Mukoni Ratshitanga’s “Faith & Defiance — The Life ofSally Motlana”, which was published in December last year, has added to a growing list of SA’s biographical offerings. The book brings to a new generation the exceptional life of Motlana as an avid developmental and Christian anti-apartheid activist from the mid-1940s until her retirement in the early 1990s. It begins in 1927, the year of her birth in Moremela, a village in the then-Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga.
Her arrival into the world was marked by bad blood that flowed due to her maternal family’s opposition to her parents’ marriage — her mother was of royal lineage and her father was a commoner. The narrative glides seamlessly into Motlana’s early life and formative years in Sophiatown in the 1940s, her tertiary education at the Anglican Grace Dieu Diocesan Training College for teachers in Limpopo, and on to the University of Fort Hare. The pace gathers momentum as Motlana enters adulthood, the beginning of her teaching career, and a reversal with her early exit from the profession after the introduction of Bantu education in 1953.
We follow her asshe rediscoversherself with eventual leadership of the self-help organisation, Black Housewives League (BHL), in the late 1960s. Brought up under the tutelage of the Anglican Church’s Father Trevor Huddleston in Sophiatown, Motlana joined the SA Council of Churches (SACC) in the early 1970s, where her leadership potential was recognised by her election as vice president of the interdenominational body, becoming one of its fiercest and most vocal leaders against apartheid. Ratshitanga is a stickler for history, sometimes laboriously so, criss-crossing various epochs of SA’s past, presumably to “facilitate”, as seems to be his central concern, “a better understanding of [my] subject and the zeitgeist that shaped her”.
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While this might make for hard work, a biography of a person born in the late 1920s is invariably a historical text that opens a window to a fast-receding past. As a black woman activist with odds heavily stacked against her, Motlana’s ability to multitask in the face of various hurdles is incredibly impressive. Part of the explanation for her industry lies in the decision she and Nthato Motlana, her husband, made to send their young children to boarding school at an early age.
“All my friends and relatives,” she told Ratshitanga, “thought I was the most cruel mother on Earth, but that didn’t bother me. The Catholics looked after the children very well.” Another estimation was provided by veteran cleric, activist, and former general secretary of the SACC, Frank Chikane. He held Motlana in high esteem because she was of the “pedigree,” “like … Charlotte Maxeke,” the first South African black woman to obtain a university degree.
Faith & Defianceis an important book for several reasons. It honours a remarkable woman and elevates SA women’s agency in challenging oppression. It therefore contributes to the struggle for gender equality, bringing added richness to the various narratives of women’s emancipation. Its release is especially auspicious as we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings.
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