New Book Release on Voice, Silence, and Gender

The book is published in the ‘New Historical Perspectives’ series with the Royal Historical Society and the University of London Press. It is accessible in Open Access online and in paperback print.

Central to the monograph is the figure of Mary Masabata Loate. Between 1976 and 1986, Masabata Loate appears in court records and newspaper articles as a school student activist, a beauty queen, a terrorism suspect, a political prisoner and finally a murder victim.

Her death in 1986 at the height of the State-of-Emergency violence within Soweto was remembered in ways that obscured her complex relationship with anti-apartheid politics as a teenager and young woman.

Masabata Loate is emblematic of the way in which gendered narratives of the anti-apartheid struggle have been formed. While lacking lacked the materials to write a conventional biography, Rachel has written what she terms ‘a shadow biography’ of this young woman.

You can read more about Rachel’s research via our Staff Profiles and find out how to purchase a copy of the book from our Publications page.