Rolene Miller’s Womandla!

International Women’s Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.

Locally, Womandla! Women Power! The “Herstory” is a reflective story of one woman’s resolve to contribute to the upliftment of women in dire circumstances.

Rolene Miller is the founder of Mosaic, a South African non-governmental organisation which provides free counselling and courtroom assistance to disadvantaged women who have been victims of gender-based violence. Miller’s book Womandla! Women Power! The “Herstory” of Mosaic was published in 2018 for Mosaic’s twenty-fifth anniversary and chronicles the founder’s life with the organisation from the time of its founding up until today. The formal establishment of Mosaic as an NGO in 1993 coincided with the end of Apartheid in South Africa, a timing Miller felt to be symbolically perfect. However, although Mosaic started off at a time of transformation, in an atmosphere of freedom and hope, getting an NGO up and running in the post-Apartheid climate would prove less straightforward than anticipated. Womandla! is the story of Mosaic’s bumpy ride.

Far from being a dry recounting of names, dates and facts, this book takes the reader on a deeply personal and emotional journey. The author makes the history – or herstory – of Mosaic come alive; to Miller, her time with Mosaic is part of her very being. We get a vivid sense of her motivations for founding the organisation, her strong inner drive to get her idea off the ground, the familial and professional hurdles she faced on the way, and her steep learning curve in the world of community work. A well-to-do white South African woman of the Jewish faith, Miller paints a detailed and insightful picture of the challenges of establishing bonds of trust with disadvantaged communities, of fostering sisterhood across the boundaries of racial classifications during the early years of South African democracy, and of bringing men and women together in discussions about abuse. She also writes openly about her personal relationship with God.

While Womandla! is Miller’s personal story, it is also – and equally importantly – the story of Mosaic’s community workers. These are women who came to Mosaic in search of empowerment for themselves and others; women who sometimes faced opposition from husbands and family members for choosing to work with Mosaic; women who voluntarily jumped straight into the deep end of the pool and, despite their lack of previous experience, learned to expertly navigate a completely new professional environment; women who had the courage and willpower to revisit their own traumatic experiences as part of their training as counsellors. Reading about these women, I find them to be truly inspirational role models.

In Womandla!, Miller shows herself to be an astute observer. Her text has the ethnographic detail of an anthropological monograph and is essentially an auto-ethnography, brimming with thick descriptions and excerpts from Miller’s personal journal through which Mosaic’s volunteers and participants are often referenced in their own words. Womandla! contains revealing behind-the-scenes accounts reminiscent of such ethnographic works as Geertz’s Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight and Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Miller’s journal entries tend to reveal her judgements of specific individuals, which some may find off-putting, but which I choose to read as signs of honesty and transparency. By sharing even her most problematic thoughts and opinions, Miller adds important dimensions to the story and opens herself up for commentary and constructive criticism.

Although Womandla! is not explicitly branded as a scholarly work, it holds significant scholarly value, most obviously because it provides an exhaustive documentation of the herstory of Mosaic. Furthermore, seen in a larger context, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the situation of women in South Africa’s immediate post-Apartheid era. Womandla! provides an interesting take on interracial, intercultural and inter-class dynamics, and to a certain extent even issues of gender and sexuality. Mosaic’s early focus on intersectional identities strikes me as ahead of its time, and as a transgender woman, I am especially impressed by the fact that Miller was emphasizing the difference between sex and gender as early as the mid-1990s.

There is strong symbolism in the name Mosaic, which was chosen to illustrate how “Broken pieces of abused women’s lives will be put together to create a beautiful and whole life for themselves” (p. 9). Although Mosaic has done much good in its 25 years of existence, the fight against gender-based violence and abuse – as Miller rightly points out in the book – is still a work in progress. As broken shards are picked up and mended, new lives continue to be shattered. Reading Miller’s account of a silent demonstration against woman abuse held by Mosaic in 1995 reminded me of the much less silent Total Shutdown protests which took place across South Africa in 2018. This book, then, is not simply a work of historical documentation; it is a testament, indeed a salute, to the ongoing and ever-vibrant women’s rights struggle in which Mosaic and similar organisations continue to play a crucial part. Womandla awethu!