Lovelyn, Belhar, and Mary

The 2015 and 2016 #feesmustfall protests in South Africa highlighted protest as a way of resisting injustice by naming injustice specifically and publicly, particularly by young female voices of protest. This contribution argues that confession is not only a grammar of faith that articulates truth claims for and within the public entities of church, academy, and society, but is also a possible means of resisting injustice. In this article, such confessions as Mary’s Song and the Belhar Confession are read together with the more recent speeches by Lovelyn Nwadeyi as an illustration of a possible theological trajectory wherein confessions might resist injustice by the very act of confessing, in which such resistance could be embedded in and articulated by confessional grammar.