Abstract
This thesis addresses the historiographical gap concerning the political contributions of Indian women activists during apartheid South Africa, focusing primarily on the Fordsburg Women’s Group, a grassroots collective formed in 1983. The study argues that the histories of Indian women, who were marginalised by not only race and gender, but also by religious and cultural/ethnic beliefs and customs remain largely overlooked in both formal state archives and dominant nationalist liberation narratives. In response to this erasure, the research employs a decolonial feminist praxis that positions memory, embodiment, and creative practice as legitimate sites of knowledge production. The methodological framework integrates socio-historical research, oral history, autoethnography, and practice-as-research, conceptualising creative outputs as artivist activations. The central artivist output of this project is constituted by the Memory Is a Weapon activations. Drawing on postmemory and the archive/repertoire distinction, the study demonstrates how performance acts as a counter-archive, making histories visible and transmitting the histories through embodied practices, storytelling, and material culture, such as saris and food. The findings reveal that the Fordsburg Women’s Group functioned as a feminist counterpublic, transforming domestic and communal spaces such as kitchens, schools, and the Oriental Plaza into arenas of political organising and mutual aid. The group’s activism blurred the boundaries between the political and the everyday, asserting resistance through acts of care, textile work, and intergenerational dialogue. The thesis concludes that the recovery of these fragmented narratives not only expands the historiography of resistance but also affirms that memory, when mobilised through creative feminist practice, is a retrospective oppositional gaze and a forward-looking weapon for social justice.