One woman's forgotten story reveals a dirty truth about Africa's written histories

One woman’s forgotten story reveals a dirty truth about Africa’s written histories

Regina Twala was an influential writer and political activist of the 50s and 60s. Yet while European men gained acclaim from her work, her name was almost erased from memory


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A photograph of Regina Twala taken from the book cover of Written Out: the Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala by Joel Cabrita. Photograph: Courtesy of Ohio University Press


Over the course of 2018, during a research period in the small southern African kingdom of Eswatini, I made multiple phone calls. My question was always the same: had the person heard of someone called Regina Twala?Twala had been a writer, intellectual and anti-colonial political activist of the 1950s and 60s. She was born in South Africa, but after her arrest in 1952 for participating in the non-violent resistance movement the Defiance Campaign, she found the country increasingly repressive. In 1954, like many other Black activists she chose to cross the border to Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, to live in exile, and died there in 1968 at 60. She was the second Black woman to obtain a degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and was one of the co-founders of the Swaziland Progressive Party, Eswatini’s first political party, in 1960. Yet no one I phoned had heard of Twala. I was surprised. From the little I knew of her, Twala had clearly been an influential figure. And Eswatini – where I was raised and educated – is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. It’s hard to remain anonymous there.


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Written Out: the Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala by Joel Cabrita. Photograph: Courtesy of Ohio University Press

How could I make sense of the fact that a significant woman of her era could be virtually erased from popular history and memory? At the heart of the mystery stood another intellectual – a celebrated European historian called Bengt Sundkler. As I would learn, Sundkler’s fame existed in direct reciprocity with Twala’s obscurity. In 1976, Sundkler published a book on religion in Africa, called Zulu Zion. It would become a celebrated reference point for all interested in how Christianity in Africa expressed itself via existing indigenous religious beliefs.
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Regina Twala’s graduation photo. In 1948, she became the second Black woman to obtain a degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Photograph: Courtesy of Ohio University Press

Sundkler reduced Twala to a researcher-fixer who procured contacts for him, rather than a co-researcher in her own right. Sundkler certainly didn’t identify Twala as the author of the words he was passing off as his own. Omitting to properly acknowledge his research assistants was something Sundkler had a habit of doing, including with his previous book, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (widely hailed as a foundational text in the history of religion in Africa upon publication in 1948). Doubtless, this was a common academic practice of this period, an era during which our contemporary sensibilities regarding research ethics were largely absent.





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Regina Twala with her first husband, Percy Kumalo in 1936. Photograph: Courtesy of Ohio University Press
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This, then, is the untold story of scholarship, of the hidden realities behind the glossy published books that find their way on to the shelves of our libraries. We think of knowledge as floating in a realm detached from the messy business of everyday life. In fact, mundane realities of race and gender shape what is counted as “knowledge”. Certain scholars – usually white, usually male, often affiliated to prestigious universities and research institutions – are permitted to define our scholarly canons. It is their work that so often finds its way into the pages of renowned journals and books published by learned university presses. Twala’s story reminds us of the forgotten people whose unacknowledged contributions so often lie beneath the work of these publicly acclaimed scholars. Her story points to the dirty secret of how books are often not written by those whose names they bear on their title pages. Sundkler’s fame was Twala’s erasure. The mystery as to how Twala – a brilliant woman of her times – was forgotten, lies with the public acclaim Sundkler received for words he did not write.

Joel Marie Cabrita is associate professor of African History and director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University. Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala is published by Ohio University Press and Wits University Press

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jan/30/regina-twala-africa-woman-forgotten-story-reveals-truth-about-written-histories