Black Consciousness women’s organizing intimacies and the coldness of European anti-apartheid solidarity

ABSTRACT

Mmagauta Molefe and Oshadi Mangena internationalised Black Consciousness womanism and leveraged a gendered critique against the anti-apartheid movements in Europe. This article shows that the contradiction between intimacy and coldness offers a lens through which we can understand both the goals of anti-apartheid as a type of anti-colonial organising, as well as the limits of narrow anti-apartheid solidarities driven by European organisers. Mangena and Molefe challenged white women’s racism and paternalism within European campaigns, and demonstrated how international solidarity sometimes amplified divisions between liberation groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Apartheid
• solidarity
• South Africa
• black consciousness movement
• women’s movements
• feminism
• European colonialism

Acknowledgement

I would like to give special thanks to Mmagauta Molefe, Arun Naicker, and Marjan Boelsma for their contributions to this piece and for their efforts and sacrifice in the struggle against apartheid and worldwide colonialism. This research was also vitally supported by the Newcombe Foundation, UCSB Department of Black Studies, the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, the U.S. Fulbright Program, and the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This contributed to the works of other exiled South Africans and those who were sent on diplomatic missions through their organisations that focused on organising abroad on missions to internationalise the anti-apartheid struggle.

2. Black Consciousness activists did not create the term “Azania,” but they did use it to refer to the not-yet-realised post-apartheid decolonial nation. It signified the freed land for which they fought through their organising and mobilisation against the apartheid regime and those who compiled with and supported it.

3. The World was the largest English-language African-run newspaper in Johannesburg. It had a large African readership, despite its white-ownership. On the eve of the Soweto Uprisings, The World played a vitally important role in reporting township unrest.

4. “Adult branch” is a reference to the Black People’s Convention (BPC) which was an organisation under the umbrella of the Black Consciousness Movement. This branch formed as a counterpart to SASO, the student organisation which blossomed on university campuses and among students in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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Notes on contributors

Amanda Joyce Hall

Amanda Joyce Hall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in History and African American Studies in 2022.