ABSTRACT
The study of biography lends itself to the interrogation of homogenized understandings of power, place, and gender. However, in order to use life narratives for the writing of history, lives and their narratives must connect to broader and socially, academically, or politically more relevant contexts. In accordance with one of Anaïs Angelo’s introductory remarks, it can be stated with regard to this text as well that a confusing amount of non-professional and perhaps so non-professional historians had a share in the telling of Paulina Nomguqo Dlamini’s life, whose voice nevertheless seemed to emerge in a strong manner. Many years after her death in 1942, Dlamini’s life resonated, in the mid-1980s, with so-called Zulu traditions and a lack of knowledge of the Zulu past at a time when Apartheid authorities faced determined resistance from those who did not want to be dumped in homelands.
