Under the Southern Cross: Helen Keller, disability politics, and apartheid South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1951, deaf/blind activist Helen Keller, then seventy years old, made a 10-week tour of South Africa. She visited nearly thirty schools and institutions for the deaf and blind and attended nearly fifty meetings. Keller is well known in disability history, women’s history, and progressivism. Less well known is her host, Arthur Blaxall, an Anglican priest in South Africa who was an advocate for the deaf and blind and an opponent of apartheid. Keller’s South African trip was the culmination of an epistolary friendship between the two disability activists that spanned some thirty years, from 1931 to the 1960s. This visit is documented in correspondence between Blaxall and Keller, as well as in a published commemorative volume that includes writings from Blaxall and Keller, Helen Keller at the Southern Cross (1952). This article argues that the two activists opposed apartheid through their understanding of the plight of the non-seeing and non-hearing. The associations they forged addressing disability provided venues and frameworks for a developing critique of racial inequities. While we identify Keller’s radical vision, we also point to her limits, showing the ways in which her own hopes and dreams for her visit to Africa grew out of colonial cultural repertoires.