Activist travel and decolonial worldmaking: black women trade unionists on the move in and beyond apartheid South Africa

The defiant everyday and further-afield travels and articulations of anti-apartheid black women trade unionists in making and changing worlds form the analytical focus of this article. The article applies the Southern concept of the musāfir – the activist-traveller constituted within politically exigent contexts – as a generative way to read the women’s high-stakes travels and insistence on mobility for the larger cause of freedom. Covering dissident overseas sorties, local campaigning manoeuvres, and exilic journeys of a range of black women trade union activists – Elizabeth Mafekeng, Lilian Ngoyi, Dora Tamana, Frances Baard, Florence Mophosho, and Emma Mashinini – via their life writings, commentary, speeches, and letters, the article examines how their travels and texts performed subversive functions. It argues, further, that their hard-won, unglamorous, insistent, sometimes fragmentary mobilities and textualities serve to unsettle the bounds of travel and travel writing studies conventionally associated with forms of individualism, privilege, and literariness.