6: What is a woman’s story?
By Lynsey Chutel
Intro
Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles is a podcast that explores sounds, interviews, music, and even noises recorded during the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives. Over five episodes, journalists, artists, and researchers present mixtapes that reconsider archival recordings and reflect on their meanings in the present moment.
The invited collaborator for this episode is Lynsey Chutel, a South African journalist and writer, living in Johannesburg. The title of her mixtape is “What is a woman’s story?”.
Mixtape
What is a woman’s story?
Archival reference no: BAB, TPA.43. 21, 157.
Conversation
Melanie Boehi:
We are recording this conversation with Lynsey in early July, 2024. Lynsey, thanks for making time. I know your schedule is very busy.
Lynsey Chutel:
Oh, thank you. The news Gods are on our side. It's a quiet day.
Melanie Boehi:
In your mixtape, you speak about your schedule and being a journalist, and I want to start by asking you, how did you become a journalist? When did you know that this is what you want to do?
Lynsey Chutel:
I knew in grade 10 English, when we did Shakespeare that I wanted to be a writer. We did Shakespeare and JM Coetzee and then later Ian McEwan, and I just knew that I wanted to be a writer. And then I told my mother and she's like, you're going to starve, and we are not rich. We are a working class coloured family from the township of Eldorado Park south of Joburg, and nobody we know becomes authors. Then for a while there I thought, okay, my marks were good enough to get into engineering, and I thought, okay, I would go be an engineer because that made money, I thought. But then somehow, I can't remember when exactly I think someone from the universities came and spoke to us, and if you're interested in writing, perhaps if you consider journalism, and I thought, well, there's something I could do. Then I would get to write. And I remember how teenagers, we discussed the world as teenagers, we know so much, and I remember one of my classmates saying, you shouldn't do the thing you love because you'll end up hating it. We were about 16 at the time, and I'm so glad to say that she was wrong.
Writing is the thing that when I sit down when I'm a journalist, and sometimes when all the logistics and the news cycle and the relentlessness of it gets to me, it's the storytelling that gets me, and I think that's how I wanted to be a writer of the storytelling. So yeah, I think by the time I got to university and I started doing journalism, I was like, oh, this is it, and I didn't look back and I just threw myself into it, got onto the university newspaper and just have been doing the news in some form or another since I was 18, so that's a while now. Yeah,
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah. And you said your family didn't know anybody who was a writer or was a journalist, so who are the people who inspired you? Did you have any role models or you just really found your way by yourself?
Lynsey Chutel:
I think it was a bit of both. I mean, yeah, we didn't know any journalists, but we are a family who loves books. And I had an interesting childhood in that my mother is a single parent and she's also the elder sister, and so all her brothers and sisters came to live with her and they all happened to be in university, so they were all studying all the time and they were all reading all the time. So I was this child in an adult world who had books around her all the time. And so it was definitely encouraged. It was never discouraged. You know once you get to the end of academia and you start to carve out what a career looks like, because journalism, academically versus journalism practise, there's a bit of a mismatch there. And so when I looked around, I started looking at who were the newspaper editors that I admired.
I gravitated towards women of Colour. I thought, well, if they can do it, then I can do it. And so I looked at Phylicia Oppelt at the Daily Dispatch. I was quite a fan of Ferial Haffajee when she was still with the Mail & Guardian, and these were just the papers that I had hoped to work. They were local papers. I wasn't dreaming very big, and that's who I looked around. But I also started politics. And it was also of the time when South Africa was kind of reentering the stage, or reentering the rest of the continent. Tab was president South Africa was really trying to rebuild those bridges. And so there was this huge fascination for me with the continent, and I had read Barbara Kingsolver's book on the Congo. I don’t know how I would feel if I did it now, but I read it when I was 15. It stayed with me and I thought, oh, I wanted to cover Africa. And so in covering Africa, someone introduced me to Howard French's book about covering Africa, and they also introduced me to a journalist at the Washington Post who had the opposite experience of covering Africa. And Howard French's book really spoke to me about how we need to challenge the way in which we write about Africa to not write about the continent as a basket case.
Melanie Boehi:
And then you went to Columbia?
Lynsey Chutel:
Yep. When I went to do my Honours at Rhodes [University] and then I was kind of in between and I applied just because this person said apply. And I got in and I remember the first day everyone else had this, I wrote my essay and I planned this and I stood up and I said, hi, my name is Lynsey, I'm still not sure what I'm doing here. But it definitely set my course for what I wanted to and wanted to do and what the kinds of stories I wanted to do: Foreign reporting and bringing foreign audiences home to local readers and reporting about poverty because I think covering Africa and covering poverty dovetail in that sense that people write about poverty as an inevitability, as if people are simply statistics or they are examples of a statistic. They are not full people with agency. And also we also talk about people who live in poverty as if they have no history, as if we don't know how they got there. And I think whether you are an impoverished person in East New York and Brooklyn, which is what I covered, or whether you are a person who lives in poverty in Africa, we must look at the systemic issues. And I think those are the things that really started. Those are the things that really drove me and got me going.
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah, yeah, very interesting. When we started engaging around these archives we've been working with in this project in particular, the Ruth Weiss Sound Archives, there were a couple of moments of discovering similarities. Obviously you're very different, but one similarity is you have this double role of being a local journalist, working for local South African news organisations, and also as an international correspondent working for, in your case, American publications. What is this like having this double role?
Lynsey Chutel:
There's a point in the archive where Ruth talks about using a conference as a news peg because she couldn't really get editors to pay attention. And she's like, okay, great. There's this conference happening. This is a way to get in. I'm not really going to write about the conference but I'm going to do is use it as a platform to write about what's happening in this country. I care about, I think it was Zambia at the time, if I'm not mistaken. And I had to do a lot of that, particularly when I was starting out.
And so you go to these conferences and you're like, hey, I will do the story. So you do the conference story. And then in one particular conference, I slipped away and just didn't come back after lunch, and I went to go and do some reporting on an entirely different story, and that's the one that ran. But that's kind of how you a no, it's good because particularly when you are a freelancer or you don't have a staff job, which is how Ruth survived for so much of a career, which is amazing honestly because it's difficult. You rely on those things and you have to find a way to get someone to pay for a plane ticket or a bus ticket or your accommodation to a place. That really stayed with me. But also when you're living in a place, I think there are disadvantages and advantages, I think you take for granted some of what you see and you just live in that.
And then sometimes someone from outside comes in and says, Hey, this is interesting, fascinating. This is a lesson for the rest of the world. And I think we missed that. And I wonder if Ruth experienced that because she said she didn't really write much about South Africa where she lived or spent her early adult years. But I think once she left and got to Zimbabwe and got to Zambia, I think she had an outsider's view. I think she deeply understood the cleavages in the region. She understood the politics of the region, and I think she did that. If you look at, we take for granted now that our liberation movements came out on top. But if you look at news reporting from that time, there was an enormous amount of scepticism from the international press. Who are these Africans? Who is Kaunda? who is Mugabe? Who are these Africans who said that they could lead who are fighting bushwars?
And so what she did was she took her experience of living in the region and she said that this is why these people are worth paying attention to, and this is why we need to frame them in a different way and frame them with people who have political agency. And I think there was a real morality that drove her journalism. I guess that's the difference between her time and my time. She got into the struggle. I was just doing a story on the elections and I met someone who was trained by Ruth. I was doing, I was covering South Africa's elections, and he was like, oh, I was an MK vet in Southern Africa. And I said, oh, do you by any chance know a woman named Ruth Weiss? He was like, yes. He knew her because she trained him up.
Melanie Boehi:
Amazing. So he did one of her courses in Zimbabwe, or
Lynsey Chutel:
I think it might have been in Zambia, but he had played South Africa, didn't really know what to do. Went to the courses and they said to him, okay, we're going to put you in the media team for the ANC Umkhonto weSizwe. And he was in Ruth's classes, he was one of Ruth's courses and he became a journalist, worked for the SABC when he came back. And I thought, isn't that fascinating? What I think is interesting about her work is that she wasn't bogged down by questions about objectivity because I think she knew the struggle at hand and she just stepped across and said, I need to do this. I haven't done that.
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah, yeah. I think definitely becoming a journalist for her was a way to align her political convictions and her work, but also with a delicate balance of not becoming too involved. She decided not to join a political party, for example, for that reason to not be seen as too close. So she did still maintain that claim of some kind of neutrality even though she was very involved and she wanted to contribute to the struggle and to development of newly independent countries like Zambia when she lived there.
Lynsey Chutel:
Yeah, I think just like her willingness to push up against these leaders and to question them at a time when maybe they weren't getting a lot of question questioning from the local press or pushback particularly from women, particularly. I think that that speaks to a courage, but it also speaks to integrity as a journalist that yes, I will help train your liberation soldiers in media and understanding the role of the media in democracy because it's something that I sincerely believe in, if practised correctly. And I think that her ability to say that I will champion the cause of the freedom of the priest of democracy, but then step back and then do the work that is required by the Fourth Estate, which is to question that authority. I think that says quite a bit about who she was and her integrity.
Melanie Boehi:
Because you mentioned when Ruth started out as a journalist, there weren't a lot of women journalists and especially not in the field of business and economics reporting, but then today you are also experiencing a lot of challenges related to gender, but also to your position as a Black woman. Do you want to talk a bit about that?
Lynsey Chutel:
Yeah, I mean, Black women are kind of trapped by a certain picture of who we are supposed to be. We must be respectful, we must be dutiful, we must be dignified. And what being dignified means is to not be too loud, is to not speak first, is to not challenge. And that goes entirely against what being a journalist is.
And so it can feel when you're sitting across a big man, a so-called Big Man and you are having to ask him questions and really pushing, sometimes they'll remind you, you are a girl and they won't use women, they'll use girl. You are infantilized and then you're also sexualized. And that I will find, for example, I'm interviewing a politician and his hand is on the back, the small of my back. Sometimes it's not even a politician, sometimes it is just a man in the street and I'm coming up to you for a vox pop and I am treated like a walking piece of meat, looked up and down first because the first thing you are before you are a journalist is you are a woman. You are a Woman of Colour who is devalued a Woman of Colour whose body has been either shamed or on public display. It is for the ownership of others, it is not for you. And you are moving also in a public space. And that matters because we associate women's bodies with a sense of domesticity. And so when women move through public spaces, as journalists often do, and we move through spaces that are aggressive, spaces that are contested, spaces that are sometimes violently contested, and your body then becomes a public space for some people and they feel this right to touch you, to ogle you to, it's just, it's incredibly frustrating. And then you're also dealing with it in the newsroom.. I worked in international newsrooms and so their policies were a lot stricter around sexual harassment. But I know that African newsrooms and South African newsrooms have issues of sexual harassment, have issues of editors taking advantage of reporters, using that relationship. As a woman, you're dealing with a message also that if you allow that objectifying, you'll progress. And what's really frustrating, and I know this happens particularly in South African politics a couple of years ago, political coverage is that if women got scoops, if women outdid their male colleagues, particularly in political reporting, the answer was she must have slept her way through. So men have sources and women have lovers.
Melanie Boehi:
When Ruth was living in Rhodesia in the sixties and she was reporting about sanction busting, that's exactly what she was accused of, that because she got scoops, she must be sleeping with people in power. It can't be just her doing her job well before they kicked her out after two years.
Lynsey Chutel:
And then how do they explain when they kicked her out? But they'll find a reason right? Once, oh no, she was no longer the flavour of the month. Not that she worked hard, not that her work was challenging. And yeah, and it's just frustrating. It really is. It's, it just devalues our work, but also devalues our personal to such an extent that it's demeaning. I'm hoping that with the number of women in journalism, because I see also particularly in foreign correspondence, and I come back to that because I was Ruth’s field, essentially her beat, I see an increasing number of women just in the last decade. When I started out the only woman I was at the AP, almost fresh out of university, I landed a job at the Associated Press in South Africa at the Johannesburg Bureau, and it was all men, mostly American, but there was one woman, Michelle Faul.
I remember sitting in the room and we were discussing the daily meeting, how it starts, and you have to say in each region who's doing what. And this was before the Sheryl Sandberg moment. Michelle scooted over and pulled me and she said, come sit at the table. And I have sat at the table every time because of that, and it stays with me as a lesson that you should always make room for other women because Michelle was the only woman and the only Woman of Colour and a woman born in Africa who was doing this job.
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah, I mean, these intersectionalities are very important. It brings me to ask you a question about your book that you wrote or you published last year. And there's also a similarity with Ruth. So Ruth wrote an autobiography in 1981, and when I asked her, why did write your author biography at that moment? And she said, it was just a moment when I had to explain myself, because people were asking, why are you doing what you're doing? She had just left a well-paid job at Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcaster, to again become a freelance journalist and moved to London. And people asked her, why did you leave this job? She wrote this whole book to provide an explanation, which has to do with her being born in Germany, in a Jewish family, and they had to escape in 1936 because of the Holocaust. And moving back to Germany and being confronted with the past that the Germans at that time very much hadn't dealt with, was just impossible for her. But I want to ask you about your book, which is a very different book. I'm very intrigued with how in your book you weave together academic research, journalistic reporting, but also personal memoir about what it is like to be Black, Coloured female in South Africa. Was writing this book also a way to come to terms with this expectations and challenges in journalism?
Lynsey Chutel:
I think it was more case of expectations and challenges of South African society. Unlike Ruth, I did not have the guts to write from personal experience, at least not at first. And, we started writing the book, my coauthor and I, as a response to protests during the COVID-19 lockdowns, in which a young Coloured boy who had down syndrome and was nonverbal was killed by the police. And it resonated with people because there had been a spate of police killings around the world, and the hashtag Black Lives Matter was making the rounds. And in my community, which is Eldorado Park, which is where I grew up, the hashtag was different. It was #ColouredLivesMatter. So a, I'm spending my time as a journalist doing the work of telling the story of this killing, contextualising it in the global sense of the global Black Lives Matter movement, but also writing about it to explain my community. That was tough and interesting and a learning curve for me. Because the question was why would a group of people who are so clearly Black, to the rest of the world at least, why would they use a different hashtag?
It was something I had to deal with because I identify myself as a Black woman, but my cultural heritage and my cultural heritage is coloured of a mixed racial background, and not in the sense of being biracial, but in the sense of people who were forced together because they weren't quite Black and they weren't seen as African. And so I also thought that by this time, the word Coloured would've fallen away in this nearly 30 years after democracy. And I also thought that what was scary for me was the sense of nationalism around Coloured nationalism. That here was something that was happening that was deeply traumatic, that was very painful to a community, but it was something that was being experienced by lots of different communities, not just in South Africa, but globally. But my community saw it as an isolating event. And so what the book did was it forced me to reckon with why Coloureds of the Africans still feel so left behind, why they feel disappointed by the democratic project in South Africa, and why this identity, which is a complex identity, I mean, why it still survives. Because who wants to be known as the people who are a product of slavery and abandonment, shame, and those attacks on Indigenous people who wants to still hold onto that word That means all those things? People who were born after apart are using the word. What we did was because I still, I believe in story and we didn't want to write another academic book because we felt it was a public conversation that needed to be had. And so what we did was every section of the book, we spoke to a real human being, and that matters, I think, because we didn't want to, we used the academic research. So there was a ton of research already done, and what we wanted to do was to bring the research home to people. What's been so interesting in the year or nearly a year since the book came out is that every time we sit down for a book signing, there's someone lining up who's coming to tell us about a heartbreaking story.
The heartbreak for me also comes from within the Coloured community because then people would give each other awful nicknames, or they would give each other a certain hierarchy in the family because colourism is such a deep thing in the Coloured community, it so stratifies our community, and it was something that I had experienced being dark-skinned, having this thick bush of hair, was a disadvantage growing up. So it also forced me to confront my own experiences within the coloured community. And so when you spoke about intersectionality, because that was important for us in the book also was, you move through the world as different as people all the time, as different parts of you, and that's what intersectionality is. I move to the world as a Coloured woman. I move to the world as a Black woman. I move to the world as an Africa., I move to the world as a woman with relative privilege because I have an education and I speak in a certain way. But then that doesn't take away the other prejudices that I've had to deal with. I think that was the thing about the book for me was it finally made me say in a far more comfortable way that I am all these things. At the same time, I am a journalist, but I also happen to be from the country or the neighbourhood that I'm covering. I am a Woman of Colour, but also a woman of privilege. The best you can do is trying to tell the story.
Melanie Boehi:
And I think your book, it's a great example of the power of journalism and journalistic storytelling, of bridging the gap between the academic research and the stories in the communities, the experiences in the communities.
Lynsey Chutel:
Yeah, we were quite deliberate about that. We were like, we will speak to people, but we also don't want to pretend that we are the first to ever have this conversation. And that's where academia is so important because it really helps shape so much of our thinking. Yeah.
Melanie Boehi:
I want to ask you about the sound archive. So when we started this project, I invited you to listen to the archive, the recordings in the archive. What were your first impressions of listening to this material?
Lynsey Chutel:
I think Ruth's journalism itself is so important, particularly her work covering women. But what I think the thing that stood out to me listening to her as a journalist was the sheer logistics of her job, the moving around, is my recorder fixed? Is this working? Is that, And I wonder often how booking a flight here, trying to get there, trying to get to the story, it's something that when readers sit down and they read the news article or they watch the new segment, which is about 90 seconds, or they listen to the radio bulletin, which is even shorter, I don't think readers understand the sheer logistics that go into producing such a short piece of work or what seems a short piece of work. And that stuck out to me. And the thing I've been thinking about throughout this entire project is, Ruth is a mom and she was a single mom, and I know that it was difficult for her, but I also wonder, is it, we had that question of men aren't asked about how they balance family and life. And on the one hand I'm like, yeah, we shouldn't be asking women constantly about motherhood. Because it’s not all we are. But on the other hand, what I take from Ruth's story is it's important to ask women about motherhood because then you ask, how do I make sure that women like Ruth Weiss get to be mothers and don't have to leave the job because that is a question that we are continuing to have. So rather than speaking to women as if they are superwomen, speak to them to say, well, how do I make it so that you can be the excellent journalist that you are and not like Ruth have to leave your job in order to choose to raise your son.
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah, I mean it's all these hidden struggles that a woman journalist go through. Ruth writes about it in her autobiography. And then the sound archive is interesting because it gives us glimpses into just some of that logistics that you mentioned, like the small talk at the beginning, checking the equipment, is the recording device running things that listeners take for granted that these things just must be running. And then there's also some recordings where at the beginning of an interview, at the end of the interview, she would ask a person practical questions about logistics, about travelling. There's a recording of a phone call with her ex-husband where he asks her how she is and she just says, she's fine. But also you can hear she's exhausted from all the travelling. And I think that really also resonated with you and led you recording your schedule for the mixtape. Maybe, I don't know,
Lynsey Chutel:
Maybe we should say in this spirit, what listeners of this podcast do not hear is that we have been trying to find this moment for weeks. I love when women work around with other schedules like this, but I also know that it's difficult. And so I've been thinking about how do we make it so it's easy, but how do we make it so that the fact that you have to go and pick up your wonderful son after this is not a strange thing. It's that hidden labour. But then we are also expected to not only compete at the same level as our male colleagues because we are women. Sometimes you are required to be better, and I imagine that in Ruth's time she must have had to work so much harder.
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah. And another woman's voice that you used in your mixtape is the recording, also from the archive, of Bessie Head. I want to ask you what drew you to this recording
Lynsey Chutel:
Bessie Head I encountered as Bessie Head, the author, and I think that's how most of us encounter her, right? Reading Maru as a teenager, but really my Bessie Head’s When Rainclouds Gather is the book that defines Southern Africa. For me, it is almost biblical in its way of depicting how we find our heroes. But then I'm also really interested in Bessie Head's life, and a lot is made about, oh, Bessie head suffered alcoholism, Bessie Head was a drunkard, Bessie Head lived in isolation in Serowe. But what's really interesting is that the Bessie Head archive in Serowe actually paints a different picture of Bessie Head. It tells us who Bessie Head was, the she too, like Ruth Weiss, and like Michelle Faul, was a single mother who did their work, and that Bessie Head was also a journalist. And what was interesting about Bessie Head’s decision with journalism, it comes back to that question about independence when she lives to South Africa and she covered Botswana and Southern Africa, she covered it in the sense that she was also driven by the subjective that we must help the liberation movements.
She became jaded by the movements themselves and struggled with that, with how the movements had disappointed her, but also struggled with how it had sidelined women and the expectations around what women should be doing as writers, as journalists, as sort of handmaidens to the revolution. And then the other thing that I think is really interesting and why I want us to remember Bessie Head is because when you go through her archives, you see it was Bessie Head who was corresponding with Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin and Bessie Head who had ideas. And I think that's why Bessie Head becomes Bessie Head, the author. I think that's the tricky part about, particularly at that time. It's easier now, but at that time, who are you, a woman, a brown woman, to share your ideas so boldly as you did? And I think that's often about what the women who are working at that time, because I think when you see Ruth sitting down to say, I am now going to write about the women because I've done my work covering liberation movements, covering male politicians, but there's a part of society here that holds the society together and Zimbabwean women, it's Zimbabwean women in rural areas. They held society together, but they were completely overlooked. That for me, is a theme for both of them. And I think it's something that I think we're still coming to grips with in journalism because what's so interesting about international journalism in particular is that so African women are often the subjects. We are the subjects of stories: We are the example of a new disease, an example, we are the victims of war, we are the refugees who carry their children from miles and miles. And so what happens is, is that African women become pictures of stories and they become symbols of stories, but they aren't the actors in stories. They are the subjects of stories. What's so interesting is this idea that even then you had these women pushing you against the idea that African women were just subjects or objects in a story that they had agency.
And I think it's significant that women are the ones who are stopping and saying, I will give women agency. And you feel this in a newsroom because you're just like, you want to do the stories like your male colleagues. You don't want to be seen as doing women's issues in inverted commas. Women's issues are global issues. I often, in this conversation, I've also been drawn to Ruth's work on women because I think the decision to focus on women is one that is deeply important, but I think it's one that can also be so dismissed in a woman's career, like, oh, you're just covering women.
Melanie Boehi:
And it's a shift that happened when she started writing books as a business and economics journalist. And you see that in the archive. The interviews are mostly with men, male politicians, male businessmen. And then when she starts this project on women in Zimbabwe in the early eighties, that's when she really interviews a lot of women. And some of these interviews are in the archive. There are many more interviews that are not in the archive that are published in the books, but there was no space in the newspapers or on radio. And that's why there were these books published by small publishers and many out of print and hard to find.
Lynsey Chutel:
Exactly. And I think you know what I also, and I wonder if she might've had this experience too, Ruth, is that when you sit down to talk to women, and if it happens to me in 2024, I'm fairly certain it happened to Ruth in the 1980s, where when you sit and talk to women and you ask them about their stories, they are surprised. I think of the economics coverage. It is women who drive the economies of so many countries, particularly rural based economies. But it's not women who do the talking. It is women who work in businesses, but it's not women who do the talking. And so I imagine that the women must also have said, no, no, there's the man of the house talk to him, getting women to talk. And then women will say, oh no, there's the man. Talk to him even today. So I think that it's just,
Melanie Boehi:
Yeah, it's part of that extra labour that women journalists have to do, but also journalists covering women. Lynsey, as somebody who primarily works with words as a writer, how was it to create a mixtape?
Lynsey Chutel:
It was a strange experience because it doesn't feel as controlled, and I was very tempted to just script it. I wanted to write it out first and then read it, right, because I mainly work in text, but I've also worked in television. And television is completely scripted. And I was tempted to do that. And what I liked about this particular project is that it forced me to take a step back and look at my work and look at my role as a woman journalist, but also look at the generational journalists who Ruth's generation have handed the bat over to, and what does it mean? What do we do with this baton that they've handed over to us? And I think that that's been the most interesting part of this project for me. And while I know the project will sit in Switzerland, there are a generation of journalists who've come up in the last decade or so, last two decades, and African women who want to tell stories and who need to know that there is a history of African women and a woman being journalists on the continent, because sometimes it can feel very isolating, and I imagine that it was much more isolating in Ruth's time. And I'm grateful for the community that's been created and for the legacy that she lived
Melanie Boehi:
And related to this. What are your thoughts about this archive being in Switzerland?
Lynsey Chutel:
I hope we find a way to share it. I really do. I hope that it finds a way here because I really do think that because when you're starting out as an African woman and as a journalist, South Africa is luckier because we have more women, but I know of my colleagues in Uganda and Kenya and in West Africa, where being a woman journalist and moving through those public spaces can feel very difficult and very isolating.
And I know of many who have decided to since when we all started out together and many have left. And so what I hope is that the archive and the lessons that the archive has taught me are shared with other journalists, but not just journalists, woman journalists in Africa, woman journalists in Europe, and also just women who are working and trying to find a place in the world and who don't want to have to choose these different parts of who we are. What I want is for these stories to come through and to empower a generation of women.
Melanie Boehi:
Lynsey, thank you very much for this conversation.
Outro
The Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles podcast was developed by Melanie Boehi, in collaboration with Andrei van Wyk, Lynsey Chutel, Talya Lubinsky, Niren Tolsi, Belinda Zhawi and Percy Zvomuya. Sound design, editing and production is by Andrei van Wyk. Original archival recordings used in the mixtapes are subject to the regulations of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien Archives. The project “Echoes of the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives” was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation with a Spark grant. Thanks go to Ruth Weiss, Maggie Caroline Katsande, the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Radio Télévision Suisse, the University of Lausanne, the Swiss National Science Foundation and all contributors. For more information on the project, please check out our website: independence-echoes.org.
