Emma Mashinini - Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (1991) - Again, here is another feminist author I chose based on her post-colonial background. However, information on her is more scant than all of the other authors I've chosen. Her autobiography is the only text she has penned. A biography is posted on IMBOKODO: Women's Struggle in South Africa. Born in Rosetteville, Joannesburg in 1929, she and her family were forced to relocate to Sophiatown, where she married young and gave birth to six children (three of which died in infancy). It was here, during her work in Henochsberg's clothing factory, that she began to campaign for worker's rights, including shorter work weeks and unemployment insurance. She was elected to the executive committee of the National Union of Clothing Workers. In 1975, the biography notes that she took a position as president of the Commercial, Catering, and Allied Worker's Union of South Africa, which by 1977 had grown to 1000 members. She was fundamental in the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, leaving that to head the Department of Justice and Reconciliation under Desmond Tutu and the Anglican Church. NYU's Summer 2001 visiting lecture series has a GREAT (though very short) video of Mashinini speaking to students on land restitution, an apartheid horror that afflicted her own childhood (http://education.nyu.edu/alt/southafrica/pages/gallery.htm).

Yet another search revealed an article on mothering in South Africa by Pumla Dineo Gqola of the University of Capetown, and the EBSCO search pulled up very few hits. But since Mashinini isn't exactly a literary figure (so much as she is a political force), information is scant.

Sources

Carson, Maidel. "Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autbiography (Review)." Library Journal 116:7 (April 1991): 7. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.  http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&an=9105201145

Dietche, Julie Phelps. "Voyaging toward Freedom: New Voices from South Africa." Research in African Literatures 26:1 (Spring 1995): 61-74. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.  http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&an=9503022586.

Education and Social Reform, Summer 2001 Lecture Series. New York University. 2001. Accessed January 16, 2005. http://education.nyu.edu/alt/southafrica/pages/gallery.htm.

"Emma Mashinini." IMBOKODO: Women's Struggle in South Africa. Accessed January 16, 2005. http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/specialprojects/womens-struggle/biographies2.htm#M.

Gqola, Pumla Dineo. "Reconsidering Motherhood in the Autobiographies of Ellen Kuzwayo and Emma Mashinini." Inter Action 4. Proceedings of the Fourth Postgraduate Conference. Eds. Christopher Roper and Herman Wittenberg. Bellville: UWC Press, 1996. 47-52.

Mashinini, Emma. Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography. New York: Routledge, 1991