Introduction

This chapter is influenced by the above double quotation by Roy (1997, 2003), from her political essays in which she highlights the ills of democracy, war and the global rise of religion and world-wide violence—all facets that she argues have little or no regard for women, and fail to tell their stories. Until a few years ago, and even sporadically, as a South African readership we have been relatively accustomed to being exposed to personal and community stories with a limited focus on the women of this country. There was even less focus (and fewer stories) on black women, with those few accounts overlooking women as narrators of their own stories, thus robbing them of the legacies and ownership of their memories.

At the height of apartheid in South Africa, black people's opinions were either thinly represented or misrepresented, and women's opinions were hardly ever covered. This situation was worse for women in societal systems in which a patriarchal stronghold held sway. Lamenting the fact that women did not have an opportunity to make their own history, Ellen Kuzwayo (1985) and Belinda Bozzoli (1991, p. 2) differentially present women's words, stressing the need for a “view from below”. Kuzwayo, drawing from her personal experience of violence, and as meted out to the majority of South Africans during the apartheid era, presents testimony against the perception that the country should back away from the apartheid regime history and move on. Kuzwayo's and Bozzoli's work expresses a persuasive fact that marginalised people are often not only unable to choose and influence the structures within which they live, but also the structures that report their stories. Many historians and researchers, despite undertaking the significant task of recording and disseminating those stories, use their own words and style of writing. What results are often not the actual words of the respondents.