Janae Pierre: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre in from Melissa Harris-Perry.

Regina Twala was one of Southern Africa's most important intellectuals. She was a writer, researcher, political activist, and feminist. Yet much of her work has been erased from our collective memory. Dr. Joel Cabrita, associate professor of history at Stanford University argues that editors, white academics of apartheid officials, and politicians whose politics were at odds with Regina's conspired to erase her literary legacy. Melissa spoke with Joelle about her biography, Written Out, The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala.

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Regina Twala was one of the most significant African women of the 20th century. She was a pioneer in politics. She was one of the founding members of Eswatini Southern Africa's first political party. She was close to leading political figures of the day, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa. She was a prolific and important writer, writing over five manuscripts, hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines but she's totally unheard of today. No one knows her name and there's no recognition of who this incredible woman was.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm always wondering when I hear the statement that everyone has forgotten her or that no one knows her. Is there an intellectual community, a pocket of activists, a group of people who do in fact know, remember, think about, refer to her?

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Melissa, if there is, I really haven't had any luck in finding them. When I started doing my research in about 2018 in Eswatini in Southern Africa, the only people I could find who had some memory of Twala were her relatives, her daughter-in-law, her granddaughter, old friends from the church, a couple of neighbors. Any sense of her public memory, her public significance amongst activists, politicians, intellectuals had been completely erased something that I found truly astonishing, considering just how much she'd done and how many firsts she'd pioneered for Black women in Africa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is hardly a long time ago. Help us think about the historical moment that she occupies.

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Absolutely. Twala died in 1968 and her death was one month before Eswatini gained independence from Britain.

Male Speaker: So ends 65 years of British rule. With it, almost the whole history of Britain in Africa, the history which one likes to think offers Africa a legacy undeniably worthwhile. We only hope Swaziland will be able to preserve her independence in prosperity and peace where so many of her predecessors have failed.

Dr. Joel Cabrita: This was the period when European powers were pulling out of their colonies across the African continent, and she was someone who was very actively involved in campaigning for Swazi's independence from colonial rule. She'd also been very active in a similar liberation struggle and neighboring South Africa against the white racist apartheid regime. Twala was born in South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, grew up under apartheid rule, knew firsthand the indignities that Black South Africans underwent during this period, and became very politically involved herself.

By the 1950s, she began involved in the Defiance campaign, which is the largest non-violent resistance movement ever launched in South Africa. She was a close personal friend of Nelson Mandela. He actually represented her as a lawyer in her divorce against her second husband, Dan Twala. She really stood at the heart of pivotal political moments in South Africa, in neighboring Eswatini, and the fight for Black self-rule and self-determination in the face of these racist white regimes across the continent.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The language you used a moment ago is that the memory of her has been erased. That's a fairly active verb. Why do you say erased as opposed to perhaps a more passive forgetting?

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Absolutely. That's really what I'm wanting to convey at the heart of this book, that the forgetting of Twala has not been an accident. It's not been something that happened by chance or just due to the natural progression of memories fading. It's been an active writing out, an active erasing. That act of erasing has people behind it both 60 years ago and in the present day. I think the first group of people to think about in the erasing of Twala are the political powers that she resisted during her lifetime.

The situation at Eswatini is that she didn't only stand against British colonial rule, as her life went on, she became increasingly critical of the traditional Swazi monarch and argued that the monarch should become a constitutional figure and that Swazi should enjoy democratic self-representation as was happening across Africa. This, as you can imagine, really led her to fall out of favor with the Monarch. When the British withdrew in 1968 and the Swazi King came to power, Twala, she'd just died actually as this happened. Even before her death, she was really a persona non grata.

The royal family, the government of Swaziland, was not going to memorialize and celebrate difficult women like Twala who had spoken out so fiercely and so eloquently against their rule in the last years of her death. I think there was the fact that her politics was wrong. There was also the fact that she was very outspoken on gender issues. That Southern Africa in the '50s and '60s was a fairly patriarchal society, which expected women to by and large keep quiet, stay in the home. Twala was extremely outspoken in her writing and her speeches about male mistreatment of women.

A [unintelligible 00:06:14] of men, similarly conspired, I would say, to make sure that her books weren't published, that her memory wasn't honored, that there were no memorials erected in honor of her after her death, and just really that her memory would be obliterated. Just a final point linked to her failure to publish, there was also the gatekeeping mechanisms of the largely white-run intellectual literary establishment of the day that she tried numerous times to get her books published, but she simply didn't have access to the right networks that would allow her to get into the world of publishing.

She had a number of European academic mentors, teachers, all of whom basically gate-kept and blocked her access to publication and to greater renown, to having her name get out there into the world. The process of writing out of history was a complicated, multifaceted one with many different parties and groups, and individuals involved in trying to make sure that this woman was effectively buried both before her death and then posthumously after her death.

Janae Pierre: We're going to take a quick pause here, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with more of Regina Twala's story. Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Jenae Pierre in from Melissa Harris-Perry. Before the break, Joel Cabrita gave us some understanding of who Regina Twala was and her importance. How Joel came upon Regina's scholarship is a story of its own. Let's go back to listen in on that interview with MHP and Joel Cabrita, associate professor of history at Stanford University and author of Written Out, The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you talk a little bit about a fairly well-known historian, Bank Sinclair, and help us to understand how Twala's story is connected there?

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Bank Sinclair was a very well-known, well-regarded Swedish historian of the 20th century. He wrote some of the pioneering books on the history of religion in Africa, particularly in Southern Africa. By the 1950s, he was teaching full-time in Sweden. He didn't have time to go personally himself to Southern Africa and do research there. He did what many historians and anthropologists of the '50s and the '60s did, which was to hire a local research assistant and pay them to carry out research on his behalf.

Regina Twala, who was this phenomenally talented, educated woman, only the second Black woman to ever graduate from Vitz University, she diligently worked for him in Eswatini for a couple of years. She typed up and sent pages and pages of detailed meticulous research material on religion in Eswatini. The problem came when Sinclair copied her work, passed it off as his own in his published books, gave no acknowledgment or recognition of the source of the work, and even word for word copied the research notes that Twala had sent him, an act of blatant outright plagiarism.

I only discovered this when I was going through Banks Sinclair's archives in Uppsala in Sweden, in connection with another research project. I came across these extraordinary research notes that had been sent in by someone called R. Twala who at that point I'd never heard of. I made my copies of them and I started doing a bit of digging. Then when I returned to Bank Sinclair's published work, his books that have made him so famous and so acclaimed in this area. I realized that in several passages there was an exact match between the words that Twala had written him in the 1950s, and then the words that Sinclair himself published in the 1970s.

I think it would be easy to dismiss this as a problem of the past, something that researchers who didn't have the ethical sensibilities that we have today did in the 1950s and that surely now supposedly enlightened times this wouldn't happen. I suspect it actually happens all the time. One of the interesting things for me being placed at Stanford University in California is the academic strike, the largest in US history that's been going on in the University of California system. One of the issues has been about fairer compensation for post-doctoral researchers, effectively research assistants who do a lot of the preliminary foundational, sometimes not even foundational, very advanced research labor for their tenured faculty colleagues, and many of whom aren't getting adequate compensation financially in terms of benefits.

Also, I think the intellectual recognition that their intellectual work is going into this labor that is then cementing and making the careers of their tenured counterparts. I think this is really a pressing issue that the academy needs to wrestle with more openly and more transparently than it is now. I think there needs to be much more of a conversation about it. In the case of researchers who are working in and on the African continent, there's an added complexity in that most of our researchers are based in African countries. US European academics will contract researchers working overseas in African countries. There I think the ethical protocols become even murkier. I think there's very little accountability. There's not much established by way of good research codes. I think this is an issue that needs to be on all academics' minds and very much on our agenda as we think about more ethical, more just and more fair ways of doing research going forward.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In acknowledging your own positionality as a white researcher, how do you think about in this moment, your work connected to your identity for uncovering retelling, and amplifying Twala's story now posthumously?

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Well, the irony that I am yet another white academic who is in a way gatekeeping access to Twala's life, is not lost on me. There are my predecessors in this story, which are the white academics with whom she had such negative exploitative relationships. Obviously, that's something that I've taken great care to avoid but I think what I don't want this to be is a story about a white academic discovering an unknown Black female intellectual because Twala's always been there. She's been hiding in plain sight. If only we would look at her and she has extensively written herself about her life and those books and those words just have to find a publisher. For me, the ultimate victory, the ultimate win from all of this would not be me bringing Twala's story to light, but Twala finally having the platform to speak for herself and for her truly important pathbreaking books to finally find a publisher 60 plus years later and finally find the audience that I believe they so richly deserve.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How does Twala's work speak to what is happening right now?

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Well, sadly, the political situation, Tini in some way is virtually unchanged from when she died in the 1960s. That the rule of the monarchy over Tini is as I infested as Ava. Over the last few years, there's been a spate of protests, popular uprisings against the monarchy that so far have been unsuccessful. The monarchy is retaliating by clamping down even more strenuously. There have been a spate of political assassinations. Just last week, one of the most prominent political activists in the country was gunned down while he was watching TV at home with his family and his young child. I want to stress that there's no evidence blaming the monarchy for this yet, but it's certainly a climate of fear and repression of ordinary citizens' right for representation and democracy. Sadly, the issues that Twala devoted her life to and she spoke about so strongly are still very much going on in the case in contemporary Eswatini.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If there was one piece written by Twala that I should read, what should I read?

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Well, I'd like to end with a lighter note, which as well as writing these incredibly important ethnographic treatises, semi-fictional novels, historical works. Twala was also an agony aunt. throughout the 1950s, she wrote an advice column in Drum magazine in South Africa, which was a famous magazine written by Black intellectuals for this very vibrant, cosmopolitan Black middle class. Twala wrote as their women's correspondence throughout the 50s. She wrote about love, she wrote about romance, she wrote about negotiating matters of the heart and the environment of the city, how to repel the advances of a man who tried to come onto you while you were on public transport. Just this very different snapshot of Twala as a woman being intimately engaged with the business of being a woman in a very day-to-day quotidian way, which I really love it. It humanizes her and shows that she was both an activist and a woman trying to live her life in very different circumstances.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joel Cabrita, associate professor of history at Stanford University and author of Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala. Joel, thanks for taking the time with us.

Dr. Joel Cabrita: Thanks so much, Melissa. This has been a fantastic conversation.

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