>> Edward Miner: On behalf of the library's African and Middle Eastern Division, I wish to welcome you to today's program, presented in recognition of Women's History Month and in honor of South African Human Rights Day. I am Dr. Edward Miner, head of the African Section. For more than 60 years, the African section has served as the focal point for Africa-based research collections and services at the library. Within the division, it is one of three sections, including the Hebraic and Near East, that provide access to collections of unmatched depth and breadth, documenting the literatures, cultures and histories of regions extending from the southern tip of Africa to the Mediterranean coast across the Middle East to Central Asia and down to the Indian Ocean Islands. The library holds rich collections in major African languages such as Hausa, Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, Kiswahili, Malagasy and Zulu, as well as hundreds of lesser known languages. Today's program, Writing African Women Back into History presents Professor Joel Cabrita of Stanford University, in conversation with Dr. Athambile Masola of the University of Cape Town. In her latest book, Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala, Professor Cabrita traces the life trajectory of Regina Twala, a South African writer, anthropologist, social worker and political activist who, after her arrest in 1952 for anti-apartheid activities, went into exile in neighbouring Eswatini. There she became involved in the Pan-African and independence movements and in 1960 helped establish the Swaziland Progressive Party. A prolific newspaper columnist, Twala wrote scathing critiques of Swati King Sobhuza's autocratic policies, as well as their patriarchs who stunted women's ambitions and silenced their voices. As an anthropologist, she conducted extensive research on Swati women negotiating social change, but the work remained unpublished. Professor Cabrita explores the political and institutional circumstances that thwarted Twala's work from taking its rightful place in the intellectual history of Southern Africa. Let me now introduce our panelists. Joel Cabrita is Susan Ford Director of the Center for African Studies and an Associate Professor of African History at Stanford University. Her work focuses on religion, gender and the politics of knowledge production in Africa and globally. Professor Cabrita's other books include Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and, the People's Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, published by Harvard University Press in 2018. Dr. Athambile Masola is a writer, historian and poet. She teaches in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on black women's historiography with a particular interest in life writing. In 2021, Dr. Masola published her debut collection of poetry as Ilifa, which was co-recipient of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award in 2022. She is the co-author of the children's book series, Imbokodo: Women Who Shape Us, which is a collection of 30 biographies about South African women who have shaped South Africa's history. Dr. Masola is also co-host and creator of the podcast, Umoya: On African Spirituality, in partnership with Kaya FM Radio. And now I turn it over to our presenter, Professor Joel Cabrita. >> Joel Cabrita: Thank you so much, Dr. Miner for the kind introduction. And thank you most of all to Dr. Masola for being in conversation with me throughout this next chunk of time. I'm honoured and privileged to be speaking with you about my book, and thank you also to all of the colleagues at the Library of Congress who have worked to make this an event. We really appreciate it. So I'd like to begin my time today by just reading a very brief two-minute extract from the book, and then Athambile and I will enter into more of a dialogue. So the bit that I've chosen to read describes the way in which Regina Twala in the 1950s became a research assistant for a Swedish historian called Bengt Sundkler Sundkler was based in Sweden, Twala was based in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, and she would send Sundkler research materials and research notes over a two-year period. But I also show in the extract how Sundkler barely referenced or acknowledged the work that Twala did in sending him this material. So I'm going to start reading now. Twala is referred to as Gelana. So as Dr. Miner said, her full name was Regina Gelena Twala. In the 1950s, she discarded her English name, Regina, in favour of her Isizulu name, Gelena. A line-by-line reading of Sundkler 's 40-page chapter in his book, Zulu Zion and some Swazi Zionists, reveals a shocking and entirely unattributed reliance upon Gelana's material. Sundkler constructed his historical narrative of the growth of Zionism, an indigenous form of Christianity in Eswatini by relying on factual data that Gelana had supplied to him, yet entirely without acknowledgement. Sundkler's presentation of rich primary materials, songs, sermons and interviews implied that these were the fruit of his own personal efforts. He presented Gelana's rich ethnographic observations from his own perspective, audaciously using the first person as if it was he who had attended these services rather than Gelana. Most of all, though, Sundkler repeatedly appropriated Gelana's reports nearly word by word, passing her prose off as his own. Compare Gelana's research report for Sundkler written in 1955 with Sundkler's published Book of Zulu Zion, which appeared nearly 20 years later in 1976. So this is Gelena sent to Sundkler in 1958. A bell was rung, and that was a signal for all to find their staves and set out for Lobamba. And when the women began singing, the congregation began marching in circles. The women with flags, omagosa always led the way. This parade before the church house was called "kuhlehla", same term as used for warriors when they dance or give a display before royalty. Now, Sundkler's version published 20 odd years later in 1976, in his book goes like this. A bell was rung. The signal for all to find their holy sticks and to set out for Lobamba. The lady wardens omagosa bore flags and led the way. The women with sticks while marching would walk in circles in kuhlehla. This was the term used for warriors when giving a dancing display before royalty. Gelana would die in 1968, nearly ten years before Sundkler published his book. I have found no correspondence giving any indication of her feelings about Sundkler's plagiarism of her work, or indeed that she even knew that this was already in the works. It seems painfully ironic that anthropology, Gelana's chosen medium for articulating African autonomy became another venue where unequal power structures continued to silence her. And another irony. While Gelana struggled and ultimately failed to publish her own book on Swati women, her research for Sundkler did appear in published form, but her published work was not attributed to Gelana Twala's rightful author. Instead, it was subsumed into a book that established Bengt Sundkler rather than Gelana as a widely acclaimed expert on religion in Africa. Gelana's experiences seem sadly in keeping with a lifelong pattern of exploitation at the hands of white academics. But this is not solely a story of defeat. Gelana also put the research she completed for Sundkler to work in other channels. She kept copies of everything she posted to him in Uppsala, Sweden. This material she recycled into fodder for her weekly column in the country's national newspaper, The Times of Swaziland. Although her voice was nearly extinguished through the published work of white anthropologists, throughout the 1960s, Gelana still found other ways to make herself heard. >> Athambile Masola: Great. Thank you, Joel. I think that's the perfect place for us to start our conversation. Because you start with this extract on Sundkler and his erasure and the writing out, which is the title of your book of Galena. But that's not — that's not the only person who does that. And maybe we can start there. I'm thinking about your position as well as now a white academic writing her life story all these years later. >> Joel Cabrita: Thanks Athambile. And yeah, I think especially in light of what I've read out, that seems a very appropriate way to begin the conversation. And you know, as you alluded to, Sundkler is not the only white academic who Twala had such a negative encounter with. My book also talks about the South African anthropologist Hilda Kuper, who was Twala's teacher and mentor throughout the '40s and '50s, both when she was a student at Wits studying anthropology and then later when she was doing research in Eswatini. And unfortunately, initially friendly relationships soon soured as Kuper became increasingly territorial about [inaudible] area, increasingly critical of Gelana Twala's radical politics. And after Twala's death in 1968, Kuper blocked Gelina's final manuscript from ever being published. Um, so, you know, looking at Twala's, you know, very painful history of interactions with white academics, it's hard for me not to reflect on my own role in this — my own positionality, that here I am yet another white academic, um, kind of managing Twala's legacy. And even though it's hopefully in a more positive sense that I'm opening up her name, bringing her to attention, I think there's still a very kind of uncomfortable dynamic of kind of power that want to be attentive to but am still kind of gatekeeping. It's me who's managing her name as a biographer. You know, you make choices both explicitly and implicitly about what parts of your subject you want to bring to life. So, you know, I think for me, I've always felt that the ultimate goal of this exercise is not merely for me to tell Gelana's story, but for her to finally tell her story for herself in her own words to the world. And as I show throughout the book, she has told her story. She's written hundreds of pages, thousands of words in multiple genres and formats, newspapers, books and so on. Her work just needs to find a publisher. So I think that really is for me where this has to end up for it to truly be a triumph that, you know, Gelana's voice has to has to find an audience in its own right. >> Athambile Masola: Yeah. But of course, we know that the story of the kind of intermediaries of the white academics is not the only story of her life. She lives this storied and very interesting life. And maybe you could just give us a sense of how you actually come to her. I mean, I know how I come to her. I was looking for articles in the Bantu world, and there's that beautiful picture of her posed with a white hat, R. D. Mazibuko at the time, which you go into her early life. But how did you come to find the story of Regina Twala? >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah, and Bantu World was, of course, the Johannesburg based newspaper that published starting in the 1940s, a very lively women's page, women's section that profiled a lot of early female writers, one of whom was Twala or Regina Mazibuko as she was then known with her maiden name. You know, I think the story of how I found Twala was just sort of a serendipitous narrative of chance encounter after chance encounter. Um, you know, actually the story does go back to Bengt Sundkler. Because in relation to a book that I was writing on Zionism or Christianity in Southern Africa, I decided to look through Bengt Sundkler's archives in Uppsala University in Sweden, where he'd been based for most of his career, because I knew that he'd done this really pioneering work on Zionism from the '40s onwards. So I suspected, rightly, that I would find a lot of very rich kind of material and field notes. So I started looking through his archives and as I was doing so, I came upon what I thought was this really extraordinary stash of material that had been sent to him by a research assistant in Eswatini, they didn't sign themselves up with their full name, they just labeled themselves are R. Twala. So no indication if this was a woman, nothing else about them. But the material that R. Twala whoever they were submitted to sundkler was so rich, so extensive, so astute, so anthropologically informed that I immediately realized this was a very kind of exceptional, accomplished intellectual who we were dealing with, and I just simply never heard of them. So I at that point was living in Eswatini. So I started kind of doing a bit of snooping, asking people, you know, have you ever heard of someone called R. Twala? They were alive in the '50s. They were probably trained as an anthropologist, and I just kept coming up against all of these blank faces, closed doors, like really no one had ever heard of her. And I make this point in the book that Eswatini is a very small country. It's not an easy place to remain anonymous. So the fact that no one had heard of her struck me in itself as very curious. Eventually, I had a bit of a break where I spoke to someone who had grown up and lived in Twala's hometown of Kolusani, outside the country's second city of Manzini. And I described the woman or the person, and she immediately said, "Oh, I think you must be talking about Regina Twala." And that was kind of the key that unlocked everything. And then once I had her full name, I could begin searching for her. Discovered that she had been politically active in Eswatini. She had run as a candidate in the legislative elections of 1964. And then that led me to, I think, probably what was the biggest kind of discovery or happy event of this whole story, which was I discovered that Twala had left behind this absolutely amazing 30-year long correspondence with her second husband, Dan Twala that was unknown. It had been kept in the private home of the Johannesburg academic, Tim Couzens, who passed away a few years ago. But Tim Couzens had collected this material in the '70s when he had been doing a series of interviews with Twala's then husband, Dan Twala. And Dan had handed over to Couzens nearly a thousand letters that had been exchanged between himself and Regina during their lifetime from the 1930s all the way to Regina's death in '68. Um, and after Tim Couzens had passed away, his widow had his papers and documents in their home and was kind of unsure what to do with them. And I was kindly invited by her to see the papers, started reading them and just realized, wow, this is a treasure trove. I can't think of anything like this in African history, this kind of love letter correspondence of this length and depth and richness. And that was then that I realized, you know, this is someone who needs a biography in her own right. She's truly remarkable. >> Athambile Masola: We're going to come back to the love letters because they're absolutely fascinating. Um, but I want to stick with this question of one of the things I've found striking with Regina's life and many other women, especially from that generation, is how they trouble this question of erasure and marginality. Because what I've been struck by is that it's possible to disappear as a woman who was so prolific. Is that it's possible to be ignored and to be erased. And it's not even a passive process, you show how people actively do it, how systems actually enable that. And I wonder if you could just speak more about your understanding now about how erasure works. I mean, again, it's implied in your title, but the whole entire story is like the systems that Regina was up against that enable erasure. So it's not the sense that these women don't exist. It's in fact that they probably exist too much, and then people actively do something to make them disappear. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah, I think you put that so beautifully. It's not that they don't exist, it's that they exist too much, that they're too vocal, that they too kind of problematic. That they're too troubling. They're too subversive. And then they have to sort of be dealt with. They have to be managed. They have to be written out. I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, you're also kind of very perceptive to point out that the title and the whole sort of thrust of the book is to say that erasure and being forgotten is not a passive process. It's not something that happens coincidentally. It's not something that we can attribute just to the natural progression of time. It's a very active, deliberate process and it requires work, it requires labor to erase people. So one of the questions that I wanted to ask with this book is, you know, what was that work? Who was doing the labor? Who were the active agents and kind of conspirators who were involved in this process of writing out this woman who, in her lifetime was actually very well known, very prolific, very significant at the center of a lot of really important developments. Yet, you know, just a few years after her death, no one has ever heard of her. So I have already discussed the way in which I think white academics were culpable, that the sort of intellectual literary establishment either relegated her to the role of an assistant and plagiarized her work at the same time, therefore not denying her the status of — denying her the status of an academic in her own right. But unfortunately, there were many other figures who were involved with this. So one of the earlier moments in her life is that Twala was trained as a teacher as many middle class black women in South Africa were in the '20s and '30s. And as an educated, professional woman, she began writing for newspapers. Again, she was far from unique as you've shown in your own work. Also in your recent collection of columns by the South African writer Noni Jabavu, which you've just published with Makhosazana Xaba. Um, there were black women who were writing for the press from a very early date. It's not that they weren't there, it's just that we don't know about them. So she began writing as a journalist for the South African newspaper Bantu World, also owned to [inaudible] . She soon established herself as one of the most popular correspondents in the press, had a particularly keen following from women. She had a very subversive, sarcastic take on men, on romance, on love affairs, on marriage. She spoke out very strongly in favor of women continuing to work after they were married, which was quite controversial for the day. And she really found her vocation as a writer and she won a couple of essay prizes. And that's another interesting thing, the ways in which many of these newspapers of the '20s, '30s and '40s ran these regular writing competitions in the form of essay prizes. And I think those are a really interesting way that the print kind of culture work to generate prompt and encourage creative activity by offering this cash incentive for writing. And so soon Twala decided that she wanted to write her first book. So unfortunately, no complete manuscript survives of this book. We know that it was finished in 1940 and it was a novel. It was a fictional account of a Zulu man who travels from the rural areas to the big city of Johannesburg to find work. And while he's there, you know, it's a kind of urban morality tale, he gets sort of sucked into the vice and corruption of the city and eventually dies. And, you know, this is not a kind of unique tale for the time. A number of other writers of the period are also kind of using similar devices. You can think of Ralph Dhlomo's book, African Tragedy. Um, anyway, in 1942, Twala finished her book and she began sending it out to potential publishers, asking who was interested. As you know, publishing options for black writers of the day were extremely limited. They were more or less consigned to the missionary presses of the period or to educational publishers who would produce school readers for Zulu children. So she did manage to interest the Education Department in the possibility of the book as a school reader for elementary or primary school children. But she was advised by the government that she had to seek the approval of this organization called the Zulu Society, which was this association of kind of Zulu luminaries, intellectuals, writers, teachers. And the Education Department said they would only publish her book if she got a sort of nod from the society, a sort of thumbs up that this was authorized by them. So she approached someone involved in the society called [inaudible], who was a peer of hers from Adams College, and who went on to be a very well respected economist and figure in the KwaZulu homeland Department in the '70s. And [inaudible] told her that, yes, they would be willing to sanction her book to write a foreword, but only if she slept with him, if she had an affair with him. So Twala was furious. And, you know, this was a pattern of already experiencing kind of sexually predatory behavior from male peers and colleagues. She refused. And as far as I can tell, the trail goes dead. There there's no other record of her book or that I can find is a fragment, a paragraph of it that she excerpted in a letter to her husband, Dan Twala. But other than that, the book has disappeared. So sort of jealous male writers of the period and, you know, don't need to tell you this. We know a lot about male South African writers of the 1940s. There's been so much research done into them and it can give you the impression that this was a completely male world, that there were no female writers. But looking through Twala's correspondence in her own archives shows me that there were female writers, but they were just being intentionally shut out and excluded from this kind of clique by these literary titans, these kind of literary men who kind of grabbed all the fame and all the glory. But women like Twala were there. And I'm sure Twala is not the only one whom we could tell a similar story about. I'm sure there are others whose names, for now at least, are still lost to us. >> Athambile Masola: Yeah, I mean those interactions with the men are so telling and I think it brings up that question of like this triple oppression that women used to talk about, that you're dealing with the men, you're dealing with apartheid South Africa, you're dealing with white men, you're dealing with white women, and how all those systems or people or groupings of people have implications for how people progress or how people's life work unfolds. I want to stick with this kind of community that she was part of. And one of the things I love that you do in the book is to place her in conversation or in relation to other women. And so while she's writing, as we've already spoken, there were a lot of women not only being written about, but also writing. You mentioned [inaudible] at the time, um, and a few others, people like Frieda Matthews were writing open letters and it was both [inaudible] as well as Ilanga, as well as the Bantu World. So it wasn't just this newspaper as well, each newspaper was doing something quite different about how to place women. It wasn't always perfect, but it was quite complicated. But then later when she becomes a social worker and even in [inaudible] but also when she's at Wits, meeting people like Ruth First. If you could just expand particularly on the woman, because sometimes you don't put them in conversation or in relation to other women. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah. So as you've just mentioned, in the 1940s, Twala actually retrained from a teacher as a social worker. She was one of the first women — in fact, she was the part of the pioneering cohort of the Young Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg, which was the first institution for training black social workers in the country. A few years later, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela would herself go to the school, and then, after graduating from the Hofmeyr School with a diploma in social work, Twala was accepted to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to do a BA degree in the Social Sciences Department. And at this point, Twala was one of the very few black students in the university, but crucially, one of the very few black women. And when Twala finally graduated in 1948 and her graduation was slowed down for one year because she had her child during that period, which is a story unto itself because she and Dan really struggled for many years with that to conceive. And the story of kind of this very difficult pregnancy fertility journey, I think in itself is insight into what it meant to be a black woman in 1940s South Africa and what your health care options were when it came to your fertility. Anyway, by the time she graduated in 1948, she was only the second black woman to ever gain a degree. Um, and yeah, I think you're absolutely right that in all these different spheres of her life, in her career as a journalist writing for these Johannesburg newspapers, in her career as a social worker, in her career as a university student at Wits, there were really these key women whom she brushed up against, came into contact with and experienced, you know, mentoring from. So, you know, the fact that her relationship with a white female academic, Hilda Kuper was so negative, I think shouldn't tempt us to think that all of her interactions with women were similarly negative. While she was at Adams College throughout the '20s undergoing her teacher training, women like [inaudible] who you are interested in writing about who was a teacher at Adams, Frieda Matthews who was another very prominent educator. She writes about these women in her letters as women who inspired her, women who mentored her, women who encouraged her, women who gave her hope, who gave her a sense that the vocation of a woman in South Africa was not just to be a wife and a mother, although it was also that. I mean, Twala was not a radical in the sense that she didn't want to do away with marriage and motherhood, but she wanted both. She wanted to have her cake and eat it. She wanted to be a domestic woman and she wanted to be a professional woman. And why not? Like, why should it be either or? Um, and so I think for her, these women were kind of inspirational role models. And then during the '40s, one of her friends at the university was Ruth First, who was that at that point a student at the university who was already getting involved in kind of quite radical student politics, who had gone to be a really key figure in the ANC and who would be assassinated in 1986 by the apartheid government while she was in Maputo. But Twala's correspondence about her university years and meeting Ruth First, I find very kind of intriguing because Twala was placed with white students. She'd hoped to be with the African medical students. At that point, it was black students doing medical degrees who made up the kind of largest number of black students at Wits. And she'd hoped to be placed with the black students for the sort of science bit of her degree. But scheduling difficulties made that impossible. So as she told Dan, her husband in a letter, she was placed with the white students instead, and she hated it. She said that they stared at her. They made her feel uncomfortable. They made her feel out of place. She was this kind of curiosity. But there was one exception to this. She spoke about a student called Ruth First who was white, who she got along very well with, who she became friends with, who she attended political meetings with, and just had this kind of much more positive interaction with, which I think is interesting because Twala in later life certainly would become so disillusioned with white South Africans and with white liberals. Um, you know, her experience of white liberals in South Africa is that they were terrible hypocrites. You know, that they spoke about progressiveness, they spoke about equality, but in fact, they in their own way, were kind of just as racist as the more obviously racist white Afrikaners. So I find it very interesting that she did seem to have at least one positive interaction with someone who was white and kind of claimed more progressive credentials for themselves. How she would have gotten on with Ruth First in later life, I don't know. But certainly for this kind of brief moment, both being university students, it was a very, very positive friendship which her husband, Dan Twala, hated. He said in an interview in later life with Tim Couzens, universities when she fell in with those radicals and began to be corrupted by people like Ruth first. >> Athambile Masola: Sure. Let's talk about the husband, the second one at least. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah. >> Athambile Masola: And of course, just the consequences of having a second husband, and we can maybe talk a bit about that. And what it meant in that context is that she leaves her first husband and then marries Dan Twala. But the role that Dan Twala also plays in her career, but how that also changes over time. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah. And I think sadly, you know, when you ask about these kind of active agents of erasure, I think Dan Twala plays a very sort of paradoxical role here that throughout her relationship with him, I think he was certainly an encourager, a mentor, at times he could be her biggest cheerleader. But also over time, as her vision grew more and more radical and as her political career kind of really took off and as she traveled and she was away from the home more and more, his acceptance of his wife falsehood, that he was happy with the career wife up to a point. But then, you know, he didn't like it. He wanted someone who would be at home or with a child. Um, and as you mentioned, Dan Twala was Regina's second husband. She was she had a first very brief marriage to a man called Percy Khumalo, whom she divorced in the late 1930s. And again, the story of her first marriage and divorce, you know, as with the story of her fertility journey, is just a really fascinating glimpse into the kind of nuts and bolts of what it meant to be a black woman in 1930s South Africa, and just how difficult it was to free yourself from a marriage that you were unhappy in and that she wanted to leave her husband because he was chronically unfaithful to her, she had evidence, she had proof. But the legal system was so difficult to navigate for women and it was so expensive to engage the services of a lawyer and go through the whole divorce process that, you know, in effect, only the most elite women could manage to free themselves from unhappy marriages. And she did manage. And she then very quickly married her second husband, Dan, who was, you know, I think in 1940s, Johannesburg, who was easily the more famous of the couple. He was the manager of a very well known kind of sporting and leisure institution called the Bantu Sports Club, which was linked to the Bantu Men's Social Centre, which was kind of a leisure hub or centre for black people in Johannesburg. It had tennis courts, it had soccer pitches, football pitches, and it was really where you would find yourself on the weekend if you were anyone kind of worth knowing. And Twala was was the manager of this sports club. He was handsome, he was charming, he was gregarious. People just really liked him. And I kind of contrast this to Regina Twala, who I think was a much more kind of introverted, shy, possibly quite difficult person. But she had this, like, sunny, outspoken, gregarious husband who everyone loved. And she was sort of, you know, quieter, more introverted, more thoughtful. And, you know, initially the marriage was bliss, and this really comes across in their letters. This was a couple just totally in love with each other. And the letters are also very frank about how, you know, there was a very physical, I mean, quite frankly, sexual component to the relationship. And again, you don't really expect to find that in correspondence in the 1930s and '40s. You know, they couldn't keep their hands off each other, which is amazing to read about. And initially, I think Dan was sort of the view that a successful professional wife would kind of reflect well on him. And there were other couples in Johannesburg of the day. I give the example of a couple who were both social workers that, you know, there was sort of a model to be aimed for, that he and his wife could both be professional, could both be involved in the "Uplift" of their people. So initially, he was very, very supportive, helped her find a publisher and so on. But then, as I alluded to earlier, as her political career began gaining ground, she became involved in the ANC in particular in the late 1940s, early 1950s. Her role in the Defiance campaign in 1952, which led to her arrest. Dan Twala really wanted to have none of that. And his position, of course, is that he was an employee of the Johannesburg municipality as manager of the sports club, and he was very nervousof anything that would endanger his position over his family. So he saw Twala's political activities as kind of recklessness and dangerous and really counselled her against it. And I think that's when you see their marriage beginning to kind of fall apart. He entered into a relationship with another woman that was obviously incredibly painful for Twala. And I think one way to read her exile to Eswatini is not just something that happened for political reasons, but I think was in effect, a way to separate from from Dan without divorcing and to live separately the rest of their lives. >> Athambile Masola: The two words I wanted to pick up on. I love the fact that she was difficult. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah, right. >> Athambile Masola: And it's time that we actually write about difficult women and women who don't fit into that model and who are vocal about not wanting to fit into that model. So it's really, really important and I think it's going to help as we grow into this work a bit more. And maybe right at the end we can talk about the biographies and the kind of wave of biographies that we're in at the moment. But to really think about what does it mean to only write about the firsts, the pioneers, the respectable women. And I think the second kind of link to that we could spend some time talking about is this notion of being a difficult woman in the context of this precarious, elite, black, respectable world that she finds herself in, in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. And what how this book perhaps has helped you crystallize what do we mean when we say black elite in that context, considering the political context, considering questions of class, considering how those that social capital that they have doesn't necessarily always filter into the next generation and apartheid's kind of the 1948 moment has a lot to do with it. So how has that part of her life helped you kind of think more about this worrying notion or this strange kind of word that we take for granted of elitism and black — >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Athimbile. Those are really interesting points to think about. But, you know, first I just want to reaffirm what you said about the value of difficult women. And I think that's as true for us in 2023 as it was in the 1950s that, you know, I think there's a huge social pressure on women to be pleasant, to be compliant. And Twala was was none of those things. There's one snippet of a letter I have to her husband where she was recently divorced, she wasn't yet married to him. So he wasn't he wasn't her husband then. She was moving back to Johannesburg and she was trying to find lodging and she wrote him a letter where she said, I worry who will want to take me on? You know, I'm stubborn, I'm private, I just want to hole up in my room with my books and I want to read and I want to write. I don't want to spend time in the communal areas of the house chatting with people. I just want to write. And I just love that. You know, she's not interested in being pleasant or being sociable, she just wants to focus on her writing. Um, yeah. I think as you've kind of, I think pointed out, categories like elite and respectable are really complicated categories when you think about it in relation to black South African life during apartheid. Because as you say, they were so fragile, they were so slippery that downward social mobility was such a perpetual risk for people of Twala's class, you know. That she was kind of the cream of the cream, that she had this fantastic education, that she had a university degree, that she was a writer. You know, she really was part of this kind of black Christian aristocracy, really, of of South Africa. But for a period for half a year, she worked as a domestic servant in a white household in Johannesburg. This was after her first divorce because she couldn't get employment at a school, because the stigma of being a divorced woman was so great. She knew what it was like not to have enough food. She knew what it was like to be so short of money that she didn't know how she was going to make her bills — kind of pay her bills for month to month. So I think what you see with supposedly elite women like Twala is this incredible precarity between enormous privilege in relation to the bulk of the kind of compatriots, but also enormous vulnerability that the privilege, the material basis, the material foundation of the privilege is so slight. And I think it's built more upon education than it is upon any form of financial monetary wealth, that it's it's very vulnerable. It's very liable to being eroded at a moment's notice. And I really love how how you kind of say that it doesn't get passed down generationally. You know, you can have a grandmother who's, you know, one of the kind of most well-regarded women of her period, one of the most highly educated women of her period, and then you go down two generations and it can be very, very difficult for the family. And I think this is definitely what what, you know, we see in the case of of Twala's family. Um, so I think categories or words like elite have to be really contextualized to the realities of what South Africa was like, particularly during apartheid. An elite does not mean the same thing in 1940 South Africa as it does in 2020's USA, for example, or South Africa. So to be very, very attentive to the resonances, the historical resonances of what exactly was the life experience of an elite woman in this very difficult period in history? >> Athambile Masola: So I wasn't ready for that section where she becomes a domestic worker and what it means. And at that time, I think she's not even married to Dan yet or they've just married. So even their marriage is not doing the thing that they had hoped it was going to do, and it's a shame, in fact. Um, and it also reminded me, I mean, there's so many women who actually have that story. There was an extract-- and I still need to trace somehow-- of people like me [inaudible], who would have been a similar generation of Twala think who had worked with Monica Wilson, well-known anthropologist who ends up who are the teacher who had studied and gone to India for like a World Council of Churches, but ends up being like selling fruit and vegetables by the end of her life, you know, so that in one lifetime you can experience what is considered like upward mobility and then something can turn a corner, opportunities can come in. And think, for a lot of people, the closure of missionary schools really affected a lot of people. And then you can end up quite literally poor in one lifetime and think that's part of the erasure in a sense. The social class is sometimes what contributes to that erasure. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah, that's really interesting. The highs and the lows can be so dramatic because I think that is not that bedrock of kind of financial stability underneath it. And you know, for Twala, her own mother was a domestic worker in Durban, in a white home in Durban. So Twala grew up knowing intimately what it was like, this kind of very physically demanding, even punishing life of service in housework. Um, and, you know, her sense of shame and kind of coming to that herself despite all her education, despite her class, I think really stands out for me. And you know this was not a kind of pejorative mocking that she was doing of the profession of a domestic worker. As I said, her mother was a domestic worker, but just this very, like profound realization of kind of what that status meant in South Africa and how kind of quickly and how far she could fall from the heights that she found herself just kind of two years ago. Um, and yeah, as you say, it's not a unique story. >> Athambile Masola: You'll have to wrap up, and we could talk on and on and on. And I'm sure there'll be many threads that we can pick up on. And maybe just to end off the genre of biography and what it means in this moment, if you could say a bit more. I mean, South Africa kind of has these ebbs and flows with life writing, black women's life writing, but also in the US context, you're based in the US and what it means in that context. If we could just end off on some thoughts on that. >> Joel Cabrita: Yeah. I mean, I was reflecting on the fact that my biography of Twala is actually just one of many that are coming out right now of women of a similar period in South Africa of a similar age, of a similar generation. I'm thinking, of course, the work you've done on Noni Jabavu, I'm thinking of a scholar like Barbara Boswell of her work and Miriam Tlali and other writers, just feels like there's a huge kind of energy and interest at the moment not discovering because those things have always been there. They've kind of been hiding in plain sight. But giving them the attention that they've always deserved and kind of doing the hard work of looking in places that aren't entirely obvious for these really, really pivotal female intellectuals of 20th century South Africa. So I think it's a very hopeful moment. I think it's time that these women are being given their due. And I'm just delighted to, you know, in some small way be a part of that, and privileged to be able to tell Twala's story. >> Athambile Masola: Yeah. Well, thank you for doing it. And thank you to the Library of Congress for this wonderful time and this conversation. Edward? >> Edward Miner: The Library of Congress is very honored to have hosted Professor Joel Cabrita and Dr. Athambile Masola in this robust, immersive conversation today about important stories that emerge from the archive. We have myriad resources at the library for the study, the in-depth study of South African history. A few to highlight are the deep collections of historical African newspapers, including South African historical newspapers in our Newspaper and Current Periodicals Division. In the African section of AMED, we have a vast collection of election ephemera, political pamphlets and manifestos, and we're very rich in these primary sources for the entire apartheid and anti-apartheid period. We have rich collections of historical photographs and images in our Prints and Photographs Division, as well as in the African Section of AMED. Thank you again to the panelists for this highly engaging dialogue.