Gendered Segregation in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa and the Making of Bertha Mkhize (1889–1981)

ABSTRACT This article explores the life of ubiquitous South African activist Bertha Mkhize, drawing upon interviews and archives. A trained teacher, she became a tailor and leader in the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in Durban in the 1920s. She then attained national prominence in the African National Congress. Yet by 1960, she separated herself from formal politics in Durban to build rural religious communities in the Bahá’í Faith. Mkhize's trajectory reflects the complexity of African women's engagement with gendered segregation – shifting between strategies of confrontation against state‐defined separation and attempts to build alternative separatist communities, within and outside formal politics.