From orality to literacy: The intellectual traditions of black South African women.

Abstract

Black women in South Africa have a long history of intellectualism as evidenced by their expertise as oral performers, rehearsing and revitalizing vibrant storytelling traditions that have been inherited by matrilineal right for centuries. This ancient rhetorical tradition has played an integral role in their emergence as aspiring writers in the aftermath of the Soweto rebellion of 1976. While their arrival on the literary scene is typically characterized as a breaking of the silence, their expertise as social commentators and community activists has roots in African patriarchal organization in which private and public spheres are delineated along gendered lines. Black women's growing public presence in the Black Consciousness Movement that launched an orchestrated assault on apartheid is less a result of their incorporation in mass education and Western epistemology than a resourceful return to their rhetorical roots.

Chapter one explores the oral traditions as sites of resistance to patriarchy and the provision of opportunities for claiming agency and individual identities, strategies that have been essential for anti-apartheid activism when learning to write. Chapter two considers the impact that literacy has had on black women, beginning with its introduction by missionaries in the nineteenth century and continuing through the apartheid era. Reasons for black women's late arrival on the literary scene are discussed in relation to pedagogical practices and philosophical positions concerning the role of black women in a white dominated society. Chapter three examines a century of composition and grammar instruction in South Africa by analyzing a selection of textbooks used in schools from the standpoint of current composition and rhetorical theories. Chapter four investigates the role of Freirean literacy initiatives in the black community as surreptitiously deployed in apartheid-era South Africa. The lack of information on literacy groups is addressed by textual analyses of reading material produced in literacy classes by black women learners for other students. Chapter five considers the crucial yet dubious role of white sponsorship in assisting black women writers to reach a wider, predominantly Western audience.