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Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa's Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Shadow of a Young Woman
Author(s): Rachel E. Johnson (Author)
- Publisher: University of London Press
- Publication Date: September 18, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 188 pages
- ISBN-10: 1915249449
- ISBN-13: 9781915249449
Book Description
Who spoke about the liberation struggle whilst it was ongoing? When did they speak and how? And what effects do the gendered history of speech and silence within anti-apartheid politics continue to have upon our knowledge of the past? Arguing that she is emblematic of the way gendered narratives of the struggle have been made, this book listens for the voice and silence of Masabata Loate and her contemporaries within political trials; newspapers; photography; human rights reportage; creative fiction, drama, poetry and song; autobiography and memoir; and oral histories. The result is an unconventional biography that sees this young woman as a shadow within the story of South Africa’s anti-apartheid liberation struggle.
Editorial Reviews
Review
As with many excellent books, this study provides ideas and methods that can be transferred to situations beyond the scholarly bounds of recent South African history. As I read the book I kept asking, and seeing, how the ideas on voice and silence might be applied to my topics of research on the black Atlantic world and to English local and regional history.
-David Killingray, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK
Through the lens of the controversial life of Mary Masabata Loate, a witness for the prosecution at the trial of the ‘Soweto Eleven’ in 1978, Rachel E. Johnson’s book provides an important contribution to our understanding of how gender complicated and compromised the way young black women were forced to navigate their relationship to the Anti-Apartheid struggle. Historically attentive, this book also invites the reader to question what kinds of truths might be delivered from an archive which too often occludes the role in the Anti-Apartheid struggle of South Africa’s youth and young black women in particular.
-Annie E. Coombes, Professor Emerita of Material and Visual Culture, Birkbeck, University of London UK. Author of History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (2003)
