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Regina Twala
Regina Gelana Twala (1908–1968) was a feminist activist, writer, teacher, researcher, evangelist, and liberation leader in South Africa and eSwatini.
Twala became a prolific researcher, writer and political activist, helping co-found the Swaziland Progressive Party. She was also the only female candidate to run for a seat in Swaziland's first Legislative Council in 1963.
Twala was born Regina Dorris Mazibuko in 1908 in eNdaleni, South Africa into a Zulu family. She was raised on a rural Methodist mission station in eNdaleni. Her mother, Muriel Majozi, worked as domestic worker in Durban.
Twala graduated from Indaleni Girl's High School in 1924, where, despite the confines of mission education for women at the time, she excelled academically. Twala trained as school teacher at Adams College, an American missionary school along the Natal coast. Her first job was teaching at her former school in Indaleni. While working as teacher in the early 1930s, Twala wrote a regular column for the popular Black daily newspaper Bantu World under the pseudonym Mademoiselle. Twala's biographer, Joel Cabrita writes that the twenty three columns that Twala wrote as Mademoiselle were "pioneering in their forthright celebration of female independence." In 1935, she began to write a similar column for the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu under the pen name Sister Kollie. While writing for these papers, Twala entered and won several writing competitions, including second prize at the May Esther Bedford Prize for an essay "Tales of Swazi and Hlubiland" that she had written based on interviews with her relatives at eNdaleni.
In 1936, Twala married her first husband, Percy Kumalo, a clerk at a gold mine in Johannesburg. She moved from eNdaleni to Johannesburg to live with Kumalo. In Johannesburg, she worked at an American Board mission school against the norm of the time that once married, women stop working outside their homes.
Twala studied as part of the inaugural cohort of the Jan Hofmyer School of Social Work, the first institution to train Black social workers in South Africa, where she graduated in 1942 at the top of her class.
In 1948, after completing a BA degree in social studies she became the second Black woman to obtain a degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (Mary Malahlela, a medical doctor, was the first Black woman to graduate from the university, a year earlier). She then pursued a graduate degree at the university, where her thesis focused on African beadwork.
Twala became a prolific researcher, particularly on women's issues and native customs in southern Africa. She also founded a library specifically for use by women.
Regina Twala
Regina Gelana Twala (1908–1968) was a feminist activist, writer, teacher, researcher, evangelist, and liberation leader in South Africa and eSwatini.
Twala became a prolific researcher, writer and political activist, helping co-found the Swaziland Progressive Party. She was also the only female candidate to run for a seat in Swaziland's first Legislative Council in 1963.
Twala was born Regina Dorris Mazibuko in 1908 in eNdaleni, South Africa into a Zulu family. She was raised on a rural Methodist mission station in eNdaleni. Her mother, Muriel Majozi, worked as domestic worker in Durban.
Twala graduated from Indaleni Girl's High School in 1924, where, despite the confines of mission education for women at the time, she excelled academically. Twala trained as school teacher at Adams College, an American missionary school along the Natal coast. Her first job was teaching at her former school in Indaleni. While working as teacher in the early 1930s, Twala wrote a regular column for the popular Black daily newspaper Bantu World under the pseudonym Mademoiselle. Twala's biographer, Joel Cabrita writes that the twenty three columns that Twala wrote as Mademoiselle were "pioneering in their forthright celebration of female independence." In 1935, she began to write a similar column for the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu under the pen name Sister Kollie. While writing for these papers, Twala entered and won several writing competitions, including second prize at the May Esther Bedford Prize for an essay "Tales of Swazi and Hlubiland" that she had written based on interviews with her relatives at eNdaleni.
In 1936, Twala married her first husband, Percy Kumalo, a clerk at a gold mine in Johannesburg. She moved from eNdaleni to Johannesburg to live with Kumalo. In Johannesburg, she worked at an American Board mission school against the norm of the time that once married, women stop working outside their homes.
Twala studied as part of the inaugural cohort of the Jan Hofmyer School of Social Work, the first institution to train Black social workers in South Africa, where she graduated in 1942 at the top of her class.
In 1948, after completing a BA degree in social studies she became the second Black woman to obtain a degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (Mary Malahlela, a medical doctor, was the first Black woman to graduate from the university, a year earlier). She then pursued a graduate degree at the university, where her thesis focused on African beadwork.
Twala became a prolific researcher, particularly on women's issues and native customs in southern Africa. She also founded a library specifically for use by women.