Hi friends, I am still hooked on ‘Call Me Woman’, a book by Ellen Kuzwayo, a South African activist. I am five chapters into the book and it has become clear that I am part of the underlining and highlighting squad! The book has so many

Five chapters in, the book has so many underlined quotes that stuck out for me and that I want to share here. If you missed my two previous posts, including about the book’s mini-review, please read it here for context.

Hopefully, these encourage you to get the book too.

1. Some call it a ghetto. Is it a ghetto? You can size it up for yourself. I have lived here for the last 27 years. With all its imperfections and shortcomings, and they are many, it is home to me.
2. Black people have always been aware of the authorities’ rationale that blacks are sojourners in the cities of South Africa who come to work temporarily and return ‘home’ in due course to some ‘homeland’.
3. The ‘ideal’ that mothers should not accept employment or at least no full-time employment until their children are of a particular age is a luxury in a community where the average monthly wage for men is between R200 and R350 a month.
4. My grandfather qualified as a teacher taught both black and white children in the same classroom in Thaba’Nchu in the Orange Free State towards the close of the 19th century and the heavens did not fall down.
5. As I have said, it is not easy to live and to bring up children in a community robbed of its traditional moral code and values: a community lost between its old heritage and culture and that of its colonists.
6. Those who have watched the famo dance have not one good word for it. I never saw it, for the rigid class distinctions of those would have stopped me even from peeping. It is said to be a most ungodly, wild type of dance…
7. The majority of black women have been discriminated against as women and as blacks.
8. It is astounding and highly commendable that so many women have survived mentally, emotionally and physically.
9. Rage, frustration, despair and recklessness are encouraged by the conditions under which black people live; and these feelings, inflamed by liquour, too often find expression in blood-shed.