Obituary: Elaine Rosa Salo, Feminist who spoke truth to power

28 August 2016 - 02:00 By Chris Barron

ElaineRosa Salo, who has died in Delaware in the US at the age of 54, was a feminist academic who blew out of the water most of the stereotypes about feminist academics. She was neither dogmatic nor judgmental. There was nothing dour or one-dimensional about her. She loved dancing, jazz and cooking. She had a well-developed sense of aesthetics. She cared about beautiful things. Not expensive things but beautiful things. She could always tell the difference.She was down to earth with a robust Afrikaans accent. She was often wickedly funny and had a raucous, guffawing laugh. She was witty with a razor-sharp tongue which she generally reserved for speaking truth to power, something she didn't hesitate to do if she felt power was being abused.She had a deep sense of compassion for those who were kept out or victimised because of gender, race, class or nationality. She spoke out fearlessly when the principles that she felt allowed people to be human were transgressed.Human dignity mattered to her. She believed people were all in it together. There were not helpers and those who needed help.Through her work as a sociologist, social anthropologist and gender activist she strove to open up spaces for women, including at the universities where she worked.She saw that the impediments to occupying and owning such spaces were not just gender or class or race or nationality but crossed myriad boundaries.She always made connections across boundaries and was critical of feminists whose view of feminism she felt was too narrow. She criticised feminists from privileged backgrounds, for instance, for their inability to speak to questions of class.A formidable network of connections helped her to integrate scholarly work and make sense of debates across space.She expected her students and fellow feminist academics to integrate the debates happening in South Africa with debates elsewhere on the continent especially.She herself drew inspiration, she wrote, "from a veritable continent of African feminist thinkers living and writing on a continent that many South African scholars located exclusively within the eurocentric tradition barely know of, or whom they often dismiss. They are poorer for imagining this intellectual tradition as being so shallow as to dismiss it or so primitive and backward that it had no history before the arrival of the Europeans."She was deeply interested in what came to be called African feminism, the work of people in Uganda, Ghana, Zimbabwe, which in many ways she felt was far ahead of what feminist activists in South Africa were trying to do.Her work was informed by an extraordinarily broad set of connections across Europe and North America as well, but she kept coming back to Africa.Eurocentric South African academics who ignored the intellectual traditions of Africa were to be deplored, but also pitied as they denied themselves "the joy of discovering other humanistic traditions".She regarded the promotion of multilingualism and curriculum transformation as key parts of the battle to embrace the intellectual traditions of the continent.Students needed to be introduced to these traditions to resolve the "seemingly intractable problems of unequal development and inequality; social conflict and weak states; environmental degradation; climate change; the material effects of hate speech; and so on", she wrote.Salo was born in Kimberley on June 20 1962 and grew up in a household of strong women.She got involved in the struggle against apartheid at an early age, inspired by the "pragmatic maternal feminism" of Albertina Sisulu, the women of the Black Sash and the more radical activist feminist tradition of redoubtable trade unionist Emma Mashinini.She obtained a bachelor of social science degree at the University of Cape Town in 1983, followed by a BA honours degree in social anthropology.In 1984 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Clark University in Massachusetts, where she got a master's degree in international development.She lectured in social anthropology and sociology at the University of the Western Cape for 10 years and was director of the gender equity unit there for a year before joining the African Gender Institute at UCT in 2000.In 2004, she completed her PhD in social anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta in the US, based on extensive research on gendered roles in the gang-ridden Cape Flats township of Manenberg.Her dissertation was titled Respectable Mothers, Tough Men and Good Daughters: making persons in Manenberg township, South Africa.She became an associate professor of social anthropology and director of the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria in 2009.In 2014, she went to the University of Delaware in the US as an associate professor in the department of political science and international relations.Salo published extensively nationally and internationally. Her research focused on gender and identity, violence, social construction of masculinities, feminism, sexuality, patriarchy and women's rights.She died after a resurgence of the breast cancer she was diagnosed with 16 years ago. She is survived by her partner Colin Miller, a jazz musician she met in Kimberley in 1985, their son Miles and daughter Jessica.1962 - 2016..

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