2021-07 - Professor Bheki Peterson - A forever man wits.ac.za - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wits.ac.za Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In the third decade of the new millennium, despite many publishers still seeing black women’s writing as having a limited market, readers have far more access than before to publications by writers from the global South. In particular, the perspectives of black women are certainly more visible in the public domain.
Yet gaps and erasures – based on intellectual authority, financial resources and visibility in the knowledge commons – mean that it’s still easier for work by black, postcolonial and decolonial feminists from global centres to secure publication and wide distribution.
As a result, the growing audience of radical young readers grappling with questions about race, gender, sexuality and freedom in global peripheries often have to turn to critical writing outside their national contexts, which inflect the topics they want to explore. Even for many restless and radical readers in the global North, much remains silenced and absent.
EDITORIAL | A mother holds the knife by the blade, indeed Mother’s Day is the one day in the year we should press pause to appreciate the mothers in our nation where life is not always easy 09 May 2021 - 18:53
The Sunday Times recently published an article by Panashe Chigumadzi on Charlotte Maxeke, titled, “Our debt to Charlotte Maxeke: 150 years after her birth, she’s still our mother”. She is celebrated as a mother figure to the struggle, one of the highest compliments one can attribute to a woman.
Chigumadzi cites several mother idioms in the piece. She also talks about Reshoketswe Mosuwe, the president of the Women’s Missionary Society (WMS), known as the “manyano”. Chigumadzi writes: “Across Southern Africa, amaManyano, the ‘mothers’ unions’ of our churches, are one of our most important social institutions. It is here that our mothers hold us up for prayer. It is here that our mothers hold each other. It is here that our mothers cry. It