Surfacing

On being black and feminist in South Africa

Desiree Lewis, Gabeba Baderoon, Yvette Abrahams, Barbara Boswell, Panashe Chigumadzi, gertrude fester-wicomb, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Mary Hames, jackï job, Ingrid Masondo, Zethu Matebeni, Patricia McFadden, Sisonke Msimang, Danai S Mupotsa, Grace A. Musila, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, Yewande Omotoso, Fatima Seed, Desiree Lewis, Gabeba Baderoon, Makhosazana Xaba, Desiree Lewis, Gabeba Baderoon

• Editore: Wits University Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776146116
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Estudios de género

What do African feminist traditions that exist outside the canon look and feel like? What complex cultural logics are at work outside the centres of power? How do spirituality and feminism influence each other? What are the histories and experiences of queer Africans? What imaginative forms can feminist activism take?
Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa is the first collection of essays dedicated to contemporary Black South African feminist perspectives. Leading feminist theorist, Desiree Lewis, and poet and feminist scholar, Gabeba Baderoon, have curated contributions by some of the finest writers and thought leaders. Radical polemic sits side by side with personal essays, and critical theory coexists with rich and stirring life histories. By including writings by Patricia McFadden, Panashe Chigumadzi, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner, Yewande Omotoso, Zoë Wicomb and Pumla Dineo Gqola alongside emerging thinkers, activists and creative practitioners, the collection demonstrates a dazzling range of feminist voices.
The writers in these pages use creative expression, photography and poetry in eclectic, interdisciplinary ways to unearth and interrogate representations of Blackness, sexuality, girlhood, history, divinity, and other themes. Surfacing is indispensable to anyone interested in feminism from Africa which, the contributors show, is in vivid and challenging conversations with the rest of the world.

CHAPTER 1

Winnie Mandela and the Archive: Reflections on Feminist Biography

Sisonke Msimang

When I was in primary school and living in Nairobi, we lived next door to a girl called Aida. Aida was not her real name, but all these years later I feel a feminist duty to protect her, given all that was said about her. This in many ways is the purpose of this story: to reflect on the duty of care feminists owe the women who populate the archive – and those who may yet enter.

Aida was older than I was. She was about 16 when I was eight. She lived with her father and that was it – just the two of them. I was in that phase of childhood in which certain older girls seemed impossibly glamorous. Aida was this sort of a half-grown girl who fascinated me – an almost-woman who still had the leisurely pursuits of a child.

Aida was Ethiopian, and she had large, exaggerated eyes that seemed exotic to me, but which are common on the streets of Addis Ababa. And she had a long and large and proud nose, which was always turned up. Her features were softened by her mouth, which was small and pouty, like that of a child. The thing about Aida was that everyone knew she had been pregnant, though no one was quite sure what had happened to the baby.

I didn’t care, of course. The rumours didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and what she gave me in time and attention far outweighed whatever it was that she had done to get pregnant and then unpregnant. So, I did what eight-year-olds do best. I followed her around without shame. After all, I was too young to be embarrassed by how much I longed to be like her.

Sometimes she would paint my nails and put lipstick on me. I always wiped it off before my mother got home from work, and if Bathsheba – the woman who looked after us – called me, I would move even more quickly. Bathsheba was under strict instructions to ensure Aida and I stayed apart. My mother hated me being in Aida’s house. She hated the idea of me being in this girl’s bedroom pretending to be older than I was, and ‘getting influenced’ by a girl whose father had so little control over her that she paraded the streets wearing make-up. My father hated lipstick, and my mother’s instructions were a way of enforcing his will.

Every morning Aida would stand on the road and wait for the bus to take her to her school. It was a big pale-blue bus with the name of the college she went to written in large letters across its side. Everybody knew that the kids at that school were drug addicts and did nothing but talk back to their teachers and smoke cigarettes all day.

Aida would climb onto that bus (I once heard a neighbour call it a bus full of demons) in a short skirt or ripped jeans with her hair wild, and off the driver would go, taking them to some godforsaken place where learning was unlikely to happen. They had no uniform at that school because they were mimicking the American education system.

At the school I went to, the uniform was a dark-green dress that went just past the knee, matched with a blazer that was comically long. We also wore white socks and clunky black shoes better suited to England than to Nairobi, but they achieved the overall effect of making us look demure. Their ugliness reminded us that the purpose of our education was to teach us to read and write and obey. We were not in school to flaunt our personalities or to demonstrate our individuality. We were on a conveyor belt, part of the British education system, so none of us could reasonably expect to attend school with wild hair and kohl-lined eyes. That would throw off the system. No Aidas were allowed.

I grew up and we left Nairobi and I forgot all about Aida and her kindness and the baby she never had, and the distance my mother tried to put between us.

Much later, when I was in university, I dated a man – let’s call him Deandre. Deandre and I broke up and made up a few times – in the way of dramatic university loves. In one of the periods when we were apart, one of his friends told Deandre that he and I had slept together. This was a lie. I had not slept with the friend. The accusation shocked me. Why would he lie? What had I done to make him think he could say something so profoundly untrue? So deep was my internalised misogyny that even in my outrage I blamed myself by asking what I had done to deserve the lie.

Deandre was not outraged on my behalf. He laughed it off and explained that sometimes men lied about women. He said that all men knew this, and their behaviour towards women took this into account. He explained that men ‘never really knew the truth’ about their partners and so his approach was, ‘if you like her, ignore the stories; and if you don’t, believe everything people say about her’.

Stories about women’s fidelity, in other words, were designed as a test women could only win if men let them. The truth about the woman at the centre of a man’s story was, in fact, incidental. What mattered were the objectives of the man telling the tale and his audience. If the tale was designed to pull down that woman, and it met a willing listenership, then she would be pulled down.

As I processed the fact that I had been lied about as part of a game I did not understand and had played no part in creating, I thought about Aida. It occurred to me that she might never have been pregnant. The innuendo about her supposed abortion was designed to signal the virtue of those who talked about her – in this case, the grown women who denounced her in order to demonstrate their own sexual restraint. My mother kept me away from her because of her own middle-class respectability. When they whispered about an aborted baby, they were really seeking to control Aida, to give weighty consequence to the wildness of her hair and the darkness of her eyes, the sexuality she refused to bridle. Aida was a prop, a mere backdrop against which they could project their own morality.

For weeks after Deandre told me about the lie, I fretted about Aida. Our stories suddenly felt intertwined. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that it didn’t matter whether what had been whispered about Aida was true or not; what mattered was that it had stuck – that it had defined her. After all these years, I was still captivated by the story of Aida’s unwanted, never-born baby.

The story about Aida’s sins was so powerful that I could remember Aida’s short skirts and skinny legs. What I had forgotten was how her hands felt holding mine as she painted my little fingernails. She was kind enough to let a little girl follow her around. She was generous enough to spray her perfume on the inside of my wrists and to giggle with me, but I had buried these acts of generosity and connection.

In my mind, Aida had stopped being a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Instead, she had become a story. She was a ghost figure who had slipped through my life. Even though I had adored her at the time, I had no proper memories of her. Over time I had become ashamed of her, and this shame had corroded my memories of her and turned her into a caricature. All I could remember now was a bad girl with wild hair and hollow eyes.

This is what women lose when we let sexist narratives strangle our real-life stories, and when we let ideas about who women should be take over the complex facts of who flesh-and-bone women really are.

By the time I wrote The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, I had been thinking about this issue for some time. Aida had represented freedom to me. As a child I was drawn to her clear spirit of independence, but I was also taught to be suspicious of her. She had been an early warning, a portent of what happens to girls who are too much in the world.

The task I faced in writing about the incomparable Winnie Mandela was not unlike the task I faced in reframing Aida in my own memory. Just as I had to ask questions about why it mattered whether Aida had been pregnant, and what purpose that information served, I also knew that I had to ask questions about the political agendas that were served by the whispers that trailed Winnie Mandela. My role as a biographer would be to extract her truths from the racist and sexist narratives that had a stranglehold on her legacy.

Because sexism is so central to how the world is interpreted, the ‘facts’ about Winnie Mandela’s life and times were often misrepresented or weaponised against her. I saw myself as part of a movement of people who wanted to ensure that Winnie Mandela could be understood on feminist terms. This did not necessarily mean celebrating her. As Shireen Hassim has demonstrated in her academic treatment of Winnie Mandela, it is entirely possible to examine the liberation fighter in feminist terms and not celebrate her actions or legacy.¹

It is important then to understand that my interest in reframing Winnie Mandela was never about ‘cleaning up’ her image or revising facts. It was about recognising that the facts about her required contextualisation.

Having assumed the mantle not simply of biographer but feminist biographer, I knew that protecting Winnie Mandela’s privacy would be paramount. It would be both an act of respect and a marker to those who will continue to study her in the future. I was too young to defend Aida – even though I knew she was being maligned. As a grown woman, who holds the power of the pen, I was perfectly positioned to do for Winnie Mandela what the anti-apartheid movement had done and continues to do for many of its male heroes. Indeed what they had done for Nelson Mandela himself, which was to protect his sexual privacy and uphold his personal dignity.

When Winnie Mandela died and the media began to replay the sexual insinuations of the past, those that had dogged her from the moment her famous husband was jailed, and her beautiful face began to appear in the media, my feminist instincts kicked in.

I was not in the least bit interested in determining whether or not she had sexual relationships while her husband was in jail, but I was deeply invested in ensuring that other people’s ruminations about these matters did not constitute legitimate grounds for scholarship and writing about her. As an act of feminist historical retrieval, I wanted to protect her from this line of questioning, and also ensure that other women were not subjected to these sorts of discussions and debates.

Given the gendered double standard, it seemed both irrelevant and deeply damaging to subject her history and life to these questions. Politically prominent men simply aren’t judged by their actions in the bedroom, and even when they are, they are seldom demonised in the way Winnie Mandela was and continues to be.

In the aftermath of her death, I read articles steeped in vitriol and innuendo. Mondli Makhanya, editor of City Press, recycled an old, mean and unsourced story in which Winnie was nowhere to be found the night it was announced that Nelson Mandela was to be released. She was apparently drunk and/or with a lover. The story had no sources, but Makhanya insisted on using it in an article he penned upon hearing of her death. The narrative is apocryphal – the errant wife out with her lover when the hero returns from battle.²

Meanwhile Thabo Mbeki did an interview on television on the very day she died. In it, the former South African president insisted that Winnie Mandela should not be singled out for celebration. He was eager to remind the public that she was ‘part of a collective that fought against apartheid and not an individual’. He also reminded the nation that she had defied the leadership of the ANC in the 1980s when she refused to disband the Mandela Football Club.³

When Nelson Mandela died, no one spoke ill of the fact that he had defied the ANC by beginning the process of negotiating the end of white minority rule in secret. He did not have a mandate from his comrades. The man widely seen as the father of the modern ANC deliberately defied ANC policy and acted as an individual rather than as part of a collective.

In the wake of Winnie Mandela’s death, the international press were no better than the South African media and key players within the ruling party. A widely shared headline published in the Sydney Morning Herald screamed, ‘“Mother” then “Mugger” of the nation’.⁴

In death, as in life, Winnie was gossiped about and derided. She could not escape the narrative that had dominated her life. The story that trailed her was simple and stark. It told of a young woman who had not existed before she met Nelson Mandela. In this story Winnie was invented as an adjunct to her husband. She was a sweet modest wife who was turned into an adulterous monster – either by the apartheid regime or by her own innate womanly weaknesses.

She had withstood these sorts of insults while she was alive, and had alternated between seeming either enraged by what was said about her or impervious to the slurs. Now that she was gone, many people seemed to take pleasure in her death. In some quarters on social media, there was a carnivalesque atmosphere in the weeks following her death. It had the feel of the scene in the film The Wizard of Oz where the Munchkins sing, ‘Ding dong the witch is dead!’

Given all of this – the glee and the innuendo and the gossip and, of course, the very real ways in which Winnie Mandela was transgressive and participated in reckless violence – I regarded the project of writing about her with some trepidation. All biographers must reckon with the ghosts of their subjects. This ghost, I worried, might not let me rest.

In the end, the ghost of Winnie Mandela was not my biggest hurdle. I had to overcome my own ideas of what biography was in order to undertake the project of writing about her life in ways that were not typical of the genre. By its very nature, biography focuses on ‘important people’. Feminism, on the other hand, is...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial Note
• Introduction Being Black and Feminist
• Chapter 1 Winnie Mandela and the Archive: Reflections on Feminist Biography
• Chapter 2 Representing Sara Baartman in the New Millennium
• 1. Unmaking
• 2. Positioning
• 3. Remaking
• Notes
• Contributors
• Permission Credits
• Index