Joel Cabrita on Written Out: The Work and Life of Regina Gelana Twala

Dr Joel Cabrita, Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University, is the presenter in this research seminar of UJ History. The event is hosted by Dr Stephen Sparks, senior lecturer in History at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Abstract: Regina Gelana Twala, a Black South African woman who was born in 1908 in South Africa, and died in 1968 in Eswatini (Swaziland), was an extraordinarily prolific writer. Twala wrote at least two book manuscripts, authored over 180 politically radical columns and articles for newspapers across Southern Africa, and penned close to 1 000 letters to her husband of thirty years. Yet today Twala’s name is largely unknown beyond the small circle of her family. My biography of Twala argues that an entire cast of characters - censorious editors, territorial white academics, apartheid officials, and male African politicians whose politics were at odds with her own - conspired to erase Twala’s literary legacy. Through her unique documentary output, Twala marked herself out as a radical voice on issues of gender, race, and class. Examining Twala’s life thus gives us fresh insight into the vanishingly small number of women in accounts of African intellectual life of the twentieth century. It is not that female thinkers and writers did not exist; rather, the conditions for intellectual production were punishingly obstructive. Unpublished writers, moreover, could more easily be written out of the documentary record. Twala’s life, then, offers us a radically alternative perspective on the well-worn narrative of apartheid and colonial rule in Southern Africa. Rather than telling the story of Black experience through the prism of protest movements and political activism, my book focuses on the cost of white rule for Black female writers and for their written production - and the consequent invisibility of female intellectuals in twentieth-century African history.
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