South African Women and the Liberation Struggle: Towards Three Traditions of Womanism in "South Africa"

Recent scholarship on South African history and women reveals a contestation around the positioning of Afrikan women in the liberation struggle. The "debate" between Athambile Masola and Panashe Chigumadzi regarding the role of Charlotte Maxeke in the history of liberation is a good case in point. However, this paper will not delve into the "debate" above but will attempt to chart three traditions of womanism in South Africa and their respective political visions. The "debate" above provides context and inspiration for the formulation of these three traditions, which have not yet been clearly delineated. We prefer the term womanism as opposed to feminism because many of the women in these three traditions worked together with their men to resolve both the national and woman's questions. They did not regard their men as enemies to be rejected in their struggles as women in South Africa. For instance, white women and Garveyite Afrikan women prioritised race and nation over gender for different political reasons. This paper will rely on an Afrikan-centred theoretical framework. We will use the historical and comparative method in this qualitative study of South African women and the liberation struggle. A literature review will be used to analyse the data in the form of scholarship written mainly by women in South Africa. In this paper, we argue that there are three traditions of womanism with three different political visions that attempt to resolve the national and woman's questions in South Africa. Without excluding the different roles of other women, this paper advances the thesis that, as far as the national and woman's questions are concerned, we can delineate the following types of womanism: South African womanism, Azanian womanism, and Afrikanist womanism. This paper seeks to foreground Afrikanist womanism, which is influenced by Garveyite Afrikan women who embraced Garveyism in the 1920s and Lembede's uncompromising Afrika for the Afrikans.