The Silencing of Women’s Trauma: Descendants’ Reflections on Disremembered Women Anti-Apartheid Activists

Abstract

Restorative potential and political threat are ambiguously embedded within remembering and silencing, attributed to its alliance with historical and contextual structures. This research inquiry is framed within and beyond the apartheid circumstance, seeking remembrance and unsilencing through the memories shared by women descendants of women anti-apartheid activists. The contributions of women anti-apartheid activists have been excluded from dominant accounts of apartheid history. It is argued that this disregard has not only functioned to silence the intersectional forms of oppression women activists were subjected to but has also halted human reformation and restoration, evidenced by the escalating prevalence of gender- based violence and femicide in South Africa. This study, therefore, sought to attain an understanding of the consequences of apartheid, the unacknowledged vicissitudes of colonial violence, and how the consequent colonial wound may manifest intergenerationally. A bricolage, informed by a critical approach to discourse analysis and heuristic phenomenological frameworks, guided an attendance to the research aims and questions, within a qualitative research design. These processes enabled an understanding of the individual and collective means of remembering lived experiences, whilst simultaneously making meaning of how unsilencing and remembering may threaten the dominant discourses as archived alongside existing power hierarchies. In concurrence with the bricolage, the analysis was guided by an integrated conceptual framework, embedded in African and Decolonial-centred praxis facilitated by a Fanonian lens and Tamale’s Afro-Feminist principles to inform intersectional alignment. The research findings are guided by an understanding of the systemic intersectional inheritance of identity and positionality construction across generations, reflecting on the experiences of the women anti-apartheid activists, as remembered by their descendants. The experiences underscore the epistemic violence of colonial disruption across the macro and micro systemic forms of existence, and how these are collectively and intergenerationally maintained across the post-apartheid milieu. Trauma discourse on remembering and silencing in individual and collective narratives emphasises discursive networks of framing silencing, silence as a discursive device, and discursive networks working in favour of women’s perpetual exclusion and invisibility.