In Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa's Anti-Apartheid Struggle, Rachel Johnson presents an unconventional biography of a little-known South African anti-apartheid activist named Masabata Loate, who was born in 1961 and, after almost a decade of involvement in the liberation struggle, was murdered in 1986. By choosing to write about Loate's life and death, Johnson deliberately selected a historical figure about whom very little information is available in the archive(s), hence the book's subtitle, The Shadow of a Young Woman. However, Johnson deploys the concept of ‘shadow’ to convey not only the limits of her knowledge about Loate but also the idea of darkness as a space of creativity that offers the potential for finding a ‘full sense of self’ (148). The result is both a poignant meditation on Loate's short life and a critical assessment of the gendered ways we know about the past. Johnson begins by telling us what she can about Loate: she was born in 1961 and lived in Soweto, a township near Johannesburg designated a Blacks-only community by the racist Afrikaner National Party government, which was obsessed with separating South Africans along unstable and contested lines of race. She was politicised by the momentous 1976 Soweto Uprisings, a protest led by students against the imposition of the Afrikaans language (the mother tongue of Afrikaners) as a medium of instruction in Black schools, to which the government responded with extreme violence. She was arrested in 1977 after she was visiting students held at the notorious John Vorster Square police station and was detained, without charge, for a year until, in a surprise twist, she appeared as a state witness. After her release, she endured threats to her safety because she testified for the prosecution's case and survived a gunshot in the leg. She also entered beauty contests and was crowned ‘Miss Mainstay’ in August 1979 (Mainstay was the name of a locally produced sugar cane spirit). Three years later, in 1982, she was arrested again, and this time she was prosecuted on charges of terrorism because of her involvement in an anti-apartheid organisation. She was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She was released in 1986 and returned home to Soweto, where she was murdered soon after, possibly for speaking out against vigilantism in her community. She was only twenty-five years old. While the above biography is a condensed summary of known facts about Loate, there is in fact not a great deal more information available to historians to help us understand who she was, what she believed, whom she loved, what she did and why. Yet it is the paucity of public knowledge about Loate that drew Johnson to write about her. As a feminist historian of South African youth, Johnson made the inspired decision to write about Loate not in spite of the scantiness of evidence regarding this young woman's existence, but because of it. In shining a light on one remarkable and all-but-forgotten young Black woman, Johnson is not interested in writing a conventional biography; she is instead attempting something different, namely to give Loate ‘a space in the historical narrative of the anti-apartheid liberation movement – a space measured out, in part, by silence’ (2). Loate is not absent in the archives, but because so few fragments of her life are available, ‘she is easy to miss, and dismiss, as an insignificant, half-seen presence’. To Johnson, this is another example of how our ways of knowing about the past are problematically gendered, and so she asks, ‘How should we approach the silences that remain, in between those fragments and beyond them?’ Her answer is to use the approach Jean Allman calls agnotology, the study of what we do not know and why we do not know it. Johnson argues that ‘any attempt to undo the historical silences surrounding Masabata Loate needs to pay careful attention to the ways in which speech, voice and silence were forged in the struggle itself’ (2). To her, this is a two-fold project: she re-reads the archive for what it does tell us while simultaneously noticing what remains unavailable and seeks to explain why. Johnson sets out to accomplish both objectives in four chapters. Since there is not sufficient space here to provide a detailed review of each chapter, I offer a summary of the contents and arguments presented in each. The Introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the role of young Black women in the liberation struggle and a critique of the conventional processes by which gendered academic, official and popular narratives of the liberation struggle were produced. Chapter 1 offers ‘a methodology for fragments’ that sees all archives as storied spaces and delineates the politics and practices of voicing and silencing within them. Her main contention in this chapter is that ‘if we acknowledge that voice and silence are not opposites of one another, but rather always entangled in any act of speech, we can position ourselves to learn much from the shadows’ (23). Chapter 2 discusses ‘struggle speech’, meaning the politics of the production of gendered narratives of struggle. When and where, Johnson asks, did ideas about youth politics, violence and masculinity appear? She probes these questions in relation to Loate's testimony as a state witness in the prosecution of the Soweto Eleven, ten male students and one female student, tried for sedition between September 1978 and April 1979. Johnson's close reading of what Loate said, how she was heard and what was said to her by prosecutors and the presiding judge reveals much about the dynamics of speaking about the struggle. Chapter 3 is fascinating. Here Johnson examines ‘speech as struggle’ during Loate's own prosecution on charges under the Terrorism Act in 1982–83. She and a co-accused, a young Black man, were charged with helping to establish an anti-apartheid organisation called the South African Youth Revolutionary Council that was formed in exile in 1979. Loate spent a full day testifying in self-defence and undergoing cross-examination, unlike her co-accused, who remained steadfastly silent throughout the trial, and Johnson concludes that what she said when testifying makes it impossible to ‘fix’ Loate within the parameters of the clear-cut oppositional narratives of liberation. Her ambiguity was compounded by the fact that Loate subsequently straddled the two seemingly distinct worlds of beauty queen and activist. Indeed, Loate ‘continually evades clear historical judgement’, and to Johnson, ‘therein lies her importance to struggle history’ because she is the type of ‘unstable subject’ that social historians of the anti-apartheid movement do not sufficiently acknowledge, let alone take seriously as political actors. Johnson concludes that because Loate was ‘shrouded by assumptions based on gender and youth, it is, even now, hard to hear her clearly’ (94). Nonetheless, Johnson argues, recognising ‘the importance of control over women's speech, as well as their bodies, is vital for unpicking the gendered dynamics of township struggle and the nature of the historical record and legacies it left’ (146). The final chapter examines the ultimate silencing of Loate: her murder in Soweto in 1986. She was killed by a group of men, possibly in retaliation against her opposition to necklacing (a brutal type of execution used against suspected traitors to the liberation struggle). Her death was written about far more than her life because, in addition to receiving a great deal of sensationalist attention from newspapers, it appears in a report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995–2003) and autobiographical memoirs, what Johnson calls ‘two of the principal post-apartheid sites for retelling the past’ (101). Johnson dedicates the chapter to uncovering the multiple meanings and places assigned to her death within popular and official narratives of the liberation struggle and, in the process, deftly highlights the gendered nature of audibility and visibility. Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa's Anti-Apartheid Struggle is a short monograph and thus ideal for undergraduate and graduate students researching the anti-apartheid struggle through an intersectional feminist lens, as well as feminist methodologies for writing shadow histories. Yet for all its strengths, inevitably one is left wanting to know more about Loate herself. While the point of the book is not to expand upon what is known about her, the linkages made between Loate, the young woman and the methodological questions Johnson raises for historians are sometimes tenuous, especially in Chapter 4, at times to the point where Loate fades from view. It is curious that Johnson does not include any photographs of Loate to help us imagine who she was, especially since, as Johnson herself points out, numerous photos of Loate were published when she won beauty contests. A search on the online database of the prominent newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, quickly leads to a photo taken by Mike Mzileni, published on 8 August 1979. Nonetheless, the book is a fine example of the need to respect the unsayable by containing Loate's story ‘within the fragments that hold her’ (40). Johnson so effectively evokes Loate's complex public persona that one cannot help wondering how many other remarkable, seemingly insignificant young women have been lost to histories of liberation struggles, in South Africa and beyond.
Susanne M. Klausen (Sun,) studied this question.