Ukuzilanda: resisting erasure

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at UNISA about MaCharlotte Mannya-Maxeke. This was off the back of a paper I had written about MaCharlotte and MaNontsizi Mgqwetho. Here are some extracts from what I shared (when the paper is published I will share the link).

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I’d like to start with a few lines from SEK Mqhayi’s poem which he wrote upon Charlotte Maxeke’s death:

Maz’emabele made yase Afrika Okwanyis’usapho luka Ntu luphela; Azi nonyaka yaphusile nje, Logagangwa yintokazi kabanina? Menzelen’ilitye lokukhunjulwa, Ze siqhayisele ngal’amavilakazi. Az’angaz’alityalwe kokwabo; Az’angaz’alityalwe emhlabeni Az’angaz’alityalwe eAfrika!

The full-breasted woman of Afrika Suckled all the black children Since this year her breasts have dried up, Whose daughter will take her place Raise a stone to her memory To display to lazy women May she never be forgotten by her people May she never be forgotten on earth May she never be forgotten in Africa

This is the work of not forgetting MaMaxeke. Not forgetting is an act of resistance against the erasure of black women’s lives, their intellectual work and political contribution throughout history. Remembering requires that we actively say the names of the women who are political, literary and spiritual ancestors who, because of the way they lived their lives, black women today can step into conversations which has been happening for centuries and across continents. In her book, Beyond Respectibility: The intellectual thought of race women, Brittney Cooper tracks the work of early intellectuals, African-American women and how they combated the onslaught of the Great Race men at the time who controlled the debate about race in America. She writes about how the women used to write up lists: “Their own genealogies of Black women thinkers. I do not think of these lists as mere lists. Instead the intentional calling of names created an intellectual geneology of race women’s work and was a practice of resistance against intellectual erasure.”. Cooper refers to this as listing:

These lists situate Black women within a long lineage of prior women who have done similar kinds of work, and naming those women grants intellectual, political, and/or cultural legitimacy to the Black women speaking their names. Listing also refers in the fashion industry to an edge produced on a piece of fabric and applied to a seam to prevent it from unravelling. In similar fashion, Black women’s long traditions of intellectual production constitute a critical edge, without which the broader history of African-American knowledge production would unravel and come apart at the seams.

If we fail to talk about women like Maxeke we run the risk of coming apart at the seams because that is what erasure does; it unravels human dignity.          

In the African discourse, memory is an act of ukuzilanda: to fetch oneself and connect oneself to the past in the present moment. Talking about MaMaxeke and the long list of women who still not part of the public imagination or general knowledge amongst our children is an act of ukuzilanda.

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The danger with remembering is that in our woundedness we only want to remember the positive part of our histories. And the same with how we remember our ancestors. We only wish to show their light but their dark remains hidden. And the same applies with MaMaxeke; in hailing her outside of the context of her peers and the difficult decisions she had to make in a political context that required people to make difficult decisions: what did it mean to have an unshaken conviction about being a representative leader of the race, a bridge between white and black worlds as Campbell describes Maxeke’s conviction? This is still a tension faced today in light of radical politics which call for the dismantling of institutions founded upon white supremacy; while now there are black elites who find themselves deeply invested in these institutions because they now benefit from them even while the structures remain unchanged. 

Moreover, the glaring absence of the names of women MaMaxeke worked alongside begs the question about the nature of her own relationships with women of her class and in particular, the women she was helping and lifting from the miry clay of poverty. Campbell hints at some of the less desirable qualities of Mother Maxeke as she was affectionately known: Campbell refers to her steely qualities: “immense personal ambition, courage and an uncanny ability to gauge the expectations and sensibilities of her audience…she knew what she wanted and adept at obtaining it”. 

What does this legacy mean for us in 2018?

I guess the most obvious for me has been the cognitive dissonance of discovering the extent to which black women were present in the public discourse only for the this to regress to the point where even in the 2000s I could count on one hand black women intellectuals who were writing publically. This regression of backlash perhaps explains why the ANC women’s league felt it was okay to say that South Africa was not ready for a woman president. It seems to me they were out of sync with their ancestors who had established the Bantu Women’s League because the SANNC had not believed women could become members. 

Secondly, I am interested in the ways in which we read history, particularly as black feminists, and how we make sense of the decisions and attitudes women held in the early twentieth century. I think there’s a tendency of being more forgiving for men to become products of their times, but women are not allowed to be products of their time and so we cannot easily dismiss their work and their lives and render them invisible because we cannot see them as part of the complex historical time they occupied. In a sense, we continue to punish women for the things they said far more than we punish the men. 

Reading about the intellectual and political contribution of women reminds me that this has been done before: being a black woman who is not afraid of speaking truth to power is not anomalous with being a black woman. In fact, it is the very essence of being a black woman because stepping outside the legacy left by Maxeke and Mgqwetho would mean that black women thinkers would not survive. As Mgqwetho says, Asinakuthula umhlaba ubolile. The lesson in MaMaxeke’s life and the women we now know about and some we are still yet to discover and list is that being present in the public discourse is a matter of survival. Being present and speaking and doing the work of changing the lives of other women matters because in 100 years from now the threat of erasure will still exist if patriarchy is not dismantled and so the struggle against erasure will continue. 

Finally, it is significant for me to deliver this lecture during the same week where women are gathering under the banner African Women in Dialogue at Birchwood Hotel. That gathering is reminiscent of the gathering which established the Bantu Women’s League in 1917. 100 years later women know the importance of gathering together and thinking about the future they deserve because we know no one else will do it for us.