed for a Masters thesis and primary research done in the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, where copies of the two magazines can be found. I am grateful to Meg Samuelson for her assistance in completing my Masters thesis and this paper. I would also like to thank the Cape Tercentenary Foundation and the National Research Foundation, South Africa, for funding my thesis.

abstract

Grace and The Townships Housewife, two black women's magazines published in South Africa between 1964 and 1969, have slipped into obscurity. In what follows, I reassess their role in the history of the black popular press in South Africa. Grace and The Townships Housewife appear to be the first women's magazines in South Africa aimed specifically at black women, preceding other more familiar titles such as True Love (1974), Pace (1978) and Thandi (1985). Besides a brief reference to these two magazines in Switzer and Switzer's The Black Press In South Africa And Lesotho (1997:157–158), no research has ever been done on Grace and The Townships Housewife. The first section provides general information (staff, content, target audience) on the magazines. The second part foregrounds the colliding voices that infuse the magazines’ content: at times the magazines promote modernity (which they often equate with ‘white’, ‘western’ lifestyles); at other times they critique modernity as destructive of cherished African traditions. The final section involves a brief comparison between the representation of black women in Grace and The Townships Housewife and the representation of black women in Drum magazine (1950s) and in Die Huisgenoot, Sarie Marais and Fair Lady (1960s). Critical to this discussion will be the sense of self-authorship presented in Grace and The Townships Housewife.

Keywords:

• Black women's magazines
• black consumerism
• urban modernity
• self-representation
• negotiating identity

Notes

1. This Focus draws on research completed for a Masters thesis and primary research done in the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, where copies of the two magazines can be found. I am grateful to Meg Samuelson for her assistance in completing my Masters thesis and this paper. I would also like to thank the Cape Tercentenary Foundation and the National Research Foundation, South Africa, for funding my thesis.

2. Switzer and Switzer (1979:14) state that:

“[a]longside the government - and sometimes in collusion with it - was the Afrikaans Press which published multi-lingual pictorial magazines like Bona, founded in March 1956”.

3. See Gqola (2001) on Staffrider magazine and Ferreira (2009).

4. Dorothy Driver (2002:157–159) notes that no stories by women appeared in Drum during the 1950s - those that bear a female signature were written by male writers under female pseudonyms. There might be a similar, yet different case of white women writing under black women's signatures in the two magazines under discussion.

5. These laws include the provision of separate buildings, services and conveniences for different racial groups (Omond, 1986:53).

6. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) sanctioned the persecution of any individual group or doctrine intended to bring about “encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non-European races of the Union” (Hellmann and Lever quoted in Lodge, 1983:33).

7. This could possibly be linked to a change in ownership. From May 1965, Grace was printed, published and distributed by the proprietors Grace Publications (Pty) Ltd.

8. The winners of such pageants are in the magazines celebrated as ‘Miss South Africa’ (or ‘Miss Benoni’, ‘Miss Johannesburg’), although they were not allowed to compete against women of other racial groups, or granted access to the national title, until 1991. In 1992 Amy Kleinhans became the first Coloured woman to win the pageant and in the following year Jacqui Mofokeng became the first black Miss South Africa.

9. Notably, Ntsikana is frequently a touchstone in the writing of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, the first woman to publish a substantial body of poetry in isiXhosa. Mgqewtho was a Xhosa Christian, like Ntsikana, who published over 100 poems between 1920 and 1929. She distils Ntsikana's message that sought to advance a synthesis between Africa and the West into the pithy lines: “The truth is found in scriptures/and also within our blankets” (Opland, 2007:196).

10. For a comparable case, see Opland (2007:180).

11. Die Huisgenoot (The House Companion) was founded as a general interest South African family magazine in 1916 in Cape Town. In its initial years the magazine served as a political mouthpiece of the Cape National Party and it consequently supported the cultural interests of white Afrikaners.

12. Sarie Marais, founded in 1946, was South Africa's first Afrikaans women's magazine. The name was taken from an Afrikaans folksong, “Sarie Marais”, created during the South African War (c 1900). The initial focus of Sarie Marais, as in early copies of Die Huisgenoot, is on the positive representation and encouragement of the Afrikaner volk.

13. Fair Lady was launched as a monthly magazine in March 1965 and was the first English-medium magazine in South Africa to be aimed mainly at a female readership (Meyerson, 1989). Similarly to Sarie Marais, it was published by Nasionale Tydskrifte, a subsidiary of Naspers, and was generally known as the English sister magazine of Sarie Marais.

14. In August 1952, Mavis Kwankwa wrote a short piece called ‘Birth of a Baby’, but it was only at the end of the decade that the next women's by-lines appeared: In 1959, Marion Welsh began to write a regular column called ‘Girl About Town’ and MK Jeffreys produced a series of controversial essays on race (Driver, 2003:252).