I have been teaching a course on Black Consciousness Poetry in the universities for close to seven years and have been nagged by the silence and absence of women in that unfolding radical moment. For about five years now, every August, the month that in South Africa marks women’s month, an image of Ministerfrom the 1980s circulates on social media. She looks away from the book in her hands to confront us with a direct gaze into the camera, with a Kalashnikov resting easily next to her hip.
The image represents a battle fought with both ideological and military warfare; what the Cold War machine would have called soft power and hard power . That image of a female guerilla looks as provocative as it does organic: the people closest to the pain should be closest to power, driving and informing the contours and contents of a revolution. The country’s history dictated their constitution: black, hypermasculine, clandestine, and Molotov-wielding.
Some of the poets in this anthology have used pseudonyms as they were underground. The editor Lindiwe Mabuza, is listed as Sono Molefe.
Decades later in the dispensation for which they sacrificed their lives, their work is virtually unknown, out of print and circulation. The absence was loud for I knew deep in my bones that as long as there were women fighting in the Mkhonto we Sizwe, there had to be women writing poetry that encapsulated the moment. I initiated a project titled ‘Recovering Subterranean Archives’ whose main objective was research into South African culture in exile.
The pursuit of such a rich record would have to entail interviews and physical tracking of the ANC’s activities. I came to know of
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