The journey to become a black woman academic in South Africa, before the ending of apartheid in 1994, was not an easy task. There were very few black women positioned as lecturers or senior lecturers at the time and certainly none that we knew as professors (currently only 2 per cent of the professors in South Africa are black women). In Cape Town, where I lived and worked, we were a relatively close knit group of black junior lecturers supporting each other while competing in a highly cutthroat individualistic academic environment—an environment ready for neither black women professors or for black intellectuals more generally. In the 1990s, through the Southern Africa Political Economy Series (SAPES), based in Zimbabwe, a few of us were able to engage with powerful African feminists, such as Patricia McFadden, Ruth Meena, and Rudo Gaidzanwa. We defined ourselves as feminists and fought to have feminism included in the curricula of our respective disciplines in our universities. As we progressed with and/or completed our degrees, many of us were of the age when decisions about having children were being made.
I can still recall some of those conversations and the conscious choices we, for various reasons, made to either have or not have children. Becoming a mother through the act of giving birth (for there are other ways of becoming a mother and of mothering), or choosing not to, is therefore a conscious decision for feminists. Making a choice to become, and when to become, a mother is the first act of feminist mothering. Deciding whether or not to be a mother breaks with the patriarchal assumption that motherhood is a natural destiny for women, that a woman’s place is in the home, and that her roles in society are primarily located in the spheres of reproduction and nurturing. The ability to exercise choice is also closely associated with the freedom to do so and with the security that this provides.
Although I was in my mid-thirties when I gave birth to Malaika, I had already pondered about having a child in my early twenties and had named my prospective child then already. Malaika is a Swahili name meaning “my angel.” The name was made famous in a Swahili song written by the Tanzanian musician Adam Salim in 1945, and is sung by, among others, the South African musician Miriam Makeba in the 1970s. The choice of my daughter’s name is itself a reflection of my early pan-African leanings.
Although motherhood was definitely in my realm of personal identification, I also knew that it would not be the only role that defined me. I was curious about the world and wanted to study and travel. I was passionate about resisting injustice in all its forms, and I wanted to make a meaningful contribution to the transformation of our societies. I believed I could do all those things—have a fulfilling career and also being a mother. However, to accomplish these goals, I was also cognizant of the fact that I would have to delay having a child until at least some of my goals were accomplished. By this time, I was already approaching the age when women begin to worry about their fertility and hear echoing phrases about biological clocks ticking.
At the time, I thought I had prepared myself sufficiently to make the decision to have a child. In hindsight, nothing really prepares one for the changes that accompany having a child. It is not merely the physical transformation of one’s body or the sudden realization of how much time a baby can consume that is a shock. It is also the acute awareness that your child is completely dependent on you for its physical, emotional, and intellectual wellbeing and that you are now responsible for its survival.
After my PhD comprehensive exams at the University of South Carolina, I had delayed writing my thesis. However, once Malaika was born, I completed the thesis pretty quickly. I became constantly aware of time constraints and I realized that if the thesis were to reach completion, I would have to write it while Malaika was sleeping. We lived in Toronto, Canada, at the time, so there was little in the way of family support.
Soon after I graduated, I was awarded a one year postdoctoral fellowship in the United States, which meant I would be in the United States during the week and in Canada on the weekends. There was quite a bit of guilt about this arrangement, as it had me away from my daughter for substantial periods of time. When her father and I separated, this became a bone of contention because her father could now claim primary caregiving responsibility during the period of my fellowship. At the time, however, it was what I needed in order to progress in academe. The choice between childrearing and career advancement is one that the majority of women have to navigate. For those who choose both, it often comes at an enormous personal expense. This was no different for me. It was then, too, that I made a conscious decision not to have another child.
After the postdoctoral fellowship, I decided to move back to South Africa. Again, I had to make a conscious choice between staying with Malaika in Toronto or going home to where I thought I could make a more meaningful contribution (since I was unable to take her home with me at the time due to a custody dispute). Although it was one of the hardest personal decisions I have had to make, I do not have any regrets about it. Malaika remained in Canada with her father while I went back to my previous position at the University of the Western Cape. Upon my return, I spent a lot of time trying to get her to join me. This experience, I think, also contributed towards my feminist mothering. It was important for me not to feel disempowered or confined because I was a mother and to engage the custody dispute from a position of strength, even if that meant being away from Malaika for a year.
We do not cease being mothers when we are away from our children. Our care takes on different forms. It is, however, important that we nurture ourselves first so that we can be the best mothers we are able to be. Being a mother should be a conscious feminist choice; how we chose to perform the role of motherhood should be, too.
Malaika joined me in South Africa a year later. Although she saw her father, who lived in Toronto, on holidays and he has always been present in her life, the primary responsibility for her wellbeing was now mine. I, however, had friends, family, and a helper in South Africa who gave me the necessary support I needed. Without that support network, it would have been extremely difficult to pursue the career I now have, which went from academe to the NGO sector and back to academe as a professor of politics and international relations. My work entailed a fair amount of travel on the continent. It could only be undertaken if others assisted with the caregiving responsibilities of motherhood—cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and ensuring that children got to school on time. I was, therefore, never a conventional mother. My child complained all the time that I was not at parent-teacher meetings or there to pick her up from school—I was not a “soccer mom.” I saw my role more in terms of inculcating values, norms, and discipline as well as earning enough money so that we could live a relatively secure lifestyle.
Malaika, therefore, did not grow up in a home where there was conventional parenting or a sexual division of labour. In her father’s home, he did the cooking and cleaning, and in our home, I was not the person undertaking these tasks, which has also affected the ways in which she has interpreted these roles—she does not align them to a particular gender.
I am an independent woman who has been able to succeed in career spaces in which men dominate. Malaika has often had to listen to me talk about the difficulties of my work environment and has had to listen to me prepare to give various talks. It was important that she and other young women see that they can be anything they want to be and that it takes commitment and passion to be successful. It is also important for our children to understand that we work not for individual success but for the greater good, that we are part of a collective, that we confront challenges while speaking truth to power, and that we seek to create a more just and equitable world. Having a feminist consciousness is about having a social consciousness.
I did not sit Malaika down to teach her. There is no curriculum for this. Feminist mothering is not about instructing. It is about creating different experiences and exposing children to diverse sets of gender and social relations through engagement, conversation, literature, film, culture, and so forth. It is about creating an awareness about power relations and promoting the values of equality and dignity that should be present in all our relationships. Malaika was part of our dinner table discussions; she also watched documentaries and movies with me, and had access to my books. Through the people I interacted with, she was also exposed to a world where gender constructions were debunked and where people could freely express their sexuality.
There were no men in the house, and she went to an all-girls school, which gave her the added confidence she now has as a woman. She did not have to spend her formative years competing with boys at school and/or competing with girls for their attention.
She did however have to deal with the race issue. South Africa was and remains highly racialized and a rather inward-looking society. She often had to deal with racism at school and within the extended family. In as much as I wanted to shield her from those experiences, I also wanted to equip her to be able to have the consciousness and emotional security to be able to traverse those encounters. In order to do so, I had to expose her to a world beyond the narrow confines of South Africa and its identity constructions.
In my own development, redefining myself as a pan-African feminist and working towards the greater good of women across the continent was liberating. Such a transformation enabled me to situate myself in a larger collective of people who have had similar experiences and who have been agents of their own destiny. I wanted Malaika to discover this, too. Only time will tell how far this has resonated with her, but telling signs are already there. I have seen her struggle with her identity construction and emerge from that inner contestation as a self-aware black woman actively claiming and embracing her identity.
I was, therefore, not surprised that she was one of the first students at her school to want to wear her hair in its natural curl, which led to many others at the school following suit and to a protest by learners at the school who wanted to wear their hair naturally that received international attention. There is now a change in the policies of many schools in South Africa for how black children can wear their hair. During the organization of the protests, I saw her grab my Angela Davies books and read them. A year later, Fanon and Biko disappeared from my book shelf. She was, therefore, grappling with the intersectionality of race and gender in South Africa.
By the time she entered university, I knew that my work as a pan-African feminist mother was largely done and that she now had to go and explore the world further on her own. Feminist mothering, I would like to believe, endowed her with the necessary confidence to chart her own way in this world. I look at her and I am proud of who she has become. I cannot talk about school plays or sports trophies, but I can speak about motherhood that enables a daughter to have the kind of sense of justice and equity that we need more of in the world. These are the values and beliefs that have emerged from my years of pan-African feminist mothering.
Malaika’s Narration of Her Experience
Within the past two years of my life as a university student, the issues of patriarchy, gender-based violence, race, cultural sensitivity, and many other crucial social issues have come to the forefront of my thought process. Every day, I learn more and more about how to navigate my way through the world as a young woman of colour. Every day, I learn more and more about what that means and how my identity both disadvantages me in wider society and how it nuances my human experiences. It is in these day-to-day moments of learning that the idea of feminist mothering becomes increasingly important to me.
My mother is by her own definition a Pan-African feminist. This identity is something that has framed her life in a multitude of ways: from the work spaces she inhabits, the books she reads, the music she listens to, and the social spaces she finds herself in. Growing up, there was nothing I could do but follow these same patterns of behaviour. Without much note at first, as her daughter, I have absorbed her teachings in such a way that being in her presence allowed her to teach me without her lecturing to me. In her lifetime, she has done feminist work both in and out of academic spaces. Hearing her think aloud made me, as a youth, grapple with issues concerning women’s place in both academe and wider society, women’s place in South Africa and Africa at large, as well as what it means to be a woman in the world. These are ideas that I find myself wrestling with more now, and, increasingly, I relate my present ideas to the notions my mother originally provided me.
Her library spans the entire back room of our home and includes Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. When in need of something to read before I went to bed or caught the train, I looked to her library. Thus, my mother has been an avenue to work I didn’t know I was interested in until I found it.
When I sit in my gender and writing classes in university this year, I’m increasingly shocked at the reading list. The ones I find myself enjoying most I look into who the author is. Almost without fail this year, my favourite texts have been authored by women I personally know through my mother, such as Desiree Lewis, Elaine Salo, and others—women I know as aunts and family friends. I now learn from them not only in private spaces but also in academic settings.
In my own day-to-day life, the teachings of my mother have become increasingly present. When in conversation with friends around the issues that affect us on a daily basis (whether it be what we’re learning on campus or the fact that we can’t walk through the inner city without being catcalled), increasingly I hear my mother and the women with whom she surrounds herself in my speech. I find myself increasingly able to look at social situations for not only what they are but also in terms of how I would want a feminist, nonracialized and, increasingly, more equal society to look like. This is a worldview I can accredit, in large part, to having a mother who defines herself as feminist.
Mothering is a conscious choice for feminists. Feminist mothering enables children to have a deeper love and respect for themselves and others as well as a deeper understanding of how the world and social and gender relations are constructed. It also provides them with a sturdy scaffolding for their own self-realization. Feminist mothering empowers both mother and child (and all others in the family) to be who they aspire to be and to fulfill their life’s purpose. Feminist mothering takes courage, as society will judge and criticize those who break the stereotypes of how a mother is supposed to behave. It is important for young feminist mothers to build personal relations with other feminists who are able to guide and support them through the very tough choices they will inevitably have to make. Feminist mothering is fundamentally about teaching the norms and values of equality and about actively working to change the power dynamic between men and women and girls and boys. Pan-Africanism is about unity, solidarity, and dignity. Together, these are transformative values. They have made a lasting impact on me, and I trust that they will inspire my daughter and many others to continue to strive for the kind of society in which we all can enjoy the freedom, dignity, and growth that have been so long fought for and by so many.
