In this post, Rachel E. Johnson introduces her new book—Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle. The Shadow of a Young Woman—which is published in the Society’s ‘New Historical Perspectives’ series with University of London Press.
Central to the monograph is the figure of Mary Masabata Loate. Between 1976 and 1986, Masabata Loate appears in court records and newspaper articles as a school student activist, a beauty queen, a terrorism suspect, a political prisoner and finally a murder victim.
Her death in 1986 at the height of the State-of-Emergency violence within Soweto was remembered in ways that obscured her complex relationship with anti-apartheid politics as a teenager and young woman.
Masabata Loate is emblematic of the way in which gendered narratives of the anti-apartheid struggle have been formed. While lacking lacked the materials to write a conventional biography, Rachel has written what she terms ‘a shadow biography’ of this young woman.
Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle is the 21st title in the Society’s New Historical Perspectives series for early career historians. Rachel’s book, and all other titles in the series are published free, Open Access, and in paperback print.
When I started researching and writing Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle I did not intend to write a biography. Yet, as I tried to find out more about the young black women who had participated in the groundswell of anti-apartheid activism driven by school students in mid-1970s South Africa, one young woman kept appearing, often in unexpected ways within the archives.
In the court cases generated by the Apartheid State’s brutal repression of youth politics; in newspapers both local and international; and in post-apartheid memoirs and recollections of the 1980s, including at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s public hearings: Masabata Loate was there.
She was at times hyper-visible and at others half-forgotten, her name misspelled, easy to miss and dismiss as insignificant. Her death in 1986 at the height of the State-of-Emergency violence within Soweto was remembered in ways that obscured her complex relationship with anti-apartheid politics as a teenager and young woman.
So, while I lacked the materials to write a conventional biography of this young woman, I could write something else – a shadow biography as I came to think of it.
It became clear to me that, while she was in no way typical of those young people mobilised by the 16 June 1976 Uprising, her appearances in the archive were emblematic of the ways in which gendered narratives of those struggles had been made, reinforced and circulated.
So, while I lacked the materials to write a conventional biography of this young woman, I could write something else – a shadow biography as I came to think of it. One which traced the fragments of her speech and image caught in the archive as a way of thinking about how and where speaking was recognised as voice, how collective voices of youth and women were forged in the struggle, and how silences, including Masabata Loate’s, were made in the process.
My book is an attempt to think about the place of speech and voice within South Africa’s liberation struggle. The liberation struggle was, in one sense, a struggle for voice – a political voice for all South Africans irrespective of race, against a state that recognised only the white minority as legitimately having such a voice. Speech is also one of the principal ways historians have of knowing about that struggle.
Loate emerges as a shadow within the narratives of the masculinised politicisation and mobilisation of the youth – a shadow that throws these processes into sharp relief.
I argue that grasping the gendered dynamics of speech in, and about, the struggle is important for unpicking the nature of political participation and the historical record it leaves us. Voice, speech and silence are explored in Chapter One which outlines an approach to working with archival fragments as fragments. Resisting the urge to fill in the gaps between the fleeting glimpses of Masabata Loate that existing archives contain underscores the importance of noticing where and how she is recorded. Loate emerges as a shadow within the narratives of the masculinised politicisation and mobilisation of the youth – a shadow that throws these processes into sharp relief.
This photograph is an example of the visibility of young men as actors within urban unrest in 1980s South Africa. Photographer, Paul Weinberg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Chapter Two examines Masabata Loate’s appearance in court in 1978 as a state witness testifying against the Soweto Eleven, who were on trial as the leaders of the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC), charged with sedition for their role in organising the school children’s march on 16 June 1976. It explores the documents and books found in Loate’s possession when she was first arrested a year before that court appearance, for clues as to the ideas and aims of this young woman.
This includes a document tantalisingly but misleadingly titled ‘My Thoughts’. This chapter charts how an archive held under her name obscures Loate’s own relationship with youth political organising in Soweto – something that the trial of the Soweto Eleven does for young women in general. For very different reasons both the state prosecution and the Soweto Eleven’s defence lawyers emphasised the masculinity of the SSRC as a political group, even as a significant number of young women were used as witnesses to describe this world.
In multiple ways Loate does not conform to the expectations of activist speech, in doing so she reveals the sharpening boundaries around what was sayable and by whom in 1980s South Africa.
Chapter Three concerns Loate’s reappearance in two very different archival sites: as a beauty queen in the society pages of the Rand Daily Mail and a defendant charged with terrorism alongside Khotso Seatlholo, as secretary and president respectively, of the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO).
At this trial Loate testified in her own defence and spoke of herself as an unwitting girlfriend of Seatlholo, an innocent beauty queen, an untrusted former state witness, who could nevertheless not quite resist admitting to the magistrate that she was ‘aware that the black man in this country is oppressed’. She and Seatlholo were both found guilty.
This chapter considers what Loate said in court and the wider struggles around speech and silence that shaped the trial. In multiple ways Loate does not conform to the expectations of activist speech, in doing so she reveals the sharpening boundaries around what was sayable and by whom in 1980s South Africa.
This poster captures the place accorded to women within South Africa’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s: South African History Online
Loate was released from prison in 1986 and shortly afterwards was murdered on the streets of Soweto by a group of around 20 men.
I hope to offer historians of other times and places ways to negotiate the interplay of darkness and light, voice and silence, in our ways of knowing the past.
Chapter Four reads the many different accounts of her death that can be found in contemporary newspaper reports both local and international, within post-apartheid memoir including Rian Malan’s best-seller My Traitor’s Heart, and as recounted at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s public hearing into the Mandela United Football Club, where her death was mentioned as a reason for the initial formation of the club.
It argues for the need to read these retellings of her death alongside the emergence over the same period of women’s voices from within the liberation struggle as a way of hearing the simultaneity of voicing and silencing.
In writing this shadow biography of Masabata Loate I make the case for the explanatory power of incomplete, partial knowledge about this young woman. In doing so I hope to offer historians of other times and places ways to negotiate the interplay of darkness and light, voice and silence, in our ways of knowing the past.
About the author
Rachel E. Johnson is Associate Professor (Modern African History) in the Department of History at Durham University.
Her research focuses on South Africa in the final decades of the Apartheid State, the transition to democratic government in the 1990s, and follows the politics of institutional change into the twenty-first century.
Of particular interest is the involvement of young people within anti-apartheid politics, and in particular the experiences of young women as activists within the school-based youth movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
Rachel’s new monograph, Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Shadow of a Young Woman is now available from University of London Press. Rachel’s book is available in paperback print, as an Open Access pdf download and in a Manifold online reading edition.
About the ‘New Historical Perspectives’ book series from the Royal Historical Society
New Historical Perspectives (NHP) is the Society’s book series for early career scholars (within ten years of their doctorate), commissioned and edited by the Royal Historical Society, in association with University of London Press and the Institute of Historical Research.
The series publishes monographs and edited collections by early career historians on all chronologies and histories, worldwide. Contracted authors receive mentoring and an author workshop to develop their manuscript before its final submission.
All titles in the series are published in paperback print and open access (as pdf downloads and Manifold reading editions) with all costs covered by the Royal Historical Society and partners. Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Shadow of a Young Woman is the 21st volume published in the series (March 2025). For more on current and forthcoming titles on the series, please see here.
