Not about Heroines: Phyllis Ntantala's Writing on African Women in Apartheid South Africa

The silencing of black women's social knowledge production in Apartheid South Africa resulted from the racial hierarchisation and gendered configuration of society by the state. This created an environment where Eurocentric and androcentric narratives, driven by various academic [and liberal] institutions, could thrive, and women's voices could not be heard (or were not listened to). This silencing has been further perpetuated in contemporary global feminist discourses, albeit scholars of Africa have been working vigorously to excavate black women's intellectual histories. This work seems to be overshadowed by dominant narratives of black feminism from the global north, which cast the vigorous scholarship and theorisation of the south as ancillary. This study considers the intellectual writing of Phyllis Ntantala in the mid-twentieth century in Apartheid South Africa and during her exile in North America as an essential site for feminist theory and political strategy making. It examines how she carefully considered and constructed knowledge about the gendered, racial and class struggles of black women and conceptualised their mobilisation for their racial and gendered liberation from Apartheid.