Call Me Woman by Ellen Kuzwayo helped me understand the women who raised me and, ultimately, introduced me to parts of myself.

As I write this review, one question from the beginning of the book comes to mind: “Where is home for a black person in South Africa?” At first, the answer seems straightforward.

But, as I read further, I realized how complex that question is—a sense of home overshadowed by colonialism and apartheid. For many black South Africans, “home” often means townships, whether formal or informal or the rural areas on the outskirts of cities.

Today, 30 years into democracy, we celebrate our diversity, embracing the idea of a rainbow nation and declaring that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. Yet this book challenges that notion, forcing us to examine the “homes” that millions of black people were historically forced into and whether these spaces are suitable for raising thriving families and communities.

Reading this book as a black woman in Johannesburg, I couldn’t help but wonder how different our lives might have been if colonialism and apartheid hadn’t shaped our past.

The book pulls you inward, urging you to reflect on what home means, on blackness in a white-colonized South Africa, on womanhood, and the state of our families and communities.

As I read, I found myself wrestling with difficult, essential questions. In many ways, we as black South Africans are the product of an identity conceptualized and enforced by white supremacy, colonialism, and apartheid.

Call Me Woman brings these issues into sharp focus, stirring up deep emotions and demanding answers we’ll need to find collectively.

Funny enough, I stumbled upon this book on impulse, drawn by its title and cover. I hadn’t considered what it meant to be a black woman before, and the cover photo of Ellen felt like looking at someone from my community, maybe even a grandmother figure. She felt familiar. I hadn’t read a single page, but I felt an instant connection.

The book opens with a letter from Deborah Nikiwe Matshoba, a black woman detained under Sections 6 and 10, laws that imposed harrowing abuse on political prisoners, including girls as young as twelve. Deborah’s letter to Ellen recounts her anguish over the impact her detention may be having on her child: “I deliberately create a mental block when I have to think of psychological problems, insecurity etc. that must be affecting my child,” she writes to Ellen about the impact of her detention.

Yet she includes little moments of humour and fashion talk—a reminder that, despite it all, she’s still her own person.

Throughout the book, Ellen weaves together her stories of love, loss, marriage, abuse, and divorce—all while being at the centre of the atrocities in her community and trying to make a difference within a system that punished her for it. She recalls how the opening of the mines in Johannesburg pulled men away from their families in the homelands, an era that ushered in the birth of Shebeen Queens in Soweto. Women, unlike men, were economically marginalised. To earn a living, they resorted to illicit liquor trade under inhumane conditions, enduring police raids.

She reflects on the sacrifices of black women who raised white children as domestic workers, often at the cost of their own families. This dynamic would lead to generations of black children growing up without their parents, perpetuating cycles of poverty and social instability.

One of the chapters, How the State Sees Me, encapsulates the dehumanizing perspective of the former government toward black people, a title that, in many ways, could have represented the entire book.

If you think you know yourself as a black woman in South Africa, read Call Me Woman. You’ll discover pieces of your own identity you may not have known you were missing.