and concern for the young South African musician Zahara, when the artist first gained prominence in 2012. Mazwai had expressed her wish that the newer musician be allowed the space to be the kind of artist and person she wanted to be even with the glare of the media and new fans. In a global patriarchal culture obsessed with reading women’s relationships as primarily adversarial, some responded with corrective sentiments about how Mazwai should not feel threatened by new artists since she was established. Thandiswa Mazwai’s next update pointed out that there was room for many different kinds of women artists in the world, and that as a feminist, she had taught herself to relate to other women in non-competitive ways. Therefore, she was asserting that her concern was genuine and suggesting that there was room to read it as such.
There are endless questions and much speculation about Mazwai’s private life, but she has control over what is said about her. Her Twitter presence is another manifestation of this carefully crafted presence: fiercely intelligent, humane and witty. Managing a very active performance schedule domestically and abroad, she speaks her mind on a range of topics. As present in the public eye as she has been from so young, how does she manage to avoid scandal so well? Whatever the answers are to this question, it is in no small measure to the level of control she exercises over her own life and the boundaries of what is public and private.
Zanele Muholi is a multiple award-winning artist who has recently and somewhat reluctantly accepted this title. For a long time, Muholi stressed her activist identity and insisted that her camera was simply one of a range of tools she uses in the pursuit of a more just society. Co-founder, with Donna Smith, of Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW), the Black feminist lesbian NGO in Johannesburg, Muholi’s work challenges ways of seeing Black lesbians and, increasingly, other queer people. Initially concerned with rendering Black lesbian lives visible by casting a spotlight on the many layers of violence such women face for their sexual orientation, Muholi has constantly sought to complicate the ways in which women’s bodies, sexual orientation, violence and pleasure are imagined.
Muholi has had numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally, continentally and across the globe in the last decade. Her work has also garnered her awards such as the Casa Africa Award for best female photographer and the Jean-Paul Blanchere Award, both at the Bamako Biennale for African Photography (2009); the Fanny Ann Eddy prize for her outstanding contribution to the study of sexuality in Africa (2009); a Tollman Award for the Visual Arts (2005) and she has participated in the Venice Biennale (2011).
Her work is both an attempt to create an archive of images of varied Black women’s bodies, sexual expressions and identities and the crafting of new ways of seeing. While the former is something she deliberately foregrounded in her early work – visually chronicling Black women’s ways of loving – it is only recently that she has admitted to the presence of the latter in her photographs and short films. Muholi’s vision is at once startling, humane, questioning, archival and generative.
Responses to her work have been complex. Her exhibition openings across the country see much larger numbers of out Black lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex folk in attendance from outside the art world than most. When in 2010 the then South African Minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana made the faux pas of dismissing Muholi’s and Nandipha Mntambo’s work as not speaking to Black women’s real lived experience, the outrage from the Black (and wider) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex (LGBTI) community was obvious in the public responses that emanated from this sector and community. Press releases from various NGOs such as FEW, Gender DynamiX, the Joint Working Group’s open letter to Minister Xingwana, as well as opinions published in the newspapers by Gabeba Baderoon, Gail Smith, Phylicia Oppelt, Eusebius McKaiser and myself, among many others, asserted the importance of Muholi’s vision. She is clearly deeply connected to the community she comes from, and continues to be active in many capacities although she no longer co-leads FEW.
Gabeba Baderoon is a celebrated poet and scholar. Her debut collection of poetry The Dream in the Next Body (2005) sold out in and went into reprint within six weeks, and had gone into its third reprint a year later, making not only South African literary history but also marking historic achievement and unprecedented success, especially for a writer who had only recently forayed into poetry. This same book saw her awarded the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Poetry in 2005. It was also named a ‘notable book of 2005’ by the Sunday Independent and was a Sunday Times ‘recommended book’ the same year. Her next two collections were The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005) and A Hundred Silences (2007), and she also has a collection The Silence before Speaking, which brings together poems from the first two collections, and elsewhere, all translated into Swedish. A Hundred Silences was short listed for both the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize and the Olive Schreiner Award. Baderoon had also been the winner of the Philadelphia City Paper Writing Contest in 1999 prior to the appearance of her first book.
Prolific as both an academic and a poet, Baderoon’s work is deeply concerned with issues of memory and embodiment, as well as developing a language to speak about layers of gendered, racialised, buried pasts and how they shape current ways of being South African. She reports being asked several times in her first few years as a poet about why she does not write like a South African poet, to which she responded: ‘I think I am a South African who writes about South African topics, but maybe I am redefining what that means to me. Maybe it means that a South African who writes about Iraq is a very normal South African, who, like most of us, thinks about the whole world’.
Zukiswa Wanner is a novelist, essayist and literary activist. She is the author of the popular novels The Madams (2006), Behind Every Successful Man (2008) and Men of the South (2010). She also collaborated with the late renowned photographer, Alf Khumalo, for their book 8115: A prisoner’s home in 2008. The Madams was shortlisted for the K Sello Duiker Award in 2007 and Men of the South for the 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
A big champion of writing, Wanner is a founding member of the ReadSA Initiative, a campaign to entrench reading culture among South Africans. Her work is unapologetically concerned with South African middle-class life in its many layers and messiness because this is what interests her, but also because, as she notes in a 2009 interview, ‘I believe I see enough of poor stories in Africa on CNN’. Highly irritated by being reminded that popular fiction – often going by that appellation ‘chick lit’ – is escapist, Wanner notes that she is interested in writing that keeps readers engrossed enough to keep reading, even if some of what is on the page unsettles and shifts them from their comfort zones.
Her columns in the South African women’s magazine, True Love, demonstrated the same pacey, witty and insightful tone that her readers have come to appreciate in her novels. The literary scholar Lynda Spencer points out that Wanner is one of a group of South African novelists who are choosing to focus shamelessly on Black femininities in ways that are not always conventional, paying attention to shifts, dilemmas and new possibilities. Although popular fiction is often dismissed as lightweight reading material, Wanner’s work is characterised as ‘provocative’ and in her doctoral dissertation, Canadian feminist literary critic, Denise Handlarski insists that Wanner uses an accessible form to explore topics that are usually relegated to more serious, high-brow kinds of prose. Wanner comments often in interviews that what readers say to her suggests that her chosen path works towards her interests.
Finally, Xoliswa Sithole is a socialist feminist filmmaker and owner of Nayanaya Pictures. Although Sithole started out as an actor, she was deeply frustrated by the kinds of roles available to her. She had roles in Cry Freedom and Mandela before turning her hand to filmmaking because of a paucity of the kinds of exciting, vibrant women’s roles she would be attracted to. As short hand, she often references that she yearned for roles in the spirit of characters like Winnie Mandela and Angela Davis. She is an independent filmmaker who values the ownership of her products, intellectual copyright aesthetically as well as politically.
Her first independent documentary film Shouting Silent (2002) shifted dominant discourse on child-headed households and HIV/AIDS stigma by locating herself
