More than three decades since the end of apartheid, historians are looking anew at anti-apartheid activism, with particularly revealing studies of the difficult post-1976 period. One of the most exciting dimensions of this new scholarship is its attention to how gendered and generational tensions shaped liberation and its limits.

In this field, Rachel Sandwell’s National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: Sex, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle Against Apartheid is a pathbreaking, must-read book. Previous scholarship on the African National Congress (ANC) in exile has focused on questions of multiracialism, communism, and violence in the long period of its banning (1960–90).Footnote ¹ Sandwell sheds new light on all of these topics and more by exploring what may seem like a surprising question: “This book set out to explain how and why the ANC, more so than any other of its allied liberation movements, expended so much organizational energy on its members’ pregnancies—on preventing and punishing pregnancies but also on managing and supporting mothers and infants” (181).

Sandwell demonstrates that several factors made the ANC distinct. The first chapter of the book underscores the ANC’s longevity: upon its 1960 banning, it had a much deeper history of aboveground organizing than any of its contemporary African liberation movements. This chapter then shows vividly how ANC women had long played key roles as organizers and as revolutionary theorists, and how women carried networks and ideas shaped in the 1950s into exile. In the multiracial Congress Alliance, diverse women leaders depicted matters of motherhood and sociality as central to questions of futurity and national belonging. At the same time as women came together in fora like the Federation of South African Women, tensions emerged around “the increasing vanguardism of Congress women’s politics and the gap between leaders and members” (31). These presaged later ideological, class-based, and generational tensions in exile. Yet as the second chapter demonstrates, leaders forged in the 1950s, such as Ruth Mompati, also built enduring diplomatic links with left women’s organizations like the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). They carried these links into exile, where they would draw further inspiration from new approaches to “revolutionary childcare” in places like postcolonial Mozambique (1).

Exile communities grew larger, younger, and more female after 1976. As the branch of the ANC most responsible for tending to the needs of families, Sandwell observes, “the Women’s Section became the part of the ANC most directly involved in governing their membership” on an everyday basis (103). The remarkable third chapter thus shows how, in the late 1970s, ANC women who had come of age politically in the 1950s sought to build ambitious childcare centers in rural Morogoro, Tanzania, for women in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Sandwell argues that it is remarkable that MK—a “scrappy guerilla army”—undertook such an ambitious project (17). By briefly housing new mothers and then caring full-time for their children, with the support of funding from UNESCO and the WIDF, these centers promised to “completely free female cadres for the fulfillment of their revolutionary role” (from a 1979 report, quoted on 1). These childcare centers were named for Charlotte Maxeke, a pioneering African nationalist activist in the 1910s–30s, in what initially seemed a fitting tribute. Yet “the Charlottes,” as the centers were known, soon fell apart. Tensions immediately arose around fault lines of class: prominent women, often partnered with prominent men, did not have their children in the Charlottes. Instead, the centers housed unmarried new mothers and their children: “Ultimately, the Charlottes were primarily for nonelite women within the ANC, women without other options or protection” (112). Records of debates in the ANC’s archives suggest that these mothers increasingly saw the centers as sites of confinement rather than freedom, as the ANC increased the length of time that new mothers had to spend at the Charlottes before they could return to military camps. Presiding over the Charlottes were the self-consciously respectable, older women of the ANC Women’s Section, who often treated the new mothers as wayward youth—even when the mothers were as old as thirty—in need of education in matters of sexual propriety and conscientious motherhood. In debates about the women of the Charlottes, Sandwell contends, we can see how leaders defined “being ANC” as “behaving in a correct way” in all aspects of life, as “personal conduct, intimate life, and social roles could all be read through the lens of ‘politics’” (91).

The stakes of performing behavior as a proper ANC comrade grew amidst a succession of crises in the 1980s, as the fourth and fifth chapters detail. The intimate lives of women at the Charlottes increasingly seemed to be political betrayals: women’s unsanctioned pregnancies not only created administrative burdens for the ANC, but also flagrantly challenged the restrictions under which they lived, as exemplified in an infamously punished case of young mothers dating men from the rival Pan Africanist Congress. By 1984, in an ANC inquest into the state of a newly constructed childcare center, “the overwhelming picture that emerges is of a quasi-carceral space, administered by a paranoid proto-state, one where anxiety suffused even the everyday of domestic duties” (168).

Through the rise and fall of the Charlottes, Sandwell reveals in microcosm the broader challenges of the ANC’s transformation from a civil rights movement in the 1950s to “an aborted mass movement, to a small revolutionary vanguard organization, to a would-be state in exile” (194). Against enduring popular depictions of the ANC’s exile period as a fall from the grassroots grace of the 1950s, Sandwell persuasively concludes that exile did not entail the “loss of a cohesive national identity” (196). The ANC had not yet created such an identity: she shows that the quest to create it—or at least to act like such an identity existed—explains the very volatility of debates about proper performances of gender, sexuality, and reproduction, from the 1950s through the democratic transition.

Sandwell opens new analytical space to think about the complex gendered culture of the ANC in exile. I hope that scholars will feel inspired to explore further one of the most significant influences on the ANC’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and community-building: Christianity. Of the “layered” traditions that shaped the ANC, mission Christianity is a significant one—especially as it was inculcated in sex-segregated mission schools, which had educated many of the ANC women who led the Charlottes (as well as their namesake herself) (12). While Sandwell says little about Christianity, I was struck by strange parallels between the ANC in exile and the Christian missions that had shaped some of its key leaders: the land that Julius Nyerere gave the ANC seemed something like a mission station; the practice of “upgrading” comrades through political education seemed something like evangelizing.

Methodologically, National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile draws generatively on the voluminous pages of the ANC archives, housed across the ANC archives at Fort Hare University, the Mayibuye Archives at the University of the Western Cape, and a range of other personal papers collections. In contrast, it uses interviews more sparingly. While Sandwell cites some older interviews, she did not include her own oral histories. She explained that the intensity of current debates on the ANC in exile “made it increasingly hard to talk through the historical questions I had about the meaning and experience of exile on its own terms”; moreover, she “felt strongly that the people I talked to had their own stories to tell and were capable of doing so on their own terms” (13). The people to whom historians talk about exile are indeed often those who have told their stories elsewhere, such as in the growing body of memoirs by activist women that Sandwell explores richly here. The women and children who lived in the Charlottes remain more elusive, as their specificities—names, personal histories, voices—appear minimally in the archives, making them difficult to track down.

How can historians make sense of subjects with such shadowy archival presences? Rachel Johnson’s Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Shadow of a Young Woman centers on this question, through an unconventional biography of Masabata Loate (1961–86). Loate remained in South Africa throughout her short life. But like the young mothers in exile, her life sheds new light on questions of political subjectivity and national belonging, wracked by gendered and generational tensions. Within the country, as in exile, Johnson points out, “youth groups were dominated by young men and women’s groups by older women” (7). She came to this project frustrated by how—in activist archives primarily shaped by men and by older women—we learn remarkably little about young women like Loate, except when they appear as problems.

Here is what we know for sure: Loate was a Soweto student activist, arrested in 1977 and detained without charge for over a year; she was released after turning state witness in the 1978 trial of the Soweto Eleven, a group of peer activists (ten of whom were male), from the Soweto Students’ Representative Council (SSRC). Condemned as a sellout, she faced “threats to her safety and was shot in the leg” (3). Incongruously (and highlighting the complexity of the late-apartheid years), she also became a beauty queen, appearing in newspaper ads for cane spirits as “Miss Mainstay” (3). She then organized Soweto branches of the Pan Africanist Congress-aligned Azanian National Youth Unity (AZANYU), while also working with a former SSRC leader in the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO). For this activism, she was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to a decade in prison in 1982, but she was released early. Soon after her return to Soweto, in October 1986, “she was murdered, or ‘necklaced’ (reports differ) just before her twenty-sixth birthday, by a large gang of men on the streets of Soweto” (3).Footnote ² In a newspaper interview at the time, her mother attributed her death to her “speaking out against the kind of violent tactics being used within the liberation struggle, to which she then fell victim herself” (3). Johnson points out that activists could also be killed as accused spies or state collaborators, or due to gendered interpersonal conflicts.

The circumstances of Loate’s death remain mysterious. Nonetheless, it has entered the national narrative as an emblematic moment of violence that begat more violence, amidst the revolutionary terror of 1986. At the center of this narrative are young men and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, underscoring Johnson’s core point about the silencing of young women’s experiences. For example, Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage straightforwardly attributes the formation of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) to the tensions that followed Loate’s murder: “In the wake of her killing, the youths turned on one another, for among the politically active young men in the neighborhood was her brother, and he wanted vengeance for his sister’s death. This is when Winnie intervened.”Footnote ³ While Madikizela-Mandela claimed to be forming the MUFC to channel young men’s energies away from internecine violence in the wake of Loate’s murder, the club would become the source of infamous attacks on alleged spies and rivals. The MUFC’s violence led to a special hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1997, from which Steinberg’s account comes. As Johnson points out, in the TRC’s final report, “Loate’s death thus appeared briefly on the stage of the retelling of the nation’s history, only to disappear in the final analysis, displaced by the narrative of another woman, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela” (121).

Johnson’s first chapter, outlining a “methodology for fragments,” aptly reflects on how South African historians have approached themes of voice, speech, and silence, underscoring the important point that neither speech nor silence can be understood simply as liberatory. The second and third chapters then explore the ambiguities of speech and silence in the archives of the trials of the Soweto Eleven (1978–79) and Loate (1982). The moving fourth chapter grapples with multivalent stories about Loate’s murder, first within the context of writing by and about South African activist women in the late-apartheid years. In journalistic accounts, she alternately appeared as an advocate of peace—“Anti-necklace ex-beauty queen murdered,” Johnson quotes the Cape Times as reporting soon after her death—and as part of a complicated web of activist street committees consumed with “jealousies,” both political and interpersonal (105, 107). Johnson then explores how the TRC did not—and structurally could not—shed light on Loate’s life and death, building on feminist work by Shireen Hassim, Nthabiseng Motsemme, and Ntombizikhona Valela on women’s strategic silences at the TRC.Footnote ⁴ Finally, Johnson critiques how Loate has appeared in postapartheid accounts only as a name on “so many lists of death” (121). The conclusion draws our attention back to historians’ fragmentary knowledge about her life, arguing that this biography of Loate has “a partiality that is necessary, because her story and that of South Africa’s national liberation struggle criss-cross without aligning” (140).

TRC testimonies are one key source of the “archival fragments” out of which Johnson revisits Loate’s life and death (4). Other sources include state archives from her two trials, as well as activist accounts in newspapers, memoirs, and some interviews. But like Sandwell, Johnson uses oral historical interviews sparingly. Their reasons differ: Johnson included little oral history because many of the women from whom she had hoped to learn “refused to speak to me, or more accurately, spoke with me, but not about the past” (ix). She found that former Soweto activists of Loate’s generation often hesitated to speak about painful past experiences, especially when they did not fit within familiar, ANC-dominated national narratives: women suggested that talking about the past “might help me, but it certainly would not help them” (37). Johnson came to see that “those refusals to speak were important archival acts”: these women were protecting themselves, in the face of yet another (British, white, and younger) researcher interested in narrating a fresh and unresolved liberation struggle (37).

I am certainly persuaded by Johnson’s point that deliberate silence may be self-protective, but she might have said more about how the specific context of her research also matters. It is not only that Loate was ambiguously located (to say the least) with respect to liberation organizations. The political context has also changed since Johnson’s doctoral research (2006–10), on which this book is based. At a greater historical distance from the era of anti-apartheid struggle, and in a South Africa where ANC dominance seems less certain, scholars are drawing productively on new interviews with and about activists who worked in diverse anti-apartheid organizations.Footnote ⁵

With such inspiring new work, the future of scholarship on South Africa’s long liberation struggle is bright, and the stories of women activists—often relegated to historiographic shadows—are growing increasingly central.