HERstory: Writing women into South African history

Abstract

It is said that “history is told not as it was but as men saw it”. Women have largely been absent from the telling of our history, despite their vital contribution made in the struggle for freedom. The Department of Arts and Culture currently has an opportunity to record the largely untold micro-histories of South Africans through the recording and archiving of oral histories. The practice of recording oral histories will have two major advantages: 1) acting as a transformational mechanism through which past imbalances are addressed, and functioning as a therapeutic mechanism to deal with South Africa's turbulent past; and 2) enriching our educational curriculum at all levels, creating deep and thorough archives to be accessed by domestic and international scholars. It is of utmost importance that research needs to be undertaken on women prior to and in the struggle; women's everyday struggles; and women in leadership positions, among other contemporary issues. 2013 marked the centenary of the 1913 Women's Anti-Pass Campaign in Bloemfontein – a campaign which served as a turning point in our history, and left a lasting legacy for South African women in the 20th century. De Lauretis' (1989 De Lauretis T (1989) ‘The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the US and Britain’, in Differences, 1(2): 5–6. [Google Scholar]) statement that “it is the specific properties, qualities or necessary attributes that women have developed or have been bound to historically in their different patriarchal sociocultural contexts which make them women not men” is useful in guiding how we write women's lives and give women a voice. We, the KwaZulu-Natal Archives, will focus on writing the lives of forgotten heroines/activists like Nokuthela Dube, Portia Ndwandwe, Phyllis Naidoo, Bessie Head, Victoria Mxenge and Charlotte Manye Maxeke.