Article

Feminist Theory
2016, Vol. 17(2) 191–209
Making Southern theory? ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700116645877
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Robert Morrell
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract
This article examines the work of six South African gender researchers working in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It suggests that their work should be
understood as situated in terms of politics, educational histories, theoretical connec-
tions and transnational engagements. It reflects on whether this work can be considered
an example of Southern theory, and in turn suggests that Southern theory should itself
be understood in relational terms that acknowledge both geopolitical connection and
distance. The researchers who were interviewed by the author all draw on a feminist
language and conceptual toolbox initially developed in Northern contexts, but in the
recent period modified and extended by engagements with postcolonial and other
feminisms. The article shows how South Africa’s repressive political conditions and
deep racial and social class inequalities influenced the research. There was a strong
link between anti-apartheid activism and research choices which reflected a battle for
the inclusion of gender in struggles that prioritised the focus on race and class inequal-
ities. Research was also shaped by the researchers’ relationship to activism and their
engagement with marginality stemming from histories of colonialism and imperialism.

Keywords
Activism, apartheid, knowledge production, South African feminism, Southern theory

South African social science has profoundly been shaped by its context. Apartheid,
a policy associated with the Afrikaner nationalist government elected in 1948, not
only separated people on grounds of race, but systematically created inequalities
throughout South African society. This article presents the perspectives of six
gender scholars – four white women, a black woman and a black man.

Corresponding author:
Robert Morrell, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, Cape Town, Western Cape 7701,
South Africa.
Email: robert.morrell@uct.ac.za
192 Feminist Theory 17(2)

Two participating scholars, Cherryl Walker and Elaine Unterhalter, were revision-
ist historians. Both studied at South African universities in the 1970s and began
publishing in the early 1980s. Catherine Campbell and Shireen Hassim, both from
Durban, began publishing in the late 1980s in Psychology and Political Studies
respectively. Rachel Jewkes, a London-born epidemiologist, began researching
nursing and teenage pregnancy in the mid 1990s and then, subsequently, drew
attention to shockingly high rape rates in South Africa. Kopano Ratele grew up
in poverty stricken black townships and began publishing on masculinity in the late
1990s. All have edited or written books on feminism in South Africa, except Rachel
whose epidemiological work has secured her the status of world leader in the South
African national academic rating system.
In the early 1970s, white rule in South Africa was challenged by the banned
and exiled nationalist movement, organised workers and the student movement.
This ferment was part of broader anti-colonial struggles in Africa as well as of
radical scholarship in Europe. Radical revisionism began to disturb academic
orthodoxy, particularly in the humanities (Freund, 1984; Saunders, 1988).
Researchers began to wear two hats, academic and activist. It was in this
context that the feminists interviewed here challenged the dominant race and
class focus and insisted that gender be taken seriously as an analytical category
and field of enquiry. Their endeavours generated a fresh research agenda that
borrowed from European and American feminism but also anticipated the
emergence of intersectionality. South African feminist scholarship was eclectic
in its intellectual debts, highly sensitive to social complexity and politically
engaged.
I examine this work from the perspective of the geopolitics of knowledge pro-
duction. Is it possible to view South African gender research as an instance of
Southern theory? Noting the danger of reifying North and South, I argue for a
more flexible and relational approach. The links between feminists, North and
South, are strong. They often belong together in networks, use similar conceptual
language and have broadly similar political goals. On the other hand, differences
are reflected in distinct intellectual genealogies, contexts and histories of colonial-
ism that express ongoing global inequalities. These stretch from north to south and
west to east and can produce disagreement even as they contribute to a collective
political feminist project (Antrobus, 2004; Davis and Evans, 2011). My task here is
to highlight particular features of the South African gender research while being
cognisant of global feminist linkages.

Southern theory
In 2007, Raewyn Connell produced Southern Theory, a book which offered a term
for knowledge produced beyond a mainstream dominated by writers based in the
North. Critiquing the canon in sociology, Connell points out that works celebrated
and frequently cited were produced in the industrial, urban North. These works
were taken as a universal norm. Europe’s colonial and imperial past and the
Morrell 193

consequent knowledge inequalities were ignored. As a result, theories produced by

thinkers in the South were often not visible.
Connell draws on the work of Benin philosopher, Paulin Hountondji (2002), to
advance her critique of Northern theory. Hountondji developed the concept of
extraversion to show that European knowledge forays into the South were
extractive in intent. Raw data was sourced and then returned to the metropole for
analysis and theorisation. Neither local needs nor African audiences were addressed.
This process embedded existing Northern concepts instead of allowing new ones to
emerge. The knowledge production process was therefore controlled by Northern
scholars for the primary benefit of Northern academic and research interests.
Connell argues that the ‘theoretical frameworks developed in the metropole
become embedded in the intellectual work of the periphery, not by the exercise
of direct control, but by the way the whole economy of knowledge is organised’
(2014: 524). To challenge this, Southern theory should reflect the context in which it
is produced and contest the conditions of research that historically contributed to
both knowledge and material inequalities. Its purpose should be emancipatory,
contributing to the democratisation of knowledge.
Recent reviews of the new surge of interest in knowledge-making have com-
mented that Southern theory is neither an existing nor homogeneous alternative to
Northern theory. Indeed, this view refuses claims that Northern theory is homo-
genous or mature and whilst accepting that Northern theory exercises intellectual
global hegemony notes linkages, connections and debts which are bidirectional.
Using an emic approach, the Comaroffs argue that the South is not ‘a thing in or
for itself’ but a relation (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 47). Developing southern
theory will require an ‘epistemological fragmentation’ in order to recentre the south
and prevent it merely from being the object of study (Nyamnjoh, 2011: 711).
Another view is that it is ‘a circumstantial project under which different notions
of theory are in a dispute for legitimacy’ (Rosa, 2014: 1). Southern theory is in the
process of becoming rather than already existing. What binds these different
approaches is widespread acknowledgement of the persistence of knowledge
inequalities (Czerniewicz and Wiens, 2013; Carvalho, 2014) and a self-conscious-
ness challenge to the status quo. A claim to Southern theory ‘is explicitly associated
with alternative forms of knowledge for the social sciences’ (Rosa, 2014: 3).
I follow Connell’s use of South and North to identify geopolitical knowledge
inequalities. The binaried distinction clearly has limitations. Connell argues for an
understanding that does not imply a ‘sharply bounded category of states or socie-
ties’ (2007: viii), but which rather draws attention to relations of ‘authority, exclu-
sion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation’ between
‘intellectual and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery’
(Connell, 2007: ix). Nevertheless, the grey area that marks the edges of North and
South conceals an important definitional challenge. How do we situate researchers
whose work draws on Northern intellectual lineages but is located in the South and
responsive to Southern knowledge imperatives? Here I draw on German anthro-
pologist Richard Rottenburg to suggest that we can begin to understand this
194 Feminist Theory 17(2)

greyness by acknowledging the existence of a language, a metacode, which

researchers across the globe agree to and use. The metacode gives them a
common language even as it permits different interpretations and thus allows for
both the acknowledgement of different perspectives and a collective and universal
project of knowledge production.
The context of theory production has implications for reception and influence.
European feminism, for example, has mostly played second fiddle to local feminist
work in the United States (Davis and Evans, 2011). Gender research in the South
occurs in a context where Northern theory offers readily available and canonised
conceptual tools while at the same time presenting political and analytical chal-
lenges quite different from those faced by Northern colleagues. The location of the
researcher will also influence choice of subject matter, approach and the research
questions asked. Researchers’ engagements with feminist issues will in turn reflect
these research choices, and their political engagement will have been shaped by
particular life trajectories and institutions. Being consciously positioned in a web of
unequal knowledge relations can be a spur to writing new theory (Keim, 2011). In
the following, I show how life experiences and confrontations not limited to the
formal academic arena shaped the growth of the South African theorists. In so
doing, I identify the key contextual mechanisms that explain the shape and form of
the theory they produced.

Feminists in South Africa

The six writers discussed in this article are part of a feminist lineage in South Africa
that stretches back to novelist Olive Schreiner, whose work around the turn of the
twentieth century was a strong critique not just of the subordinate position of
women, but of capitalism and racism in Southern Africa (Burdett, 2013). Similar
themes were reflected in the second wave of feminist writing in South Africa.
Jacklyn Cock’s work on African women in domestic labour (1980), Cherryl
Walker’s historical work ([1983] 1991) on the suffragette movement and Judy
Kimble and Elaine Unterhalter’s work (1983) on the role of women in the anti-
colonial struggle all grappled with issues of race and class which at the time received
the bulk of research and activist attention as the primary vectors of oppression.
Feminist research was conducted in politically volatile circumstances where to
be a researcher could be considered as associating yourself with the cause of com-
munity activists and one of the anti-apartheid liberation movements. In some cases,
researchers were explicitly undertaking research to better understand the condi-
tions on the ground as a way of analysing conditions of oppression and thus
informing oppositional strategies. This work was sometimes an expression of
feminist commitment and sometimes reflected dissidence and opposition to the
apartheid system as a whole.
The lived experiences of my six interviewees varied widely, although in each case
particular events, individuals and influences were critical in forming them as reflex-
ive anti-apartheid subjects. Some were white and middle class and ostensibly
Morrell 195

benefitted from apartheid’s racial dispensation. Others grew up feeling the disad-
vantages of racial exclusion and poverty. For each, however, their personal loca-
tion in the apartheid order was converted into a critical lens on gender inequality
and served in many cases as a prompt to engage in activism. Conscious engagement
with context served as a spur to action which fuelled the research process.
The Comaroffs capture this aspect of theory making, describing it as ‘the historic-
ally contextualised, problem-driven effort to account for the production of social
and cultural ‘‘facts’’ in the world by recourse to an imaginative methodological
counterpoint between the inductive and the deductive, the concrete and the con-
cept’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 48).
The audience for South African feminism included activists and academics, all
of whom were energetically engaging with questions about apartheid and how it
could be overthrown. South African feminists spoke generally to at least three
different audiences: academic colleagues, political activists and communities (who
were often the subjects of the research). In each case, they were confronted with the
obvious presence of women in the struggle to end apartheid, but also differences
amongst women and between men and women and violence by men against
women. Their work developed a new agenda of feminist research that integrated
colonial histories and their consequences into analysis and offered richly detailed
case studies of gender dynamics.

Methodology
In 2013–14 I interviewed six gender scholars as part of a global knowledge research
project. Its goal was to study intellectual work practices and knowledge production
processes. The purpose was to understand how established and, in some cases,
world-leading researchers had developed their research careers. The interview
schedule paid particular attention to early influences, career choices (including
publication choices, collaborations, funding) and intellectual partners and mentors.
Each scholar interviewed was well known to me. Having been born in Cape Town
in the mid 1950s as a white South African, I had experienced segregated schooling
and had been involved in university student politics and subsequent anti-apartheid
activities. I had met my interviewees as fellow lecturers and gender researchers. I
selected them because they fitted the criteria of being active and established gender
researchers working on and in South Africa. They span a number of disciplines but
each in their own right are recognisable as major contributors to gender theory and
research. I was very familiar with their writings having collaborated with some of
them, taught their work to students and encountered each of them many times in
academic settings. The interviews were thus deeply informed by my knowledge of
their work.
Five of the interviewees are women over fifty years old who were highly aware of
and had experienced apartheid as a social system. The single male interviewee was
younger and had experienced apartheid as a school-going teenager in the early
1980s at the height of a period of militant and often violent protest. One of the
196 Feminist Theory 17(2)

five female interviewees had grown up outside South Africa, and another two now
work and live in the UK though grew up in South Africa. All informants were
politically active in their early adult years. The women scholars were active both in
championing women’s rights and fighting for the overthrow of apartheid.
The process of converting context into new insights is pinioned by key markers
in the life course. In analysing the interviews, I adopt a chronological and thematic
approach. I start by examining how early life experiences impacted on and
informed a sociological imagination, before moving to later phases and themes:
education; activism and intellectual debt (theoretical and personal). The focus is on
how the individual researchers made sense of their experiences and how they came
to act on these experiences in the realm of knowledge-making. All the interviewees
provided informed consent and subsequently agreed to be mentioned by name.
They also had the opportunity to see how their views were represented in this
article.

Family and childhood

Despite the stark racial divisions in South African society, experiences of childhood
were not racially uniform (Burman and Reynolds, [1976] 1990). If South African
whites were generally far better off in terms of material living circumstance and
future prospects, it was obviously not the case that all were blind to racial inequal-
ity or exempt from forms of discrimination themselves.
Elaine Unterhalter, born in the 1950s, came from a Jewish family and was aware
of anti-semitism early in her life.

I was born in Johannesburg and my parents were in some ways very close to the
upper-middle class whites’ milieu but in other ways quite apart because my father and
my mother were very active members of the South African Liberal Party and I think
they encountered a lot of hostility from peers for standing up for issues that they
believed very much in about the franchise particularly. And my mother had been a
social worker and worked in Alexandra township [a small residential area in greater
Johannesburg reserved for black African occupation and the scene of many protests
against colonialism and later apartheid] and then later Soweto, before she became a
sociologist and went to the university. So apartheid and opposition to some of its very
destructive features were a very constant refrain of my childhood.

Shireen Hassim was born in the early 1960s, and until the age of twelve lived in an
inner-city segregated area in Durban. She was classified under apartheid as
‘Indian’. She experienced the country’s systemic forms of racial discrimination,
including attending schools that were reserved for ‘Indians’.

I grew up being quite exposed to Black Consciousness and reading Black

Consciousness poetry. But there was absolutely no way that it was acceptable for
me to be politically active. I did become an activist in ’76 [the year of the Soweto
Morrell 197

student uprising]; I was in Standard 8 at high school at Reservoir Hills. But it was
completely not acceptable and I had huge rows with my parents; girls didn’t do these
things, you had to hang out with boys.

While Elaine was white and Shireen black, both experienced childhood in politi-
cised ways. Both were aware from early on that South Africa was a country divided
along race lines but with strong and unjust exclusionary mechanisms that affected
many people. The explicit political commitments of Elaine’s parents and, in
Shireen’s case, the politicisation of the country after the Soweto uprising, provided
the foundations for oppositional politics.
Kopano Ratele, an only child, grew up in a small village in the north west of the
country. His maternal grandfather was a local chief and his childhood until the age
of ten was ‘relatively secure, loving, predictable’. But then his parents split up and
he went to live in a township in conditions which he describes as very tough. He
lived in a shack with his mother, was often cold, and had no money. ‘[W]e’ll be so
hungry some days, we didn’t have food, so we would go to funerals to get some
food’. By the time Kopano got to secondary school in the early 1980s, his impov-
erished life circumstances and the rapidly politicising nature of life in the racially
segregated township combined to open him to the heady life of student politics.
There were numerous routes to politicisation in South Africa. In these examples
we see them in family life and material circumstance. Subsequently, the seeds sown
were fertilised in the school setting.

Education and radicalisation

The secondary school years were very important in fostering intellectual curiosity
and a penchant for critique. For Elaine Unterhalter, a childhood immersed in
books gave her the intellectual tools to realise that her elite, single-sex schooling
was an exercise in gender domestication. ‘[O]nly six or seven girls, I think, passed
their matric or got to university out of about seventy who were in my (matricula-
tion) year. So basically what the ethos of the school was they were bringing up
young women to be the rather dumb partners of successful men in the corporate
sector’. On the other hand, Elaine and some friends got together, formed a debat-
ing team and beat the elite neighbouring boys’ school, inverting the gender pre-
sumption that boys were cleverer than girls. This gender consciousness was soon to
be complemented by a passionate opposition to racial inequality. Elaine studied
History and English at Wits University. It was the early 1970s and the forces of
opposition were becoming bolder, more organised and more radical (Moss, 2014).
Elaine became an active member of National Union of South African Students,
which was beginning to follow the implications of radical social analysis that was
emerging among exile scholars in the UK (Legassick, 1974; Wolpe, 1974). This
involved forms of activist scholarship as well as community activism that included
close engagement with workers and the incipient trade union movement. Two of
her history lecturers ‘absolutely blew my mind [. . .]. putting on the table [. . .] the
198 Feminist Theory 17(2)

issue about the connections of race and class (even though) we didn’t even have a
language to talk about them’. Elaine’s years at Wits University brought together a
set of political values and commitments with an intellectual training which
acquainted her with a corpus of left-wing, largely Marxist and anti-colonial,
work. She made sense of these in a country that was experiencing the acute effects
of poverty, racial inequality and authoritarian government, and her writings
reflected this.
Catherine Campbell tells a story with similarities and differences. She went to a
single-sex school in Durban.

[W]e were brought up, we were girls, we were going to be top at everything. In my
class everybody got A’s for matric, we all came top in Natal. Very much we were
brought up to be an intellectual elite and to be leaders in politics and the professions.
[. . .] We were very, very, very feminist; right from school at an early age. Everybody’s
mothers were involved in Black Sash [a liberal, anti-apartheid women’s organisation].

Kopano was in high school in the early 1980s. He attended a township school
(reserved for African students). This was a time of student activism, openly con-
fronting apartheid security forces and attacking those seen as collaborators.
Kopano was swept up in the militancy and the violence though he did not join
many of his schoolmates who secretly crossed the border for military training.
Kopano remembers:

I did Fanon when I was in high school, but formally I started that at Vista
[University], so we were introduced formally to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
and stuff around Black Skin White Masks. [. . .] So that was Fanon, very influential,
and Biko becomes very impressive for me around that time. High school a little bit but
not in depth; only when I get to Vista I start reading them, finding them and getting
something that expresses this pain for me.

For Kopano, race was a defining feature of the development of his politics. As a
black man he was excluded in many ways, with fewer life options and resources.
Franz Fanon and Steve Biko were the central figures in his political imagination.
He reflects back on the limitations of his understanding then and how his reflection
on their works has shaped his own: ‘[E]very time I go back to him [Fanon] – I [see
that I] was reading him in a very flat way [. . .] Now I think what he meant for those
lines that you can’t be a black man and be a man at the same time. But I wasn’t
reading him like that’.
In a strikingly different setting, Rachel Jewkes was becoming politically con-
scious. Having completed her A levels in the UK, Rachel took a gap year to South
Africa. She went to work on a health project in what was then the Transkei (now
the Eastern Cape). ‘I really came to understand for the first time a bit about public
health and about poverty and its impact, and of course about apartheid and its
impact on people’s lives’. She returned to the UK and trained as a medical doctor.
Morrell 199

During this time, she joined the anti-apartheid movement, becoming one of its
national Vice Chairs and running its Health Committee. Her politicisation involved
an introduction to gender politics:

although coming very much from an angle of socialism, or communism, that was
inspired quite heavily by the Soviet Union and the ANC line on gender was very much
that women were oppressed, but we have to free everybody else before we can deal
with oppression of women. So that gender wasn’t in the forefront of my work during
that period.

It was only later, once she began undertaking medical research, that her politicisa-
tion began to be moulded by contextual realities and fed into a research agenda
that she pioneered in South Africa.
Student experience at South Africa’s universities radicalised many young people
as they encountered new and critical ideas. For my interviewees, schools, particu-
larly for black pupils after the 1976 Soweto uprisings, also served as nurseries for
radical questioning and political engagement.

Activism
Cherryl Walker is considered as one of South Africa’s founding academic feminists
in the sense that her writings (Walker, 1983 [1991], 1990) constitute one of the first
conscious engagements with gender to complement race and class as critical factors
in understanding South Africa’s inequalities. At university, Cherryl participated in
feminist campaigns against restrictive, old-fashioned ideas that still governed insti-
tutional rules but undertook research in an academic environment still largely
uninterested in ‘gender’. She explains how her interest in the discipline of history
morphed into activist involvement in land issues. ‘I got involved in land partly
because I got fed up with university. [. . .] I ended up at Neil Alcock’s project in
KwaZulu Natal where I was for a year. So I was completely immersed, thrown into
land issues in that particular context. [. . .] dealing first-hand with particularly evic-
tions off farms, it was happening all around, and people were coming to Neil’s
project for assistance, advice’. During the 1960s and 1970s eviction of labour ten-
ants from white farms intensified along with state removals of Africans from land
deemed to be ‘in a white area’ (Surplus Peoples’ Project, 1983). Working on land
issues with black communities directly threatened with eviction was volatile and
dangerous and, indeed, Alcock was himself shot dead in 1983. In Cherryl’s case it
meant renouncing, at least for a while, a middle class life and academic career. In
the early 1990s, with the ANC unbanned, Cherryl took up a university position in
Durban, exploring her interest in gender, land and ethnicity in a range of publica-
tions. Acknowledgement of her contribution as a lands activist came in 1995 when
in newly democratic South Africa she was invited to become a Lands
Commissioner, with the task of redressing the gross racial disparities that were a
feature of the apartheid landscape.
200 Feminist Theory 17(2)

When Elaine Unterhalter finished her degree she volunteered for service at
Charles Johnson Memorial hospital in Northern KwaZulu-Natal. She describes
the experience as a ‘revelation’.

I’ve never lived in a rural area, never been up close and personal with the kind of level
of suffering and deprivation, because you were so cut off by living in the suburbs and
not socialising with people in townships – and there are all these things about anxi-
eties, about race and sexuality which is almost overwhelming, not obvious but is
nevertheless present in a very horrible kind of conditionings that we have. And at
Nqutu where there were forced removals and a huge amount of land dispossession
and a lot of illnesses that were coming to the hospital were horrible. A child died more
or less every night.

The experience pushed Elaine into more radical politics and so, worried that she
would be arrested by the security police, her parents encouraged her to continue
her studies overseas at Cambridge. Once in the UK, Elaine became heavily
involved in ANC politics, working with Harold Wolpe, a major intellectual and
activist, and began to develop a personal politics that found expression in her
writings (on race, class and gender in education) and in increasing exposure to
the patriarchal politics of the exiled anti-apartheid movement.
At the Indians-only University of Durban-Westville, Shireen, who had
already been politicised at school, became involved in dangerous, underground
politics in the mid 1980s. ‘[I] got involved with the ANC underground and it
helped that I was a Muslim girl because it was under the radar. So at that point
I got involved in that sort of group of people and my main job was to be a foil
for the things that the men were doing’. In Shireen’s case Jo Beall, who sub-
sequently became a prominent urban studies scholar, was a friend, fellow activ-
ist (and member of the ANC underground) and thesis supervisor. ‘So it was not
just an intellectual influence but also a political influence. And she was my
supervisor [for] the whole of my master’s until she went into exile’. Capturing
how tight-knit this community was, Shireen comments on an early collectively-
written book chapter (Beall et al., 1987): ‘That was a very interesting group and
a very interesting involvement because half of the authors were either in jail or
having babies at the time the article was written; and the other half of us didn’t
quite agree with each other’.
Durban-based Catherine Campbell has similar memories of how her academic
work and her political convictions and activities merged. She was a Psychology
lecturer in the 1980s.

I was involved in [. . .] Rape Crisis work and whatever [including therapy work with
political detainees who had often been tortured], you didn’t really have to think any-
thing because you were part of a community of critical scholars who were anti-apart-
heid, so you didn’t have to have a philosophy, that’s just what you did. And then
remember all my friends were linked to political parties or trade unions.
Morrell 201

Intellectual exploration and political activism

The link between knowledge-making and activism was close and constantly rein-
forced through interwoven social, intellectual, political and professional networks –
what Cetina (1999) calls an epistemic culture enveloped this community of
scholars. It could be seen by whom they knew and worked with, who their political
comrades were and which books they read.
Elaine Unterhalter began her postgraduate studies in London. Her intellectual
community was South Africanists researching and writing revisionist history, soci-
ology, anthropology and politics, based mostly in South Africa and the UK. These
were publishing what became a rival political-economy orthodoxy to the ‘liberal’
narratives associated with Monica Wilson (neé Hunter) and Leonard Thompson
(1969, 1971). While there were strong debates within the new revisionism, there was
also a fault line between being a scholar and being an activist. Here Elaine began to
encounter opposition from those who argued that scholarship should be free of
political engagement. This opposition spurred Elaine to orient her scholarship even
more directly towards feminism (Unterhalter, 1991; Unterhalter et al., 1991) and
to begin to take it up both in her writing and her politics (Gaitskell et al., 1983;
Kimble and Unterhalter, 1983).
Shireen describes herself as ‘an activist scholar’. She reflects on how the ANC
had asked her to investigate the rival Inkatha’s Women’s Brigade in order to figure
out how to outflank what they saw as a conservative women’s politics that was
buttressing Zulu nationalism and standing in the way of national liberation. She
was a member of the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW).

We never could make inroads into organising those [African, Zulu-speaking] women
in the townships; Inkatha was always there, it was always a blockage. So we didn’t
quite know what to do because it was hard for us as mostly Indian activists to go in
there and organise African women, we couldn’t speak the language, we stuck out
like a sore thumb. So that’s what we were trying to grapple with when I started the
work on Inkatha. I think what it made me see was that the social networks
mattered.

This insight was a crucial moment in moving Shireen’s academic work away from
the linear Marxist connections between race, class and gender, looking more closely
at the formation of political movements and how they represented gender consti-
tuencies, and to focus on gender interests as more than a subset of race or national
agendas.
Rachel had been heavily involved in anti-apartheid activism. In 1993 she mar-
ried a South African and the following year completed her postgraduate medical
training. She then returned to South Africa and, at the beginning of 1995, headed
up the Women’s Health Division of the Centre for Epidemiological Research in
Southern Africa (CERSA) in the Medical Research Council (MRC). Prior to this
Rachel had worked in the ANC camp at Mazimbu, Tanzania, and encountered
AIDS as a heterosexual phenomenon for the first time. Some of her male colleagues
202 Feminist Theory 17(2)

went very quickly from apparent good health to death. Yet her work in the MRC
was initially focused on women. Gender was thought of as being ‘about women’.

The idea that men were part of gender was not in the frame when I began my research
in South Africa. In terms of my immediate work, when I got to South Africa we
started looking at teenage pregnancy and the factors associated with those teenage
pregnancies. [. . .] I sent Kate Wood who was a young volunteer from England off to
go and do some interviews, and when she came back with a set we had an astonishing
finding that 22 out of 24 young pregnant teenagers talked about being raped or beaten
by their partners. This was a shock. [. . .] And so that’s how we got involved in
researching gender-based violence.

Kopano’s interest in racial inequality had led him to read Fanon and Biko. But as
he progressed through university he began to think critically about their views, in
the process developing a theoretical apparatus that is now a major feature of
gender research in South Africa. He is interested in how the racial category
‘black’ maps onto the gender category ‘man’, aware that both Fanon and Biko
had an idea of ‘black man’ that in Kopano’s retrospective view was largely uncon-
scious of gender. In the quote below he reflects on how he became aware that
gender and race are matters of perception as well as being highly relational and
contextual.

The more you know somebody [. . .] [the more awareness of ‘race’] becomes unconscious
and something has to happen to bring it back. So the flip-side of this, you can see ‘men’
[generically] or only see this one part, their blackness. And at certain moments, only
sometimes, something reminds you [. . .] So that consciousness [which says], ‘When I see,
this is what I’m seeing, it’s a man’. So something has happened [. . .] why can’t [Biko and
Fanon] see what I’m seeing? And that is consciousness that literally it’s both a con-
sciousness of the self but a consciousness when I see.

The radicalisation associated with activism committed interviewees to a set of

values and a mode of critical enquiry. While the activism itself may have ended,
the research that followed continued to reflect its political drivers.

Making Southern theory

Cherryl Walker began her historical studies of women’s politics in South Africa at
a time when the major ideological and intellectual fault line was between Marxism
and Liberalism, between political economy approaches that foregrounded social
class, and individualist and idealist approaches which drew on a conventional
social science that was considered by its critics to be vested in a conservative
status quo. Cherryl identifies two challenges to South African scholarship in this
period. The one was being insular and ignoring revisionist scholarship, the other
was uncritically embracing inappropriate, Northern scholarship. She points to a
Morrell 203

trajectory of scholarship that parallels radical scholarship in India. Initially closely

aligned to anti-colonial struggles, subaltern studies emerged as a Marxist critique
of European scholarship and the colonial gaze. But this wave was followed by
postcolonial critiques which identified a dependence on modernist concepts
within subaltern studies and suggested yet another way of generating fresh new,
‘independent’ perspectives (Chakrabarty, [2000] 2008).
Cherryl reflects on a critique of her Women and Resistance in South Africa
(Walker, [1983] 1991), that it was a ‘kind of replicatory history putting women
in’. She rejects the view that her work could have been read as a simple inclusionary
project with no novel input.

I was certainly reading and thinking about [feminist issues] and I suppose to
some extent also in one’s own life – so there was that feminist understanding of the
person as political and these issues are meaningful in my own life and in my relation-
ships and I was working through them as well. But there was certainly a strong
commitment and a sense of rootedness in South Africa and the political struggles
here, and trying to understand issues around women’s rights and conceptualise as
women’s rights fitted in.

Cherryl was not just fitting South Africa into a theoretical box created by Northern
theorists. Rather, she was engaged in a dialogue that included considerations of
self, context and the very specific political issues that presented themselves in the
country.
After many years of university teaching, Shireen went to study in Toronto,
attending international conferences with Nancy Fraser, Linda Gordon and
Carole Pateman. As she describes it, her political work became ‘translational’ –
‘quite often to audiences that had a solidarity interest in South Africa but their
scholarship was about other places’. This new exposure made her ‘think much
more about your society from a slight distance [. . .]. So it helped to have people
talk about welfare states because suddenly I could see that what we were building
in South Africa was a kind of a welfare state and look at what that meant’. Over
time, Shireen extended her work beyond South Africa, working with global col-
laborators, still driving a political agenda that pointed out ongoing patriarchal
practices and suggesting how women in the South could collectively act to improve
their situation.

Departure from ‘the North’?

Elaine Unterhalter reflects on the shifts in her scholarship associated with the fall of
the Berlin Wall (1989) and the freeing of Nelson Mandela (1990):

suddenly you’re able to talk about it [citizenship] in a new language because before
that the language of that was just a Cold War language; there was a capitalist or there
was a communist version of citizenship. But suddenly in the 1990s I think those
204 Feminist Theory 17(2)

become new fields of scholarship and South Africa presents this very interesting case
of trying to re-write all those prefaces.

Elaine refers to the possibilities for new thinking simultaneously opened up by

developments in the North and the South. The fall of apartheid opened up space
for new ways of thinking that were needed to address new questions (primarily
around the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid). The left intellectual fram-
ings that had been used in the old opposition discourses were no longer so relevant
nor did they command authority. But the euphoria that accompanied the opening
up of intellectual space was soon replaced with concern. The unforeseen deaths
caused by AIDS, including ANC exiles and members in the ANC camps in
Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, seemed to dent the promise of the 1990 liber-
ation and the 1994 democratic election as much as ‘racism or the political intransi-
gence of different sectors of the society’. So Elaine confronted the limitations of
existing knowledge and turned to the work of Amartya Sen and Martha
Nussbaum, whose work was intellectually accommodating and flexible, and
widened the scope of her work to include the Indian sub-continent:

existing disciplinary knowledge has got important pieces of the furniture that you
need, whether it’s economic analysis or historical analysis or empirical skills and
empirical data collection. But it always goes into closure and that one feature of
Southern theory or the southern academics in the Northern universities is that it
doesn’t fit, it doesn’t answer our questions.

Unterhalter notes the necessity of adapting theory to a context and of the need for
conversation between theory and research questions. Her own location in an
English university, her familiarity with Southern contexts and her feminist passion
made her a particularly acute commentator on the need for critical reflection on
theory-making.
A decade later Kopano wrestled with being a black man. He muses about the
nature of local feminist research and particularly about the development of mas-
culinity work in South Africa.

So in telling the story of the development [to] the next generation about who were the
people who wrote about this . . . where did this start? And it feels, because of the
hegemony of western paradigms about who is important to read, it’s so difficult to
show people that . . . the development of these moments in South Africa is as import-
ant to us as (in fact sometimes much more) than other developments about why
people campaign.

The struggle against apartheid was important in shaping South African research
agendas, creating links with activists and fuelling the search for social justice. But
there were limitations too. South African feminists were, by and large, white and
focused on local issues. This meant that they were not easily able to develop an
Morrell 205

agenda that included issues of ‘race’, to give attention to issues of indigenous

knowledge or, initially, to include in their ranks black African scholars. In fact,
feminism was often regarded with suspicion and even hostility by black South
Africans who thought it a Western-import, remote from ‘the people’ (Qunta,
1987; Letlaka-Rennert, 1991). Others argued that there wasn’t a single South
African feminism but rather racially divided feminisms (Lewis, 1993). The opening
up of South Africa to global influences after the ending of apartheid made it easier
to widen the lens and to be receptive to new theories.

Discussion
Growing up in South Africa, experiencing and resisting its tyrannies, provided a
rich context for six scholars to develop a particular approach to gender. Whilst
links between experience, political activism and intellectual choice were not uni-
form, each theoretical outcome reflected experiential and political engagement.
The involvement of feminist researchers in South African research shifted the
debate. Before the mid 1970s, questions about society had been framed as being
about race and class. Gender was largely absent from the equation. The scholars of
the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s theorised the gender order of South Africa, reconstitut-
ing understanding and offering the world new ideas of how gender operated in
contexts of political struggle, gross inequality and cultural and historical diversity,
all against the backdrop of a particular route from imperialism, colonialism to
post-colonialism.
In some respects this work was a continuation of earlier traditions that chal-
lenged academic conventions and social and political inequalities. On the other
hand, South Africa’s feminists were much more integrated into activist politics
and community-based anti-apartheid work. Their work was self-consciously dir-
ected to non-academic audiences while at the same time drawing on and critiquing
existing gender theory.
South African feminist research is heterogeneous. Generational, racial and loca-
tional differences are evident in the preference for theories, involvement in particu-
lar kinds of politics and the choice of research area. But does the collective work of
South African feminists qualify as Southern theory? At the outset I noted that the
definition of Southern theory is not settled. One objection to the inclusion of the
South African feminists might be their use of concepts such as race, class and
gender that are constituted through Northern contexts and theory. Another
might be that Northern theorists are central to the work. Certainly, feminists
were more inclined to borrow from progressive and anti-colonial theories emanat-
ing from the North than from those home-grown in Africa.
Richard Rottenburg’s concept of the metacode allows a response to these cri-
tiques as well as a reconciliation. In his account of development negotiations in the
mythical African country of Ruritania, Rottenburg shows how different perspec-
tives are expressed (by a development bank representative, a consultant and an
organisational anthropologist) and how they miss one another, each expressing a
206 Feminist Theory 17(2)

specific approach that fails to grasp that of the other party. He argues that a
metacode is necessary for these three actors to understand one another and to
make meaning between them. The metacode arises out of processes of translation,
‘when an idea or a thing is carried over from one idiom to another, from one
culture to another’. The processes of translation generate a form ‘that did not
previously exist’ (Rottenburg, 2009: xxxi). ‘Every act of translation is inevitably
also an act of performative omission and addition’ (Rottenburg, 2009: xxxi). The
metacode thus provides the rules that allow scholars to talk to one another.
Operationalising the metacode requires reflexivity and an agreement about the
rules of the technical game (Rottenburg, 2009: 177). In heterogenous circum-
stances, an epistemic link (Rottenburg, 2009: 192) is required to hold different
frames together and to permit a broad agreement about what has been discovered
or is valid. In my case, this link could be global feminist knowledge that unites
competing knowledges, dedicated to emancipation and democratic participation
under an umbrella fashioned by Northern scholars.
South African feminists have a distinctive position that reflects South African
circumstances and perspectives. Using Rottenburg’s concept we could theorise this
as an in-between position, between North and South; one that draws on Northern
intellectual lineages whilst adding its own signature. Connell’s purpose in Southern
Theory was ‘to propose a new path for social theory that will help social science to
serve democratic purposes on a world scale’ (2007: vii). South Africa’s feminists
have, unarguably, been helping to make that road.

Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the Gender and Education Symposium, Comparative and
International Education Society Conference, Toronto, USA, 11 March 2014 and I thank
Halla Bjørk Holmarsdottir for the invitation. I acknowledge the financial support of the
Australian Research Council (DP130103487) and the Global Arenas Project (PI Raewyn
Connell and Fran Collyer) as the inspiration for the primary material which I use in this
article. I would also like to acknowledge the intellectual input of Raewyn Connell and my
colleagues in the Global Arenas Project and the generous collaboration of my interviewees.
Gratitude to my friends for their helpful suggestions: Karen Barnes, Ralph Borland,
Mignonne Breier, Brenda Cooper, Debbie Epstein, Rebecca Hodes, David Johnson,
Sophie Oldfield and Vanessa Watson. Finally, I received unusually constructive and patient
support from reviewers and the Special Issue editors and I record here my grateful thanks.

Funding
The author received financial support from the National Research Foundation.

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Morrell 209

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