Pumla Gqola Book Launch: ''Rape: A South African Nightmare''

Africa is still waiting for the dawn

Pumla Gqola

Pumla Gqola, Mail & Guardian

I want to conjure up an image of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe that is slightly out of focus in post-apartheid Southern Africa: we concentrate usually on the man who gave us the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959, was imprisoned in 1960 on Robben Island, a revolutionary whose vision, words, humaneness is known.

I want to talk about Sobukwe’s valuing of the imagination, the Sobukwe who took great pleasure in the nonobvious, who relished works of the imagination.

But he also understood the value of the imagination when unbounded, not limited to the pages of a novel or a performance on a stage.

That is what the iconic image of Sobukwe letting soil fall through his fingers is: recourse to the metaphoric, the poetic, the symbolic, when ordinary words were both unavailable and inadequate.

Pumla Gqola: 8th Robert Sobukwe Memorial Lecture

Book Launch: A Renegade Called Simphiwe

Simphiwe Dana is nobody’s darling

By Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader, 23 September 2013 

“Part of what makes Simphiwe Dana so compelling for me, part of why I had to write this book, is that she is almost impossible to govern,” writes Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola in her latest book, A renegade called Simphiwe. This book is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public (and private) life of the musician. In this country where our imagination of political liberation has largely focused on the soap-opera like manoeuvres of politicians, Gqola carefully recasts our eyes by showing us the intersection between the creative and the political. While we have been accustomed to colourful politically focused book titles fit for Hollywood blockbusters fromEight Days in September to Mangaung: Kings and Kingmakers, Gqola dares and goes against the grain in this book.

Feminist Biko – From Dana to Gqola

Simphiwe Dana

by Hugo Canham, Identities in Flux

The recently published A Renegade Called Simphiwe is as much about the supremely talented Simphiwe Dana and its author, leading feminist scholar, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola. As she cautions the reader on more than one occasion, this book is not a biography, so readers who want an expose’ of Ms Dana may be a little disappointed. In Gqola’s words, this is a book by “a writer in conversation with the ideas in another artists work”. However, this book will go down as a cornerstone in South African feminist works on a public figure. Gqola is not a silent author putting forward sanitized ‘facts’ to an unimaginative readership. She is part of the story that she tells and she pushes readers to participate in the narratives that she weaves. At various points we as readers are asked to explore our own complicity in misogynous, patriarchal, anti-creative and anti-intellectual discourses.

How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violent masculinities support endemic gender based violence in contemporary South Africa

How the ‘cult of femininity’ and violentmasculinities support endemic genderbased violence in contemporary... by TigersEye99

Pumla Gqola's talk at One Billion Rising (Wits & Constitution Hill)

Loudrastress

I am a feminist, a WITS Professor, a member of the African feminist and global feminist movements, and a member of the 1in9 Campaign, a feminist campaign – now organization – started to provide support to the woman we call Khwezi, who laid a charge of rape against the man who is now President Zuma, 1in9, an organization which supports other survivors of sexualized violence.

‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann and African feminist literary imaginings

by Pumla Dineo Gqola, 2008

Abstract. ‘Crafting epicentres of agency’: Sarah Bartmann and African

feminist literary imaginings. The story of Sarah Bartmann has been one of

the fascinations of academic writing on ‘race’, feminism and poststructuralism in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century. An enslaved Khoi woman, she was transported to Europe where she was displayed for the amusement, and later scientific inquisitiveness of various public and private collectives in London and Paris. Her paradoxical hypervisibility has meant that although volumes have been written about her, very little is recoverable from these records about her subjectivity. In this paper I am less interested in tracing and engaging with some of the debates engendered by this paradox and difficulty more broadly. Rather, I want to read and analyse how African feminist literary projects have approached Bartmann’s absent presence. My paper then tasks itself with exploring the possibility of writing about Sarah Bartmann in ways unlike those traditions of knowledge-making that dubbed her ‘the Hottentot Venus’. It analyzes a variety of texts that position themselves in relation to her as a way of arriving at an African feminist creative and literary engagement with histories which fix representations of African women’s bodies, via Bartmann in colonialist epistemes.

Respect our rights

by Pumla Gqola, City Press, 6 May 2012

The Traditional Courts Bill is meant to replace the Black Administration Act of 1927 with a law that is constitutional.

Instead, if passed, it will in effect strip between 17 million and 21 million people living in rural South Africa of many of the rights we enjoy in the rest of the country.

Artists are a gift to treasure

Pumla Gqola, Radical Africa

I have a vested interest in the controversy over Minister Lulu Xingwana and the Innovative Women exhibition curated by Bongi Bengu last August. I have written on Zanele Muholi’s photographs before, and find Nandipha Mntambo’s work so thought-provoking that as I wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition, I vowed to spend more time writing on her. I have also written on Bongi Bengu, the curator and an artist in the show. I have no intention of stopping.

What is Slavery to Me?

by Pumla Dineo Gqola

Much has been made about South Africa’s transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. “Memory” features prominently in the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is slavery to me? links with that research in its concern with South Africa’s past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the Western Cape for three centuries by the British and Dutch.

Wanting Wambui Otieno back

by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Loudrastress

The news of Wambui Otieno came at the end of August 2011, as South Africans wrapped up Women’s Month, and a particularly horrid women’s month it had been too, with backlash and misogyny in public spaces like we had not seen in a long time.

I have loved Wambui Otieno, Mau Mau, feminist, unbowed woman ever since I have known about her. Although I never met her personally, I followed her life – backwards and forwards – first, as the African feminist universe buzzed when she lost the legal battle to bury her husband where she wanted, then reading a borrowed copy of her memoir, and afterwards “stalking” her online.

Pumla Gqola: Books & Me

A Response to Simphiwe Dana on Taking African Languages Seriously

by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Loudrastress

Although I have written about this topic in the papers before, several years ago in the Mail and Guardian, this post is motivated by Simphiwe Dana’s courageous opinion editorial in this past weekend’s Sunday Times. There are a few aspects of Ms Dana’s argument that I disagree quite strongly with, but I do share many of the concerns that she articulates.