An African American 'Mother of the Nation': Madie Hall Xuma in South Africa, 1940-1963

Abstract

Madie Hall was among the most prominent African Americans to live in South Africa during the twentieth century. She arrived in the country in 1940 to marry Dr A. B. Xuma, the highly respected physician who was soon to become President of the African National Congress. By the time she left in 1963, following her husband's death, Hall had helped to re-vitalise the Women's League of the African National Congress (ANC) and had launched the Zenzele clubs, an influential network of women's organisations eventually linked to the international Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). Yet, evaluating the accomplishments of her life in South Africa is complex. While some contemporaries and historians have dismissed the Zenzele clubs for their domestic orientation, labelling them as apolitical organisations, I would argue that the clubs were linked to a profoundly political philosophy of African American advancement and racial uplift. Furthermore, Hall believed adamantly in women's rights, perceiving Americans as having 'more advanced' attitudes toward women than South Africans. By the 1950s, however, ideas of racial uplift had become an anachronistic survival of an earlier age and women's politics were validated primarily by their association with struggles against apartheid. Nonetheless, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a new South African women's movement began to define its objectives, Hall's desire to live a free and independent life would have resonated as a sympathetic voice from the past.