And their voices were everywhere: Myesha Jenkins and the Pan-African feminist performance strategies of liberation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Feminist poet, editor, and anti-Apartheid activist Myesha Jenkins brought – possibly for the first time on South African public radio – a deliberate feminist agenda that validates poetry as political action. This paper documents and analyses her amplification of poetry on public radio and the feminist collectives that came before it, with specific focus on Jenkins’ Pan-African feminist imagination and movement building. I suggest that Jenkins’ body of work – particularly Poetry in the Air (PitA) – provided wider access to the featured poets as well as a place for self-writing and self-representation. I argue that PitA, along with Jenkins’ other work building feminist poetry and performance collectives, made important contributions to South African women’s performance strategies of liberation, in a country (and world) that actively (re)produces the ‘Female Fear Factory’. As a co-creator with Jenkins on some of these Pan-African feminist poetry collectives and productions, I use the oral histories that I conducted with her between 2016 and 2017, the transcripts of PitA, and the social history of contemporary South African feminist poetry collectives to examine her legacy.