Southern experiences in dialogue: A study case on South Atlantic Knowledge Production
by Dr Laura Efron

The aim of this thesis is to make a trans-national and trans-Atlantic study of the exchange of radical educational practices and ideas between Latin America and South Africa in the South African context of state of emergency during 1980s.

How did radical Latin American ideas from the 60s and 70s arrive into South Africa? Which ideas found an audience here? Were they read, analysed and re-appropriated by local organisations in the South African context of struggle against apartheid? How were they put in practice? To answer these questions, this thesis analyses the work of the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) an independent research agency that supported the labour movement in South Africa.

ILRIG published a wide range of educational materials for use in the training and education of trade union and social activist circles. Amongst these materials was a series of booklets and pamphlets on liberation movements and struggles in Latin America. This study uses these publications and the workshops that ILRIG organised around them to open up a broader discussion of how ideas travel across contexts.

I am putting forward the contention that rather than constituting a barrier between Africa and the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean was a space of dialogues and exchange. In terms of this, if we understand the ocean as a communication space rather than one of separation, analysis of local realities and experiences cannot be conducted on the basis of the idea of exclusivity or exceptionalism. Experiences and realities in these two sides need to be understood and interpreted in their hybridity. One side of the ocean cannot be understood without paying attention to the other.

Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle by Dr Emily Bridger

While there have been many books on South Africa's liberation struggle, the involvement of girls and young women has been all but missing. Young Women against Apartheid tells the stories of female students from Soweto who committed their teenage years to the struggle during the 1980s. It explores what life was like for African girls under apartheid, why some chose to join the liberation struggle, and how they navigated the benefits and pitfalls of political activism. These were young women who 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.

Primarily a work of oral history, this book is not only concerned with what young female activists did, but equally with how they 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. The book serves as a 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.