Provides a new perspective on the struggle against apartheid and contributes to key debates in
South African history gender inequality sexual violence and the legacies of the liberation
struggle. WINNER OF THE RHS GLADSTONE BOOK PRIZE 2022 WINNER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF
CHILDREN AND YOUTH GRACE ABBOTT BOOK PRIZE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE
2022 While there have been many books on South Africa's liberation struggle during the 1980s
and early 1990s the story of the involvement of African girls and young women has been all but
missing. This book tells their story analysing what life was like for African girls under
apartheid why some chose to join the struggle and how they navigated the benefits and
pitfalls of political activism. These were women who as teenagers and secondary school
students made an unconventional choice to join student organizations engage in public protest
and take up arms against the state. They did so against their parents' wishes and in
contravention of societal norms that confined girls to the home and made township streets
dangerous places for female students. They participated in both non-violent and violent forms
of political action including attending marches and rallies throwing stones or petrol bombs
at police and punishing suspected informers and other offenders and even joining underground
guerrilla armies. Thousands of these young women were eventually detained interrogated and
tortured by the apartheid state. At the heart of this book lie the life histories of the female
comrades themselves who in interviews construct themselves as decisive actors in South
Africa's liberation struggle. Primarily a work of oral history this book is not only concerned
with what female comrades did but equally with how these women remember and narrate their time
as activists: how they reconstruct their pasts relate their personal experiences to collective
histories of the struggle and insert themselves into a historical narrative from which they
have been excluded. Through exploring these women's memories this book serves as an important
corrective to South Africa's male-centric literature on violence and provides a new gendered
perspective on the wider histories of township politics activism and conflict.
