Page 21 - Research & Innovation Report 2020

HUMANITIES

“The questions we need to ask are: ‘What is considered Dr Magoqwana’s project draws on the skills of historian, Dr
knowledge?’, ‘How do we know what we know?’ and ‘Who is Nomathamsanqa Tisani, those of cultural and indigenous religion
the producer of knowledge?’ It is through our grandmothers expert Dr Nokuzola Mndende, and those of expert in Xhosa literary
(ooMakhulu), our aunts (ooRagadi, ooMakhadzi) and our mothers heritage Prof Pamela Maseko. Its aims are:
that we have shaped our intellectual foundations of knowledge.
Through their stories, folktales, stories of origin, reciting of clan • to formulate a multidisciplinary approach in populating and
names (iziduko) our grandmothers have managed to locate challenging the Xhosa archive in order to give a gender sensitive
our own histories and transfer this oral history, but without historical account of Eastern Cape histories;
recognition.” • to identify, curate and document the literary heritage of the
Eastern Cape for the diversification of the Xhosa literary canon;
In 2020, with a R800 000 grant from the National Institute for • to identify, study and archive the ritual speech (ukuthetha) that
the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Dr Magoqwana was has been used by Xhosa women to challenge and access power
able to continue her project to centre women in the definitions in different spaces and times; and
of African sociology by excavating the maternal legacies of • to establish digital strategies for the intergenerational transfer of
knowledge in the Eastern Cape. As part of this work, with Prof women’s knowledge systems, including digitisation of the oral
Jimi Adesina of Unisa she co-authored “Reconnecting African archive to include stories of origin (amabali emvelo), folktales
Sociology to the Mother: Towards a Woman-centred Endogenous (iintsomi) and myths shared by different generations of women
Sociology in South Africa”, published in the December 2020 issue in the region.
of African Sociology.
“This project hopes to make a catalytic intervention in the fields
“The article’s primary focus is the challenges that face African of sociology, anthropology, African languages, gender studies
sociology in the 21st Century,” Dr Magoqwana explains. “In and literature by centralising the intellectualisation of the Xhosa
pivoting around the elder mother, the paper introduced a language while centring African women’s everyday ways of
‘matrifocal’’ sociological understanding of the discipline, shifting knowing,” says Dr Magoqwana.
the centralising of ‘fathers of the discipline’. The paper explores
and integrates the language and values carried by African “We have also decided to include my MA student Nomtha Menye’s
grandmothers in dealing with sociopolitical and economic research on indigenous environmentalism, as many indigenous
challenges of their societies. societies tend to link culture and nature in defining their knowledge
cosmologies. Water, for example, is sacred, as are totem animals
“By re-reading of historical texts, gathering oral knowledge from associated with clan names. The work of eco-feminists in Africa
our grandmothers, reading of the arts, rituals, songs, rhymes, and the Global South emphasises that if we want to restore our
poems, proverbs (amaqhalo) and idioms (izaci) of the isiXhosa- relationship with the planet and the environment we need to go
speaking population in the Eastern Cape, we hope to generate an back to Mother Nature; we need to revisit the feminine principles
alternative perspective of the Xhosa archive which has mainly been of nature, and how to value the natural environment, because it is
defined by masculine storytelling.” so much a part of who we are.”

“Why would you study violence in political

theory only using the writings of Frantz Fanon

when we have works like Ellen Kuzwayo’s
Call Me Woman and Fatima Meer’s Race and

Suicide in South Africa?”

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