This chapter proposes a new mixed-methodological approach to recovering and analysing black women’s and children’s intertwined, gendered lived experiences of motherhood and domestic work in South Africa’s past. The approach offered involves simultaneously ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’ two diverse cultural forms to reconstruct narratives in women’s history: the contemporary art of Zanele Muholi and the literary fiction of Sindiwe Magona. In particular, it brings Magona’s short stories from Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (2003) into conversation with Muholi’s Minah VI (2008), ‘Massa’ and Maids, IV, Hout Bay (2009) and Bester I, Mayotte (2015). However, it must be noted that Magona and Muholi occupy different gendered subject positions. While Magona’s fiction depicts her experiences as a maid-mother, Muholi is a gender nonbinary artist who visualises their own experiences as the child of a domestic worker. Muholi’s art-activism has often been interpreted in terms of its depictions of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people. Yet, the ways in which the artist’s work also sheds light on children’s lived experiences of maid-motherhood requires further analysis. In general, these written and visual works illuminate the evolution of black gender-oppressed people’s identities, cultural forms and activism over time.

This chapter examines the Pan-African and civil rights struggles of radical anti-establishment Nigerian musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

This chapter investigates how Jamaican musician, Bob Marley, used reggae – inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism – as a weapon for preaching a liberation gospel advocating the decolonization of Southern Africa and the unity of Africa and its Diaspora.

This chapter examines the Pan-Africanism of former South African president Thabo Mbeki, comparing him to Kwame Nkrumah, before examining his efforts at building institutions of the African Union and engaging the African Diaspora in America, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

Despite recent challenges, global and transnational approaches continue to provide valuable insight and novel perspectives for scholars of South African history. This chapter examines recent contributions to transnational histories of colonialism and empire in South Africa, before engaging in a detailed examination of global histories of antiapartheid. Drawing on sources from a range of international organisations, it examines three specific themes that highlight the possibilities for a global history of South Africa. The role played by the entangled discourses of humanitarianism and human rights, registered in the language of international organisations such as the United Nations, illuminates continuities and transformations in the framing of South African politics and social relations at a global level. An exploration of concepts of ‘solidarity’, central to antiapartheid campaigns around the world, moreover, can help to navigate global historical approaches away from Eurocentric tendencies. And the testimonies of individual activists provide a necessary reminder that global and transnational histories reveal the multiple perspectives, subjectivities and connections that shape local historical experiences. The final section of the chapter considers possibilities for the future development of these approaches.

This chapter analyses the Pan-African career of Nigerian scholar-technocrat, Adebayo Adedeji, who headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) between 1975 and 1991. The author also assesses his efforts at promoting economic development and regional integration across Africa, as well as his intellectual contributions to these two fields.

This chapter assesses the environmental and human rights activism of Kenyan Nobel peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, focusing especially on her Green Belt Movement.

This chapter examines the Pan-African career of Jamaica’s Dudley Thompson, a lawyer who put together the legal defence team that defended Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta from charges of being an instigator of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in 1952. Thompson was also a founder member of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and served as his country’s ambassador to Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Namibia.

This chapter examines one of the early champions of African democracy: the only black Nobel prize winner in economics, St. Lucia’s Fabian intellectual, William Arthur Lewis. She assesses Lewis’s economic theories, his role as the economic adviser to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and his calls for multi-party democracy in Africa’s diverse states.