Women combatants and the liberation movements in South Africa: Guerrilla girls, combative mothers and the in-betweeners

Abstract

This article examines women's role as combatants in national liberation forces in South Africa. Three categories – guerrilla girls, combative mothers and the in-betweeners – are introduced to underscore the varied ways in which women have participated in combat within the national liberation movements. Factors such as age and one's ability to leave the country affected whether women could participate in combat as ‘guerrilla girls’ or if it limited them to fighting apartheid violence from home, or if there were women who can be defined as having fallen somewhere in between these categories. These categories are used to theorise women's combat roles in the anti-apartheid struggle, thus broadening and challenging the dominant notions of combat that often hide women's contributions in war. In this regard, different periods of struggle, physical location, as well as age, determined the methods of activism available to men and women.