MEC Dhlomo to lead the remembrance of the 'Zulu Princess in York'

Sibusisiwe Makhanya (affectionately known as ‘Nkosazana’ by locals) was a woman who had deliberately gone in the face of African convention in her decision not to marry and to pursue an independent career. Sibusisiwe Violet Makhanya was a pioneer social worker, who received acclaim both locally and abroad for her innovative social welfare programmes within the community of Umbumbulu.

She was among the first Zulu women to remark on the need to change the position of women (even in rural areas) when she gave evidence to the 1930–32 Native Economic Commission. It was to this commission that she said;

. . . there is a keen desire for independence in the women and a keen desire for ownership . . . . I know of cases in our district where, when the parents have died and the brothers have become heirs, the girls are not in any way provided for. I am thinking of one or two cases where the girls have actually left their homes and have gone to urban areas where they are working and providing for themselves, whereas in former times, 10 or 15 years ago, that would not have taken place, where the brother would have gone to the town and fetched the girls back to the kraal.

Even as a young woman Sibusisiwe had taken an interest in community affairs, and by the early 1920s she had started an organization called the
The event seeks to remember and honour the role that Sibusisiwe Makhanya played in the development of the uMbumbulu community, her contribution to the education of the community (including starting a night school) and her role as a fighter for women’s rights.

Bantu Purity League, in order to improve the 'moral standards' of African girls. As Bertha Mkize put it subsequently, the League aimed 'to keep the girls pure in the right way' - at a time when the extent of premarital pregnancy, especially amongst girls, was causing considerable alarm in community circles.
Sibusisiwe's concern with the 'purity' of the 'Zulu race' was shared by many and there were very material foundations for their fears. By the beginning of the twentieth century, changed patterns of child-rearing threw the burden of sex education on mothers rather than on grandmothers and the peer group as in the past: the result of mission abhorrence of female initiation ceremonies and the development of the nuclear family, especially among Africans.

The migrant labour system which deprived villages of young men and put great pressures on the girls on their return exacerbated these problems at a time when safe forms of sexual intercourse were either forgotten or frowned on by communities. Her fears were heightened in the late 1930s when medical experts began to reveal the ravages of venereal disease (sexually transmitted infections) in the cities and countryside. Apparently unknown in African society before the mineral revolution, syphilis was revealingly known amongst the Zulu as isifo sabelungu ('the white man's disease') or isifo sedolopi ('the town disease').

Both the language and her lament were familiar. The disruptive experience of modernity had since the beginning of the nineteenth century elicited similar responses from the intellectuals and ruling classes of Europe. The African intelligentsia born of this very modernity, these processes of class formation and urbanization, the anguished cries against it and the lament for the past implied and its attack against modern ways of socialisation were never unambiguous.