Twentieth-Century South African Women’s Memoir as Historiography

ABSTRACT

While historians of twentieth-century South Africa have made use of women’s memoirs as an archive, this article argues that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. In Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965), Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985), and Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography by Emma Mashinini (1989), authors critique and reconstitute narratives of the South African past, told through the lives of politically engaged women. They present versions of South African history that not only act as a corrective to the apartheid state-sanctioned narrative of South African history as white supremacist triumph, but also probe the limits of the histories narrated by liberation movements.

KEYWORDS:

• memoir
• nation
• historiography
• South Africa
• gender

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude to Srila Roy and Caio Simões de Araújo for including this article, providing me with a space to begin thinking about a new strand in my research. I am especially grateful for the anonymous reviewer’s comments. My particular thanks go to the two groups of students who enrolled for my South African Women’s Memoir seminar at Colby, and to Lauren Parker.

Notes

1 Luise White (2021) has addressed similar texts written by members of the Rhodesian security forces.

2 Perhaps most notably Jonathan Hyslop (2010).

3 Historians have, too, produced a substantial literature on black women’s political activism and lives under segregation and apartheid. Important early texts include Keletso Atkins (1986), Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe (1991), Jacklyn Cock (1980), Deborah Gaitskell (1979), Shireen Hassim (1993), and Cherryl Walker (1982, 1990).

4 Scholars have long been interested in the question of women’s relationship with the state and the nation in South Africa. See especially Anne McClintock (1991), Linzi Manicom (1992) and Hassim (2006).

5 In March 2022, a re-opened inquest into Aggett’s death in custody found that members of the Security Branch were responsible for his murder.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

SE Duff

SE Duff is assistant professor of African and world history at Colby College in Maine, United States. An historian of age and gender, she is the author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 (2015) and Childhood and Youth in African History (2022).