Abstract
The marginalisation of black women’s social and sociological knowledge production during Apartheid South Africa stemmed from its racialised and gendered structure. Apartheid created an environment in which Eurocentric and androcentric narratives, supported by various academic and liberal institutions, flourished while the voices of black women went unheard or unacknowledged in public discourses. South African feminist scholars have been working diligently to unearth the intellectual histories of black women and illuminate how they have navigated the limitations they confronted to produce knowledge on their experiences. However, these efforts are often overshadowed by dominant narratives of black feminism from the global north, which tend to frame the scholarship and theorisation emerging from the south as secondary or limited to autobiography and creative writing.
This study explores the intellectual production of Phyllis Ntantala, Harriet Ngubane, and Lauretta Ngcobo in South Africa during the mid-to-late twentieth century. It investigates how they conceptualised and theorised their – and other black women's – gendered oppression and strategies for liberation using research and social theory. It further explores how they acted as knowledge producers despite the discursive silencing they faced and how they navigated their gendered political and social limitations to assert themselves as intellectuals.
This study further demonstrates the pertinence of their work in informing the conditions of black women during Apartheid as well as in illuminating the sites in which black women have deeply conceptualised their racial, gender and class struggles. In doing this, these women grappled with feminist concepts such as multiplicity, intersectionality, and self-reflectivity – even though they did not use these terms – in their research and writing while exercising their agency in fashioning a livelihood to achieve their aspirations.