Phyllis Ntantala Revisited: The Politics of Mothering Black Resistance Movements through Writing

Abstract

Phyllis Ntantala was born in South Africa in the 1920s and moved to the USA in the 1960s. She used her writings as a weapon to confront injustices meted out to African people the world over. Her struggle made a significant contribution to Pan-Africanism, as she identified not only with the struggles of black South Africans, but also with the struggles of African Americans. This Pan-African approach comes out strongly in her autobiography, A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (1992). The text captures not only the struggles of the African people in South Africa as they resisted and challenged discriminatory practices by a white settler minority community, but also that of the African-American community, as it depicts the dramatic struggles of the civil rights movement, led by figures such as Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. To those who assumed that Ntantala would be grateful for the privileges she enjoyed in the USA, and which she lacked in her native South Africa, she responded that in her country she “lived as a black person”, and that in the USA she “was also a black person”; consequently, she “looked at things from a black person’s perspective” (1992, 198). This article is an academic and intellectual celebration of Phyllis Ntantala’s contribution to Pan- African struggles as an intellectual, woman, and mother. It is written from an Afrocentric and Pan-Africanist perspective by an African-American woman.