Catherine Higgs

Zenzele: African Women's Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927-1998

Abstract: The Zenzele clubs of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which date from the late 1920s, were founded by mission-educated African women who sought to improve the lives of rural African women by enhancing their subsistence farming and cooking skills and educating them about household cleanliness, basic child care, and health care. Unlike associations for African women in British colonial Africa, Zenzele clubs did not evolve into political organizations. In the white-run segregated and apartheid states that persisted through 1994, Zenzele women did not engage in direct political action; rather, they sought to unite African women across class and ethnic lines and focused their efforts on community development.

Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas

A unique and important study, Stepping Forward examines the experiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black women in Africa and African diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives in a number of different settings. This wide-ranging collection designed for classroom use explores the broad themes that have shaped black womens goals, options, and responses: religion, education, political activism, migration, and cultural transformation. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine the lives of black women in the United States and the Caribbean Basin; in the white settler societies of Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa; and in the black settler societies of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Among the contributors to this volume are historians, political scientists, and scholars of literature, music, and law. What emerges from their work is an image of black womens agency, self-reliance, and resiliency. Despite cultural differences and geographical variations, black women have provided foundations on which black communities have not only survived, but also thrived. Stepping Forward is a valuable addition to our understanding of womens roles in these diverse communities.

Happiness and Work: Portuguese Peasants, British Laborers, African Contract Workers, and the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1901–1909*

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the allegation that slaves were harvesting cocoa off the west coast of Africa on the Portuguese island colony of Sao Tome and Principe became an international scandal, not only because slavery had long been outlawed, but also because one of the major purchasers of that cocoa was the Quaker chocolate company, Cadbury Brothers. The Portuguese denied the charge of slavery and claimed that African workers on the islands were not only happier than Portuguese peasants, but also more content than many European workers. This article explores this claim and argues that the conflicting interpretations of what the British called the crisis over “slave cocoa” and the Portuguese called “the English cocoa controversy” can be explained by differing perspectives about work.

The Cabra Dominican Sisters and the ‘open schools’ movement in apartheid South Africa

In January 1976, the Cabra Dominican Sisters in South Africa and the Association of Women Religious (AWR), with the support of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC), opened their schools to students of all races in direct contravention of apartheid law. This radical action was informed by their dedication to the Dominican motto ‘veritas’ (truth) and by the desire ‘to give practical Christian witness to social justice’ in a revolutionary situation. In opening their schools, the Cabra Dominicans joined the broad liberation movement that helped to crack the façade of the apartheid state and ultimately led to its dismantling.

The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977

Daniel Magaziner’s intellectual history begins where Gail M. Gerhart’s classic study, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology, 16 ends—with the origins of Black Consciousness (BC). Where Gerhart points to the collaboration between BC members and a broad spectrum of Christian activists, Magaziner places Christianity at the center of his analysis, which he limits to the nine years from 1968 through 1977. This period, Magaziner argues, ‘‘opened the intellectual space for a new generation of South African thinkers to explore the possibility that superficially simple statements—‘I am Black’, ‘I am a Man’, ‘I have dignity’, ‘I am the image of God’—might be profoundly potent’’. 17 Just how potent these assertions were, as black activists struggled to emerge from a long silence imposed by an oppressive apartheid state, is the subject of The Law and the Prophets. It is a persuasive argument, artfully rendered. It is also an insiders’ history, in at least two ways. First, Magaziner assumes his readers’ familiarity with the broad outlines and a fair amount of the detail of South Africa’s modern history, as in his observation: ‘‘The Soweto story is well known and needs only the barest sketch here’’ (155). Second, and more important, the author anchors his analysis of the evolution and application of BC ideas in the more than 50 interviews he conducted with activists and observers; he also draws from the interviews that Gerhart did with the BC theoretician Steve Biko in the 1970s, before his death in police custody in September 1977. Thus insiders’ assessments of what happened, albeit nearly four decades after the fact and translated by Magaziner, are preserved. This is a major contribution to the historical literature. As many scholars of the apartheid era know well, written records are sparse. Saving documentation of one’s activities could lead to imprisonment or death. Many of the records that have survived are found in the University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers in the William Cullen Library and those collections can be small: the Black People’s Convention (BPC [A2177]) and the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO [A2176]) each comprise 2 archival boxes. Other collections, including the University Christian Movement (UCM) at 30 boxes, are larger. Together, SASO and the UCM were the first intellectual homes for many BC thinkers. Led by Biko, black students had broken with the multi-racial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in 1968 and founded SASO the following year. SASO excluded whites and embarked on a sustained critique of white liberals, dismissing as self-serving those who imagined the impossible in the South African context—a ‘‘colourless’’ society (27). The UCM had its share of white liberals, albeit Christian. That many BC thinkers used Christian imagery should not surprise us,

Guardian of the Light: Denis Hurley: Renewing the Church, Opposing Apartheid (review)

tant, the erosion of the Church’s influence and teaching in the cultural and moral sphere.Yet even from these shadows, Levine, along with others, including Edward Cleary, who has also written extensively on the Church in Latin America, see the future as full of challenges for Catholicism, but they argue that there is also no reason for fear.As Levine notes:“In Latin America today, religion is a buzzing, blooming confusion of possibilities, full of innovation and full of social and cultural energies (p. 198). In the face of these possibilities,Aparecida suggests, however tentatively, that the Latin American Catholic Church is ready again to fully engage with the future.

A Christian, Civilized Man: D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu was born in the Cape Colony in British southern Africa on 20 October 1885, when a few African men could vote and the prospects for black equality with the ruling whites seemed promising. He died on 3 August 1959, in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa, 11 years after the apartheid state had begun stripping blacks of their rights and exorcizing the ‘ghost of equality’ with a completeness unparalleled in the country’s history.2. The ‘ghost of equality’ was the last vestige of the Cape liberal tradition — itself best summed up by the dictum ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ — finally erased in 1959 with the passage of legislation that would, the following year, remove from parliament the last elected representatives of Africans.