Winnie: Writer ignores key scholar

The article by Ntombizikhona Valela on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (“The woman who helped forge an icon”, April 13) fails to acknowledge the likely influence of Dr Babalwa Magoqwana, who has been instrumental in presenting uMakhulu as a social institution of leadership and knowledge.

Magoqwana, who was a lecturer at Rhodes University at the same time Valela was a student, has been presenting her work on uMakhulu publicly for several years now.

The formulation of uMakhulu as an institution of leadership and knowledge has been received with great enthusiasm and warmth by many audiences, especially because this formulation clarified what most African students and scholars organically know about their own grandmothers and their epistemic role in African communities.

I note that Valela, in her own 2017 thesis on Madikizela-Mandela, threw in one line on Magoqwana and the names of some African feminists without so much as citing a word from their work.

This does not surprise me, because in Magoqwana’s public presentations on uMakhulu, she consistently referred to these African feminists, except she did so knowledgeably and with rigour.

I am glad that Magoqwana, who has spent years carefully working out this formulation as her contribution to African sociology, was acknowledged in 2017 when she was awarded a National Research Foundation-FirstRand Foundation sabbatical award to pursue a larger research project on uMakhulu as an institution, based on a thorough proposal.

Ask anyone who was at Rhodes: this specific formulation of uMakhulu was promoted by Magoqwana, who has patiently targeted the long and arduous peerreviewed process to publish her work.

It seems to me Valela fails to honestly acknowledge Magoqwana’s influence in her recent tweets and newspaper article, in effect erasing Magoqwana in service of acknowledging the significance of Madikizela-Mandela—