South African Women Speak

Vukani Makhosikazi reflects the lives of African working class women under apartheid. Women in suffering and struggle. Women living in the cities of South Africa and in the bantustans; working in the factories and on white farms; and many living without jobs. The lives of all these women controlled by the pass and other apartheid laws and institutions, but above all, controlled by the fact of being women, African and working class.

The book talks for and about women in their struggle to make ends meet in the face of rising rents and the soaring cost of food. It tells of their fight for adequate housing, for child care facilities, through church groups, through township women’s  organisations – struggling for a free and just society, free not only from class exploitation and racial oppression, but also free from sexual oppression.

Vukani Makhosikazi was written by a Johannesburg-based women’s collective over a period of three years. it is the product of many many interviews, conducted with women keen to tell the stories of their lives. The participants in the collective are Jane Barrett, Aneene Dawber, Barbara Klugman, Ingrid Obery, Jennifer Shindler and Joanna Yawitch.”