Questions of lineage mark much contemporary writing by Black women, from Nomboniso Gasa’s Women in South African History (2007) to Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017), signaling a longing for beginnings and continuity in the face of the vast silences and abrupt severing which mar so much of South African history. In Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke, the journalist and anti-apartheid activist Zubeida Jaffer uses her biographical pen to place a singular woman at the heart of anticolonial and antiapartheid struggles and, in doing so, claims for women the authority to shape the kind of country we are creating today.
Feminist Africa Issue 22: Feminists Organising - Strategy, Voice, Power, Latest Issue, Reviews fa22_review_3