New monograph published - Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle

Congratulations to Emily Bridger (History), whose monograph Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle, has just been published with Boydell & Brewer.

While there have been many books on South Africa's liberation struggle, the story of the involvement of African girls and young women has been all but missing. This book tells their story, analyzing what life was like for African girls under apartheid, why some chose to join the anti-apartheid struggle, and how they navigated the benefits and pitfalls of political activism. These were women who, as teenagers and secondary school students, made an unconventional choice to join student organizations, engage in public protest, and take up arms against the state. They did so against their parents' wishes and in contravention of societal norms that confined girls to the home and made township streets dangerous places for female students. They participated in both non-violent and violent forms of political action, including attending marches and rallies, throwing stones or petrol bombs at police, and even joining underground guerrilla armies. Thousands of these young women were eventually detained, interrogated, and tortured by the apartheid state. At the heart of this book lie the life histories of these young women themselves, who in interviews construct themselves as decisive actors in South Africa's liberation struggle.

Primarily a work of oral history, this book is not only concerned with what young female activists did, but equally with how these women remember and narrate their time as activists: how they reconstruct their pasts; relate their personal experiences to collective histories of the struggle; and insert themselves into a historical narrative from which they have been excluded. Through exploring these women's memories, this book serves as an important corrective to South Africa's male-centric literature on violence, and provides a new gendered perspective on the wider histories of township politics, activism, and conflict.

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