Ramashamola and the Search for the Black Women’s Postcolonial Archive
Recent scholarship has grappled with the possibilities of the erasures of black women’s history and memory from the archive. Scholar Ashley Farmer acknowledges the power imbalances at work within the archive but insists those same power imbalances provide insight into the lives of invisible women. In “Search of the Black Women’s History Archive,” Farmer argues that scholars of Black Women’s Studies are called to seek out the “extinguished and invisible” aspects of black women’s lives by revisiting the known archive and reflecting more deeply on the power imbalances within it. [1] With this approach, scholars are urged to return to favored archives, because there is as much knowledge embedded in the lack of evidence as there is in existing documents about black women’s lives. In doing so, she argues, scholars challenge the notion of “the” archive, highlighting the ways in which erasures in historical documents are not absences but presences that can be examined. In other words, black women’s voices can be found in the omissions and silences. [2]
Even if grant that the field of black women’s studies excavates the memories of everyday women like Ramashamola, why does she remain forgotten?
Cheryl McEwan’s essay, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa” provides a useful starting point for beginning to answer this question about South African women and the historical record. McEwan considers how exclusionary systems of colonialism and apartheid in addition to race and gender are reproduced through the construction of archives.[3] This takes shape in the absence of women in African history more broadly, and specifically accounts for how marginalized women continue to be silenced, even in attempts to create inclusive archives of the present and stories of the past.[4] Since black women have been excluded from dominant accounts of South Africa’s own history, efforts to construct a non-exclusionary archive must attend to how the legacies of colonialism and apartheid have effectively silenced black women’s voices. Additionally, these same systems of oppression must be considered when asking what is missing in recent scholarly approaches to recovering black women’s voices within the archive.
In looking to South African scholarship for tools forward, one path is building what Cheryl McEwan terms the “postcolonial archive”.[5] This envisions a historical record that incorporates “radical memory projects” rooted in both the discursive and material empowerment of previously oppressed peoples. [6] This approach conserves the memory of oppressed peoples by considering how the compounding oppressions of gender, race, geography, and apartheid erase the historical agency of women and denying them agency in constructing archives. Accordingly, the postcolonial archive is expansive and creative in its identification of materials deemed archival.
This point is taken up by Ria van der Merwe in her essay “From a Silent Past to a Spoken Future: Black Women’s Voices in the Archival Process” where she discusses story cloths as alternative methods for accounting for archival records of marginalized peoples in South Africa. Community-based embroidery cloths projects offer opportunities for black women to record their stories and effectively preserve their memories on their own terms.[7] For van de Merwe, story cloths present a step toward addressing the absence of black women in South African history. For women defined as illiterate and uneducated by Western categorization, story cloths highlight the fact that they have been excluded from traditional archives due to the insistence on written records.[8]
With these different approaches in the background, I return to the subject of Ramashamola and the question of why she remains forgotten. Locating Ramashamola within the archive calls for a marriage of the aforementioned approaches.
The building of the black women’s postcolonial archive must attend to the silences within the archive (such as there being no trace of Ramashamola’s own voice during her time in prison), while also acknowledging that due to colonialism and apartheid she does not appear within the archive in the ways traditionally expected.
This fact does not diminish her story or the impact her story had on the lives of South Africans. Instead, it encourages the possibility for new methods to emerge in recovering the black women’s stories within the archive.
In essence, arriving at the question of how current scholarly methods within black women’s studies mask stories like Ramashamola’s begins with asking difficult questions. Ramashamola’s story reveals the absence of colonialism as a framework for analysis within current black women’s studies, and in effect, suggests that existing frameworks marginalize women of the third world. This is not to say that American black women do not already occupy the margins of the archive. Instead, however, when we place Ramashamola’s story beside Huggins’ story, we are made aware of how disciplinary orientation toward written records inhibit the emergences of narratives of third world women.
[1] Farmer, 290.
[2] Farmer, 293.
[3] Cheryl McEwan. 2003. “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (3): 739.
[4] McEwan, 744.
[5] Mc Ewan,
[6] McEwan, 753.
[7] van der Merwe, Ria. 2020. “From a Silent Past to a Spoken Future. Black Women’s Voices in the Archival Process.” Archives And Records-The Journal Of The Archives And Records Association 40 (3): 239–58.
[8] Van der Merwe, 241.