Forget Beyoncé. South Africa has a packed runway of Slay Queens who embraced the notion of rebellion and bravely paved the way for female cultural icons to take centre stage. They changed and influenced pop culture, music, art and design, but were often viewed as problems because they failed to conform.
University of the Western Cape (UWC) PhD Graduate Mbali Mazibuko has completed her study that explores rebellious Black Femininities articulated through popular culture in South Africa.
From apartheid South Africa in the 1980s to today, the focus shifts from Brenda Fassie’s impact in the 1980s to Boom Shaka and Lebo Mathosa during the early years of democracy, and on to contemporary women like Khanyi Mbau and the Slay Queen.
Her work was summed up by the UWC Department of Gender Studies as “articulating the biographies of rebellious femininities that destabilise hegemonic gendered, sexual and intersecting social constructions. The study shows how they do not simply oppose notions of ‘respectable’ or ‘traditional’ femininities, but strategically resist dominant norms while surviving, re-creating and co-constructing within heterosexist contexts.”
Mazibuko’s work is partly biographical, but also a critical feminist discourse about rebellion and Black Womens’ agency. Mazibuko grew up in a creative space where her parents encouraged her to read, and her father would pass the newspaper to her because he knew “I would read anything and everything I could put my hands on.” She attended High School at the National School of the Arts where she trained in Drama and Theatre, but admits that she was more interested in the theory of the arts than the practice of it. She went on to do a BA in Sociology, Political Sciences and International Relations. She did her Honours and Master’s in Sociology, but her focus and the core of her academic work was on gender, and particularly the representation of black women.
Her work builds on established literature and theories. “There’s a tendency to think about the histories of marginalised people, particularly black women, as if they end somewhere. I like to think about people’s stories and the past, or this notion of the past and history, as continuous. And for me to think about histories as continuous necessarily means that I need to look at where I am and what I’m trying to make sense of in my own life. As a gender and feminist scholar, that is the one space that I learnt about things like standpoint theory and the notion of situatedness, and how ‘the personal is political.”
Brenda Fassie, Lebo Matosa and many others have become iconic but not fully celebrated, she explained, yet their work was powerful and deeply political.
“It could change paradigms, and I do think that the more we’re able to connect with the work that we do, I think the more genuine it becomes. And that’s something that I try to do. And the kind of feeling that I try to give people in whatever it is that I’m writing.”
Mazibuko said more should be done to explore the issue of rebellious women because it is perceived as negative.
“It’s supposed to tell you how not to be. So when we shift, we should be encouraged to think about rebellious women as also not just reacting to power but also reconstructing worlds.
We think about rebellious women as working collaboratively together. We think about rebellious women as creating and recreating alongside one another, while also subverting the dominant forms of power. I think then we might be able to have a more productive conversation of what it means to be a rebellious black woman.”
How do we exist in spaces in ways that are not normative but in ways that truly express who we are and what we want to see? Mazibuko said she looked at how popular culture helped to find that expression. And this is what inspired her to look at the late Brenda Fassie.
Mazibuko said: “I wanted to understand how she managed to be rebellious in the 1980s and during apartheid. There was so much repression, structurally, legally, but also culturally and socially. And there were things that we were allowed to do, things that were not allowed to do, particularly as black women. And then I went into the 1990s, which is when I was born, and I resonated with Boom Shaka and particularly Lebo Mathosa as an icon.”
Mazibuka concluded: “Beyond them being rebellious, there are messages that they are sending to us in their music, aesthetic and politics about how we can be the black woman that we want to be, as opposed to the black woman that our families, our societies are telling us we should be.
“This phenomenon of slay queens is actually not new because when you look at women like Brenda Fassie and the women of Boom Shaka, Lebo Mathosa and Thembi Seete, then you cannot single out women like Khanyo Mbau as exceptional or shameful. They have followed in these footsteps.
