On maternal legacies of knowledge, ukwambathisa, and rethinking of the sociology of Eastern Cape, South Africa

ABSTRACT

This volume excavates and explores maternal knowledge histories from ordinary and everyday ways of knowing that have been repudiated in ontological and epistemic foundations in formal institutions of learning globally. The purpose is to deliberately insert African maternal legacies of knowledge and in this way disrupt, rethink and reimagine values around which academic canon is constructed in the academy, values which privilege patriarchal ways of knowing. Contributions in this volume emphasise the use of African maternal legacies of knowledge as part of the process of canon formation. As is widely known, the academic canon marginalises or misrepresents African maternal ways of knowing and the contestations around the canon have intensified in the last decade, whose genesis is in the introduction of schooling in Africa. It is therefore necessary to include in the canon, knowledge that reflects maternal realities and ways of knowing to produce a representative and inclusive canon.

KEYWORDS:

• Maternal legacies
• canon
• indigenous languages
• sociology
• Eastern Cape

The canon debate and the maternal legacies of knowledge

In South Africa, particularly the present-day Eastern Cape Province, there is a long history of contestations on the prominence of a particular knowledge in institutions of learning, namely, an epistemic canon deriving from the Western intellectual world, and obliteration and ostracisation of African maternal knowledge and thought systems. The driving force behind the contestations were the early African thinkers, as early as the 1800s. They present a strong dissension about the imperial and colonial projects which introduced a schooling system that sought to devalue and invisibilise African thought systems. The invisibilisation, they argued, meant exclusion of African ways of knowing in institutions of power and knowledge production, such as those of learning. It also slanted the ways in which others perceive African historical, social, political, and other experience, and also in which Africans themselves understand their own histories. They further posit that the indigenous African phenomena must be made knowable as an integral part of the epistemic canon in education (Gqoba [1888] 2015; Mgqwetho [1924] 2007; Ntantala 1958); because it is knowledge production that gives value and power to a canon that excludes African thought systems and entrenches silences about them.

The distinction of what should be included in the academic canon is never neutral but is riddled with issues of power and other dynamics. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to the desire to address a range of issues around gender and knowledge production in South African academy as well as to intentionally begin a process of valuing maternal legacies of African women through all forms of archives: the historical archive, linguistic archive, literary archive, oral archive, and so forth. The ultimate aim is to insert these maternal legacies of knowledge, which have been undermined and marginalised because of the power dynamics around gender, in the academic canon.

The canon debate, especially in relation to its lack of inclusiveness, raises questions of whose epistemology and ontology are appreciated, and therefore included in the construction of the canon, and which are not, and what is the extent with which the canon formation resembles power struggles between those social groups that are included, and those excluded? In South Africa, the debate goes beyond this and raises questions about how choices are made in rendering the canon inclusive, and what power dynamics are in place. This is so because, historically canon formation processes are never neutral or impartial but show struggles of power with respect to class, race, religion, gender, and so forth. The South African canon constitutes contributions that exclude outputs by African scholars, African women, and in African languages. This is motivated by deliberate ignorance that there are no sources from which one can draw in the revision, growth, diversification, and transformation of the canon.

This volume is a response to the questions above. It engages with and reflects on thoughts, ideas, and knowledge of and by African women. It is also motivated by the debates about transformation of the academic canon in South Africa, particularly the need for inclusivity of the canon, and to consider indigenous ways of knowing in the teaching, learning, and research practices of the university.

The value of indigenous languages in foregrounding intellectual thought

The uniqueness about this volume is the consideration of indigenous language concepts in unpacking issues around maternal legacies. Language, whether written or spoken, is the medium through which societies share their values, thoughts, and opinions about their physical, social, and spiritual environment. It is the lens through which they construct their ideas, beliefs, and thoughts about the world around them. Language, the words used to communicate, is the source of knowledge for any society speaking that language (Wa Thiong’o 2013).

While language as a means of communication is important, however, it is not as important as knowledge, ideas, and wisdom embedded in the language itself. Mazisi Kunene (1981) fiercely argues against the practice of marginalisation of African ways of knowing in the academy which ascribes to them only as folk thought with no place of merit in the academy. Kunene places language at the centre of the reimagination of African ways and thought. He argues that “the secret ancient wisdom lies in the names of things and their forgotten meanings” (Kunene 1981, ix). In advancing this thought, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1986, 15) states that language serves as a “collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history,” and of cultural cognition of speech community, philosophy, and belief systems. Language can therefore be viewed as a reservoir for “storing” and communicating cultural cognition, acting as both memory bank and a fluid vehicle for (re-)transmission of cultural cognition (Maseko 2018; Ntshingana 2019). Words that make up a language spring from the struggles to name the thoughts we have about different phenomena in our social surroundings; words are the dress that cover the ideas of a society. This is a universal linguistic phenomenon (Wa Thiong’o 2013).

This understanding of language and knowledge suggests that all beings have a common phenomenon – to use language to express past experiences and to react to the present to make sense of the future. This issue hopes to show the dynamisms of language, how it adapts and captures the fluidity of gender in African language and its transformative abilities towards decolonial futures. Sylvia Tamale (2020) warns against the decolonial agenda that is devoid of the cultural and historic sensitivity if we are to enjoy women’s liberties.

The general understanding that language is not static, and therefore cannot be a reliable source of historical archives, is noted with caution as the words and meaning change over time but values attached to them remain. This is why ubuntu as an African philosophy has stood the test of time, even though it has been commercialised and adapted in different sectors of our lives. We hope to show that gender fluidity embedded in indigenous languages can be seen as a resource to build on and protect the growing gender and sexual liberties.

Titled Maternal Legacies of Knowledge: Rethinking the Sociology of the Eastern Cape the contributions here were part of a research project led by Nelson Mandela University, where scholars, activists, traditional and organic intellectuals, and musicians gathered to interrogate the undervalued maternal contributions of our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and sisters who have shaped our knowledge foundations as scholars. Through their stories, folktales, stories of origin, reciting of clan names (iziduko), our grandmothers have managed to locate our own histories and transferred this oral history without receiving recognition. We wanted to excavate the maternal knowledge histories from ordinary and everyday ways of knowing that have defined our ontological and epistemic foundations with the purpose of embedding these in the formal academic canon. We wanted to build from the ongoing works of Bernedette Muthien and June Bam (2021) in their formulation of the “indigenous feminist perspective” that seeks to produce knowledge of our “precolonial past that is fuller, more complex, diverse, of immense value and therefore, not dismissible.”

In this special issue, we centralise the indigenous women’s oral and textual histories as part of building what Toyin Falola calls a “ritual archives” (2017). In his insistence on the “archive” beyond the walls of the formalised institutions of knowledge, Falola encourages us to preserve the cultural meanings of rituals and their interpretations as archives. By re-reading of words in the historical texts, oral knowledge from our grandmothers, reading of the arts, rituals, songs, rhymes, poems, proverbs (amaqhalo) and idioms (izaci) of the different indigenous African languages we hope to generate an alternative perspective of the isiXhosa canon which has mainly been defined by masculine story telling. “IsiXhosa literature, being the first local vernacular literature to be written” (Mtuze 1990) is centralised and engaged in this special issue.

One might be forgiven to think that Eastern Cape intellectual histories were only of men. This is the outcome of non-neutrality of the canon. However, the work that Nomathamsanqa Tisani (2020) continues to do in excavating women’s contributions in the Eastern Cape herstoriography is commendable. She has been tracing the very roots of the Eastern Cape intellectual traditions to ooMakhulu (grandmothers) of the intellectuals, like Tiyo Soga. Tisani (2020) is re-reading the intellectual heritage of the Eastern Cape province through Nosuthu Jotela, who was Tiyo Soga’s grandmother. The countering of the masculine hegemony on the canon of the Eastern Cape histories can only be traced by a combination of archival and oral histories from the living vernacular sources present in different parts of the province. The combination of these methods helps us to unearth new ways of thinking and balancing the centuries of scholarly injustice seeking to wipe out women’s contributions. Falola (2017) terms this type of contribution a “ritual archive” where:

words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects that document as well as speak to those religious experiences and practices that allow us to understand the African world through various bodies of philosophies, literatures, languages, histories and much more. By implication, ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and earth-based human beings. (Falola 2017, 703)

We believe that the combination of excavating the “ritual archive,” linguistic archive, and “inter-generational memory embodied in our grandmothers-mothers-daughters” is necessary in challenging the skewed canonical knowledge systems in this part of the world. We hope this data on rituals, language, and meanings of proverbs can be harnessed to formulate philosophies that centre the indigenous forms of knowledge beyond the gender binaries that have been inherited in the Western-centred canons. We hope this will add in the ongoing work by Magadla et al. (2021) on building deeply contextualised and historicised African/indigenous feminist vocabularies to counter the current growing “neo-traditionalism” (Mkhize and Ntšekhe 2021) that seems to take away the power and influence of many African women through sexualising their very being.

Ukwambathisa as the epistemic intervention and preservation

In this special issue, we situate five papers from the intergenerational voices of historians, sociologists, gender, and sociolinguistics experts to bring a colourful overview of some of the neglected maternal influences in the intellectual traditions that have influenced this “home of legends” (Webb and Ndletyana 2018). The bringing out of these intellectual traditions can be likened to the concept of “ukwambathisa,” an isiXhosa term that means to shelter and safely protect one’s sacred possessions with a garment, ingubo. Asemahle Ntlonti’s (2021) solo exhibition titled “Vuthulula” speaks to the heart and meaning of ukwambathisa as a process of dignifying and paying respect to the living and the departed. She also uses the metaphor of the Xhosa women’s shawl, ityali, a term used for shawl, sjaal in Dutch, adopted from the Dutch settlers from the 18th century into the language and culture of the Xhosa people. She notes that,

… ityali: a traditional, checkered felted blanket, or shawl … [is] used in birth, in marriage, and in death; as a woman, ityali reflects your life cycle and initiation into womanhood. [It’s] function is to fasten a baby on one’s back, to swaddle, and to wrap up and warm. This act of “wrapping up,” uquta, is used as an expression to keep something safe, secure, and sacred. Metaphorically, it translates as carrying your family, their history and their secrets. uQuta is to wrap up one’s home in a blanket. This is perceived to be one’s livelihood, and a way of locating oneself in the world. “I am, because my family is.” This expression translates to keeping one’s existence and the little one has safe and sacred, as it is very dangerous to share when you do not have a lot that has not been taken or tainted.

Ntlonti responds to this sense of preserving life. She further uses this blanket as a symbolic response to collective mourning, or inzilo (Ntlonti 2021). Even though Ntlonti (2021) refers to inzilo (mourning) in her exhibition, this meaning covers the essence of this project that seeks to “wrap”/ “cover”/ “preserve,” and “dignify” the women’s contributions to the sociology of the Cape. Even though this is metaphor, we apply this to the process of re-reading the archives to excavate the works and contributions of women like Eleanor Xiniwe as one of the leading business women in King William's Town in the late 19th and early 12th centuries. In his contribution in this volume titled “Commanding the respect of all who knew her: recovering the marginalised history of Eleanor Xiniwe and challenges of the colonial archives,” Denver Webb uses archived newspapers to stitch together the biographical information on this businesswoman, who also travelled in the same choir as Charlotte Maxeke and Katie Makhanya between 1891 and 1893 to raise funds for education. In this article, we begin to see the complicated and layered lives of the women that attended the choir and personalities that we rarely see in the colonial archives.

In this volume, Nomathamsanqa Tisani also questions the validity of the colonial archive in recovering the memory of ooNdlukulu (queen mothers) Nosuthu and Nonesi (King Faku’s mother), weaving the life and influence of Nosuthu and Nonesi, between the 1820s–1830s. Both women had a special relationships with “inkosi” (after King Ngqika’s passing) and King Ngubengcuka (amaMpondo), respectively. Both women were regent kings at the height of the British invasion and were then “suffocated” as the title of her paper “The Queen Mothers’ struggle for breath: the colonisation of an institution” suggests. Studying the two matriarchs, in the early 19th century of amaXhosa and abaThembu, Tisani traces the “queen motherhood” in the works of many African feminist scholars across the continent (Amadiume 1997; Steady 2011) and answers the call by Ifi Amadiume (1987) to centre matriarchal heritage in seeking to understand the gendered power relations defining the post-colonial society today. Tisani shares the leadership techniques and forms of resistance employed by “ooNdlunkulu” and how this posed a threat to the colonial government that eventually suffocated the institution to death in the mid-19th century Southern East Africa. Both Webb and Tisani help us situate and historicise this issue within the three African women who provided leadership while building long lineages of resistance and intellectual complexities of the era.

Ntongela Masilela (2010) notes the Xhosa and European complicated encounter was the ultimate fertile ground for the early Xhosa intellectual to challenge the European Colonialism and political ideologies. He acknowledges the role of Tiyo Soga in his foundational contributions towards the nationalist and political resistance of the British colonialists. The works of Andre Odendaal, Mcebisi Ndletyana, Jeff Peires, and many prominent writers of this region have significantly contributed to the celebration of rich intellectual heritage of the Eastern Cape but are also characteristic of the masculine historiography that “forgot” the connected histories of the women and celebrated men of this region. We hope to build on the critical analysis of Peter Mtuze (1990) in retracing the “feminist critique of the Xhosa women symbols” beyond the literary archives. In re-centring maternal contributions in the sociology of the Eastern Cape, we begin to challenge the “patriarchal bias” (Tisani 2000, 99) that has shaped the understanding of women in Xhosa history through “isihelegu sikaNongawuse” (the catastrophe of Nongqawuse).

The story is about the prophesy of the young woman – Nongqawuse – who is used to explain the Xhosa cattle killing catastrophe of 1856, where the Xhosa people killed most of their cattle and buried most of their corn in expectation of the “dead [to] rise” with better crop produce and new cattle without disease (Peires 1989). This patriarchal bias in the history of the Eastern Cape has been constructed without taking into consideration the rich matriarchal histories of pre-colonial Africa and how women used to influence armies, religious institutions, national economies, and political leadership (Steady 2011). Tisani (2000) shows that in the Cape, Xhosa chiefs were in constant communication and advised by the elderly women who sometimes acted as regents in the absence of the older chiefs.

The exclusion of women from the writings belied what was happening at the time. During the 1830s four senior houses in the Xhosa polity, as listed in the genealogies table in The Christian Watchman, had Queen Mothers taking charge of affairs while heirs were minors. With the sudden death of Hintsa in 1835, Nomsa had to step in and support her son who was still ikrwala (a young man who has just returned from initiation school). When Ngqika died in November 1829, Sutu became regent during the minority of the Rharhabe heir, Sandile. (Tisani 2000, 100)

We challenge the stereotypes and singular insertion of a patriarchal posture of women in the isiXhosa archive while showing evidence from other linguistics groups (Basotho and Batswana). We employ the rich linguistic and archival evidence to provide an overview of the women’s involvement in rituals, building of businesses and conflict resolutions in pre-colonial, colonial, and contemporary Africa. We use “carrying and bodies as the archive” termed by Nirmal Puwar (2021, 7–8) to engage the “inter-generational daughter-mother-grandmother body memory” in the making and writing process of the special issue.

Carrying, Puwar (2021) argues, is a form of methodological approach that can enhance what we call ukwambathisa. This is a process of covering, dignifying, and celebrating these women foremothers, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers. This is a part of a bigger excavation of a project to knit together a quilt of different colours and contributions of maternal sources of knowledge. An African quilt is normally knitted by the elderly women in the village, with lots of old clothes and throwaway pieces. This means, the not-so-useful pieces are then recycled into something beautiful and colourful to keep the members of the family warm and “covered” (direct meaning of ukwambathisa). Sinoxolo Musangi summarises this well when she notes that:

By putting the older black women in my family on the agenda, I imagine not only my own freedom and that of others, but I also, quite deliberately, want to take seriously the intellectual contributions of black women who have, over the years, constituted the survival of something I want to call black theory and a logic of care. (Musangi 2018, 403)

In this issue, we use biographical, historical, and conceptual meanings of this term while detailing the rituals that are used to “cover” and protect different members of the family. Imbeleko (the child ritual) or what Nokuzola Mndende calls “idinara yomntwana” (2002, 155) can also be called “ibhayi” (baby blanket or shawl) designed to introduce the young to the ancestors. This is the ritual that can complicate one’s life if not performed according to the right procedures. The need for the mother to be seated next to the “child” (regardless of age) connects the mother to the child symbolically and physically, while elders knit the necklace as a sign of process and protection. It is worth noting that the mother in this practice can be a “social” mother rather than a biological mother. This means every child will have a “mother” hence the saying in the common Xhosa language “alukh’usana olungena nina” (A child without a mother does not exist). At the centre of this saying is the notion of care and communality around motherhood, beyond individualism that defines the institution today (Hill-Collins 1993; Oyewumi 2015).

In this volume, Grace Khunou also reminds us of the power and influence of Rakgadi (paternal aunt) in the Batswana family during ritual performance and conflict resolution. Titled “Ritual, family connections and BoRakgadi,” Khunou uses a combination of methodologies to access the language and power of the paternal aunts in many African families. She makes use of Bhavenda institution of Makhadzi (paternal aunt) and states that “is important to note here is that these multiple roles of Makhadzi are not only in familial spaces but in multiple societal settings.” This is confirmed by the work of Pfarelo Matsila (2020) who notes that in Vhavenda cultures, Makhadzi (paternal aunt) plays a very powerful position in who becomes the king within the royal family. She can even be the regent when the king is too young to lead. The paternal aunt, Matsila notes, occupies a sacred position in Vhavenda cultures in the rituals of “uphasa” and “thevhula” (liberation and thanksgiving rituals). She goes further to note that in Vhavenda community, regardless of class distinction, these women are normally associated with being spirit mediums. This is why Khunou concludes by arguing for the fluidity and relational power dynamics that tend to define the African family social formations beyond the gender binaries.

On maternal lineages and family ties

It is common to centre the mother–son relations in studying the black family and lineages of knowing. However, the mother–daughter–sister relations lack in-depth analysis. Speaking about the poor representations of the mother–daughter relations in arts, Gloria Wade-Gayles (1984, 8) noted that mother–son relations tend to dominate the narratives while the few famous autobiographies tend to have a one-dimensional view of this relationship. She states that “… mothers or grandmothers are mentors and nurturers whose example of strength guided their daughters to success.” It is the fights and conflicts that tend to define the relationship between the mother–daughter relations. Motsemme (2010, 95) tells us that due to disconnecting generational conversations and hardships, these legacies that are normally transferred orally turned to be lost as the focus become the “tension and conflicts,” and she states that:

African mothers are then faced with having to teach their daughters what it is to endure these harsh and inhumane exigencies of life as women. This moral counsel of mothers to their daughters often passed on by word of mouth or through social and cultural practices, then attempts to capture what is of value for a growing African woman. And as they attempt to teach their daughters to not only survive living within the interlocking structures of race, class and gender oppression, they must also encourage them to transcend their painful pasts and continue the survival of their communities. Within these transgenerational interactions, tensions erupt. (Motsemme 2010, 95)

The dominant studies of the mother–son relations in the Sociology of the Cape have limited the deep historicisation of the mother-daughter relations. When we focus on the maternal legacies of knowledge we also want to focus on the meanings and metrics of family relations between the grandmother (umakhulu), mother (umama) and daughter (intombi). The latter has a deep-seated meaning for many Nguni communities as the word not only refers to the daughter but unmarried woman, a girl child, irrespective of the age. The daughters occupy a different source of power and authority in their parental homes as umafungwashe (first born-daughter) and sometimes as an outsider (umakoti – young bride) in the marital family. Far from romanticising the pre-colonial heteronormative marriage relations, in this issue, Neo Mohlabane uses her rich ethnographic data among the Sotho-speaking people from Lesotho to understand the role and meaning of bosali of never married Mathepa women in the contemporary BaSotho context. Titled “Ke mosali oa Mosotho: reflecting on indigenous conceptions of womanhood in Lesotho,” this paper interrogates and challenges the contemporary emphasis on the heteropatriarchal meanings of the conception of Mosotho womanhood. Drawing from the matriarchal heritage and influence of great warrior women like ‘Manthatisi of the Batlokoa, she argues that “we ought to use these herstories as springboards to understand silenced indigenous conceptions of bosali (womanhoods) that are not only complex but multifarious and beyond the confines of binarised hetero-patriarchal constructions.” The “inter-generational memory” that is traced and embodied via the bodies of “grandmother-mother-daughter” (Puwar 2021) is central in revising the histories of knowledge that long have been forgotten as foundational in our humanities and social sciences.

Thozama April (2012), while conducting a detailed ethnographic and archival study to rewrite and re-insert Charlotte Manya Maxeke in the liberation archive, used Margaret McCord’s (1997) biography of Katie Makhanya who was the direct sister to Charlotte Maxeke. April confirmed that through the details of Maxeke’s sister, Katie, she was able to confirm the date of birth for Charlotte Maxeke.

The cutting of the umbilical cord and reconnecting to the “mother tongue”

In this volume, we have employed the use of indigenous African languages to access the deep epistemic, philosophical and ontological meanings of embedded knowledges across the southern Africa. As noted by Ifeanyi Menkiti (2004), the use of language is the form of “umbilical cord” to link gender and sociolinguistics to create a contextualised gendered meanings unique in this region. As noted by Mndende (2002, 161) inkaba (umbilical cord) can also be known as the place of birth. This is why Nomalanga Mkhize and Mathe Ntšeke in this volume argue for “Ukuzwa Ngenkaba: connecting with African ways of knowing through the umbilical cord” a form of African sense making which “connects us to the African episteme.” To locate the maternal legacies project into this region, it is to locate a sense of rootedness while revising the rich intellectual histories that have enriched the African episteme. According to Mkhize and Ntšeke, the process of the burial of the umbilical cord into the soil helps us connect both history and biographical attachment to land, spirituality, and rituals in many African societies. They, however, argue that “while the idea of inkaba, the umbilical cord, is linked to birth and origins, the reference to inkaba, ‘the navel,’ refers to our sense of connection and sympathy with others.” This is linked to the search of African-centred knowledge production that values personhood beyond sexualising cultures today. Teboho Lebakeng, Manthiba Phalane, and Nase Dalindjebo (in Segalo 2020, 3) also use inkaba as a metaphor in calling for a decolonial thought based on endogenous knowledge systems. They argue, we need to “[c]ut the intellectual umbilical cord from the western epistemological paradigm and move away from borrowed discourses … ” (in Segalo 2020, 3) if we are to produce knowledge that is relevant and sustainable in the African university today. They challenge the universities “in Africa” that are “not for Africa” even though they have slogans and visionary statements that describe them as “African” (in Segalo 2020).

Through different engagements with this issue, we hope to show what the curriculum and canons would look like if centred on inkaba. Magoqwana (2021) argues for “ukubuyiswa” (a Xhosa spiritual ritual of bringing back home the spirit of the departed to protect those in the physical realm) of the maternal intellectual ancestors as archives of knowledge to enable the humanities and African Social Sciences students to connect to their “collective memory” and forms of rootedness beyond the single masculinised narratives in the curriculum. She argues for:

reading the work of Fatima Meer (Race and Suicide) as classic means that we expand beyond Emile Durkheim’s study of suicide as the canon in Sociology. Centralising the works of Ellen Khuzwayo (Call Me a Woman) as part of the critical gender introductory courses along with its historical account of violence instead of just Frantz Fanon (political theory) we are then able to balance our intellectual ancestors to include the power of maternal ancestors. (Magoqwana 2021, 93)

In this instance, we begin to see that foundational knowledge can be produced through engaging the archive and indigenous languages to give a distinct sense of African rooting while engaging the global. It is through this engagement with maternal legacies of knowledge that we challenge the “Western intellectual structure of knowledge [that is] derived from conceptual schemes that devalue women” (Nzegwu 2006, 9). When we begin to tap into African matriarchal connections and contemporary meanings of this power and authority, we begin to challenge “some of the contemporary appeals to culture and selective invocations of traditions” (Nzegwu 2006, 2) to oppress the African woman in the post-colonial society.

At the end of this issue, young and early-career African scholars engage and critically review two edited books. Chanel van der Merwe delves deep into remaking and rethinking of the archive used by Muthien and Bam (2021). She enters the book through her grandmother’s experience and notes the impact of elders in naming. Siphokazi Tau also provides a “feminist critique” of the book on the “Power and authority of African women in the precolonial era” edited by Sifiso Ndlovu and argues for a more complicated and layered relation of the chosen women in this history book.

Conclusion

This issue is designed to centralise the philosophies and conceptual value of linguistic differences towards gender equality in the archives and academic canon. When Oyeronke Oyewumi (2005) noted the “patriarchal nature of the archive” in Yoruba cultures simply because of the gender titles assigned by those who had a different conceptual meaning of authority and power from European societies, she also used thick ethnographies and linguistic archives to speak back to the “invention of women” in Africa. This is like the works of Amadiume (1987) in Igbo communities in West Africa. Both gave the courage to younger African women thinkers who followed their approach while making “epistemic interventions” (Adesina 2010) in the category of gender as a tool of analysis in African societies. Through the different contributions in this issue, we hope to have shown the power and abilities of language, whether through oral, textual, or other forms, to excavate the missing maternal contributions in ritual and linguistic archives in Southern Africa. Historiography that makes us be alert and critical to processes that have been used to value some experiences over others is important in providing a critical eye to biases that entrench some experiences while ostracising and keeping others muffled. We can only build from what is familiar and known to us, and language can provide the historic and philosophical tools we need to centralise African women’s experiences in the current socio-economic and intellectual quagmire we find ourselves in today.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this issue who have greatly improved the original ideas shared here. The National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) has supported us executing the vision with their generous support in hosting the Colloquium that resulted in the call for this special issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences [CRP20/1047].

Notes on contributors

Babalwa Magoqwana

Babalwa Magoqwana is the Director for the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Nelson Mandela University, and an Associate Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Her research on Maternal Legacies of Knowledge is supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Pamela Maseko

Pamela Maseko is a Professor and Executive Dean in the Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. She has steered post-apartheid policy, practice and research on multilingualism and studies and on historiography of isiXhosa literature in South Africa. Her research has uncovered significant early writings of black early literates in South Africa, including, that disclose unexpected voice, agency and views on gender as an example. She is also the co-editor of a UKZN Press Literature Series that republishes works of literary traditions of the 19th century early African thinkers from the Eastern Cape, South Africa.