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In 1978, amidst the aftermath of the Soweto Uprisings and after being held in detention without charge for over a year, a young black woman who had just turned eighteen, stepped into the witness box at Kempton Park Circuit Court, north-east of Johannesburg. She was there to testify in the apartheid State’s case against eleven Soweto school student activists, on trial for sedition. She confirmed her name as Mary Masabata Loate. Loate would live with the consequences of this decision to talk for the rest of her short life.
Who spoke about the liberation struggle whilst it was ongoing? When did they speak and how? And what effects does the gendered history of speech and silence within anti-apartheid politics continue to have upon our knowledge of the past? Arguing that she is emblematic of the way gendered narratives of the struggle have been made, this book listens for the voice and silence of Masabata Loate and her contemporaries within political trials; newspapers; photography; human rights reportage; creative fiction, drama, poetry and song; autobiography and memoir; and oral histories. The result is an unconventional biography that sees this young woman as a shadow within the story of South Africa’s anti-apartheid liberation struggle.
Through the lens of the controversial life of Mary Masabata Loate, a witness for the prosecution at the trial of the ‘Soweto Eleven’ in 1978, Rachel E. Johnson’s book provides an important contribution to our understanding of how gender complicated and compromised the way young black women were forced to navigate their relationship to the Anti-Apartheid struggle. Historically attentive, this book also invites the reader to question what kinds of truths might be delivered from an archive which too often occludes the role in the Anti-Apartheid struggle of South Africa’s youth and young black women in particular.
— Annie E. Coombes, Professor Emerita of Material and Visual Culture, Birkbeck, University of London UK. Author of History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (2003).
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Introduction: The Shadow of a Young Woman
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1 A Methodology for Fragments: Voice, Speech, and Silence
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2 The Soweto Eleven and the Sayable: Speaking about the Struggle
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3 Witnessing, Detention, and Silence: Speech as Struggle
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4 Stories of Life and Death: the Struggle to Speak
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Conclusion: Shadow Histories