RETHINKING AFRICA, indigenous women reinterpret southern Africa's pasts

232pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2021

"This book is a powerful reminder of the herstories and the knowledge produced by indigenous women. These stories must be told and become part of knowledge production. It is part of the process of renaming Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall and the establishment of the Khoi and San Unit at UCT. It is testimony to what is possible when higher education partners with the people of the land." Loretta Feris, Deputy Vice Chancellor: Transformation, University of Cape Town

"Thank you to the editors, the contributors and the ancestors about whom you write. I have searched for this perspective - a book about indigenous people from the perspective of indigenous women in South Africa. For so long we have been fed the perspective of the coloniser and his descendants - a perspective that normalised racist, corporate greed that ravaged the earth and humanity. Committing genocide while its conservationists lionised the 'noble savage'. May these voices reshape how we see our world and our possibilities as human beings." Pregs Govender, author of Love and Courage: a story of insubordination

Contributions include:

"Writing Ourselves Back into History: the liberating narrative of who we are" by Sylvia Vollenhoven

"Gendering Social Science: Ukubuyiswa of maternal legacies of knowledge for balanced social science studies in South Africa" by Babalwa Magoqwana

"Feminism-cide and epistemicide of Cape herstoriography through the lens of the ecology of indigenous plants" by June Bam

"Rematriation: reclaiming indigenous matricentric egalitarianism" by Bernadette Muthien

"The bones" by Diana Ferrus

"Valuing the increased and invisible workload: Indigenous women, labour and the COVID-19 pandemic" by Sharon Groenmeyer.

Researcher, facilitator and poet Bernedette Muthien was a Fulbright-Amy Biehl Fellow at Stanford University. She serves on the advisory boards of the journals Human Security Studies and Journal of Human Security, and the International Institute on Peace Education.

June Bam currently heads the Khoi and San Unit, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. She is the originator of !Gâ re – Rangatiratanga – Dadirri, a project on ‘deep listening’. She was a visiting professor with Stanford University’s overseas programme and co-editor of Whose History Counts. Her collaborative work, Turning Points in History, won the UNESCO Peace Education Prize for South Africa in 2008.