Too many accounts of the struggle for justice in South Africa focus almost exclusively on racial justice. Yet we have complex and multiple identities. Who wins and who loses when gender, for example, is rendered either invisible of less important than our racialised identities in both the archives of history and in our public records about the struggles against colonialism?
In this public debate, we take up the challenge to recall and discuss the experiences of women of all backgrounds in the struggle against oppression and for a just and inclusive South Africa. Women aren't homogenous, and even constructions of gender must, of course, be interrogated to intersect with ideas of class, geography, political association and other markers. But a good starting point in the battle against forgetting is to begin to push back against reductions of history to grand narratives about The Big Men prominent in out textbooks and public celebrations or who the giants of history were.
This dialogue aims precisely to right these wrongs by affording an opportunity to fill in the gaps in public memory about the full range of experiences of women in the struggle.
Apartheid Museum, Northern Parkway and Gold Reef Road,
Ormonde, Johannesburg
RSVP - email: info@apartheidmuseum.org
or call Sibongile on 011 309 4700