The spiritual journey to becoming a history-keeper of South African liberation movements

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe editors of this collection reflect on the ways that studying the anti-apartheid liberation movement is a consciousness raising process. We consider the cosmological, spiritual, and affective impact of tarrying with liberation histories. From Vincent Harding’s (1981) conceptualisation of a ‘deep river’ and Cedric J. Robinson’s (1983) notion of a ‘Black Radical Tradition’ to the ‘endarkened feminist storytelling’ offered by Cynthia Dillard in 2000 and 2012 and elaborated upon by Venus Evans-Winters and Bettina Love (2015) and S.R. Toliver (2021), there are a set of devotional and spiritual practices associated with being hailed by and becoming a carrier of the historical memory of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Contributing authors reflect on the pivotal personal life experiences, and definitive exile journeys, that shaped their families and communities. These early, formative, and mostly non-organisation-based consciousness-raising experiences have been understudied in the historiography of the anti-apartheid liberation movement. Nevertheless, these are vital pathways to internationalism, as a set of contemporary research practices, movement and organisation strategies, and political identities. Our goal has been to make sacred ways of being salient in the historical research on the anti-apartheid liberation movement.