COSA | Lecture: Rachel Sandwell, "Women, Youth, and Anti-Colonial Struggle in South Africa’s Exiled Liberation Movements"

Using the archives of the African National Congress of South Africa & the letters and memoirs of past activists, this talk will examine how women shaped the exiled struggle against apartheid in South Africa. From the 1960s through the 1980s, South African women pushed the mainstream of the anti-apartheid movement to consider women's particular suffering under apartheid, and to fight for broad social transformation as part of overthrowing apartheid. At the same time, within the movement, generational tensions also sparked conversation and at times heated disagreement over topics like sex education, access to birth control, and the right to family life within a militarized revolutionary movement. These challenging conversations reveal that younger generations of exiles brought new political ideas into the movement from the mid-1970s onwards, transforming an aging political organization into a more militant formation.

Rachel Sandwell (Cornell University) is author of "National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: Sex, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle Against Apartheid ."

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