'Home and the World': The Contestation of Social Fictions in Three South African Women's Memoirs

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Periodical article

Title:	'Home and the World': The Contestation of Social Fictions in Three South African Women's Memoirs
Author:	Samuelson, Meg
Year:	2005
Periodical:	The English Academy Review
Volume:	22
Pages:	32-42
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	autobiography women writers social conditions literature Historical/Biographical Law, Legal Issues, and Human Rights
About persons:	Zazah Khuzwayo Mamphela Ramphele Zubeida Jaffer
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1080/10131750485310051
Abstract:	Social fictions about the home prevail in postapartheid discourse. Veiled in mythologies of home are the following facts: half of women murdered in contemporary South Africa die at the hands of their intimate partners; the majority of women raped in South Africa are assaulted by nonstrangers. The oppressive realities facing African women in the 'home' are stranger than fiction. Nationalist discourse, however, reproduces 'the 'natural', gendered division of the public as against the private', drawing a curtain between the two spheres and denying the violence of home as it produces fictions of national unity and integrity. As shown in this paper, memoirs by Zazah Khuzwayo ('Never been at home', 2004), Mamphela Ramphele ('A life', 1995) and Zubeida Jaffer ('Our generation', 2003) engage with the facts and fictions about women, the home and the world in postapartheid South Africa. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]