And she didn't die: An interview with Lauretta Ngcobo in Johannesburg, 18 August 2010

abstract

Lauretta Ngcobo is a political figure whose engagement with the anti-apartheid struggle predates the birth of the Pan-African Congress, of which she is a founding member, and her subsequent political exile in the early 1960s. Her literary works – Cross of Gold (1981), And They Didn't Die (1990) – can be read as fictionalised histories of the anti-pass campaign of the 1950s and 1960s and its aftermath. Ngcobo's particular sensitivity to the socio-political and cultural forces shaping the life experiences of Black women and their writing in apartheid South Africa is illustrated by essays such as African Motherhood – Myth and Reality (1988), penned in exile. Her latest offering, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (2012), stems from a deep awareness of the silencing of women's voices within the post-apartheid liberation narrative. My introduction to the short interview that I conducted with the author at the Miriam Tlali Book Club (Johannesburg, 18 August 2010), shows that Ngcobo herself is not immune to the patriarchal representations that marginalise the voices of female anti-apartheid activists. I propose that studying the reception of her work requires an examination of domesticating labels such as ‘struggle wife’ alongside literary descriptors such ‘exile writer’, ‘struggle writer’ or ‘feminist writer’.

keywords:

• Black women
• apartheid
• Lauretta Ngcobo
• historiography
• literature

Notes

1. Mbulelo Mzamane, author of Mzala: The short stories of Mbulelo Mzamane (1980), Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

2. Es'kia Mphahlele, author of Down Second Avenue (1959), London: Faber & Faber.

3. Njabulo S. Ndebele, author of Fools and Other Stories (1983), Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

4. Literary event held at the Windybrow Theatre in Johannesburg to celebrate Women's Month in the week preceding the interview.

5. Charlotte Maxeke (1874–1939), founder of the Bantu Women's League, which later became part of the ANC Women's League.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Polo Belina Moji

POLO BELINA MOJI is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pretoria and co-convenor of Gender Research@University of Pretoria (GR@UP), which was initially launched under the auspices of the Institute of Women's and Gender Studies at the same institution. With a PhD in Comparative Literature (Sorbonne-Nouvelle 2011) Polo is associated with the Department of Modern European Languages, where she conducts research in the field of Feminist Literary Theory and Francophone/African Literatures. Email: [email protected]