‘Mary and Annie resist’: gender and resistance in South Africa 1900s–1950s

ABSTRACT

This paper maps women’s political resistance in South Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. Its primary focus is on African and Indian women and how their differing social and economic realities shaped their political consciousness and shaped their activism against the colonial apartheid state. African women, both urban and rural, were confined to the reserves and subjected to pass laws. Indian women who arrived as indentured and free immigrants were exposed to labour tax and immigration controls. Whilst African and Indian women formed part of the oppressed majority, their resistance up until the 1950s was largely organised along racial lines. This paper highlights the complexity of gendered resistance and the dynamics of Indo-African race relations in South Africa’s road to democracy, via archival sources and oral histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• resistance
• Indian
• African
• South Africa

Notes on contributor

Kalpana Hiralal is an associate professor in the School of Social Sciences at Howard College at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate-level modules on global history, women, gender and politics and culture and tourism. Her PhD dissertation focusses on the South Asian Diaspora to Africa in the context of settlement, trade and identity formation. She is the co-editor of Satyagraha, Passive Resistance and its Legacy (Manohar 2015), the editor of Global Hindu Diaspora Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge 2017) and the co-author of Pioneers of Satyagraha Indian South African Defy Racist Laws1907–1914 (Navajivan 2017).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.