Changing history, changing histories: Separations and connections in the lives of South African women

Abstract

In this paper, I revisit correspondence between Lily Moya, a fifteen-yearold school-girl growing up in the Eastern Cape, Mabel Palmer, a 74-year-old Fabian socialist and head of the 'Non-European' section of Natal University, and Sibusisiswe Makanya, the first Zulu woman to train as a social worker in the USA, which I first edited and published in 1987. Originally subtitled 'the separate worlds of three South African women', Not Either an Experimental Doll explored the divisions and misunderstandings between these three generations of South African women. Challenged by recent events in South Africa, in this paper I argue that the text can also be read as a story of the shared worlds of these three women, of the connections between them wrought by mission education and philanthropy, which in turn have provided some of the conditions of possibility for the country's negotiated settlement. In this narrative, the personal has indeed become the political. At the same time, I also argue that this micro-history prefigures the gendered violence which is so disturbing a part of South Africa's contemporary social landscape.