The spiritual journey to becoming a history-keeper of South African liberation movements

ABSTRACT

The editors of this collection reflect on the ways that studying the anti-apartheid liberation movement is a consciousness raising process. We consider the cosmological, spiritual, and affective impact of tarrying with liberation histories. From Vincent Harding’s (1981) conceptualisation of a ‘deep river’ and Cedric J. Robinson’s (1983) notion of a ‘Black Radical Tradition’ to the ‘endarkened feminist storytelling’ offered by Cynthia Dillard in 2000 and 2012 and elaborated upon by Venus Evans-Winters and Bettina Love (2015) and S.R. Toliver (2021), there are a set of devotional and spiritual practices associated with being hailed by and becoming a carrier of the historical memory of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Contributing authors reflect on the pivotal personal life experiences, and definitive exile journeys, that shaped their families and communities. These early, formative, and mostly non-organisation-based consciousness-raising experiences have been understudied in the historiography of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Nevertheless, these are vital pathways to internationalism, as a set of contemporary research practices, movement and organisation strategies, and political identities. Our goal has been to make sacred ways of being salient in the historical research on the anti-apartheid liberation movement.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-apartheid liberation movement
• cosmology
• Sangomas
• devotional histories
• consciousness-raising
• soul work
• pathways to international research

Historians of radical liberation movements undertake the crucial task to document and analyse particularly volatile historical events. Events like the anti-apartheid liberation movement are historically significant for a variety of reasons. These reasons include a major society-wide social transformation with global implications that shape basic historical categories. Recently, we have witnessed such transformational activism within South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements (Nyamnjoh, Kwoba, Chantiluke, and Nkopo 2018; Nomvete and Mashayamombe 2019; Booysen 2018; Nyamnjoh 2016). These movements have reprised earlier moments in the anti-apartheid liberation struggle when ‘the pedantry of official apartheid culture … its own exclusiveness, parochialism, chauvinism and xenophobia [that] blunts wholesome cultural development and distorts values … [and produces] educational neglect’ was publicly rejected (Nkomo 1990, 11). Stepping into such a volatile history as a researcher requires self-reflection, nuanced attention to individual social positionality, and awareness that studying the ideas of the people who sustained and lived through the anti-apartheid liberation movement also changes the historians as well. But it is not just that we have been changed as people who engage with the history of anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Rather, in this collection, our cross-generational authors reflect on the ways that they came to the anti-apartheid liberation struggle long before they became formally or professionally trained; when anti-apartheid liberation represented languages for fighting against inequality in our own societies; and when anti-apartheid liberation struggle meant stories offered by exiles who were relatives, friends of the family, other-mothers, and teachers that we respected.

The journey to becoming a scholar of South African liberation movements, particularly the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, is related to the devotional practice of becoming a Sangoma; all who follow this path receive a sacred calling to it. Diaspora thinkers such as Cynthia Dillard (2000, 2012, Young 2006), Venus Evans-Winters and Bettina Love (2015) have referred to the ‘sacred nature’ of epistemologies that animate and sustain our research and teaching. Though this collection is not about educating Sangomas or traditional South African healing practices, it does allow our authors to think and speak of the work they do from a personal, intimate, and true place that recognises what Vincent Harding dubbed ‘the deep river’ and what Cedric Robinson called the ‘Black Radical Tradition’ – these are cosmological ways of employing history. From terms like ‘movement writers’ and ‘movement babies’ to ‘exilic consciousness’ to ‘movement narratives’ to life writing and autobiographical accounts of living with liberation struggles, the historical work that these contributors are doing reflects an important part of the historical legacy of the anti-apartheid liberation movement (Norman 2021, 170; Msimang 2018: 148). When we convened a panel at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) Virtual Conference, entitled ‘The Movement Resonated Deep in My Soul: Pathways to International Research in the Anti-Apartheid Liberation Struggle’, we used evocative and solemn words typically associated with ritual. We sought to call forth reflection on sacred ways of being that take responsibility for walking with this history seriously. To use such holy words reflects what Cynthia Dillard called our ‘spiritual strivings’ (Dillard 2006). Each contributor in their own way has experienced a kind of revelation that sustains their ethical behaviour and their conscious commitment to praxis. We have been imbued with a ‘fugitive pedagogy’ (Givens 2021) that has kept us ‘running for freedom’ (Lawson 2015) ‘teaching to transgress’ (hooks, bell 2018), and ‘teaching freedom’ (Payne and Sills Strickland 2008). Only such inexplicable and sublime ‘barakah’ (blessings) could explain the survival and decades of study and teaching of liberation movements that is evidenced herein. This collection, ‘The Movement Resonated Deep in My Soul: New Perspectives on the Global Anti-Apartheid Liberation Movement’ is a volume of essays that brings together social movement thinkers and action research scholars of anti-apartheid liberation, post-apartheid, African studies, African diaspora studies, transnationalism, and pan-Africanism to reflect on their pathways to international research through the various subjects, geographies, and histories they study. We asked contributors to reflect on how the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, in particular, catalysed their scholarship and activism. Reflecting on their years of being, organising with, historicising, and studying Black activists and the transnational solidarity politics that they engage in as the ‘conscience of nations’, authors explore what it means to be committed long term to international research and movement work (Franklin 2021).

To know liberation movement history, to treat it as worthy of study, and to treat its lessons as a great wisdom is nothing short of a miracle – particularly in an era of widespread, pro-fascist, anti-Black bans against such history. Liz Fekete has explained that:

‘rightwing libertarian ideas … intent on unchaining capital from the restraining hand of regulation, corporate-backed networks … foment a counter-revolution against progressive gains in the field of labour and civil rights and consumer and environmental protections. Ploughing huge sums of money into provoking outrage and manufacturing free speech crises’ in educational settings from nursery schools to universities (Fekete 2022, 39).

Prominent among the response to the widespread expansion of pro-fascist, anti-Black bans include the African American Policy Forum’s Open Letter on Fighting ‘Anti-Woke Censorship of Intersectionality and Black Feminism’ (2023) and the United Nations ‘Second Session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent – Thematic Discussion: Global Reparatory Justice’ (2023). Despite such organized rejection of categorical warnings against pro-fascist policy making, local and national roll backs to democratic electoral and judiciary processes and rights to privacy and bodily integrity are ongoing and swelling in their thousands. Such concerning anti-history legislation in the United States has proven influential in misinformation campaigns and is a terrible portent of fascist policy making globally rooted in the most anti-democratic and pro-slavery aspects of the established history of American political development (Keck 2019). Hochschild and Levine Einstein (2015) have documented the relationship between misinformation and grave and ‘consequential’ public policies. Benkler, Faris, and Roberts have referred to a ‘diet’ of misinformation as distorting individual and collective policy preferences that they have called ‘propaganda’ (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018). Every time academics and researchers equivocate on the historical meaning of colonialism and enslavement and patriarchy, the embodied history of those who remember the consequences of these vile systems must be carefully retold. Such embodied histories are encountered in the ongoing marks they leave on flesh, womb, and psyche.

The contributors to this volume, whose scholarly interventions are summarised in detail below, include historians, geographers, communications scholars, educationists, ethnic studies scholars, performance studies scholars, political scientists, feminist and cultural studies scholars, critical gender studies scholars, anthropologists, urban studies scholars, and media makers and artists. Despite this disciplinary range, there is a trenchant media focus in this collection, which enlists diverse approaches to the study of South African social movements including radio, music, poetry, and international communication networks to name a few. Like the new body of social documentary and cultural texts, our work ranges widely across popular and academic disciplines and ways of remembering the anti-apartheid liberation struggle (Desai 2014, 2018, 2022; Dube and Otto 2016; Neille and Poplak 2020; Walker 2018). The contributors all have in common the experience of being drawn into studying and preserving the history of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Mottiar and Lodge call this self-conscious and intentional engagement with liberation struggle history, ‘how movements survive’ (Mottiar and Lodge 2017, 103).

The contributors further explain how their engagement with the anti-apartheid liberation struggle has been a transformational process that deepened their historical consciousness, agency, and will. This transformational process calls people to bring their gifts and talents to bear in the struggle for liberation. The researchers included in this volume are contributing to the struggle for liberation through their careful excavation, archiving, documentation, and analysis of the living history of resistance. At the risk of being repetitive, nearly all of us are ‘movement babies’ having been raised by anti-apartheid liberation activists or exiles or having been part of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle ourselves. In this volume, we create space for amplifying both untold histories of the diaspora and exile that have contributed to the liberation struggle in Azania as well as the embodied memories of being politically socialised into the anti-apartheid liberation struggle while reflecting on our own political awakenings and consciousness raising. The closest and most commonly recognised forms of re-membering our own political awakenings and consciousness raising presented in this collection are also described in memoirs by Sangomas (Nkabinde 2009). We are not Sangomas, but we were definitely called into a transformational process that defined how we live our lives.

‘Sangoma’ is a Zulu term for a traditional healer. Within social circles, these healers are highly revered and respected for their wisdom, and their ability to perform rituals and promote healing from physical, spiritual, and emotional illness. Within public health and epidemiology, a patient’s likelihood to turn to these healers is understood by some as an obstacle and by others as a companion form of culturally meaningful integrative health (Wreford 2005). Within scholarship on African and Black religion, these healers are reviled by some and revered by others. Sangomas are a critical part of the social, public health, and legal world of South African society and have been granted formal legal rights in the constitution (Binsbergen and Wim 2003; Kleinhempel 2017; Mokhoathi 2017; Nkabinde 2009; Postel 2010; Wreford 2005).

For our purposes, however, we are concerned with both the various roles that Sangomas play in society and the purpose-filled lives that they are called to. Following scholar Shawn Wilson (2008), if we think of the conduct of research as ‘ceremony’ that transforms researchers by sustaining a ‘relation’ between traditional objects of study and traditional research, then the way that we relay our own arrival and positionality in the anti-apartheid liberation movement is significant. Our contributors use (auto)ethnography, archives, reminiscences, interviews, and storytelling as ways to enter the history of these liberation movements as ‘culture keepers’. Reflecting on the calling into this history, it serves us best to signal the traditional academic tone in the Romanised font and the ceremonial or non-traditional tone in the italicised font. We use italics intentionally. We intend for the words to land, ignite, and catalyse a cognitive disruption.

One does not just become or decide to be a Sangoma. They must receive a calling and go through rigorous training from an elder Sangoma to properly access the ancestors in the spirit world to guide their works. We have asked contributors to describe the transformation of becoming a history-keeper of the anti-apartheid liberation movement and to describe the people and stories about the struggle which set them on their path. To commit to this training and to take on the mantle of becoming a Sangoma, a sacred transformation of a person into a medium between the spirit world, the ancestors, and the living and dead must resonate deeply within one’s soul. One has to think about oneself as a vehicle for preserving and disrupting history as it is experienced in the lives of people and communities. This transformation must be encouraged by something far greater than themselves, which then guides them to the path they must walk. It is through their tether to the past that they can perform their duties in the present. Sangomas, their training, and the ways that people relate to them reflect the embodiment, and institutionalisation, of spiritual beliefs in the everyday lives of people. People’s spiritual beliefs, like their historical beliefs, transform who they can become.

Sangoma practice, even among those of us who were introduced to it unconsciously, produces experimentation, vulnerability, aesthetic rebellion, and risk taking that can imagine places as disparate as Conakry, Dar es Salaam, Los Angeles, and Soweto as being continuous geographically, and sonically. Sangoma practice enables us to view these places as ones where we must build global Black spatial imaginaries. Perceiving the ties between such disparate places is not an easy task, especially since the historical categories of diaspora and Pan-Africanism and Black liberation have been diminished in the places of rank and privilege and status. We have asked contributors to describe and reflect on the transformational journey of becoming a history-keeper of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Further, we have invited them to describe the people and stories about the struggle which set them on their path.

Those of us who answer the call to memorialise the snatches of memory carried by displaced people, fugitives, exiles, runaways, and the people who harboured them along the way formed part of our ethical lives and constitute an important form of political education. These stories of political education are intimate and reflect the struggle of displaced people to fight against racial terror in all of its dimensions wherever it emerges on the planet. The contributors are tethered in the present to these liberation movements of the past through lineage and kinship, through their predecessors’ participation in these struggles, through their own life-long commitments to liberation movements, and/or through linking these struggles to those other global struggles that are informed by them. The contributors are also tethered to these liberation movements by metaphysical, cosmological, and etheric modes of being and knowing. Like Sangomas, these scholars use historical methods to answer ancestral callings for healing, re-memory, acceptance, and cultivating new understandings of the present. Whether the present must be celebrated or condemned depends on how we understand the insights that liberation movements have made perceivable. For those of us who study liberation movements – their culture work, ethics and principles, organisations, and their contributions to human evolution – those movements accompany us with unsettling revelations about the spiritual transformations that occur when people involve themselves in revolutions of consciousness and of their political, economic, and cultural worlds. Following Toni Morrison and other Black feminist theorising about historiography, helps us understand how certain stories have to be told, retold, and untold in order to make room for the stories of the wretched of the earth. These thinkers offer pregnant and enduring theoretical assistance here, providing a vocabulary for discussing the intellectually generative labour of bearing certain kinds of histories as a scholar (Gordon 2008; Millward 2016). The contributors are writing politically significant histories that are necessary, usable histories for the present and enable us to interrupt the normalised tragicomic operations of power. The contributors have been called to push back against fatalism and hopelessness and to offer historical accounts that reignite reckoning and deep social transformation.

So, indeed, while we present in this collection new research based on anti-apartheid liberation movements past and present through our throng of methodological approaches, we also offer our pathways to this research. We do this to highlight the calling we have all received to illuminate the stakes of this work for our personal lives and for the continued struggle for liberation in South Africa and across the globe. While some scholars are in a conversation about the consolidation of democracy, others are in a conversation about whether we have achieved post-apartheid. Still, others are in a conversation about the notion that South Africa is a legal fiction that obscures the land theft of conquest and the subjection and attempted extermination and repression of millions of persons over hundreds of years. The stakes of this collaborative research project are finding compelling answers to the questions: What is liberation? What is liberation for? Who is liberation for? When is liberation possible? As people committed to African liberation and liberation of African people across the globe, we have gathered to offer systematic assessments of various strands of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. We find common cause with the legacy of activists who were configuring global notions of a post-apartheid world and the creation of a renewed and whole Azania (Chami 2021, 12, 17, 19, 21–22).

Due to the South African state’s banning and exile policies, and the international solidarity work of South African exiles across the globe beginning in 1960, we consider how this movement emerged outside of South Africa. We are not suggesting that the most important literature on the anti-apartheid liberation movement has come from outside. But in our own formation as historical caretakers of these movement legacies, our stories branch out across the globe to many places outside of South Africa. To put as fine a point as possible on this matter, Latasha B. Levy writes, ‘much of the scholarship on the anti-apartheid liberation movement tends to divorce … world wide struggle from a history and tradition of Pan-Africanism’ (Levy 2016, 197). The ethical decision for solidarity with anti-colonial struggle emerges both from our own positionality within movement spaces but also emerges from the freedom dream of a liberated and whole Azania that would transform the world. The accusation that racialised peoples from the Global North ought not to speak about liberation movements in Africa rests on a dangerous divide and conquer strategy familiar to the colonial playbook. According to philosopher Emmanuel Eze (1997), the premise of the anti-diaspora claim, has the effect of heightening normal sociological differences, of class, race, language, ethnicity, and culture, to unleash a subtle epistemological attack on African people sited outside of the continent. This is a hostile epistemological claim that has been repeatedly disproven. Each time it resurfaces (as if never encountered before) it advances the notion that African people outside of the continent lack the intellectual prowess to address complex multivariate historical phenomena. It operates to make liberation movements, Pan-Africanism, and solidarity practices seem far-fetched, illogical, and no longer significant for the present. The international solidarity work and its significance to the anti-apartheid liberation movement is a historical fact. This collection of research articles probes that fact through careful and sustained examination of how and where the processes of political consciousness raising occurred. Additionally, we are concerned with intimate and historically significant accounts that illuminate how and why historicising anti-apartheid liberation movements in a global context matter.

Background and context

This volume comes following the aforementioned panel during which many of the contributing authors participated. The research shared and stories told during this panel compelled us to share the insights expressed with a larger academic community. In the end, we have teamed up with Third World Thematics (TWT) and its global readership of social scientists and expanded the theme and pool of writers in order to do just that: share this vitally important work and the stories that led us to produce it.

Moreover, this collection is part of an expanding initiative to focus more research on African studies and its relationship to the African diaspora within NCOBPS, a 54-year-old US-based academic professional association. At its historic founding, the organisation was internationalist and Third Worldist in orientation. Indeed, the African Association of Political Science Association (AAPS),¹ a continent-wide organisation made up of liberation-minded Black thinkers in political history, political movements, and political economy, hosted NCOBPS members at their continent-based conferences for about a dozen years. Over time, NCOBPS members turned towards a US-based focus on voting rights, education, policing, and other domestic concerns and AAPS, facing a series of internal challenges, closed its doors. The internationalism represented in this interdisciplinary group of papers is a regeneration of the foundational focus of NCOBPS. From African politics publications in the association’s journal to collaboration with the African Heritage Studies Association to the founding of the inaugural 2021 pre-conference of the Transnational Black Women in African Politics, this collection seeks to encourage scholars to expand their research in African studies and African diaspora studies outside of the geographical boundaries of the United States.

In this collection, authors provide granular explanations of a global movement where we consider such events and subjects as Oliver Tambo in London and Lusaka, broad coalitions of domestic and transnational churches, the work of universities and civil society in liberation politics, as well as the African Union, TransAfrica (one of the most significant anti-apartheid liberation campaigns in the United States), and many other international bodies. For us, the anti-apartheid liberation movement is still a living model for global transformative social change. Our approach to reflecting on our own politicisation speaks to the significance of the global anti-apartheid liberation movement for the next generation. Of significant and worthy mention is political scientist Randall Robinson (1941–2023) who founded the South Africa Movement Campaign of TransAfrica in 1977, which organised daily protests using a jail-in strategy of Black elected officials and everyday people at the South African embassy in Washington, DC (Meer 1989, 5). Robinson’s novel Makeda (Robinson 2011) explores his own familial relationship to Global Black freedom movements in his grandmother’s storytelling and time travelling lessons. Makeda provides yet another rich lesson of how important spiritual interventions and family storytelling have been to mobilising anti-apartheid liberation movement activism in the Global Black world.

This volume not only speaks to the history of anti-apartheid liberation work strictly in terms of liberation struggle within South Africa and across the diaspora, but more importantly, we think of it as a mode of resistance to the past, and ongoing structural and living violences of colonialism still bludgeoning the present. In this way, this collection is in conversation with much of the contemporary scholarship analysing South African social movements past and present. We are in particular debt to the University of Ohio short book series that since 2014 has re-released and produced new accounts: assessments of the 1976 youth movement that frame them in a longer century of activism (Heffernan 2019; Heffernan, Nieftagodien, and Ndlovu 2016; Nieftagodien 2014); accounts that describe the liberation movements in the context of imperialism and anti-communism (Horne 2019); accounts from members of the armed wings of the revolutionary movements (Cherry 2012); and records of student responses to various tactics of state repression that targeted the wider society but had outsized effects on younger people. Increasingly, engagement with anti-apartheid liberation histories is emerging from these voices, amplifying voices and stories, campaigns, and reminiscences that aid substantively in our understanding of anti-colonial resistance and revolutionary thinking in Africa.

We contend that there is no case to be made for colonialism and our work in this collection is to name colonialism, and plot its demise. As such, this collection of essays places the anti-apartheid liberation movement and its many legacy social movements as branches in the rhizomatic network of myriad liberation campaigns rooted in anti-colonialism.

In this collection, our contributors address the issue of colonialism in their own ways. Considering both methods and approach, each author makes a clear statement about colonialism, its harms, and its various forms of violence. For instance, in Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s article, she argues that colonial violence actually gets lost in the normalisation of everyday poverty without the infusion of anti-apartheid liberation activists re-animating calls for economic justice, while Sophie Toupin argues how forms of fugitive infrastructure were implemented in the late 1980s to resist and fight against the South African apartheid regime and settler colonial state (Willoughby-Herard, 2023b, this issue; Toupin 2022, this issue). To talk so specifically and deliberately about forms of colonialism in this volume was a collective decision that came only after multiple meetings and several hours of deliberation as we pondered if we wanted to make the editorial choice to publish our collection in this journal.

In deciding where to place this collection, the guest editors and authors deliberated on the controversy around the publication of the 2017 Viewpoint piece ‘The case for colonialism’ by Bruce Gilley in a sister journal to Third World Thematics. The Third World Quarterly (TWQ) Viewpoint piece, which was withdrawn and does not form part of the scholarly record of the journal, still raises some discomfort amongst scholars years later. Gilley’s (in our opinion, absurd) article has a contested history. The withdrawal notice for this article, as written on Taylor & Francis Online, states that Gilley’s article was ‘withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay’ and that, ‘the journal editor … received serious and credible threats of personal violence’ subsequent to the publication of this essay (Gilley 2017). In addition to the still active controversy around its publication, the article has since been published by other sources online subsequent to that withdrawal.

This lingering afterlife and impact of Gilley’s article raised ethical, spiritual, and cosmological questions. Gilley’s article did not meet rigorous academic standards. Again, in the context of pro-fascist policy making and far right ideological organising, referred to above, the fact that Gilley’s piece could pass scholarly review will continue to signal long-held and well-founded fears. Musoba, Jacob, and Robinson (2014) have documented the many legal implications for social, scientific, historical, pharmaceutical, biomedical, and genomic research based on the kind of lethal racial ideologies that Gilley endorsed. In a June 2023 interview with the former director of the Tuskegee University Legacy Museum (Alabama, USA), Dr. Jontyle Robinson, explained the devastating impact over generations of ‘governments’ role in the long historical arc of endorsing, legitimising, and giving ground to colonialism as rational, reasonable, and acceptable (Willoughby-Herard 2023a). Dr. Jontyle Robinson would have us consider Gilley’s writing as tantamount to apologias to genocide. Dr. Jontyle Robinson referred interviewers to the Official Proclamation by President William Jefferson Clinton against the ‘misdeeds’ of the United States Public Health Service in its ‘Untreated Syphilis Study in the Negro Male in Macon County, Alabama, 1932–1972’ (WHTV 1997). Gilley’s writing might be most generously described as championing misdeeds.

Our contributors agree that Gilley’s defence of colonialism in this piece is symptomatic of the rise in authoritarianism reflected in the presidencies of Donald Trump (United States of America), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), the prime ministership of Viktor Orbán (Hungary), and the multiple candidacies and party leadership of Marine Le Pen (France). Yet, for our larger research formation, the idea that colonialism can be defended is anathema. A terrible economic, cultural, and psychological toll is still being paid for naming, healing from, and rejecting the rapacious force of colonialism and its proponents. Thus, Gilley’s article has had significant and substantial afterlives.

However, after all things considered and after long and arduous conversations regarding this amongst our contributors, we decided to move forward with this volume as long as three criteria were met: 1) That we receive correspondence from TWQ’s leadership outlining the events that led to the publication of Gilley’s article and what steps have since been implemented to prevent such a mistake from being repeated; 2) that we could outline our specific process for deciding to publish in this journal in our introduction; and 3) that our authors all outline their stake in anti-colonial work in their individual papers. We engaged in a lengthy, process-oriented discussion and a rigorous debate. This was necessary because where we publish and disseminate these histories of anti-apartheid liberation movements matters. The ethical implications for contributors were of the greatest importance. An example of this was shared by one of the conference panellists from which this collection emerged. The researcher spoke of an exceedingly painful experience as the only Black Teaching Assistant in an undergraduate course when the professor assigned the Gilley piece. When Gilley’s article was assigned and they were the only voice willing to repudiate it publicly, they realised that for their professor and some other influential scholars of Africa, the legacy of colonialism is not embodied or experienced. Reflecting on their experience made the panellist question the ethics of contributing to this collection in the sister journal to the one that was responsible for publishing it. To this point, this panellist said:

My data is not my own, as it is other people’s experiences and stories. I am not sure that I can do justice to their stories and write against this craziness in this way. My relationship with the movement is also about friendships not just ‘data/informers’. They welcomed me into this space and welcomed me to do research in ways that other researchers have not done. I take people’s narratives really seriously.

This is an example of the considerations – which are often underappreciated and under-examined in the academy – that go into the production of the kind of intentional and ethical anti-colonial work we highlight in this collection. Moreover, it also speaks to the very real dilemma we had to sift through as we considered if we could continue with this publication.

However, in our conversations about TWQ’s correspondence that explained the leadup to the Gilley publication and their subsequent organisational audit, we questioned where in academia we can find space/archives/philanthropies/non-profits that are not embedded in area studies/colonial work.² In answer to this question, we concluded that far too few such place exist and that we, too, are caught up in the historical present and the historical past of these institutions. Considering the constant anti-Black rhetoric and events that peppered the Trump Era, during which Gilley’s article was published, it only further highlighted for us that no truly ‘safe spaces’ exist (Hanhardt 2013). For us, and particularly Willoughby-Herard, this project would be a failure if we did not focus with a deep intent on how to claim space in academic publishing and presses. For academics in fields that focus on the liberation and study of the Third World, it is imperative that we learn how to stand up to and on editorial boards wherever we find ourselves. Therefore, we have endeavoured to share the steps we have taken, the conversations we had, and the criteria we demanded as we moved forward with this publication.

As Sangomas are trained by their elders in their calling, our collection is instructed by a cadre of scholars, activists, and freedom fighters who have left behind in their written work and in their mentorship, a legacy for us to carry to inspire the proceeding generations until the struggle ends. Much of what we have written here is inspired by the writings of Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, Bessie Head, Es’kia Mphahlele, Ntongela Masilela, Zora Neale Hurston, Edouard Glissant, WEB Du Bois, Francis Nesbitt, Robert Sobukwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Francis Nesbitt, Tinswalo Mageza, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Steve Biko, CLR James, Brent Hayes Edwards, Gertrude Shope, and Saidiya Hartman amongst countless others. Within the bountiful web of Black political thought that this list of thinkers, writers, and liberation theorists represents, exists a dialogue in which we are entering in this collection. We are grounded in the interconnections of the functions of diaspora and liberation within anti-colonial struggle as represented by the likes of Robinson, Rodney, Masilela, Nesbitt, and James. This coupled with our meditations of our own politicisation as characterised by the work of people like Hurston, Du Bois, Mphahlele, Baldwin, and Hartman are exemplary of the conversations this issue wants to highlight and expand upon.

Contributions

This volume is wide-ranging in terms of its interdisciplinarity, its geographical reach, subjects, scales of analysis, and the training experiences of its contributors. Contributors’ work is based in Oxford, England; Pretoria, South Africa; Lusaka, Zambia; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Los Angeles, California; Santa Barbara, California; and Detroit, Michigan, among other capitals of the anti-apartheid liberation movement and subsequent struggles. We intend for readers to remember that anti-apartheid liberation meaning making is both uncovered in the study of movement history but also lives on and is continually created in our contemporary moment.

The first contribution in this collection, ‘Dar es Salaam on the Frontline: Red and Black Internationalisms’, comes from Yousuf Al-Bulushi. Al-Bulushi’s essay explores the Pan-African movement from the vantage point of Tanzania, a key frontline state (Al-Bulushi 2022, this issue). Under the leadership of Julius Nyerere beginning in the 1960s, independent Tanzania took a strong position in support of liberating the rest of Southern Africa which remained under either Portuguese or white settler rule. What John Saul has called a ‘thirty year war for independence’ ensued, with Dar es Salaam serving as epicentre of the ongoing anti-colonial and Pan-African struggle. Al-Bulushi argues that along with South African exiles, Dar served as a base for radical thinkers from across the continent and the world. Combining primary and secondary narratives from scholars and activists who were based in Dar from the 1960s-1980s with personal accounts from his family, Al-Bulushi charts the trials and tribulations of everyday life in this Pan-African metropolis, and the parallel struggles for intellectual decolonisation that occurred at the University of Dar es Salaam at this time. He closes by ruminating on the contemporary salience of these political and theoretical debates from the vantage point of the post-colonial malaise in Tanzania and South Africa today.

The next contribution, ‘Dawn Breaks: the anti-colonial legacy of the ANC Women’s Section radio segment’, is an auto-ethnographic study that explores how its author, Martin L. Boston, came to study South African exiles after combing through the pages upon pages of Dawn Breaks archival documents at the Liberation Archives in Alice, South Africa (Boston 2022, this issue). Dawn Breaks was a weekly 30-minute radio segment of the exiled African National Congress (ANC) radio programme, ‘Radio Freedom’, that broadcasted primarily from the radio programme’s Lusaka, Zambia headquarters every Thursday evening. In the archive, Boston was enamoured by the myriad documents covering the ANC Women’s Section radio segment for the larger propaganda outlet, which was tasked with re-appropriating the South African airwaves to fight for the liberation of South Africa from outside the confines of the nation-state. Given that Dawn Breaks began broadcasting on 13 March 1980 and did so consistently throughout the decade, it is curious that more has not been written about this radio segment that posits South African women as a central part of the ANC’s most vital propaganda outlet. In response, Boston argues that one of the most significant contributions by Dawn Breaks to the ANC, Radio Freedom, and the anti-colonial anti-apartheid liberation struggle was their articulation of a more inclusive and expansive anti-colonial vision for South Africa’s liberation from the clutches of National Party apartheid rule by elevating the voices of women in struggle. In addition, Boston argues that Dawn Breaks, as a cultural product of struggle, also offers a significant model for studying how and why scholar-activists like Boston, but more particularly Black women in struggle, are politicised into joining anti-apartheid liberation movements and are able to find their voice in anti-colonial struggle. This kind of work is indebted to entities like the Women’s Section’s radio segment because it amplified the Women’s Section’s growing voice and activism across the clandestine ANC organisation in exile through the airwaves.

Amanda Joyce Hall’s contribution, ‘Black Consciousness women’s organising intimacies, and the coldness of European anti-apartheid liberation solidarity’ examine the undulating dynamics of Dutch solidarity with two women members of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, Mmagauta Molefe, and Oshadi Mangena (Hall 2023, this issue). Applying lenses of intimacy and coldness to solidarity-building, Hall reveals the limitations of European anti-apartheid liberation organising for its gendered racism, but also for its allegiance to the African National Congress. Hall argues that this allegiance stifled attempts by Pan-Africanist and Black Consciousness activists to build international support for a global anti-colonial movement in the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprisings.

While Hall draws our attention to gendered racism in movement politics, our next contribution explores the transformative biographies of several Pan-African women leaders and the way that they contribute to the research journey of historian Tiffany Caesar (Caesar 2023, this issue). Caesar explores how she became a Black Woman’s Archivist through her research on South African Renaissance woman, writer, political activist, educator, and mother, Phyllis Ntantala. It was through this research that Caesar first became intimate with the archive. Phyllis’ work also led Caesar to study two more influential women: African American writer, political activist, mother, and educator, Margaret Walker (7 July 1915 – 30 November 1998), and Queen Mother Moore, (27 July 1898 – 2 May 1997) who was in her own right an important Pan-African Leader, founder of the Reparation Movement, political theorist, mother, and educator. In this contribution, Caesar explores how these transnational Black women demonstrate Black feminist praxis and leadership despite the normalcy of heteropatriarchy. Caesar also shares her utmost desire to walk with them as scholar activists and share their legacy of women-centred Pan-Africanism as a form of preservation of Black women’s voices and advocacy against colonialism. In the end, Caesar’s piece shares that these women are linked by spiritual calling, geographical proximity, and willingness to be courageous during multiple African Liberation Movements globally and under which the anti-apartheid liberation movement falls.

Following Caesar, we then shift our focus from anti-apartheid liberation era subjects to contemporary feminist praxis. In ‘And their voices were everywhere: Myesha Jenkins and the Pan-African feminist performance strategies of liberation’, Natalia Molebatsi discusses the media activism of Black feminist poet, editor, and anti-Apartheid activist, Myesha Jenkins (Molebatsi 2023, this issue). Molebatsi argues that in addition to Jenkins’ published and live poetry, she used the medium of radio to, as Thomas De Frantz and Anita Gonzales remind us, ‘amplify and accelerate the distribution of performance’ (2014, 5). Molebatsi traces the late Jenkins’ commitment to replicate Black feminist poetry on public radio as she did on digital platforms. For the first time on South African public radio, a deliberate feminist agenda was centred to invite a validation of poetry as political action. This essay analyzes Jenkins’ amplification of poetry on the radio and the feminist collectives that came before it, within the register of Pan-African feminist collective imagination and movement building. Molebatsi suggests that Jenkins’ body of work – particularly her groundbreaking radio programme Poetry in the Air (PitA) – provided wider access to feminist ideals where new, brave spaces were crafted for self-writing and self-representation. Molebatsi argues that PitA, along with Jenkins’ other work building feminist poetry and performance collectives, were imperative to South African women’s performance strategies of liberation, in a country (and world) that actively (re)produces what Pumla Gqola terms the ‘Female Fear Factory’. Further, in this essay Molebatsi explores Jenkins’ radio poetics as imperative to the project of liberation, one that is as ongoing and unfolding now as it does in the past that is not past. As a co-creator with Jenkins on some of these Pan-African feminist poetry collectives and productions, Molebatsi uses the oral histories that she conducted with her between 2016 and 2017, the transcripts of PitA, and the social history of contemporary South African feminist poetry collectives to examine her legacy.

Continuing Molebatsi’s cultural theme, the next contribution, by historian Mychal M. Odom, takes us back to the era of anti-apartheid liberation struggle in, ‘The Home of Afro-American Music: Los Angeles and the Creation of Hugh Masekela’s Anticolonial Sound’ (Odom 2023, this issue). In this piece, Odom examines the life and cultural work of Hugh Masekela and his record label Chisa Records during his time in Los Angeles from 1966 to 1976. From the wake of the Watts Rebellion to the eve of the Soweto Uprising, for Masekela and other African musicians in exile life in Los Angeles deepened their bonds with African American culture, bridged the space between African liberation and Black Power, and more importantly sustained the anti-apartheid liberation movement in exile, laying the grounds for the cultural boycott. Promoted as the ‘Home of Afro-American Music’, Masekela and his label challenged what Odom calls the white global spatial imaginary’s promotion of South African music as tribal and backwards. Masekela and other Chisa artists, both South African and African American, generated what Odom labels a Black global spatial imaginary which in sound, aesthetics, and political practice linked Black liberation struggles in Southern California to those in Southern Africa.

The next contribution, ‘Fugitive Infrastructure in the Fight Against South African Apartheid’ by Sophie Toupin, examines an encrypted communication system integrated as part of Operation Vula, an underground mission spearheaded by members of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that was operational from 1988 to 1991 (Toupin 2022, this issue). The purpose of Vula was to bring key leaders back from exile to steer from the ground the machinery of mass movement against the apartheid regime. To make Vula a reality in a highly militarised South Africa of the late 1980s a whole infrastructure of covered resistance (physical, technical, and people-based) was necessary. In this contribution, Toupin proposes the concept of fugitive infrastructure to understand this form of resistance. Toupin suggests that the secret mission Vula and its communication system can be interpreted as a (fugitive) infrastructure of marronage, whereby the system comprised not only an instrument for coordinating resistance to the apartheid regime but also a materialisation, at the level of infrastructure, of a potential alternative future for Black South Africans.

Next, Abebe Zegeye’s contribution on the Pretoria synagogue highlights a thematic rooted in the cultural preservation of religious sites, which has become more pronounced in his scholarship in the past decade (Zegeye 2023, this issue). As an anti-apartheid liberation activist from Ethiopia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US), and Oxford (UK), Zegeye’s writing is animated by what is possible. Having the chutzpah to believe, still, in an African future based on coexistence not domination, his study of this particular synagogue is oriented towards the kind of social cohesion (to use Magona’s 2023 language) it can deepen. Exploring the synagogue’s presence in the movement reminds the author how anti-apartheid liberation activists reclaimed abandoned communities and places, repurposing them for survival, flourishing, and liberation. Like other places historicised in this volume, the Pretoria synagogue was an important part of anti-apartheid liberation meaning making. Zegeye’s own experience of being conscientized by Philadelphia (US) civil rights activists shaped his orientation towards the apartheid struggle. Revising what this fact means may require fellowship in sacred places and imagining ways that everyday people can make sites of remembering into harbours, sanctuaries, and refuges – for surfacing the desire to build together a society worthy of all its people.

Our penultimate contribution comes from Tiffany Willoughby-Herard with her essay, ‘Political Education in a Food Pantry: Child Perspectives on the Liturgy and Agape of Rev. Mangedwa Nyathi in Detroit (USA)’ (Willoughby-Herard, 2023b, this issue). In it, Willoughby-Herard looks at the life of the exiled anti-apartheid liberation activist, Rev. Mangedwa Nyathi, and the founding of the Hartford Memorial Baptist Church Agape Center, which fed people all over the city during the worst and hardest parts of the 1980s and 1990s. While teaching about the world struggle against apartheid from the pulpit every Sunday, he also did what so many other exiles and anti-apartheid liberation activists did, he provided immediate aid and comfort to communities where many people were left behind, and condemned to live on the dregs of what other people did not want. He was a mentor and big brother for countless other student exiles living in the Michigan/Windsor region holding weekly dinners for them and welcoming them in. For years Willoughby-Herard’s family, whom were migrants to Detroit from Haiti and the US South survived because of the Agape Center. Not only this, but Rev. Nyathi also went all over the United States talking about the struggle against apartheid, helping other exiles to learn how to speak up for the new world they were labouring to bring about. In this meditation and political history, Willoughby-Herard offers an oral life history reflection on the work of the Agape Center for their family to show that those of us whose understandings of a world that must be fought over and fought for are always in his debt.

The epilogue for our collection is written by the incomparable feminist media activist Elizabeth Peters Robinson. In her essay, ‘Who Will Tell the News?’ Robinson reflects on the many movement journalists, photographers, and chroniclers and the ways that they marshalled anti-apartheid liberation media to build solidarity. She considers how their point of views yield important information, some of it flawed, even self-serving (Robinson 2023, this issue). Nonetheless, Robinson argues that getting out the news and telling the tale requires a medium. For her, some of the most pivotal ones in struggles for self-determination, for liberation, are airborne. For example, the drums, in our histories and imaginations, and community media, especially radio in the fight against apartheid and its aftermath. Thus, it came as no surprise to Robinson that a number of the pieces in this collection recounted both tellers and radio as their medium. Leftist scholars have long examined diasporic solidarity politics through analyses of media making (Young 2006). Narratives and representations continue to be an important terrain for contesting power politics and articulating how exiles, diaspora politics, and internationalist women’s movements build movements together (Blain 2018; Culverson 1997; Henry 2000). Robinson, however, explores the history of alternative press outlets that deliberately intervened in ‘tales of the state’ – those narrative strategies to misshape the American peoples’ consciousness about global affairs through triumphant propaganda. The international scene was represented as orderly only inasmuch as it reflected nineteenth-century racial hierarchies of nations. These alternative press outlets brought to mind histories of anti-colonial struggle and revolution, not as social problems or catastrophes in need of pacification but as the primary egalitarian forms for achieving democracy.

Ultimately, this epilogue casts more light on the communicators and their chosen distribution tool with the intention of considering why community mediums – not just corporate, private, or state – are essential in telling our stories.

Conclusion

This collection arose from contributors who answered our call to reflect on how they became involved in the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Beginning from self-reflection about our own investments in particular disciplines meant that we were able to speak across and beyond the disciplines. Our contributors have offered a thoroughly interdisciplinary collection that returns us to ethical questions including: What is liberation? Who is liberation for? How do we achieve and sustain liberation? These are fundamentally anti-colonial questions but also questions of the human spirit and what the ancestors call us to do.

Scholar-activists committed to undertaking the lifework of documenting and participating in radical liberation movements accept their duty to analyse these particularly volatile historical events and the circumstances that surround them. We deploy this historical practice and the related forms of engagement using the experience of spiritual dedication, similar to that which emerges in the making of Sangomas. For ‘endarkened people’, to borrow from Cynthia Dillard’s term, ‘Endarkened feminist epistemology’ (Dillard 2006, 2012), reconceiving studying and embracing liberation histories as ritual practices and anchors of cultural memory. For us, a critical feminist journey that excavates how racialized gender is made and entrenched in discriminatory social relations is part of the spiritual work of becoming abantu (people).

Having gathered to share our research and stories for the panel, “The Movement Resonated Deep in my Soul: Pathways to International Research in the anti-apartheid liberation Struggle”, at an acclaimed Black scholarly conference was another transformative experience. Not only were we able to tap into personal reflections, interviews, family stories, and archival findings that we carry with us, we were operationalising our own contributions to the legacy of that organisation. The movement resonated in our own souls but bringing our study of the movement to the NCOBPS steered us towards new visions and possibilities for working together. One of the most essential liberation practices of the anti-apartheid liberation movement and anti-colonial movements writ large has been a set of intentional epistemological interventions. These include polyvocality, heterotopia, wide ranging interdisciplinarity, and speaking across geographical reach, subjects, and scales of analysis. In our volume we have extended these epistemological interventions by foregrounding the experiences of political socialisation and conscientization that shaped our contributors. This humanistic approach to movement history-keeping, indeed, has much to say about how we historicise the anti-apartheid liberation movement, who belongs to it, and where they joined this global struggle.

Third World Thematics (TWT) is the leading journal of humanistic scholarship and policy in the field of international studies but it has not always been in conversation with Black liberation history-keepers. Only a handful of NCOBPS members have published their work in this journal. All of our contributors come to international studies through their own disciplines. For example, Tiffany Caesar trained in education and came to international studies through African-centred education. Natalia Molebatsi trained in communications and came to international studies through feminist performance poetry. Amanda Joyce Hall trained in history and African American studies and came to international studies through the study of student protests. Most distinctive about this collection is an exploration of global South African-based social movements and how they have shaped thinking about internationalism across several generations.

In 2014, when young people began protesting against the coloniality of education, the structural obstacles of unemployment, the inability to access adequate housing, and the ongoing challenges of sexual violence, they were met by neoliberal state explanations and failed policy interventions. We have entered into this debate as important interlocutors. We are based in the Global South and the Global North and traverse both. We are also based in an unmarked spatial imaginary, a so-called ‘hidden generation’ raised by anti-apartheid liberation movement activists that lived in exile both within and outside of the African continent. This is a quintessentially Pan-African condition that reveals the history of colonialism and coloniality. When we attempt to speak about liberation movements, the first move of colonial advocates – alive and kicking today – is the accusation that we ought to respect the coloniser’s national boundaries. Those national boundaries did not serve us in the 15th century, in 1884 and 1885, and they do not serve us today. Solidarity politics and the pursuit of liberation, however, continue to serve our ethical and spiritual interests. This is why we have amplified the stories of consciousness raising because the anti-apartheid liberation movement lives in our memories, our bodies, and in our dreams.

The anti-apartheid liberation movement relied heavily on support from all corners of the globe. Exiles not only promoted the anti-apartheid liberation movement around the globe, but they also re-spatialised the struggle for Black freedom. Exiles established schools, social work centres, food pantries, guerilla training camps, and record labels. All of this culturally sustaining and ethically motivated activity invigorated and leveraged decades of civil rights philanthropy from below. Every single article in this volume reflects on the dynamic nature of an anti-apartheid liberation movement where ‘exilic consciousness’, as Martin Boston theorises, creates anti-apartheid liberation geographies and breathes life into the long anti-colonial struggle (Boston 2022, this issue). These analyses of historical material are sacred offerings of our situated knowledges about the anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Such offerings are our collective contribution to the future of anti-colonial struggle.

Dedication

To conclude on a personal note, we would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of our esteemed colleague and giant in the field of anti-apartheid liberation studies, Dr. Francis Njubi Nesbitt. Dr. Nesbitt entered the beyond place where only the ancestors can name in 2020 and left behind a legacy of work that has lifted the scholarship of every scholar of South African social movements and especially those represented in this collection whether directly or indirectly. Particularly, Dr. Nesbitt’s monograph, Race For Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946–1994 (Nesbitt, 2004), is a template of academic rigour and thematic contribution that we all strive to emulate in our own work. However, beyond the scholar, what we miss most is the man. What a kind and generous man he was. He was a true mentor and friend to many and will surely be missed. So, in the words of the freedom fighters that paved the way before us and who lay the track for our continued march, ‘Amandla!’

We also salute TransAfrica founder and recently departed mentor Randall Robinson and his grandmother. Randall Robinson’s grandmother, we salute you. May Randall find his way to the ancestors with grace and love.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Humanities Center (USA).

Notes on contributors

Martin L. Boston

Martin L. Boston is Assistant Professor of Pan African Studies and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento State). He holds a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), and also taught at DePaul University, UC San Diego, and Washington State University before joining the Ethnic Studies Department at Sacramento State. Boston’s research focuses on South Africa’s exile period (1960–1994), US-South African comparative history and liberation movements, apartheid and segregation, and Black South African and Black American cultural producers.

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an American academic and author who is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Professor Extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa. Willoughby-Herard’s research focuses on Black political thought, Black radical movements, Black feminist politics, feminist pedagogy, South African politics, youth politics, political education, and queer and trans sexualities.

Notes

1. The description of the organisation can be found here: https://www.ipsa.org/profile/african-association-political-science. The organisation’s journals can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/publisher/aaps.

2. For more discussion of these ideas, see the following article: Alburo-Cañete et al. (2022) ‘(Dis)comfort, judgement and solidarity: affective politics of academic publishing in development studies’, Third World Quarterly, 43:3, 673–683, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2022.2039064