Two Women and Their Territories: Sheila Roberts and Miriam Tlali

Abstract

South African black women have tended to make distinctions between their own aspirations and those of European and white American feminist movements, which have influenced the thinking of many white South African women. Miriam Tlali, for example, has said that she would call herself a feminist, but not in the narrow, Western kind of way of speaking about a feminist. They have perceived western feminism either as in pursuit of trivial gains or as separatist in a way that black South African women, as members of a community striving for the extension of human rights to all its members, cannot afford to be. When Tlali was asked if she would focus in her writing on the lives of black women, she replied that she would not make an explicit decision to concentrate on women: Our liberation is bound abso? lutely with the liberation of the whole nation, so I'll always combine the two.1 She has preferred to identify herself as a womanist in the sense defined by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, who claims to have invented the term simultaneously and with the same meaning as Alice Walker: