Excavating the archive: centring women's experiences and voices in the South African Transformation Discourse

Abstract

“RWM is about changing patriarchy... because the struggle is not over yet” – Sizani Ngubane founder and executive director of the Rural Women's Movement (RWM) cited by Melissa Turley in South Africa: Law of the Land (2012)“When women write from a positionality that is built through solidarity and inclusiveness, they conjure up new intellectual products: treasures which, if acknowledged and accepted become an important part of the stock of intellectual and cultural products in their respective societies, regions and continents. Their thoughts and words can become key ingredients in the transformation of the notions of dignity and citizenship from the narrow masculinist confines which have excluded women into more broader-based, more inclusive and more sustainable vehicles of social justice and fairness. When women write, they create new worlds of intellectual creativity and activist energy; they break new ground in terms of the realisation of essentially different and more empowering relationships with men. By challenging the assumptions that men are the knowers of our societies and the expectation therefore that women should be deferential and 'respectful', that is, silent and submissive, women articulate new voices and sounds; choruses which speak eloquently to the need for writing to become a democratic space in ways which cut across race, gender, class and age.” – Patricia McFadden in Reflecting on gender issues in Africa (1999: 1).“Like many colonized African scholars, I have found myself working with the methodology of intellectual archaeological digging to recover disqualified, submerged subordinated or appropriated African knowledges, more specifically women's knowledges.” - If Amadiume in 'Bodies and choices: African matriarchs and Mammy Water' (1993: 92)