The Travels of Florence Mophosho: The African National Congress and Left Internationalism, 1948–1985

Born in South Africa in 1921, Florence Mophosho led an extraordinary life, running the gamut from domestic service to eventual international diplomacy undertaken in her role as a representative of the exiled African National Congress of South Africa (ANC). This article outlines Mophosho's diplomatic travels and argues that the routes she traversed reveal a world of Eastern Bloc and Third World women's political struggle that was particularly active through the 1960s and 1970s. Her career exposes moments in women's history largely missed by existing historiography and resituates the work of the ANC within these networks. The fragmentary archives of the ANC, coupled with the personal archives of members of the South African liberation struggle, reveal the interplay between the ANC and other socialist and national liberation movements of this period via women's work.