"The Mamas Were Ripe": Ideologies of Motherhood and Public Resistance in a South African Township

The article examines the women of the small black township of Munsieville, South Africa, located on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and how their political leadership and mobilization during the 1980s embodied the convergence of multiple ideologies of motherhood. This convergence created a paradigm shift in black women's understanding of themselves, influencing how they responded to state violence and racial injustice. The article analyzes a particular woman as emblematic of this transition to political action through her organizing a protest against the apartheid police, with its subsequent death of a youth, and her authorship of a political tract that accounts for her radicalization.