The unknown or unacknowledged Black Feminist legacies of CALS
- Christopher Gevers
CALS director Prof Christopher Gevers discusses three radical Black feminists and their (unrecognised) role in shaping our organisation
As part of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) #WomensMonth series, I want to reflect on the contributions of three radical Black Feminists – Alice Kinloch, Anna Julia Cooper and Miriam Makeba – who, in very material and unacknowledged ways, contributed to the establishment of CALS in 1978; prefigured what CALS would become in the decades that followed, and can help us to understand what is to be done as we confront the interlocking and intractable afterlives of colonial apartheid today. In order to do so, we need to re-locate the origins of CALS in the longer traditions of thought and resistance that made its emergence in 1978 possible, necessary even.
The official origin story of CALS is well-known: along with the Legal Resources Centre, CALS was founded in 1978 through the collective efforts of lawyers such as John Dugard, Felicia and Sydney Kentridge and Arthur Chaskalson. However, all origins stories – and particularly official ones – are fabrications, assembled from disparate parts. We choose what to accent and what to leave out when we weave them together. We also choose when to start them. Re-locating CALS origins in the longer and broader transnational struggle against colonial apartheid exemplified in the lives and works of Kinloch, Cooper and Makeba – lives lived as scholars, teachers, activists and not lawyers – discloses a richer, if more complicated, account – one that incorporates the contributions that are too-often silenced in accounts of the past, and brings to the fore the contingencies, anxieties and discordant notes that are too-easily smoothed over.
Alice Kinloch was born in the Cape Colony in 1863 and moved to Kimberly in the 1870s. In today’s nomenclature, Kinloch was a pioneer of the field of ‘Business and Human Rights’. In the final years of the 19th century Kinloch gave a series of lectures in England and published a pamphlet titled ‘Are South African Diamonds Worth Their Cost?’, in which Kinloch informed her well-healed, audience that:
'The handsome dividends that a certain company pay are earned at the price of blood and souls of…black men. Shareholders may be in happy ignorance of this, so we would remind them that there are several thousands of fellow-men kept under lock and key for their sole benefit, and that the gems on their wives’ hands, and the finery bought by their ‘profits’ are, to ‘seeing’ eyes, bespattered with human gore.'
Kinloch proceeded to set out ‘the state of affairs in South Africa, for which the bloody, brutal, and inconsiderate hands of avarice and might are answerable’, where ‘[f]or more than a quarter of a century Kimberly has been the stage for the worst forms of undisguised inhumanity’.
In doing so Kinloch mapped the racialized and gendered structures of domination – legal, social, geographical, economic – that underpinned the emerging extractive industry that were not only novel in the late 19th century but remain unsurpassed in many respects today. Moreover, Kinloch set out and stitched together numerous unjust laws and practices committed against Black South Africans that would later come to be known as apartheid – including the racial hierarchy of labour, police brutality, forced removals, pass laws, labour compounds, gender-based violence, economic super-exploitation of thousands of lives deemed disposable, public violence and humiliation, and white impunity – which Kinloch explicitly linked back to the ‘time of slavery’ in the US.
This alone would and should have been enough to make Kinloch a household name, however she proceeded to establish the African Association in London in 1897, which organized the first Pan African Conference in 1900. The resolutions of that Conference included a call for direct action in respect of ‘the situation of the native races in South Africa’, including the ‘degrading and illegal compound system of native labour in vogue in Kimberly’, the ‘“pass” or docket system used for people of colour’, the ‘difficulties in acquiring real property’ and the ‘difficulties in obtaining the franchise’.
Today we know a lot about this Conference and the Pan-African movement that it founded, but we know very little about Kinloch. There is no surviving photograph of her. Ironically, the only legal trace we have of her is her Marriage Certificate and the pamphlet, which she published in her husband’s name.
Kinloch could not attend the 1900 Pan African Conference in London, but Anna Julia Cooper did, where she presented a paper on conditions of Black Americans and was elected to the Executive Committee of the resultant, short-lived Pan-African Association (so too was Kinloch’s husband, in her absence).
Cooper lived a remarkable life that rivalled that of Kinloch: Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper was the first Black women to receive her doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1925 at the age of 66 (later translated as Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists), and would live another 40 years, dying at the age of 106 a few months before the United States’ Civil Rights Act was passed.
By the time she attended the 1900 Conference, Cooper had already published pathbreaking collection of essays A Voice from the South by a Black Women of the South (1892) and founded the Colored Women’s League. Cooper’s work included theorizing two concepts that have become in vogue in recent times – namely ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘intersectionality’ – yet Cooper’s contributions to both are seldom acknowledged. Of intersectionality, she wrote, in 1892:
‘The colored woman of to-day occupies…a unique position… She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.’
A line could be drawn straight from Cooper to the founding of CALS: she was a member of the Niagara movement, formed in 1905 to champion the rights of Black Americans, which was the predecessor to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The NAACP would later serve as an inspiration and in some respects a model for the formation of public interest law organisations in the later 1970s, including CALS. However, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, I want to tell this story slant, as oftentimes ‘success in circuit lies’.
When Cooper died in 1964, America was in turmoil, notwithstanding the passing of the Civil Rights Act, and protests and police repression would follow in the years to come, particular after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. A year before Cooper’s passing, a young Miriam Makeba had addressed the United Nations about the situation in South Africa, which she described as ‘a world problem and the burning question of the day’. Makeba began her speech by recalling the inaugural summit of the Organisation of African Unity – at which she performed – which was the culmination of the efforts of Cooper and others in London in 1900. As in 1900, Makeba called for positive action against the apartheid regime, criticizing the ‘lip service’ of the Great Powers and warning that ‘the time has come for the whole of humanity to shout out and to act with firmness to stop these crazy leaders from dragging [South Africa] into a horrifying disaster’.
During her time in exile in America, Makeba repeatedly situated the struggle of Black Americans within a larger Pan-African political imaginary – just as Cooper and Kinloch had – and drew her audiences’ attention to the connections between the struggles of Black Americans and Black South Africans. In fact, it was Makeba’s insistence on these connections that led to her exile again, this time to Guinea in 1968. There she continued to promote the cause of Black freedom across the continent and beyond.
Makeba returned to the UN in 1975 as Guinea’s representative to the UN General Assembly, shortly after Guinea had spearheaded the drafting and adoption of the Apartheid Convention. In her address Makeba schooled the assembled dignitaries on the ‘decisive importance” of the ‘participation of women in the fight against imperialism, colonialism and racism’ and ‘all the causes of social injustice: indignity, exploitation, oppression, and inequality’. Makeba proceeded to address the problems of the ‘recrudescence of repression and …intimidation [of] the liberation movements of Azania, Zimbabwe and Namibia…[struggling] against the policy of apartheid and its inhuman practices’, the ‘Palestinian people[s] struggling for the recovery of [their] usurped homeland’, the need for a New International Economic Order and UN reform (including the elimination of the veto in the Security Council), and the regulation of deep-sea exploration; and concluded with a call for ‘the advent of a world based on justice and peace’.
What does this have to do with the establishment of CALS? Well, it was in response to the upheavals in the US in the late-1960s, and the related international action against apartheid in the 1970s, that the Carnegie Foundation’s focus shifted under the leadership of its new President, Alan Pifer, first to ‘the promotion of equal education opportunity and rights…across all of its grant programs’ in the US, and then – following Pifer’s visit to South Africa in 1973 – to the re-engagement of the Corporation in South Africa and, in time, the formation of the LRC and CALS. As Rosenfield, Sprague and McKay note in their history of the Carnegie Corporation:
'The LRC-CALS human rights law enterprise dovetailed with the increasing commitment of the Corporation to social justice under President [Pifer]. Through close American-South African collaboration and engagement of individuals and their institutions…, including the … [NAACP]…, legal activism and law reform were fostered in South Africa.'
This process was spearheaded by Carnegie’s David R. Hood. In fact, according to CALS’ founding Director John Dugard, CALS was ‘largely David Hood’s idea’.
It was not David Hood’s first idea, however, or even his preferred one. The Carnegie Corporation’s archive reveals that Hood was hesitant ‘to commit [Carnegie] to a legal program’ and doubted ‘that the South African legal system offered adequate potential for reform’. Hood’s initial plan was more radical, and in the mold of what Makeba had demanded: namely to work directly with Black community leaders, including the Black Women’s Federation – communities that were taught, galvanized and inspired by Kinloch, Cooper and Makeba – rather than work with liberal white lawyers. Hood’s initial plan was scuppered by the banning orders that followed in the wake of the murder of Steve Biko. CALS was Plan B.
Over the past four decades CALS has grappled with and confronted many – although certainly not all – of the discordant notes that were present at its founding as a mostly white liberal legal project, and – in doing so – has sought to reshape itself into a social justice organisation that more closely reflects the traditions of thought and resistance exemplified by Kinloch, Cooper and Makeba. In fact, their radical analyses of power and radical visions of justice underpin many of CALS’ projects and interventions today, which are concerned with racial domination, patriarchy, corporate accountability, civil and political rights, land and redistributive justice. What is more, like Kinloch, Cooper and Makeba, CALS aims to conceptualize and insist that these are ‘interlocking systems of domination’ (to use bell hooks formulation). However, we must do more to grapple with these as transnational and global forms of domination as well.
There could not be a more urgent time to do so, as both domestically and internationally our conceptualization of power and justice are wearing thin – as our existing epistemologies and ontologies fail to contend with rising inequality, white supremacy, patriarchy, techno-capitalism and climate change. Today, the traditional social justice script that emerged post-1994 – in which state capacity was the problem and the Bill of Rights the solution – can no longer explain let alone contend with the ongoing violences and afterlives of colonial apartheid and their relations to other structures of domination, old and new. We live in a time when, to return to Kinloch, the ‘undisguised inhumanity’ of the past has become disguised, digitized even, but no less deadly.
Palestinian scholar Edward Said teaches us that ‘in human history there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society, … this is … what makes change possible’. Identifying such levers of change requires new ways of conceptualizing power, and imaginative means of using law and activism to dismantle oppressive systems. It also requires acknowledging the limits of law. In doing so we must recuperate and reorientate ourselves around the lives and thought of Radical Black Feminists like Kinloch, Cooper, Makeba, drawing inspiration from their insistence that a more just world is not only still possible but always necessary.