In approximately the last fifteen years of the twentieth-century the women’s voice in the autobiographical genre has established the lineages and structures of South African intellectual, cultural and political history which heretofore were not clearly visible to us. Such autobiographies as Ellen Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (1985), Helen Joseph’s Side by Side (1986), Maggie Resha’s ‘Mangoana o Tsoara Thipa ka Bohaleng (My Life in the Struggle, 1991), Phyllis Ntantala’s A Life’s Mosaic (1992), Frieda Bokwe Matthews’ Remembrances (1995), Mpho ‘M’atsepo Thunya’s Singing Away The Hunger (1996) and others have established a solid historical delineation in the role of women in the construction of South African modernity. One of the most consequential lineages of this political and intellectual history is that from Charlotte Mamye Maxeke (1874-1939) through Frieda Bokwe Matthews (1905-1996?) to Ellen Kuzwayo (1914-  ). Ellen Kuzwayo is the best advantage point from which to view its genealogy. This perspective explains the arresting portrait of Charlotte Manye Maxeke in her autobiography: “I myself attended the first NCAW [National Council of African Women] conference. The greatest moment for me was when, at that conference, I met the legendary Mrs. Charlotte Manye Maxeke. Charlotte Many Maxeke was a household name in the Transvaal during that period. She had played a prominent part in establishing the American Methodist Episcopal Church in South Africa, a church started by the blacks for the blacks and with the blacks. She had also travelled to the USA, obtaining a degree from Wilberforce University; in 1902 she was thus the first black woman graduate in South Africa. I learned recently that the African National Congress has named a creche in Tanzania after her. When I first encountered her, her bearing, her upright head and clear eyes, proclaimed her as a woman of character and principles. She appeared firm and composed; a woman of values and standards. She gave me the impression of being conscientious and very business-like in her dealings but, above all, a woman very clear about the purpose and direction of her church and her community involvement. I did not find her easy to approach---unlike Minah Soga. I longed to get near her and talk to her; but except for hearing her address the conference, I never had an opportunity to speak to her. Now that I look back, perhaps the disparity in our ages was a barrier to my reaching her. . . And then there was my attraction to the personality and image of Minah Soga and Charlotte Maxeke, who fired my imagination. However, I was too young and too immature to make a useful contribution. The influence and insight of these women should never be underestimated. As the first National President of the National Council of African Women, Charlotte Maxeke, for example, said, in her Presidential Address to the second conference, held in Bloemfontein on 8 December 1938: ‘I want to thank you very much and congratulate you on your excellent deliberations. This work is not for yourselves---kill that spirit of ‘self’ and do not live above your people, but live with them. If you can rise, bring someone with you. Do away with that fearful animal of jealousy---kill that spirit, and love one another as brothers and sisters. The other animal that will tear us to pieces is tribalism; I saw the shadow of it and it should cease to be. Stand by your motto---’The golden rule’. This was the Charlotte Maxeke of the 1930s.” Call Me Woman not only has compelling portraits of other New African intellectuals such as Alfred B. Xuma, James S. Moroka, Z. K. Matthews, Mina Soga and others, it also captures critical moments in the political South Africa such as the founding of the ANC Youth League in 1944. This outastanding autobiography articulates an overarching conceptual dimension of a particular phase of the New African Movement. This is what Bessie Head (the youngest member of the Sophiatown Renaissance, a cultural movement which was the last season of the New African Movement) found so impressive about the book, as she writes in the Foreword: “The autobiography of Ellen Kuzwayo puts aside the rhinoceros hide, to reveal a people with a delicate nervous balance like everyone else. No calculation is ever given to the price black people have had to pay for thity-six years of Boer rule. The documentation of human suffering in this book is terrible. It is as though a death is imposed on people by the ruling white race and black people constantly struggle to survive under this pall of doom. But at the end of the book one feels as if a shadow history of South Africa has been written; There is a sense of triumph, of hope in this achievement and that one has read the true history of the land, a history that vibrates with human compassion and goodness.” The great novelist was positioning Ellen Kuzwayo as one of the foundations of South African Feminist and Gender Studies. Within a few years of this attempted remapping of our political and intellectual history by Bessie Head, Ellen Kuzwayo was appropriated into the canon of Feminist Studies by one of its strongest voices: “Kuzwayo also records moments from the lives of her grandmother and mother, whom she focuses on in order, again, to reprtesent resilience and enlightenment rather than passivity or backwardness. Her project in Call Me Woman becomes particularly clear in comparison with Noni Jabavu’s The Ochre People, for Call Me Woman also casts back in various ways to the world of pastoral harmony, a world permitted to relatively few black South Africans in the 1920s and 30s. Like Jabavu, who also came from a prosperous rural Christian community, Kuzwayo is clearly concerned with the breakdown of family life and with the absence of moral guidance for young girls entering puberty. Yet she does not present the ‘new’ urban woman in the terms set up by Jabavu, whose world is threatened by women who remain outside the family structure. . . In fact, Kuzwayo’s text focuses far less on the individual self than is usually the case with autobiography, for although it includes a considerable amount of personal narrative, with some introspection, it tries, largely through its portraits of other women, to proclaim an anti-individualist position that coheres with the philosophy of communalism proposed by Black Consciousness. . . Kuzwayo’s text advocates the kind of female empowerment and female separatism which one associates with Western feminism at a certain stage of its history. . . The word ‘feminist’ does not, however, come from her pen. In this regard she honours the current refusal by black South African women to assume a position whose ideology was formulated, largely, in white middle-class Europe and America: feminism has, historically, often been blind to the specific oppressions and exploitations suffered by black and working-class women” (“M’a-Ngoana O Tsoare Thipa ka Bohaleng---The Child’s Mother Grabs the Sharp End of the Knife: Women as Mothers, Women as Writers” by Dorothy Driver, in Rendering Things Invisible: Essays on South African Literary Culture (1990), (ed.) Martin Trump). In a recent Foreword to Mpho ‘M’atsepo Nthunya’s Singing Away The Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman (1997), what Ellen Kuzwayo says of Mpho Nthunya applies with equal force to her own historical situatedness: “It took outstanding character and personality for Mpho Nthunya to forge a life for herself and her family and then to bring up six children after her husband’s death. It takes outstanding character and courage for a woman to dare to tell the truth about her life. This book shows that. Mpho’s humility is moving. Time and again she expresses doubt about her book, doubt as to its appeal to readers, Basotho or non-Basotho. It is a simple book, but a great book, and part of its greatness is the questions it forces us to ask: about our societies, our values, the sets of choices we now refer to as ‘lifestyles’; and about the lives of women and men in colonised African communities. In its unembroidered telling of the facts of life for one poor but resourceful African woman, it reaches out to people of all races, classes and backgrounds; to the educated and to people like Mpho herself: the African women of the earth, so often referred to as women at the grass roots of society. One hopes she will live to see the success of this book and perhaps to write another, for she has much to tell us all.” Ellen Kuzwayo is one of the outstsanding New Africans brought forth by the modernist experience in South Africa in the twentieth-century.