Page 20 - Research & Innovation Report 2020

HUMANITIES

Reconnecting African sociology

to the mother

“In the field of sociology, students have always been trained around the fathers of the discipline
and we need to connect them to maternal sociological knowledge that was always a distinct
feature of the African continent.” – Dr Babalwa Magoqwana.

“We need to re-train ourselves to connect with our matriarchal
history, which was always a distinct feature of the African
continent,” says Dr Magoqwana, senior lecturer in the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology and Interim Director of the Centre
for Women and Gender Studies (CWGS), established at Nelson
Mandela University in October 2019.

One of the CWGS’s key academic projects is to research and
foreground African women’s biographies, intellectual production
and political histories. The absence and erasure of these voices
is part of a bigger sociology of violence that tends to undermine
women’s contributions to development of different societies. It
also contributes to bodies of knowledge and university curricula
that cannot be decolonised without foregrounding women.

“Why would you study violence in political theory only using Dr Babalwa Magoqwana
the writings of Frantz Fanon when we have works like Ellen
Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman and Fatima Meer’s Race and Suicide are represented in the curriculum and broader production of
in South Africa? If we are to define life away from patriarchal and knowledge. This is why we need ‘balanced’ social science and
discriminatory societies we need to pay attention to how women humanities knowledges,” says Dr Magoqwana.

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