MATHABANE

MATHABANE.COM

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

HOME
Order Books
Arrange Lectures
Free Articles
Sponsor a Student
Order Serialized Chapters
The Poet's Corner
Famous Speeches
Vocabulary Builder
World News

PREFACES
Kaffir Boy
Miriam's Song
African Women
Love in Black & White
Deadly Memory
The Last Liberal

FIRST CHAPTERS
Kaffir Boy
Ubuntu
Kaffir Boy in America
Miriam's Song
African Women
Love in Black & White
Deadly Memory
The Last Liberal

DUST-JACKET & REVIEWS
Kaffir Boy
Kaffir Boy in America
African Women
Love in Black & White

CONTACT
E-mail
Feedback
Author's Bio

PREFACE

AFRICAN WOMEN

The earliest idea for this book occurred to me following publication of my first book, Kaffir Boy, in 1986, which is about my coming of age in apartheid South Africa. Kaffir Boy elicited from its readers around the world hundreds of letters condemning the apartheid system for its inhuman treatment of blacks and supporting the black majority's struggle for independence and justice.

This epic struggle, fought since the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652, has culminated in negotiations for a nonracial, nonsexist and democratic South Africa. It is my fervent hope that such a country, the fondest dream of millions, thousands of whom sacrificed their lives for it, is gloriously realized.

Most of the letters I received expressed admiration for my family, particularly my mother. Readers were keenly interested in the story of her life, as she had played a pivotal role in preventing me from self-destructing amid the raging hell of ghetto life. She raised seven children and put up with physical abuse at the hands of my father, all while groaning under the yoke of a triple oppression: she as black in a white dominated and racist society, a woman in a patriarchal culture, and illiterate in a world where those who could read and write had control over her life and the lives of those like her.

Granny, my mother Magdalene & my sister Florah

The stories of my mother's struggle and experiences -- and those of African women like her who battle for survival every day-- have waited too long to be told. Women, after all, are the unsung heroines of many a liberation struggle that rid Africa of the galling yoke of colonialism and white oppression. Unfortunately, many of their exploits, accomplishments, and sacrifices have gone unrecognized. Yet without such women, victory would have been impossible.

IN South Africa, women fought alongside men in the battlefield, as part of Umkonto We Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC). They marched, protested, and died in the streets. They slaved for a pittance as maids for white people. In their own homes they strove valiantly to keep families together and to sustain hope in the young, who are the future and salvation of the new South Africa.

My mother endured insults, humiliations, and beatings to see me educated. She encouraged me to shun gangs, to read books, and to pursue my dream of using tennis as a stepping stone to freedom. She even helped me make the hard decision to accept a tennis scholarship to America at age eighteen, when my parents and six siblings relied heavily on me as the primary breadwinner and my departure was certain to plunge them back into grinding poverty and hopelessness.

Though I already knew a great deal about my mother's life, especially that portion of it which is intertwined with my own, I knew there was much more about her past, her struggles, her growing up without a father, her marriage to a man almost twice her age who abused her, her bout with insanity, and her staunch faith in God.

In 1992 my sister Florah came to America. During her visit my wife, Gail, and I had long conversations with her about her life, particularly her relationships with men and her struggles as a woman in a male-dominated society and culture. She was then attempting to extricate herself from an abusive relationship with a former gangster. She had become involved with him during a period of great pain and turmoil in her life, when the young man she thought would love her forever, the father of her only daughter, began cheating on her.

As Florah recounted her story, patterns began emerging about her life that paralleled my mother's. Though belonging to different generations, both had been purchased by men following the lobola custom, after which the men changed and the relationships turned oppressive and abusive. With no knowledge of Western feminism or law, my mother and sister instinctively refused to accept their inferior status and degradation as women, and they fought doggedly for their rights as they then understood them to be.

Intrigued, I probed deeper and discovered much about their lives that had remained hidden and buried or had failed to register with me when I was growing up, absorbed as I was in my own struggles for freedom and rendered blind to sexism by seeing it accepted and condoned in the world around me.

Knowing that my maternal grandmother, Ellen, another victim of lobola and a survivor of male abuse, was still alive, I decided to investigate her story, too, from her childhood in the tribal homelands to her life as a single mother in a strange city, raising three children on her own after her husband abandoned her for another woman.

What emerged when I followed the three stories was a harrowing, poignant, heroic, and inspiring saga of three women who, in their individual ways, refused to buckle under tradition, custom, and oppression. They fought against daunting odds to preserve their individuality and independence, their dignity and pride, their hearts and souls. They worked and raised children in a culture and society where black women had hardly any rights, were daily discriminated against by apartheid, and were regarded as the property of their husbands or fathers by custom. Any attempt to liberate themselves--as the lives of Granny, my mother, and my sister revealed-- was condemned and harshly dealt with.

The stories of these three women are told in their own words. They are distinct yet interwoven memoirs of abuse, oppression, and witchcraft, of being cheated out of inheritances, of being sold at a young age to older men, of mysterious deaths and insanity, of rape, silent pain, endurance, of survival, triumph, faith, and, above all, undying love.

In telling these stories in the first person, through the eyes of each of the three characters, I have sought to avoid intruding on the ways of my grandmother, mother, and sister saw, felt, thought, and acted. I was surprised by how differently we often saw the same thing and reacted to the same experience. For instance, my father, with his strange moods and domineering and stubborn pride, was far more of a tyrant and abuser that I had let myself remember.

This book does not claim to be a representative study of all South African women, let alone of all African women. Nor are the men described in its supposed to represent all African men. Yet the oppression of women is widespread in South Africa, largely because as apartheid over the years has emasculated and degraded black men, and stripped them of their manhood by depriving them of the means to provide for their families and loved ones, many of these men find convenient targets for their rage, frustrations, and bitterness in those under their immediate and absolute control: women.

As in the case of my father, this abuse of women is made easy because apartheid, for its own devious ends, has encouraged and rewarded tribalism among blacks. Thus my father continued to cling to customs and traditions that had long outlived their usefulness, mainly out of a sense of desperation. Under tribalism men have power, authority, and respect, while in the modern world ruled by the white man they are powerless, get no respect, are called "boys," and treated as less than dirt.

Yet many African men and women have heroically retained their dignity and sense of self amid the horrors of apartheid. Their lives in many ways have been the opposite of the lives depicted in this book.

It is a fact that some African women like the custom of lobola, despite its abuses, and take pride in going for the highest price. They have their own reasons, just as my mother, Granny, and sister had their own for their love-hate relationship with the custom. For some African women, seeing a man pay for them is the only moment in their lives when they feel valued.

The issue of witchcraft is particularly sensitive and complex. There are many who dismiss it as primitive superstition. To people brought up under the influence of Western culture and Christianity, whose lives are steeped in modern technology and science, belief in witches and voodoo may sound fantastic, straight out of the Middle Ages. But readers of this book must bear in mind that there are various ways to perceive and interpret the same reality.

In South Africa, given the horrendous state of health care among blacks, endemic illiteracy, and the sway of tribal beliefs, it is easy for people whose mental and physical well-being has been devastated by apartheid to believe in supernatural causes. Yet there is something about the nature of witchcraft that defies Western scientific explanations and cannot be easily dismissed as mumbo-jumbo, just as there is a lot about Christianity and other major religions and faiths that cannot be explained using logic and reason. Such beliefs exercise a profound influence on people as they search for answers to the conundrums of life, to the eternal questions of who and why they are. The challenge is not for one culture to pass judgment on another--no one possesses absolute knowledge about the nature of things--but for us to seek to understand, learn from each other, and respect the complex differences among the various belief systems of the world.

Through these simple stories of the lives of my grandmother, mother and sister, I hope to pay tribute to the millions of grandmothers, mothers, and sisters worldwide who continue to do so much to preserve hope and peace in our troubled world, despite suffering long and often in silence at the hands of outmoded customs and traditions that serve only to stifle their growth, strangle their dreams, and prevent them from become what they have the God-given potential to become: full human beings and equal partners to men.

Kernersville, North Carolina
1994

(Click on button to order an autographed copy of African Women)

top of page