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‘I don’t sing for people who do not see me’:1 Women, Gender and the Historiography of Christianity in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Greg Cuthbertson
Affiliation:
University of South Africa, Pretoria
Louise Kretzschmar
Affiliation:
University of South Africa, Pretoria

Extract

One of the cultural features of South Africa’s new democracy is the prolific publication of autobiographical narratives by previously marginalized people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has also focused attention on the plight of oppressed groups under apartheid, and many of the voices being heard are those of women. These personal accounts are breathing life into the sinews of organized political protest and – to mix metaphors – unearthing the ‘hidden past’ interred in apartheid history. As Alison Goebel also reminds us, life histories or personal narratives have long been identified as ‘an ideal feminist method’, and have frequently been used in work about African women.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

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Footnotes

1

McCordMargaret, The Calling of Katie Makanya (Cape Town, 1995), p. 57.

References

2 See, for example, Natoo Babenia. Memoirs of a Saboteur Reflections of my Political Activity in India and South Africa, as Told by Ian Edwards (Bellville, 1995); Matthews, Frieda Bokwe, Remembrances (Bellville, 1995).Google Scholar

3 For a literary overview, see Daymond, y, ‘Gender and “History”: 1980s South African women’s stories in English’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 27 (1996), pp. 191213 Google Scholar. For discussion of women’s autobiographies, see Judith L. Coullie, ‘(In)Continent I-lands: blurring the boundaries between self and other in South African women’s autobiographies’, ibid., pp. 133–48.

4 Alison Goebel, ‘Life histories as a cross-cultural feminist method in African Studies: achievements and blunders’, paper presented at the ‘Promoting women’s history: local and regional perspectives’ conference, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6 July 1995.

5 See, for example, Nicholas Southey, ‘Uncovering homosexuality in colonial South Africa: the case of Bishop Twells’, unpublished paper, 1995 (by kind permission of the author); Andries du Plessis, ‘Gender studies and homosexuality: where are the histories?’, paper presented at The future of the past: the production of history in a changing South Africa’ conference, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 10–12 July 1996.

6 McCord, The Calling of Katie Makanya.

7 Ibid., p. 57.

8 Mager, Anne, review of The Calling of Katie Makanya, South African Historical Journal [hereafter SAHJ], 34 (1996).Google Scholar

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42 Recently the work of the Comaroffs has been criticized by a number of southern Africanists. See, for example, Clifton C. Crais, ‘South Africa and the pitfalls of postmodernism’; Leon de Kock, ‘For and against the Comaroffs: postmodern puffery and competing conceptions of the “archive”’; Doug Stuart, ‘Revelations from neo-modernity’; and Bruyn, Johannes du, ‘Of muffled Southern Tswana and overwhelming missionaries: the Comaroffs and the colonial encounter’, SAHJ, 31 (1994), pp. 273309.Google Scholar

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47 Ibid., p. 219.

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59 Landman, Digging up our Foremothers.

60 On the ordination of women to the priesthood, see Report of the Commission on the Ordination of Women (Church of the Province of Southern Africa, Cape Town, 1989).

61 Hulley, Leonard, Kretzschmar, Louise, and Pato, Luke, eds, Archbishop Tutu: Prophetic Witness in South Africa (Cape Town, 1996).Google Scholar

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64 Ketshabile, ‘Challenges facing women in South Africa’, ibid., pp. 180–1.

65 Carmichael, ‘Creating newness: the spirituality of reconstruction’, ibid., pp. 182–98.

66 Beverley Haddad, ‘En-gendering a theology of development: raising some preliminary issues’, ibid., p. 199.

67 Ibid., p. 208.

68 Hodgson, ‘African and Anglican’, ibid., pp. 106–28.

69 Rampele, Mamphela, ‘On being Anglican: the pain and the privilege’, in England, Frank and Paterson, Torguil, eds, Bounty in Bondage: Essays in Honour of Edward King, Dean of Cape Town (Johannesburg, 1989), pp. 17790.Google Scholar

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74 See, for example, Denise Ackermann, ‘Being woman; being human’, in Ackermann et al., Women Hold Up Half the Sky, pp. 93–105.

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79 Ibid., pp. 227, 231 and 207.

80 See Dorothy Driver, ‘Women and voice in colonial discourse: self-representation in writing by black South African women’, paper presented at the Instutite of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, May 1989, pp. 16–19.

81 See Cuthbertson, Gregor and Whitelaw, David, God, Youth and Women: The YWCAs of Southern Africa 1886–1986 (Johannesburg, 1986), pp. 3540.Google Scholar

82 McCord, The Calling of Katie Makanya, p. 4.

83 See Maylam, Paul, ‘Tensions within the practice of history’, SAHJ, 33 (1995), pp. 312.Google Scholar