IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: REVISITING NONI JABAVU’S MEMOIRS

Athambile Masola, lecturer, University of Pretoria, Humanities Education Department

Using Alice Walker’s essay ‘In search of our mothers’ gardens’ as a starting point, this lecture will examine Noni Jabavu’s writing and its significance in South Africa’s literary landscape. Noni Jabavu’s work as a pioneer amongst black women writers in South Africa has largely been erased. These lectures will look at why she has been erased from history and make an argument for revisiting her work anew. The first lecture will be an overview of black women writing in Africa, the second will look at the two memoirs written by Jabavu and the final lecture will discuss her Daily Dispatch columns.

LECTURE TITLES

1. Black women writing: a history

2. Noni Jabavu: The Ochre People and Drawn in Colour

3. Wednesday columns: Noni Jabavu and the Daily Dispatch

Recommended reading

Deck, A. 1990. ‘Autoethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Noni Jabavu, and Cross-Disciplinary Discourse’. Black American Literature Forum 24 (2) 20th-Century Autobiography (Summer, 1990), 237–256.

Walker, A. 1994. 'In Search of Our Mother's Gardens.' Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Haarlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Xaba, M. 2009. Noni Jabavu: a peripatetic writer ahead of her times. Pretoria: Tydskrif vir  letterkunde 46 (1).