In celebration of decades of women’s activism in the nationalist struggle for liberation, the Women’s Section of the African National Congress opened a kindergarten called The Charlotte Maxeke Child Care Centre in Morogoro, Tanzania in 1980. On this festive occasion Frene Ginwala, an activist in the liberation movement and an intellectual in her own right, posed the following questions about Charlotte Maxeke: ‘Who was Charlotte Maxeke? What had she done to merit such praises and honour? What made her name retain its magic for decades?180 Implicit in these questions are assumptions about Maxeke’s place in history. I do not attempt to claim Maxeke’s place in history by limiting her activities to the recent concerns of the women’s section of the African National Congress. I will instead attempt to present an account or a reading of Maxeke’s intellectual trajectory by surveying her life which spanned a period of approximately sixty five years.181
The intellectual trajectory of Charlotte Maxeke does not lead directly to the manifestations of recent concern about gender politics and power in the liberation
180See Franz Fanon, “The intellectual Elite in Revolutionary Culture” in W. Cartey and M. Kilson
The African Reader: Independent Africa: a documentary based on the writings of political leaders and writers including Nkrumah, Fanon, Senghor, Soyinka, Chief Luthuli, Eduardo Mondlane, Kenyatta, Aime Cesaire, Patrice Lumumba (New York, Vintage Books, 1970), p.126
181 Frene Ginwala, “Charlotte Maxeke: The Mother of Freedom,” ANC Today, Vol. 2. No. 31, 2-8
August, 2002; Sechaba, August, 1990.
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movement. It demonstrates how Maxeke’s own theorisation of the everyday questions the nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. Her work also alerted nationalism to other forms of inequality that were prevalent in South African society. This resulted in the consideration of gender inequality as one of the crucial frontiers and figurations of the struggle for liberation in South Africa.
So, who was Charlotte Maxeke? She was bigger than the response of scholars and activists in the liberation struggles in their attempts to address the question of the role of women in the struggle for liberation would suggest. In nationalist frameworks, Charlotte Maxeke is placed so as to highlight the linear development of women’s movements within the broader nationalist movement of the African National Congress in South Africa.182 In this perspective Maxeke’s role as the first president of the Bantu Women’s League indexes the role of women in the struggle for liberation in South Africa. While Maxeke’s name helps to track the origins of the League as integral to the African National Congress, it falls short of integrating the ideas of Charlotte Maxeke.183 This has created discord between Maxeke’s name, her ideas and the early women’s movement she helped to build in the formative years of black protest politics of the twentieth century.
182 See Shireen Hassim, Women’s Organisations and Democracy in South Africa South Africa,
(Scottsville, University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2006).
183See Angela Davis, Women, Culture and Politics (London, Women’s Press 1990), p.7.
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The continuum between Charlotte Maxeke’s ideas and the development of the early African women’s movement reveals the extent to which experiences, differences and dominance have become the grid of intelligibility in the history of the struggle for liberation in South Africa. This is the common thread which runs in the feminist and nationalist historiographies of the struggle for liberation in South Africa. When followed in a single dimension, the ideological struggles staged in the three spheres tend to overshadow other features of the struggle for liberation. Charlotte Maxeke is a victim of this trend. Although she is remembered for her role in the formative years of the liberation movements of the twentieth century details about her family background, education and the vast range of her political activities has remained obscure in most scholarly work on the struggle for liberation in South Africa.
The ambiguities of leading women in the record of black resistance is further explored in Angela Davis Women, Culture and Politics in which she provides an evaluation of the plight of Afro American women in the women’s movement in the US. According to Davis, the women’s movement in America is characterized by two distinct continuums, one visible and another invisible, one publicly acknowledged and another ignored. The inclusion and the exclusion of Charlotte Maxeke highlight a pattern which characterises women’s movements in general.
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This state of affairs is best explained by Ruth Pierson, a feminist scholar who has warned against privileging one kind of human activity over the other. She argued:
“the chaos and complexity of human activity do not allow themselves to be contained by the schemata of tight systems. In the process some of the recalcitrant human matter inevitably seems instead, to leak out through the cracks of any grand theory and poses a challenge to totalising claims”184
In other words, a simplistic view of Maxeke as an iconic representation of women in the formative years of the twentieth century’s struggles fails to account for her theorisation of the everyday. Maxeke’s doubling theorisation of the Native Question presented a mode of analysis to the workings of liberation politics. It is like the mode offered by Pierson. Maxeke’s ambiguity calls on us to engage with her as both a celebrated and a neglected figure.185It pushes us beyond the limits of a linear progression of political biographies as it raises questions about the gendering of black protest politics in South Africa in a substantive way that takes into account the production of ideas and thought.186
184 See Ruth Roach Pierson, “Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice in the Writing of
Canadian Women’s History” in Joan Scott and Judith Butler Feminists Theorize the Political (New York, Routledge, 1992), p.79.
185 Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa; Class, Nationalism and the State
in twentieth century Natal (Johannesburg, Raven Press, 1986), p. viii
186
The debate about political biographies has featured prominently in the work of Ciraj Rassool who has brought the conditions for the production of political biographies to close scrutiny. He asserted that the conditions for the production of political biographies can serve as a means to extend the field of South African resistance history beyond the documentary realist methodological boundaries of the chronological narrative. Rassool’s critical stance offers an opportunity to reflect on the past and present condition of Maxeke’s biographies.
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Maxeke’s theorisation of the everyday presented a frame of intelligibility previously unknown to African women. This frame is often mistaken as essentialist. Essentialism takes reproduction, nurturing and care as the basis from which women are understood in historical narratives. As a direct consequence of this misreading, any attempt to produce a concise biography of Charlotte Maxeke has to transcend the limiting effects of such frames in which women have been rendered in history. 187
Maxeke’s own theorisations of the everyday, her work on what she called “African womanhood”, the living conditions of Africans in urban areas, the plight of young girls found destitute in urban centres of Johannesburg, juvenile care, education and the employment of Africans in urban centres transcends such reductionist views of women in history. She created an oeuvre through which her name continues to resonate, and she discovered deep and consequential meanings. The spheres of Maxeke’s theorisation have unobtrusively been at the core of the twentieth century liberation discourse in South Africa. This warrants a close examination of the significance of Charlotte Maxeke in South African history.
See Ciraj Rassool, ‘Contesting Isaac Bangani Tabata: New Directions for Political History in South Africa (Extracts)’ paper presented in Historical legacies and New Challenges: 27-30, Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research Working paper No. 56. p.5
187 Frene Ginwala, ‘Women and the African National Congress: 1912-1943 ANC online
www.anc.og.
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