 to our lounge for the fifth Brownback series lecture. And today, we are delighted to welcome Rachel Sandwell of McGill University, who's finishing her PhD in history there. And she will speak of the ANC in exile. I hope Kate knows she has to go to Poland, Women's Transnational Political Work in the African National Congress in exile between 1960 and 1990. So I need to do a few pieces of technical work first. It's the first time that we will have, but not the first, because you used to do this. But we have now a more impressive gimmick here to video Rachel's presentation. And if all goes well, and Rachel likes it and you behave properly, we will put it on our website. But in order to do that, and in order, we hope to have the question period also recorded, we need you to fill one of these forms, right? To say, I agree to be on the video, and I agree to, for my questions, to be voted. First of all, I should ask, is anybody objecting to this? Because if you do, we will stop recording during the question time. OK, so if you're not, then you'll be fine. You've got time. Is everybody got time? You're in this person's office, so you don't? Oh, you do have one? No, you don't. OK? And please, fill what you can. We'll fill the rest. And Rachel, I'll teach you two for this one. Wait, two, three, four, five. No problem. In her class. No problem. Yeah? OK. That's all we see if you have two. Thanks, Melanie. So, OK. Right. So, enough. The other thing is I'm going to tell you about our next meeting, right? So our next Wednesday, same place, same time. And Duka, who's just here, our Banting fellow, soon to be our full-time faculty. And Duka will speak about the adventure of Aqpos, the Mavericks, street stories, humor, and the Nigerian digital imagery. And this will be preceded by Suzanne Clausson's presentation on March the 5th, which is also on South Africa during apartheid, sex, shame, and suicide, posting white heterosexuality. We had already a South African and exiled presentation with many sound strength there. We spoke about their medical work. And we will have a South African day shortly. Melanie, Chris, can you talk about this? Actually, I was going to do two other things. We have two other seminars coming up before the next brown bag, actually, that I should mention. And the Aqpos just haven't gone out yet. But they will be going out very, very soon. The first is actually our visiting scholar from the University of New King, Dr. Lihai Fan. We'll be presenting on China-African relations two weeks from today, same time, same room, same slot. January 22nd. And I'm just, I think, needs to give me a quick blur on the talk. And we'll be sending out a poster very, very soon. Then a week after that, January, which means, I think it's the Wednesday. I think it's one week after that, but I'll have to confirm. We have on January 29th, again, same time slot, same room. But let me confirm it with the poster. We'll have Mark Atprecht and SN9. Mark is the author of a recent book on sexual rights in the same topic. They're going to be doing a book launch of their two books at Octopus Books that day in the evening. But they've also agreed to do a seminar presentation on campus here. And so they'll do a presentation on sexual rights in Africa, again, January 29th in the same time slot. Again, the poster for that will be coming out very, very soon. So two further upcoming talks that will be happening before on this panel. OK. And as usual, for those of you who are not on the, yes, if you could close the door. And what do you, we could ask, do you still have handouts? Yes. We could ask you if somebody shows up to give them the handout of Rachel, or we'll just leave it there. And if you are not on, is anybody not on the list of African studies? You're all on it? OK, good. So I don't have to do this. And it remains then to me to introduce Rachel. The reason why she's coming here beside her good work is that I heard her speak about her former piece of work, which is now, she's now reviewing for submission to the Journal of South African Studies. Is that it? South African Studies? Southern African Studies. Southern African Studies on the sexual politics and the questions of motherhoods in, amongst the ANC and exile, which was, I thought, a fantastic thought. So I thought it would be really nice to have her over. She's almost finished with her PhD at McGill. She studied with Elizabeth Ellsborn and Dr. Ivanka of Concordia, who works on youth politics in Tanzania. And her topic is more generally about the ANC and exile. It started more on questions of reproductive rights, but it's becoming more political as we will hear today. Rachel, before she did history, was an anthropologist in training. She graduated from McGill in Anthropology and worked on questions of development and then did an MA at the LSE in Anthropology and Development before she found the right way in history. She is also an activist. She works and a community worker. She works as a volunteer. And she's done that over the years on AIDS rights. And she's done some of that work in South Africa when she was over there, in London when she was over there, and now in Montreal and social rights. And she's worked, interestingly, on an exhibition on the history of banishment when she was in South Africa in work which is very similar in the way to what Monica Patterson was joining us next year is doing. She's actually the research assistant of Monica these days. And we are delighted to have you here. She'll speak for about 35 minutes, 40 minutes, and then we'll have a long period of reflection and discussion. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much Dominique for the introduction and thanks, everyone, for the invitation. It's great to be here. So as Dominique indicated, this presentation is part of my dissertation work which is ongoing. So I'm very much looking for comments. It's a work in progress and I'm excited to hear questions and feedback from the audience. And if at any point I get too quiet or too fast, just let me know and I'll slow it down. And I have the talk timed at 37 minutes exactly. So we'll see if it goes according to schedule. So I'd like to begin with a quote. It's a long quote, but in its mild chaos and exasperation, I think it provides a fitting introduction to what I'll discuss today. The author is Florence Mopocial, who's pictured on your handout here. And at the time of writing, she was a member of the ANC, delegated to the Women's International Democratic Federation, based then in East Berlin. In May 1969, she wrote this paragraph of complaint to her friend and colleague, Ray Alexander Simons, a South African trade unionist and communist then based in Los Acasambia. Mopocial wrote, and I quote, I suppose you know Ruth is not here, but in the Soviet Union. Somebody phoned me from there. She'd given her phone number and hospital for me to contact her. I tried the whole day. It was impossible for me to get through. I was very disgusted, as I really wanted to discuss some vital matters with her, which I was hoping to discuss with both of you. She had written to me whilst I was in Morogoro, telling me she has left you in tiny in charge of women's affairs. And nothing more. As I knew you were very efficient, I was disappointed that till I got to Morogoro, names of delegates to the World Congress were not forwarded either to the headquarters or WIDF, only when I confronted them didn't so show me a letter from Ruth, suggesting that delegates be decided by conference. As I was the lone woman there, I had to suggest the following. Kate Mulally in Morogoro, Magdalena Resha, Algeria. These are the two tickets the WIDF is providing. They will first attend a seminar in Poland from there to Finland. I suppose you've got invitations to that effect. Then there's Nomava Shangaste, Moscow, who will pay her own costs. Olive Landman not yet confirmed she will pay her own. This very moment I've received telegram with the two names from your end. I hope Kate knows she has to go to Poland. So this hastily written jumble of information paints a vivid picture of the international world of the ANC in the late 1960s. Moposha was writing from Berlin where she was based to Lusaka where her friend was based and where the ANC leadership was based. Moposha had just been to Morogoro, Tanzania. Indeed, she'd been attending the ANC's 1969 Morogoro conference, a key moment in the organization's exile history. But Moposha makes no mention of the conference in the letter. Instead, she seeks Simon's help in finding two ANC representatives for the upcoming Finland conference of the Women's International Democratic Federation, henceforth WIDF, and I have the acronyms because there's a few too many listed on the sheet. So Moposha complains that the ANC wouldn't provide her with names, the Ndzo whom she refers to as Alfred Ndzo, then the secretary general of the ANC. He failed to show her a letter on time, meaning she herself was obliged to make an on the spot decision at the Moro conference about whom to send as she complains. But even once the decision was taken, she found herself struggling to track down the women themselves. Kate Molale and Magdalena Resche, Molale being then based in Tanzania while Resche was in Algeria. So I choose to begin with this quote, confusing as it is, because it conveys both the logistical challenges of running an organization in exile and the breadth of the ANC's reach. In this paragraph alone, we hear of ANC members in Algeria, Tanzania, Zambia, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and eventually Poland and Finland. We also hear of the frustrations incurred as a small number of underfunded people struggled to communicate across distances that even today would be difficult to manage. This quote provides an excellent entry into what I'd like to discuss today. Namely, women's international work within the ANC in exile and its purpose and effect on the ANC. So during its years in exile, the ANC was self-evidently international or indeed transnational. In 1960, the apartheid government had banned the ANC inside South Africa, turning what had been the nascent mass movement and a well-established party organization into an underground illegal organization and an exiled political military force. Leaders inside South Africa were arrested or went underground while others fled into exile. Oh, Artambo took the lead in establishing diplomatic missions in various African countries, as well as in Eastern Bloc countries and notably the UK. The ANC also at this time opened military camps first in Tanzania and later Angola. So by the mid 1960s, the ANC had approximately 5,000 members in exile. But as much as the ANC obviously was in these years based internationally, most accounts of the ANC have focused on its relationship to the South African situation or on its diplomatic maneuvering. Recent scholarship made possible by the publication of new memoirs and the new accessibility of a number of ANC and other governmental sources has begun to examine both the macro and micro-politics of exile, considering how situations in host nations, shifting geopolitical allegiances during this fraught period of Cold War and African national liberation struggles, not to mention South African aggression and tensions within the ANC itself all shaped the course of the organization in exile. Today I wanna push in a related but slightly new direction. In examining the participation of ANC members in what might be termed the conference circuit, a multinational scene composed of national women's organizations, labor organizations, NGOs and national liberation movements, all of whom met at multiple conferences throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. This international community, I argue, provided a key space where the ANC sought recognition and also where it formed its analysis of its own role in South Africa and beyond. This space, I argue, enabled and shaped a particular anti-colonialist reading of the ANC's own struggle, which might truly be termed internationalist. I wanna make the further suggestion that this internationalism was a gendered female in a particular way. As Florence Moposha once suggested, perhaps rather bitterly, full-time politicians are too busy to attend conferences, meaning that it was ANC women who frequently attended these international events. While other members, mostly male, involved in military and secret diplomatic work, traced other, more difficult to follow routes. So these public conferences were diverse in nature. Some were specifically organized by women's organizations, such as the WIDF, which I'll come to in more detail shortly, while others were more gender-neutral, like the Afro-Asian People Solidarity Organization. Throughout the 60s and 70s, ANC members attended dozens of meetings and public events in a startling variety of countries, from Iraq to Canada to Mongolia to Benning. Women from the ANC played a disproportionate role to their numbers within the ANC itself at these international events. So historians and activists have disputed the roles women played within the ANC and in the broader political sphere inside South Africa in the years before the criminalization of resistance in the 1960s. Debates have centered around the question of women's political involvement, asking to what extent their participation was feminist in an autonomous sense, and to what extent their undisputable participation in public political action was formed by or shaped by patriarchal gender ideologies. But few scholars have yet explored what happened to women political activists of this period who then left South Africa and entered exile in the 1960s. Political scientist Shereen Hassan, one of the few to write on this topic, has suggested that women's work in exile was mainly in the sphere of welfare work, that women were expected to devote themselves to childcare and other caretaking work. While this holds true to some extent for the 1980s, when membership in the ANC changed significantly, I argue that the same cannot be said for the 60s and 70s, when women's work seemed to consist mainly in representing the ANC and the South African struggle. So these are the broader issues at stake here. The ANC in the world, and women in the ANC in this international world. For the purpose of my talk today, I'd like to organize these thoughts via discussion of the career of one woman, Florence Mopocio. You have on the handout a brief outline of her life, as well as a map to help us think through at least some of these complex and varied trajectories. I choose Mopocio in part because she's present, but elusive, and therefore attempting challenge. A number of her letters survive in Ray Alexander Simon's files. The ANC's administrative archive also contains many letters and reports by her. But unlike some other senior ANC women, there's no published material in Mopocio. The only biographical material on her that I've located are entries on the ANC's own webpage and on the website of South African history online. I found no interviews with Mopocio. In all likelihood, she died too soon in exile in 1985 before people began to interview the exiles with enthusiasm. She left no personal collection of papers, no private archive to be donated to a public collection. This is something she has in common with other ANC women. There are no published biographies of black women in exile and only two published memoirs by black women. No black women have deposited archival collections anywhere. This isn't part of feature of the exigencies of exile. The conditions of daily life were there so difficult that it's something of a miracle that anything has survived. But the elision of women, black women in particular, from the documentary record is surely worth noting. So following Mopocio provides alluring methodological difficulties. But her life's work also reveals the many possibilities of exile, making her an intriguing subject to pursue. My interest then is less than her personal biography. Instead, my focus is on what her professional life tells us about the ANC's place in a particular international community structured by the Cold War and by a series of overlapping transnational allegiances. So I'll first describe Mopocio's early life and movement into exile, and I'll then discuss two broad periods of her exile life. A period from 1965 to 1970, when she was based with the WIDF in Berlin and her final decade or so in Morogoro, Tanzania. So little is known about Mopocio, particularly prior to exile. The bare bones of her life are that she was born in 1921, exact date unknown, in Alexandra, a township inside Johannesburg. Forced to leave school for financial reasons, she became first a factory worker or first a domestic worker and eventually a factory worker. In the 1950s, so her early 30s, she became involved with the ANC for the first time, it seems, with the defiance campaigns of 1952. These were the ANC's first mass popular actions and they drew many thousands of members, including Mopocio. Following this initial engagement, her political commitment seemed to have grown, leading her to further work with the ANC, as well as involvement in local Alexandra politics and involvement with the growing women's movement. 1960, the beginning of a new decade, marked a sharp increase in state repression and Mopocio was arrested a number of times. She then went underground on the ANC's orders and finally in 1964, hires up in the ANC, ordered her into exile. She went first to Bussaca, then to Dar es Salaam. In 1965, she was deployed, to use the ANC's word, to the WIDF in Berlin. So I want to make the observation here that her deployment is probably indicative of the importance the ANC membership accorded to the WIDF. She was a high-ranking woman and for her to be sent, indicated that they took the sending seriously. So what was this WIDF? Can I ask very quickly, has anyone heard of the WIDF before today? Want me to say it again? WIDF is the Women's International Democratic Federation. So it is a surprisingly elusive organization. I have found in my searches only two historians who have published on it, and I'll be interested to hear from those if you've found more. Surprisingly elusive considering it claims to have represented in 1960 some 200 million women worldwide. What was it? At essence, the WIDF was a Soviet-influenced women's organization. It had its origins in interwar international women's peace activism, organizations such as the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom, the World Congress of Women Against War and Fascism, and the Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee all provided the context for the WIDF's establishment. In Paris in 1945, 850 delegates from 40 different countries attended an international women's Congress, and out of this meeting, the WIDF was born. Eugénie Cartant, a French Communist, was elected its first chair and occupied that position until 1967. So the WIDF's goals, stated goals, were to defend the rights of women and children, sorry, to defend the rights of women and promote their equality, to defend children's rights, to prevent the spread of fascism and defend national independence, and to end war and militarism. And we can talk about those more in the question period maybe. In practice, the WIDF's activities were largely in the zone of information dissemination and the formulation of policy. The organization financed by contributions from members' organizations, which were women's groups worldwide, held large conferences every three years. These conferences gathered hundreds of women from a wide variety of countries and were sites of discussion and debate over issues such as national liberation, disarmament, and imperialism. In between conferences, the WIDF distributed publications about women and sent delegates to events to speak for women worldwide. Their influence was arguably not insignificant. For a number of years, they held consultative status with the United Nations and eventually spurred the UN to celebrate first an international women's year in 1975 and then a decade for women from 1976 to 1985. In these ways, historian Francesca de Hanne has argued, the WIDF actually helped to mainstream women's rights as human rights. And the WIDF also, distinct among international women's organizations at this time, was openly anti-colonial and supported third world liberation movements. So this last point probably made the WIDF particularly appealing for the AMC. Here was an organization that would readily support the AMC even in the tenuous years of the early 1960s. In a report submitted to the AMC, well, Pochel described the WIDF as providing important moral support for the AMC's work. The organization always, she noted, publicly condemned racial discrimination and also sent telegrams to the South African government condemning issues of particular violence. They also, she noted, provided material support when possible. From a posture then, the WIDF was understood to serve as an important ally in the struggle for recognition of the AMC. And here I wanna underline a point that I'll return to. It's clear from the AMC's own documentary record that many within the organization felt themselves to have only tenuous and fragile claims to legitimacy worldwide at this time. In this context, winning affirmation from an international organization mattered. So although it's hard to get a detailed picture of what her daily life entailed, it seems that Moposha's work at the WIDF consisted mainly in spreading information about the South African struggle in WIDF publications and the public events. She was also, it seems, responsible for the Africa desk of the WIDF, sending their materials to affiliates throughout the continent. So Moposha also traveled extensively in this period, both in her role as WIDF member and as an AMC member. In most cases, it seems probable that the WIDF funded the bill for travel. In 1968, she wrote to Ray Simons to let her know she'd be traveling to Mogadishu for a German Friends of Africa conference. She hoped she would also visit friends in Lusaka and Dar Salaam on this trip. Early in 1969, she traveled to Morogoro, Tanzania for the AMC's Morogoro Conference. In July 69, she traveled to Sierra Leone, again for a German Friends of Africa conference. She also traveled within the Soviet Union and East Germany. Although I found scant information on the content of these meetings and conferences, it seems probable that they were sites for Moposha to communicate news of the AMC's struggles and its particular analyses of the South African situation. Moposha's private letters from this period reveal anxiety about the perceptions of the AMC, although whose perceptions she doesn't actually specify. So in 1967, Unconto Vesisue, the armed wing of the AMC, launched its first military action in exile, invading then Rhodesia along with Zimbabwe liberation fighters. Known as the Wanky Campaign, this military effort is now widely viewed as a failure. It certainly had no direct military or strategic benefit, and indeed resulted in the deaths and arrests of a number of MK cadres. However, at the time, the AMC publicized and celebrated the campaign heavily in its international publications, the Shaba. But Moposha reflected a more wistful version of the celebration when she wrote to Ray Simons. And I quote, she wrote, our boys are pushing forward. Very soon we'll be respected like the heroic Vietnamese. I wish I was younger to share in the hazards. I'd really like to get back for all that has been done to our people. I die a happy death. Later in the same letter, she wrote, I know conditions are not too favorable to foreign country. All the same, we have to do the best to contribute to our struggle. The sooner we have a Vietnam, the better. Our patience is exhausted. So Moposha here communicates a sense of fatigue and a need for rejuvenation for the AMC. She also underscores the international dimension of the AMC's position, explicitly comparing their struggle to that of the Vietnamese. And suggesting that the AMC needed to be respected as the Vietnamese were at this time. And it's ironic, I think, to pause and recall that it's the Vietnamese struggle today that's largely forgotten while the AMC's struggle years are celebrated, when they'd only compare the attention given last year to General Vo and Nguyen Gap's death versus Nelson Mandela's death two months later. So the same anxiety over international respect for the AMC persisted for Moposha. In 1968, she wrote again to Simons, requesting information on the Zambian commemoration of South African Women's Day. She wrote to Simons, it's good for the world to know that even in exile, we're doing something to contribute to our struggle. She also continued to manage AMC attendance at WIDF conferences and expressed concern that a diversity of women should attend. Writing to Simons in 1970, Moposha listed several names of attendees and remarked that these choices were made, quote, as an attempt to get new women involved and not have the same people all the time. It gives the impression of non-existence of an organization, quote. Moposha then seems to have viewed her work representing the AMC as significant, but also uncertain. In other words, the position of the AMC was not for her either secure or proven. Both Moposha's activities, essentially publicizing the AMC, and her anxieties along with her very presence at the WIDF, underlining importance that the AMC leadership placed on this international work. After Moposha left the WIDF, she was replaced and the AMC continued to send high-ranking personnel to the organization throughout its exile period. So I'll move now to the next phase of Moposha's career, which were her years in Morogoro, Tanzania. And Morogoro, sadly, is not pictured on the map, but it is about 170 kilometers inland from Dar es Salaam, which is pictured. So in 1970, Moposha returned to Africa, specifically to Morogoro. Up until the late 1970s, only a few hundred AMC members were based there, but by 1985, there were 5,000 members, or roughly 5,000 AMC people there. Residing in a community that had been granted to the AMC by the Tanzanian president, and it was a community set slightly apart from the Tanzanian town. Writing to Ray Simons in 1969, Moposha suggested with perhaps unintended brusqueness, I intend on going back to Africa towards the end of the year. I feel I've done my bit. Somebody else should come and represent you people. By 1970, she was settling in to Morogoro, where she was to take a leading role in the AMC women's section there. The 1970s were a busy decade for Moposha. She traveled extensively, representing both the women's section of the AMC and the AMC itself. By the end of the decade, she was also heavily involved in establishing childcare for the growing numbers of children being born in exile. She also gained power within the AMC. In 1975, she was appointed to the National Executive Committee, the AMC's highest governing authority. She remained in the position and was reelected to it in 1985, shortly before her death. She was one of only two or three women on the NEC during these years, as far as I know. The correlation of her ongoing travel and her rise to power within the AMC is, I argue, significant. That someone of her prominence in the organization was expected to attend these events underlines the importance that the leadership accorded them. Moposha herself set out a clear analysis of the purpose of this international work. Writing in an official report on the activities of the AMC women's secretariat from 72 to 73, Moposha stated that the responsibilities of the women's secretariat included, quote, mobilize international moral and material support, initiate and maintain relationships with international, continental, national organizations and individuals, by prompt, friendly, informal acknowledgement of correspondence of any kind and any kind of support demonstrated, i.e. moral, material, in forms of goods or money set. Demonstrate our solidarity with peace-loving women of the world with means at our disposal as our struggle cannot be divorced from the international scene. So two key ideas stand out from the statement of mandate. First, that the AMC needed both moral and material support. And secondly, that the AMC women's experience was intrinsically linked to broader contestations, obliging the AMC to act in solidarity with other movements worldwide. And Moposha's own trajectories continued to embody her commitments to promoting the AMC internationally. In 1972, she attended the All-Africa Women's Conference in Tanzania. She attended WIDF meetings in Cuba and Bulgaria and Afro-Asian People Solidarity Organization meetings in Baghdad and Benet, to which she traveled via Moscow. She also traveled to Baputlan-Lisaka on AMC business and to the Soviet Union. It's worth noting that Moposha was not the only AMC women's representative traveling widely in these years. In the 1973 report on the women's secretariat activities, Moposha described the following travels for the period of 72 to 73 alone. Two AMC women's reps traveled to Mongolia for an Opswell conference. AMC representatives also traveled on invitation to Sweden, India, the Congo, Cameroon, and Somalia. The same report includes summary descriptions of the activities of AMC women's stationed in Algeria, Moscow, India, and the GDR. Moposha flagged the Somalian invitation is particularly important as it was, quote, the first invitation of its kind on the governmental level. The women's secretariat, she noted, had sent a letter of gratitude to the head of state and Somali women. Additionally, she observed that the delegation to Cameroon had led to, quote, the head of state lashing out at South Africa's racial policies, end quote. Across the diversity of settings, AMC women were working to put forward the AMC's own agenda, positioning themselves as the sole legitimate representatives of the South African immigration struggle and working to make a strong case against apartheid. In addition, Moposha at this time found herself largely responsible for producing the publication, The Voice of Women, commonly referred to as VAL. This publication was produced erratically and sporadically from the early 1970s until the late 1980s, usually from Morogoro. The publication aimed to publicize the situation inside South Africa, as well as the work being done in exile. And it also noted and celebrated women's struggles worldwide. In her letters to Ray Simons, Moposha frequently complained about the struggles she faced in producing VAL. In 1972, she just suggested that, quote, in fact, VAL has contributed to my failing health. Every time it has to be out, we work against time, which means doing overwork at times until the early hours of the morning and no Sunday off, end quote. Just when she felt the paper had begun to take off internationally, they lost personnel. The ANC administration redeployed workers away from Morogoro. In reports Moposha made to ANC headquarters during this period, she frequently detailed her frustration with the chronic underfunding of VAL, its lack of resources even so basic as printers ink and typewriters, and the lack of article submissions received. Throughout these years of laboring to produce VAL, Moposha iterated a strong sense of the political importance of the paper for communicating the South African women's situation to a worldwide audience, and ideally to an audience inside South Africa as well. But in addition to this work of traveling and publishing materials to promote the ANC's own cause, I want to look at the ANC's interests in supporting other political movements and to consider the implications of the support. Frequently, ANC publications listed their support for various groups worldwide, such as the Vietnamese people, the North Korean people, Chilean women, Palestinian fighters, and more. But one example of these statements of solidarity stands out, and I was truly delighted to find this. In December 1970, Moposha wrote to one Angela Davis in detention in New York City. The letter included in a book Angela Davis published on her release is brief and worth quoting at length. Moposha wrote, dear Angela, we have learned through the publications of the Women's International Democratic Federation with utter disgust the news of your arrest. The oppressed and fighting women of South Africa who have been and still are victims of racial oppression perpetrated by a clique of white racists have everything in common with you and the just struggle of your people against racism and all the unjust deeds that go with it. We admire your courage, self-sacrifice, and determination to free the lot of your expressed and your oppressed and exploited population faced with a ruthless enemy which claims to be the most developed militarily, economically, culturally, and otherwise, yet its own Afro-Asian citizen suffer from want of everything necessary for nature's human development. We are proud and inspired to have a young woman of your caliber. We assure you, we assure you, and all peace fighters in your country are full support for your demands, being aware that no peace can be achieved without freedom. We demand from those responsible for your arrest your immediate and unconditional release together with all your colleagues languishing in prison for the same ideals. Victory in your lifetime, your sisters in the struggle, Florence Wopocio. So three things of note in this letter, I think. First of all, the analysis is not framed in terms of shared identity or civil rights struggle. Instead, the letters language is, I would argue, distinctly anti-imperialist. The interesting term Afro-Asian underscores this. It's unexpected in the text. It's not a term that Angela Davis herself would necessarily use. But in using it, Wopocio draws a link between Davis's work and international movements, such as the Afro-Asian People Solidarity Organization, with which Wopocio was involved. Secondly, the letter draws an explicit link between the struggles faced by black Americans and black South Africans. With Wopocio noting that the women of South Africa have everything in common with you and the just struggle of your people against racism. Thirdly, the letter articulates a WIDF style understanding of peace. Peace as triumphing over imperialism and colonialism, which cannot be achieved without freedom. Peace, in this case, is entirely continent with armed struggle. Wopocio here positions the ANC and African-American, or Afro-Asian, activists as participating in a shared struggle against US imperialism, with not just parallel but arguably the same goals. Wopocio mentioned this letter in a report she wrote to the ANC headquarters. In her account, Wopocio perhaps overstated the ANC's actual contribution to Angela Davis's freedom when she wrote, quote, we played no small role in contributing to a release by demonstrating our moral support with her and the entire black oppressed population in the USA, guided by the activities of the WIDF. Occasionally, we sent letters of protest, including a signed petition to the Nixon administration and copies to her with an accompanying letter assuring her of our support, quote. So while the influence of the ANC and the US justice system or on the Nixon administration may be less than they supposed, I would argue that this letter is nevertheless important. The ANC women's secretariat engagement with the plight of Angela Davis via the medium of the WIDF suggests that their international work, their participation in world gatherings of women, helped form their analysis of precisely the nonspecificity of the South African situation. At least from Wopocio and other women in exile, the struggle against apartheid was understood as deeply connected to broader struggles against imperialism. So moving now to the final years, Wopocio's last years were spent in Morogoro and she continued to edit and produce vow and complain about the challenges this entailed. Increasingly in the years following the 76 student uprisings, she took responsibility for providing care for the new members of the ANC. Her work seems to have shifted from international conference attendance to managing education and childcare programs for the ANC, something I discuss in greater detail elsewhere. She also complained more and more frequently of ill health in these years. She tells Ray Simons she was diagnosed with an ulcer and at one point was sent on short notice to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. In 1985, she was reelected to the NEC at the national conference in Cabway, but shortly after on South African Women's Day, August night 1985, she passed away age 64 and no cause of death is recorded. So in conclusion, we've seen Wopocio's career unfold, a career which began in factory and domestic work, then led her into political organization, then to persecution and arrest, and finally perhaps unexpectedly to the life of an international diplomat. She visited a diverse array of countries and presented it countless conferences and public events, probably addressing in total thousands of people over the two decades of her international career. Wopocio's career, her travels, her writing, her frustrations and her power within the ANC points to the centrality of international work for the ANC in exile. We remember Wopocio's comment, full-time politicians don't have time for conferences, but looking at her life's work and her dedication to it, the process of conferencing, the genre of international diplomacy, we see Wopocio placing emphasis on the importance of this very international action. And equally, it appears that ANC also prioritized this form of diplomatic work throughout this period. So Wopocio's life provides new insight into the ANC's international work, repositioning women's work much closer to the center of the ANC's preoccupations in exile. But Wopocio's trajectory also points to the international as a site of formation for ANC members' political thought, their analyses of their own place within the ANC and the ANC's place in the world. Following the contours of Wopocio's life gives us access to an international community that's easily forgotten. International solidarity conferences gathering together women from the third world to Soviet bloc and the West, guided by multiple associations and affiliations with multiple goals. In making this link, or in making this, I aim to link work on the ANC with a growing body of work on black internationalism. I'm thinking here of the work of Carol Boyce Davies and Eric McDuffie in US and Caribbean black communist women, Cheryl Higashita's work on black women's writing, and in a different way of Antoinette Burton and Chris Lee's work on Cold War Cultures. In making this link academically, I'm pointing out that for these women of the ANC in the 1960s and 1970s, their work was, in their own perspective, already actually connected to a whole set of wider struggles. Thank you. Thank you very much. For you, who has just arrived, we're videotaping the thing, and we've asked everybody if it was fine to take the questions. It's fine, right? And let's give you a form to finish this. Okay, so the way the question and discussion time works is that I'll monitor this, so you, and we'll take questions and contributions, and please identify yourself before you speak, especially if you need this form, but also because Rachel doesn't know most of us, so she knows where you're coming from, so you can tell your department and what you're doing, and maybe what are your topics of interest. Okay, so, yes, Suzanne? My name is Suzanne Flasso, I'm in the history department here at Carleton. Needless to say, but I'm gonna say it anyway, it's so wonderful to see a scholar writing about women in African history, modern African history, and the colonial history. I just taught a course called African Women Colonialism, and the students in their presentations just got so annoyed by the absence of women in the historical record. They started doing presentations on women I've never heard of, and we're doing amazing things in Nigeria and the countries I don't know much about, so it's great to hear about this woman who I've never heard of, Makocho. There wasn't a feminist kind of dimension to your talk, so I'm just, I have so many questions, but how can I sort of focus this? The bit she quote are very focused on anti-racism, anti-colonialism. What about patriarchy and sexism? Was that part of her analysis or work? Obviously she was organizing childcare, but I don't know what to make of that. And how could, what kind of connections did she continue to have with actual South Africans? I mean, to be able to decade speak on behalf of South African women, what did she know of what life was like with South African women? Her life is so obviously different, and what about the personal and the political? I mean, this kind of life she had, did she have family, was she gay? Like, what do we know of her personally that made this kind of life possible? And I suppose, lastly, were there many like her? Were there other women who spent decades representing the ANC in building international links? Or is she an unusual example of an activist South African woman? That's, I'll stop there. Only four questions. I'm told I have more, I'm being very good. Stop with your four. Okay, so should I answer that and then go ahead? Yeah, okay, so thank you. Those are all fabulous questions, and they're all, yeah, they're all relating to topics that I'm so interested in, so thank you for posting them. I'll go in order. So what about feminism, patriarchy, sexism? I'm so interested in this question. It's something that's hugely debated, as you know, in the South African scholarship, especially scholars looking at this 50s period, but very few people have yet looked at what was the content of these debates in exile. And what's tended, I think, what's often been said, typical line is that in exile women's political, women's political liberation was subordinated to national liberation, right? National liberation, the national struggle was seen to come first. I am trying to make an argument, and it's hazy due to my lack of expertise with socialist theory, really, with the theory of the Soviet Union. I am interested in talking about how these women, and I'll come to how many there were, but how these women inside the agency in exile didn't just have this reductive theory of, oh, we've gotta just give ourselves up for the national struggle. They were in women's organizations, right? So they must have been developing a new analysis. Yeah, and I think they were, although, and this is why I'm very interested in the WIDF, I think it wasn't an analysis formed in a lot of ways, essentially, by Soviet thought. So essentially, by Soviet women's work, and I really wanna go and read this in more depth, there's a fascinating quote by another A&C woman, Ruth Lompati, who was more prominent than Florent Lompati, although spelled not very well known, and Ruth Lompati also spent a number of years in the Soviet Union, or in East Berlin, and also in the Soviet Union, she trained there, and there's a great quote where she's interviewed, she's actually interviewed unlike Florent Lompati, and someone says, you know what, about women, and she said, look, you know, a lot of people ask me about the role of women. She said, as a woman, every time, for sure, I've encountered sort of oppression and sexism, and every time I've encountered it, I've fought against it, but for me, women cannot be free until our people are free. So it is, but yeah, and it's interesting, I find it, it's interesting, because it's, yeah, nationalist argument in dialogue with the Soviet sort of focused or Soviet-oriented thinking of the WIDF more broadly. So there's a whole body of thought that I'm actually convinced is really interesting to explore there, because for sure, these women were discussing it, although it doesn't form a large part of their personal correspondence, which is also interesting. The correspondence mostly is about national struggle, but that leads me to another question that you asked, what about the personal and political, the one thing that I simply left out of this presentation for lack of time, and it was a bit almost shady for me to do so, because a lot of her letters actually talk about her efforts to get in touch with her daughter, whom she had to leave behind until I forget. Yeah, and this was the case for many women who went into exile in this early period, and actually later too, it's sort of a constant theme of these women writing from exile, remembering their experiences in exile, is remembering the experience of leaving behind their children, whether they knew it was gonna be forever, as in Mapocho's case it was, or whether they thought it was just gonna be a few years, some women succeeded in bringing out their children. But yeah, a lot of her earlier letters to Ray Simons, and they're really painful to read, are about her efforts to reconnect with her daughter. The age of the daughter isn't given, and the daughter was left with her sister, and she has frequent problems communicating with her sister, which again is understandable, writing someone receiving letters from abroad would be subject to violent targeting, so she could put her child in danger even by writing. But other than that personal element of the child, basically nothing personal comes through, no mention really of friendships in great depth, no other personal accounts. So that is itself also interesting, sort of absence of the personal. In terms of connections with South Africa, the ANC made a big effort kind of more broadly to keep learning about the situation inside. Ray Simons, who she's writing to is I think kind of an important vector for this. Ray Simons could more easily receive mail and correspondence and visitors from South Africa, so they made an effort to stay in touch with the South African situations. They were so out of touch with so much. Exactly. She began as a woman. I mean, Melissa's doing work finding about how the women's section was against Epiprovera, not really understanding how black women wanted that. I mean, that was a very desirable form of contraception within South Africa. So this constant speaking on behalf of women, I mean, how much was she in touch with, I suppose, what's going on on the ground? Personally, I think not, I mean, I think she personally was not very much in touch. And this is the major critique of the XL ANC and it's a good one, right? Especially, yeah, especially in the 80s when you see kind of mass movement sticking off, when you see the rebirth of the women's movement inside South Africa with the Nathalia Organization of Women and the Federation of South African Women kind of limps on, but arguably not doing much until the 80s. So I would say that, yeah, she was out of touch. And what's interesting for me is to consider, so there's this out of touch that's sort of holding up that the South African struggle as their way to be legitimate on this world scene. But in a lot of ways, her understandings were being shaped by this internationalism, which is interesting, right? The critique of their distance is really important, but it also seems interesting to me to turn to look at what else they were learning from in the absence of strong connections in Africa. Thank you. I just had to, you should say when you were... Oh, sorry, I'm Melissa Armstrong. I'm a PhD student in history here, and I'm doing work on the ANC in XL specifically. I had two questions. The first was, you were talking about anxiety internationally, and I was wondering if that was based on them wanting to be the primary liberation movement and the way of a competition from the PAC or from other movements. And does this anxiety decrease over time? Does it just disappear from the letters as the ANC is becoming more established as the primary liberation movement? And then the second is, I find her story and her biography sort of interesting in that she goes from a really international focus or a really international to slowly moving down to more of a more focused and more agoral, towards the organization. And in some of the wild research, I find it going the opposite direction where there's a lot of kind of insular nationalist movement within the organization, and then it goes more international as it goes forward, looking at legitimacy worldwide, trying to establish itself in South Africa. So it goes from inwards to outward. So I find her biography really interesting since the opposite. So if you could just comment on that as well. Yeah, those are two great questions. Thank you. So the question about anxiety with the ANC being the sole legitimate struggle is key. The fact that the PAC is on the handout as an acronym, but I don't mention it, is an indication that I was gonna talk about it in the talk and asked it. The PAC and anxieties about the ANC's competition with the PAC. The PAC was the alternate, was the other representative of the South African struggle in exile. Arguably in the 50s, it was a more popular movement inside South Africa. Arguably, Robert Sabukoi was better known than Nelson Mandela. In exile, the PAC never did very well. They limped along, but a lot of African countries were more prone to supporting the PAC because the ANC was perceived as being too closely linked to white communists. So throughout, and I'm sure you've seen this in looking at the ANC files, throughout the ANC files, there's all these complaints and going on and on about the PAC saying, well, we did very well at the conference. These two PAC people tried to show up and disrupt the proceedings, we were able to suppress them, come on. But it's true, there was this real anxiety about proving not just that there was a problem in South Africa, which was something that was a case that needed to be made in the 60s and 70s, but that the ANC was the one who spoke for the people. And so definitely that anxiety is there. Does it decrease in her letters? I would say not that much. And other people's letters sort of, but it's sort of into the 80s later than I would have thought an ongoing way later than we remember the PAC doing anything next time. Yeah, the question about her trajectory and what you say you see in the sort of moving outwards, that's really interesting. It's really neat. I think that I don't have yet the evidence to say this. I think what happened is a shift from what I would call Soviet internationalism. So a deliberate policy of thinking about the world in a different way and an internationalist way shifted in the 1980s. First of all, with the ANC being recognized and receiving a lot of legitimacy with the rise of the anti-apartheid movement in the West. So we see a shift in the polls of influence, right? Who they're mostly trying to appeal to here is other national liberation movements and Eastern Bloc countries. In the 80s, we see a shift towards the West, towards Western legitimacy, Western anti-apartheid movements and the rise of NGO work and that kind of international work, which is similar but different in orientation to the sort of internationalism of the 60s and 70s. So I think that's a big prescription of the role of women. Wondering how you negotiate what seems to be a tension in the war, which is essentially being a biography of looking at ways this speaks to ANC and exile. And then the presentation, you show some degree of dependence on the epistolary exchanges, the nationalism and all of that. I think that there is a value for, I really don't know the rest of the world, but trying to speak more to how you negotiate this tension. Because right now, I see a vast area, say, in Nigeria, with the ongoing letters amongst Nigeria's Heads of State and so on and so forth, that the epistolary style seems to be, especially in societies where there is much archiving, as one of those elusive systems of communication that needs to be tracked. I know you're walking more in history, but I'm interested in how you mine this very delicate relationship between dominantly biographic work and either its relatedness or otherwise with the activities of all the history of ANC. For me, I think that the biography of this one will make a great work and will certainly speak to... Okay, those are a really great set of comments and questions, thank you. It's something I'm really thinking about. I actually had a moment just before beginning the talk where I looked at this picture of her and thought, I'm talking about this woman and it's a huge burden of responsibility, actually, to speak about this woman's life and it's something that I have scrupulously avoided until very recently. My other work, actually, my supervisors kept having to push me to say, name these people, follow these people, don't just reduce to kind of anonymous interlocutors. So this move to using biography as a way to see into the ANC in exile is new to me and I'm still thinking out the implications of it. I think in using the term career, I'm sort of hastily referencing the work of Antoinette Burton on Santa Ramarao. I don't know if you've read this book, but it's very interesting and I'm sort of inspired by it. So Antoinette Burton writes this book, forget the title, anyway, Santa Ramarao and I think it's called The Post-Colonial Trajectories of Santa Ramarao and it's about this Indian or this woman from India who grew up largely in US diplomatic circles in the sort of 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and it became a novelist, traveled internationally, was a journalist, sort of represented India to the Americans. And so Antoinette Burton writes this amazing book about her and says, okay, my focus here is on her career, is on trying to trace her movements as a political figure but not on the personal side of biography. So I'm sort of trying to do something like that, but on the other hand, the allure of the personal is really huge, her letters are so vivid they convey so much and her voice is really irresistible to me. So the question of yeah, how to deal with that and how to methodologically reconcile it is interesting what I want to do. I shouldn't put this on record, but what I want to do for the chapter is to try to write this crazy multi-strand biography of four prominent ANC women who were like Mofocial who shared many of her concerns, who had similar experiences of kind of international work and try to braid these women's lives together to capture both what I would argue is their exceptionality. These were a small group of women, they were very exceptional, but they show us something, they show us a field of possibility but how to do that while also respecting their integrity not as references or not as mere signposts, but as people with complex lives is a great question. Better run for the Photology and Ethnology after this. Yeah, thanks for the talk. Very interesting and then some more questions to some of which just popped out. Just, and perhaps it's inevitable, we have a lot of biographical questions, but the one is, do you have a sense of how she emerged as a leadership position in the 50s? From helping to organize as a faculty worker in the Jollberg area, any sense of that trajectory? And then the question about when she went to Tanzania, did she more or less have ties with WIDF? Did she, was it because she, in the kind of ANC area, she was just really tied to ANC issues or was she connected all to Tanzania and the women's branch of TANU or whatever it may have changed its name by then to the ruling party in Tanzania or the other organizations? Just curious of how those networks either continued or got severed and she started to focus on the other things potentially. Yeah, okay, those are great questions. Thank you. So how did she rise to this, what I would argue, as a level of some political prominence? Is a really neat question and I have absolutely no real information about it, but I can read through the lines. What seems to be the case is that, and this is just from actually the ANC biography, is she on their website, she was first involved in the 30s in the Defiance Campaign. She did not, and this is interesting, she did not enter political activism in Johannesburg through trade unions. So this marks her out, a lot of people at ANC in exile got involved through trade unions. So in other words, one could say, through communist party involvement frequently. She doesn't seem to have been whether or not she was later a member of the communist party, I don't know. It's hard to tell, I think, my bet would be not, but it's hard to tell. But what seems to have happened is, so she was involved with the Defiance Campaigns. She was then involved with the Alexandra Basgoykat, which was in 57, which was a big, very significant political moment, but significant also for Alexandra local politics. So this involvement in the local politics there, I think is quite interesting. She was also involved with the Federation of South African Women, which is a really fascinating organization that I don't know nearly enough about. No problem. But my bet is that her higher up status was actually because of who she knew in Alexandra. So a few prominent ANC organizers, namely Alfred So and Thomas and Kobe, both of whom were really prominent in exile, were from Alexandra. So my bet just reading through the lines is that she knew them in that personal connection of, we're talking about a very small bit of Johannesburg. So the personal connection of this small part of Johannesburg led her to this position of exile prominence. Did she get ties with the WIDF? No, she kept in touch with them by writing, and she kept being pretty involved, even once in Morrogaro with China Organized, who went to the WIDF and in pressuring Ray Simons to keep in touch with the new people who were sent to the WIDF. Ray Simons, I think was actually quite closely connected to the WIDF because of her strong ties to the Soviet Union, I would say. And lastly, the Morrogaro scene, other kind of women's organizations there, that I know less about, and it's something that people have asked me about other parts of my work, and it's an interesting question. My sense just from reading absences is that the ANC was less in touch with women's organizations, or indeed with politics and Tanzania at all, than we would expect. And I'm not. There's been some mistakes who basically tied in the pre-democats in the 60s, and he was saying completely out of touch with what was happening with South Africa and I know in Tanzania, and it was really focused on... And in the Azoom. Exactly, yeah, it really did focus on... Yeah, if I were gonna guess, I would say that the ANC kept pretty separate from Tanzanian authorities and only hires up in the ANC, like really, like, Artamba. In part, maybe, because there was this awkward thing where the PAC got kicked out of Tanzania for the coup-é-chou, yeah. So, there might have been some tensions there that are just either scraped out of the files or never got written in. But it's an interesting question. I had a question. She met with Algerian people, with Vietnamese people, Cuban people now. For the, it might be difficult to answer, but do you see some parallels with women's section of liberation movements elsewhere? Or is there anything to learn from you of the similar histories of these countries that have membership in the WID? I think there is, and I don't... I'm sort of catching up to speed on it very quickly. In the last four months, I've been trying to hastily learn all this sort of Cold War, broader Cold War history, and I'm still catching up. The very phenomenon of a women's section is really interesting to me, and the fact that the ANC had one, and then so did all these other national liberation movements, I find interesting in the letter I flag where she writes, okay, we wrote to the Somalian head of state and the Somali women. This differentiation of these two categories is very interesting to me, and the fact that there was in these movements a organizationally defined separate unit with its own mandate that was seen as connected to the liberation struggle, but having its own precise kind of terrain is very interesting. And they clearly felt, and they're actually meant to make a list of it, their correspondence, details, communication with women's movements around the world. But the specificities, I'm not sure, but it does seem like they were interested in, at least building some kind of ties with women in these other sort of women's sections. Because in the work of Monica Patterson on childhood politics and internationalism, there is this idea also, this is part of a possible answer, there is this idea that if you package A and C demands under childhood demands, they would be better received at the UN because it's, you know, we go to the International Year of the Child and all that, but also in the amongst, you could see the global community of people who are likely to give money or do some political pressure with their own government. Is there any sense that, you know, presenting yourself as women instead of A and C helps, and that helps to bolster that section of the... Yes, yeah, and I really, I think it's a really interesting point. I think absolutely the women's secretariat was put forward as the face of the A and C to raise public support, international support. And I really got struck by this when I started reading the Sushaba, the A and C's publication. So even much before there was even a women's section, the women's section was officially established in 69, but even in the 60s, Sushaba was publishing big front-pagey stories about women in South Africa, women's experiences, women political leaders. I said, oh, this is interesting, but of course it's as you say that it's, or I would argue that it's as you say, it's much more palatable, or as Monica's saying about childhood equally, it was much more palatable to put women forward, to say here are women victims, so here's the sort of horrible situation of women under apartheid, here's strong women political leaders, and to use women as a way to make the A and C a more sympathetic character. And this is precisely why I wanna sort of push back against maybe more militaristic or masculinist readings of the A and C in Excel to say like, actually if they were so concerned about getting this international support, which was vital, I mean, which made the crucial difference to the A and C's eventual success such as it was, the role of women was actually very important for the organization, it was not just marginal, or it was not just sort of insignificant, it was actually quite central. I had another one, you know, Suzanne asked you about feminism in her discourse. They mentioned, she mentioned a lot of peace, and you didn't stop too much on peace, and I was wondering, is the peace thing more, does it belong more to women or to the women's section, or are they, is it widespread across the A and C language? And if not, is it easier to speak about peace when you're a non-militaristic organization, you know, when you are the women's branch of a thing which has a militaristic, more violent part, can you talk about that? Yeah, this is a great question. So the question about the word peace, where it belongs, and what it means, I think is hugely interesting. I read it now as a sort of a word with a double meaning that probably even at the time had a double meaning, but I think certainly now if we don't read with a tentativeness to the historical period, we misread. I think they meant peace, as she says in that amazing letter to Angela Davis, no peace without freedom. So peace was meant as the attainment of victory against imperialism, peace was meant as national liberation struggles succeeding, peace was meant as anti-colonial action. So it is a, it is not a peaceable notion of peace. It's a powerful or I don't know, full-fisted, whatever, aggressive notion of peace. What? I want you to peace. Yeah, yeah, and so, and I think in that sense, they're very much inspired by the WIDF, by analyses from the WIDF. Was the word peace used the same in other ANC publications? It's a good question I should refer to Sashaba more carefully. I suspect that it probably was easier for women to be using this word, for women to foreground peace as a goal, to say what women and children need is peace, but this was the WIDF's really strong line. Western feminist organizations are inadequate because they don't condemn imperialist violence. And as another note of interest, something that didn't make it on the handout, but I should have just put it on. I didn't have time to talk about it. In 1978, apparently, Flores Mofocio underwent military training in Zambia and Lusaka. Though it would have been very brief and cursory. It's only mentioned in Ray Alexander Simon's book that in 1978, Ray Simons and Flores Mofocio and some other women went to a facility just outside of Lusaka, did a day's worth of training course, learned how to hire a gun and swore the MK oath and became the women's battalion, which is really interesting because neither of them, I mean, they both would have been in their 40s or their 50s at that point. So you think this is mostly symbolic, I can't imagine either of them would have actually carried a gun, although there were many MK women who were fully military trained and did carry on military actions. But it's an interesting, unexpected piece in Mofocio's life. For the presentation, I have about, oh, sorry, my name is Haifeng from Beijing. I want to ask you about your idea, original idea, why you come across this question and then about, if you want to talk about the history of South Africa, why you select women's role as your topic and why you select this lady, specifically, because there might be other also prominent ladies as our exile also contributes to this part of history. So why is she? And then I rather have to say general level, in China, we also have some people in Canada that select South African history of your topic, but they may talk in a macro level issues such as someone focus on, I just recently helped one of his beauty candidate, just the guy who had him about his topic. He actually want to talk about the insane role about South Africans pull out from a common wealth. So, of course, he compared with human candidates, Joe and then other colonies, exile colonies, Joe. And then this is because according to Chinese, how to say, research focus, now more important lady need to understand the macro level things, specifically national Joe. And for you to talk about women, why start, could you tell us a little bit about this kind of a background you share for your topic. And then also, I really feel interested with what you kind of said about the methodology because what kind of things, because you didn't touch upon very in detail about your method or where you find your resources except for the biographies or the kind of letters she used and what else. Okay, thank you, that's a lot of questions. Let me see how to approach them. So the question, I feel like I can sense two questions. One is why am I interested in women in the National Liberation Movement or women in the ANC? And number two, what's the significance or purpose of studying the sort of particularity instead of the more macro level? So maybe I'll start with the significance. I think, and it's especially in this sort of international work, well actually no, in the other sections of what I do too, I think looking at what women do in the ANC I think can teach us a lot about the politics of being inside the ANC. In a lot of ways, my major interest is asking what it meant to be a member of the ANC throughout this period. And I came to women secondarily in a way. I came to women through reading the files of the ANC and seeing how often women or questions of gender, so the sexuality and the policing of sexuality, the policing of gender, how much that mattered. And then looking at this astonishing network of international travel, it really took me by surprise and it's sort of why I gave so many catalogs of all the places these women went. I think it's unexpected and so in looking at these questions, the policing of gender inside the ANC and then the movements of women associated with the ANC, I think we see the organization in a different way. I think we see it in a way that maybe calls into question or complicates readings that have just looked at the sort of political or military strategy of the ANC. I think particularly looking at gender and women in the ANC lets us see how vulnerable the organization felt and also how discontinuous it was. I think this work interests me because it breaks up the ANC. And scholars talk about this in the right to say that one of the amazing strengths of the ANC is what a diverse, weird, almost mix of people the ANC has been and looking at this work really in the tensions actually. So the complaints against the administration, the sort of disaggregation inside the ANC I think is quite useful. And maybe that also answers why I got to it. Methodologically, and this leads also again back to the same question in my methodologically, I've looked a lot at the ANC's own administrative archive. This has the unique feature of consisting largely of material on women. And this is for the interesting reason as actually Sherin Hassel pointed out to me that material on women was for the ANC probably considered to be non-provocative. So the ANC, people most recently, Stephen Ellis and the male guardian last week have condemned the ANC for stripping its records, for taking out a lot of the material. So I alluded to these sort of male, diplomatic, military, strategic guys who trace different routes, impossible. I mean, people like Stephen Ellis, people with extensive connections and personal sort of knowledge of these people can follow them but the actual files are gone. But these files about the women remain. So what I'm trying to do methodologically is use these files of the women's section because those are left almost entirely but not completely intact to really do what I would call an ethnography of the organization in Excel to really look at the everyday life. So yeah. And why is she? Why her? That's a great question. There were sort of three women that I could have picked for this talk. There's four women that I have sufficient correspondence. So there's four women whose correspondence is collected by Ray Simons. So I have enough letters that I can get a sense of them. Ruth Mumpati would have been more obvious. She was more high profile. There's a few interviews with her. So I picked Vipocho because she was harder and also because they're therefore shorter. Ruth Mumpati's life would take a lot more time. That's why. There's time for maybe one more question or comment. Let me say you. Yeah, I just had a comment on the U.S. that talks about just image of women. I think it's interesting because internally from what I was reading, the women's section was really promoting women to be fighters, carry guns, to not necessarily be peaceful, to project this very alternate image. And so it would be interesting. I don't know from those conferences if you were able to see this international image or trying to produce, be different from what they're trying to do internally because they're definitely more promoting women with guns, like fighters. Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think it gets at this real question about the meaning of peace internationally and also why the WIDF didn't get along so well with Western feminist groups. Because I think my sense isn't, again, it's hard to say. My sense is that you could go to a WIDF meeting and hand out your pamphlet as the ANSI basically had of a woman with a baby tie to her back and an AK to her hands, as they were fighting for peace. And that worked. So I think that image, that really key signal image of women's, what we would call violence in the short order, could also be read as peace in this 60s and 70s moment of militancy, of real worldwide militancy. But yeah, it's an interesting, it's a really interesting tension. And as maybe as an addition to that, I would say, I think there were disagreements within ANSI. I think different segments within the organization probably thought quite differently about that question, which is also interesting. Before we thank Rachel, I would like to make sure that you give me your letter of permission there on your way out. And I wanted to say that after this, Rachel would meet with two people of students in African studies for a master class. And it's something we've started this year. Sean Mills, who came earlier to talk about the occasion in the exploring Montreal, did the same. And I hope we will do that for many other presentation to come. And for you, master students, keep an eye on this because it's often a nice opportunity if the presentation of our guest meets your own research interests. But for the moment, thank you very much. Thank you.