Towards gender-inclusive histories: addressing gender amnesia in South Africa’s liberation discourse

Résumé

The historiography of South Africa’s liberation struggle has largely privileged the experiences and contributions of male political actors, often marginalising the significant role played by women in the struggle against apartheid. This phenomenon, conceptualised in this paper as ‘gendered amnesia’, reflects the systematic exclusion of women’s experiences from dominant liberation narratives and collective memory. Against this background, the paper examined how patriarchal structures and selective historical representations have contributed to the erasure of women’s political agency within South Africa’s liberation discourse. The paper interrogated the historical and political processes that have shaped gendered amnesia and challenge the exclusionary nature of liberation historiography. The paper employed a qualitative desktop research methodology based on the analysis of secondary sources, including scholarly literature, historical documents, biographies, archival records and policy texts. The paper is theoretically anchored in feminist theory, which provides a critical lens for understanding the intersection between gender, power and historical representation. The findings reveal that, despite women’s central role in mobilisation, organisation and resistance, post-apartheid historiography continues to valorise male leaders while relegating women’s contributions to the periphery. This selective remembering is shown to be a political and ideological process that reproduces patriarchal power relations and reinforces gender inequalities in contemporary South Africa. The paper concludes that recovering women’s histories constitutes a transformative act of memory work that challenges hegemonic liberation narratives and advances a more inclusive understanding of freedom and social justice.

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