In May 1940, a smartly dressed African American woman from Winston-Salem, North Carolina disembarked at Cape Town harbor. The war in Europe had postponed her trip to South Africa and her upcoming marriage to A.B. Xuma, a highly respected physician who was soon to become President of the African National Congress (ANC), the country's main nationalist organization. Well-educated and anxious to contribute her experience to the cause of black progress in her adopted country, Madie Hall Xuma revitalized the ANC Women's League and became its first President. But equally important, she founded a network of women's organizations, the Zenzele (“do it yourself”) clubs. With a strongly domestic focus during the 1940s and a greater emphasis on social service after their affiliation with the international YWCA in the 1950s, these clubs formed the center of Xuma's life in South Africa, creating the legacy most commonly attached to her name.

In an interview in 1963, just before Hall left South Africa after her husband's death, she elaborated on how she perceived domestic skills:

Although the Zenzele clubs conveyed new domestic expertise and ideas about gracious living, Hall stressed the longer-term personal significance of these accomplishments. The clubs, she believed, gave women enhanced confidence and knowledge of how to run an organization and raise funds, and a new collective identity as sophisticated homemakers.

Women's accounts of their activities best convey the meaning of this experience. In 1947, R. Msweli, a founding member, wrote from the Johannesburg neighborhood of Sophiatown about her new level of self-assurance: