Mandela University's Centre for Women and Gender Studies shares more:
The image is an entry-point: a doorway and portal. The sepia-tones of the photograph mark the first mode of transportation, in which projection, background and bodies connect in layered meaning-making. Generations echo through an embodied collage, as three figures time travel to gaze at us, head on.
Nomusa Makhubu’s artwork ‘Umasifanisane II (Comparison II)’, from her Self-Portrait series (2007-2013), is the meaning-filled cover of Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women’s Intellectual Legacies.
Speaking to Contemporary And about her work, Makhubu notes that she uses “performative photography to revise the ways in which post-memory is not only inherited memory without primary experience, but can rupture and interrogate predominantly masculine historical narratives.”
This image, as an intentional choice, marks the project of Inyathi and its critical epistemic work. As Dartmouth’s Hood Museum notes “In Self-Portrait, Nomusa Makhubu (born 1984) presents a haunting vision of South Africa’s past by embedding her portrait on several colonial-type photograph … Makhubu’s projected body is a transparent vehicle through which carefully selected archival images seep into the present while she recedes into history, creating a jarring sense of time-travel in which the viewer is offered a glimpse into the conventions of colonial representation that produced black subjectivities in specific ways.”
The image brings the central concept of Inyathi into the foreground, as the idea of historical lineage and black women’s subjectivities is made visible. “We think of the women featured in this book as forming a lineage, a tradition of black women’s survival wisdom across the 19th and 21st century”, the editors write in the first chapter.
Five years after the online colloquium that marked the project’s genesis, the Centre for Women and Gender Studies and the NRF-DSI SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination will host the launch of Inyathi on 28 February at the North Campus Conference Centre from 1pm to 2:30pm.
Published by Mandela University Press, Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women’s Intellectual Legacies brings together scholars and intellectuals across institutions and disciplines.
The book is edited by the Director of the Centre Babalwa Magoqwana, alongside Siphokazi Magadla and Athambile Masola of Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town, respectively.
At the heart of Inyathi is the concept of ‘ukufukama’, an expansive idea that considers multiple ways of incubating, transferring and sharing intergenerational knowledge – and that demonstrates this through the book itself, too. As its epistemic foundation, the title is drawn from the isiXhosa proverb that “means wisdom is learnt/sought from the elders”, the editors write.
Inyathi explores the lives, work and legacies of 15 women from the 19th to the 21st century, including Sarah Baartman, Phyllis Ntantala, Miriam Makeba, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Thandiswa Mazwai – and “seeks to create a systematic, eclectic, historical picture of the present and past women intellectuals, activists, artists, and cultural custodians”.
It does so through “a bold and original approach to unraveling the lie that women were mere passengers in the vehicles of history that have brought us all here”, Vice Chancellor Professor Sibongile Muthwa writes in the foreword. “The volume is transgressive, inspired, and makes a unique contribution to the African feminist body of work”, she adds.
The dexterous and imaginative work of the Centre and Chair is made visible through Inyathi – as the book unfolds as a creative, conceptual and care-filled body of research with immense range – reaching across disciplines, form and generations to bring us a vitally important contribution to contemporary research and theorisation.
The book is separated into three sections: Ufukukama, Umsindo and Umcimbo – exploring African Women’s Intellectual histories, Creative Lineage and Legacies and Gender and Liberation, respectively.
Contributions from Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, Dr Yvette Abrahams, Bev Palesa Ditsie, Nomfundo Xaluva, Dr Kholeka Shange and Brigalia Hlope Bam engage in a multi-faceted and dynamic conversation through which the editorial concepts form a golden thread that knits together generations and ways of seeing and working – as theory meets praxis in delightful, bold, subversive and incisive ways.
Deliberately rooted in African Feminist concepts, Inyathi engages in vital epistemic work – making important interventions in what knowledge is, how it is recognised and who counts as an intellectual by centering the everyday as its focus – the idea of “lived wisdom as a method” – and “African languages as languages of theory”.
In this way, keynote speeches, dialogues and conversations sit alongside academic writing, marking a critical understanding of authorship, and the belief that “intellectual works are varied and have the ability to sit alongside each other”, as the editors write.
The importance of this project cannot be overstated, in the ways that it “shifts the geography of reason” – to use Lewis Gordon’s framing. The concepts it creates and the ways that these are mobilised in service of our collective liberation have resulted in a collection that is an inheritance – bequeathed to us all to carry forward and build on.
For as scholar and poet Gabeba Baderoon writes, “The editors of Inyathi counter the exclusion of women from the public imaginary by creating a capacious, horizontal conception of intellectual work that encompasses the scope of African women’s conceptual labour, visions of the future, and archive of liberatory thought … At last, here is a collection hospitable to the breadth of African women’s intellectual brilliance.”
Join us at the launch of Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili: Theorising South African Women’s Intellectual Legacies on 28 February at the North Campus Conference Centre from 1pm to 2:30pm. RSVP via Wendy Adams or register via Zoom Webinar for online Participation: For any enquiries please email: wendy.adams@mandela.ac.za