Back to ContentsMakabongwe Amakosikazi - Honour the Women
Just as it is not possible to discuss the problems and disabilities of South African women without discussing the problems and disabilities that apartheid inflicts on the whole black population, so also it is not possible to assess the women's political activities and struggles without surveying the general struggle for liberation.
A historian commented in 1980 on political struggle in South Africa:
Women in South Africa, from the turn of the century, have emerged as primary catalysts for protest and challengers of the apartheid regime. With all the disabilities and devastating effects of apartheid on the status of women . . . those most oppressed of the oppressed have never lost sight of the fact that meaningful change for women cannot be forthcoming through reform but only through the total destruction of the apartheid system. Thus the common exploitation and oppression of men and women on the basis of colour has led to a combined fight against the system instead of a battle of women against men for 'women's rights'. While women desire their personal liberation, they see that as part of the total liberation movement. Although there is no doubt that the overt leadership has been dominated by men, the seemingly unacknowledged and informal segment of society controlled by women has been the key to many of the most significant mass movements in modern South African history. It is only in the very recent past that the crucial role played by women in raising basic issues, organising and involving the masses has become more widely recognised.1
Women's organisations have always operated within the framework of the political resistance movements, because of the women's clear understanding that the reforms they need are dependent upon a restructuring of the state itself. This is one of the reasons that women's participation and initiatives often disappear subsequently from written history. For while it is easy to see the role of women in the political struggle when their activities are specifically among women - as in the various phases of the struggle against the pass laws - it is not as easy to see the pivotal role that they have played in the general activities of the male - led organisations. In various campaigns referred to here, women were not bystanders, nor reluctant participants dragged along by the militancy of the men, but were an integral part of the whole development of the campaigns. Without their activities, the campaigns could not have taken place.
Cherryl Walker2 comments on the dearth of material on women as reflecting the subordinate position that women have occupied in society, and also the preoccupation of male historians with political and constitutional rather than social history; as well as the historians' own, often unconscious, bias against women, in itself a product of the very social attitudes that reinforce and perpetuate women's subordination within the larger society. For many historians, women are invisible.
Despite their background of a patriarchal society, African women have never occupied the position of subservience that still exists in some parts of Asia and Africa. Even before the traditional pattern had been shattered, women played a notable part in many anti - colonial struggles.
In the innumerable campaigns run by the national liberation movement, although a significant number of women played increasingly important parts, the leadership as a whole has usually been male - dominated, although certainly no more so than we find in countries where women have a longer tradition of political struggle and much greater opportunities.
Dr Fatima Meer3 writes that Indian and African women in particular have left indelible marks on the modern movement for liberation. 'Indian women at the beginning of the century virtually made Gandhi, and proved the efficiency of the new liberation dialectic of satyagraha that he introduced.' The Indian resistance movement had remained mainly elitist until the women from two ashrams in Natal and the Transvaal transformed it into a mass movement. In 1912 they defied the anti - Asiatic law, crossed the provincial border from both ends and provoked the miners of Newcastle to lay down their picks and strike. A thousand workers then began the epic march led by Gandhi across the Natal border into the Transvaal. According to Meer, 'The great figure of that struggle was not Gandhi, but the emaciated young Valiamma, who refused to surrender despite her fatal illness following repeated imprisonments. She died in the struggle.'4
White women of South Africa, except in small numbers, have not generally associated themselves either with the national liberation struggle or with the powerful women's movements. However, it would be wrong to undervalue the work of white women through organisations like the Black Sash and in fields of academic research, while in the Federation of South African Women (FSAW), the small white membership played a notable role. In the years before the First World War, there were white women suffragettes, inspired by their British sisters, who fought for the right to vote; the right of white women, that is. In those years women, children, lunatics and criminals, together with the majority of black men, were debarred from the vote. White women were not enfranchised until 1930; giving them the vote was partly impelled by the desire to reduce proportionately a small number of black men in the Cape who were entitled to vote.
Passive Resistance and the Defiance Campaign
In 1949, following the return of the Nationalist Party in the (whites only) election, the African National Congress (ANC), benefiting from a new dynamism coming from its Youth League, adopted a Programme of Action calling for strikes, civil disobedience and non - co - operation.
Prior to this the South African Indian Congress, under a more radical leadership than in the past, had in 1946 launched a passive resistance campaign against the Asiatic Land Tenure and Representation Act, aimed at limiting land occupation by the Asian community. Over two thousand Indian resisters went to jail for occupying land that was debarred to them. The Passive Resistance Campaign was of major importance for the political advancement of Indians as a whole, and of Indian women in particular.
Six of the 17 people who initiated the campaign were women, four of them from the Transvaal, who crossed the provincial border into Natal without the necessary permits, and were arrested. Although the actual numbers of women who participated in the campaign were not large (an estimated 300 of the 2,000 arrested were women),5 the fact of their participation was carried forward into the campaigns run jointly by the Congress organisations in the 1950s and in their participation in the FSAW. A leading figure was Dr Goonam, one of the only five black women medical practitioners in 1946, of whom four were Indian women.6
As a first step in the implementation of the Programme of Action adopted by the ANC in 1949, a one - day stoppage of work was called for May Day,1950. Police fired into crowds of people in the township, killing 18 and wounding 30, including children. The outburst of sorrow and anger that followed the shootings brought together the African National Congress, the Indian Congress and the Communist Party (then about to be declared illegal) in a committee formed to call a national stoppage of work as protest on 26 June 1950. Hundreds of thousands took part in what was primarily a protest against apartheid; schools were empty, shops in the townships and particularly Indian shops in Johannesburg and Durban, were closed. In Port Elizabeth the stoppage was spectacular - all shipping was halted, businesses closed and hotels and garages left without staff. From that time on, 26 June became Freedom Day for South Africa.
The 1950s were turbulent years of political activity. During this whole decade, up to 1960, the emphasis of all the campaign was on peaceful protest, on non - violent methods of struggle. The campaign launched, that of Defiance against Unjust Laws, was a peak in mass action, marked by discipline, humour and determination on the part of the participants. Eight and a half thousand people deliberately courted arrest by defying apartheid regulations and laws, and among those who went to jail was a fair proportion of women. People from all the groups into which apartheid divides the population participated in the campaign.
The liberation movement, now broad - based, having enhanced unity between the different groups, proved itself capable of sophisticated campaigns. It had acquired symbols: a flag, a national anthem, a salute. The women wore a uniform - the black and green blouses that symbolised support for the ANC. The freedom songs composed for each new activity were sung throughout the country.
But each new protest was met by counter - action by the government in the form of new laws that effectively prevented similar protests in the future. Prohibitions and banning orders began to cripple the organisations.
The Congress of the People, Kliptown in June 1955 drew up a Freedom Charter for all South Africans. But it was followed by the arrest of 156 people (16 of them women) on charges of treason (all acquitted after a four - year trial). In 1957 and 1958 there were widespread revolts in many country areas (including those involving the women's anti - pass campaigns described in more detail below). They were met with excessive cruelty, assaults on people and burning of their homes and possessions. On 26 June 1957 there started a campaign of boycott - this, too, became illegal soon afterwards - and the tightening network of new laws and police activity brought ever - increasing repression and brutality.
One of the most horrifying examples of this occurred on 21 March 1960. The Pan - Africanist Congress (PAC), formed in 1959 after a split from the ANC, called a demonstration against the pass laws. At Sharpeville, faced with a large peaceful crowd of protest, the police opened fire. In a bloody scene 69 men and women were killed and more than 180 wounded.
This atrocity was followed by the declaration of a State of Emergency lasting five months. Raids were on a mass scale and hundreds were detained.
The ANC and the PAC were banned. The last legal action taken was the calling of a National Convention by black leaders for May 1961.
The general strike called for 29 May 1961 brought army mobilisation, helicopters and tanks in the townships, and the largest display of naked force brought into play to crush this last, theoretically legal, demonstration against apartheid laws. It was a climax and turning point in political struggle in South Africa. Seven months later the first acts of sabotage took place, with the emergence of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the now illegal ANC.
Indefinite detention without trial, solitary confinement and torture brought in an era of political trials.
Throughout the long years of resistance women played an important part together with men. In addition they initiated and sustained their own protests against apartheid, demonstrating a strength that overcame their greater insecurity and oppression, and the responsibilities of children and homes that often they had to carry single-handedly.
Because of their comparatively small numbers in industry in the past, black women in general were excluded from the experience in worksolidarity relationships that have often provided a training ground for male political leaders. Domestic servants cannot join together easily to ask for better wages or work conditions; each has to deal individually with a single employer.
Despite the male monopoly of politics, African women burst on the scene in 1913 in a campaign against carrying passes, a struggle that remained a prime objective and proved effective in drawing in mass support.
Although at that time women did not fall within the provisions of the pass laws, local authorities had the power to make byelaws compelling women to obtain permits that in effect were the same as carrying passes - permits that cost them a shilling a month at a time when five pounds a month was an excellent wage.
When petitions and deputations had failed, the women 'threw off their shawls and took the law into their own hands'.7 In Bloemfontein 600 women marched to the municipal offices and demanded to see the Mayor. When they were told he was out, they deposited a bag containing their passes at the feet of the Deputy Mayor and told him they would buy no more.
Similar demonstrations spread to other towns and many women were arrested and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. If they were given the option of a fine, they all refused to pay, and officials at small country jails were confronted with the problem of a mass of women prisoners for whom they were not equipped.
Singing hymns, 800 women marched from the location to the Town Hall in the Orange Free State town of Winburg, and told the authorities they were tired of making appeals that bore no fruit, and thus they had resolved to carry no more passes. In a tiny Free State country town this mass demonstration of women was a stupendous event and made a striking impression. But the authorities were adamant and continued to arrest women, who had to be carted from one small town to another to find sufficient jail accommodation
The struggle continued for years, and eventually these dauntless women were successful. Passes for women were withdrawn.
The same total capacity for defiance and solidarity was to surface among a new generation of women fighting the pass laws in the 1950s.
The earliest political organisation among African women was the Bantu Women's League, formed in 1913 a year after the founding of the ANC. A pioneering woman, Charlotte Maxeke, founded this League, forerunner of the ANC Women's League that would be established 35 years later. Women in the ANC were auxiliary members only, without voting rights until 1943, when they were admitted as full members. At the same conference, the need for a women's league was acknowledged, but it was 1948 before it was officially inaugurated.
The Women's League took some years to build itself into an effective organisation, and in its earlier years the work was largely the supportive type that has always been the women's role: catering for conferences; providing accommodation; fund - raising.
There were many difficulties in stepping outside these limits, comments Cherryl Walker in her book on the history of women's struggles in South Africa.8 Any form of political organisation against apartheid was difficult. The women's difficulties were compounded by the fact that economically they were more vulnerable, and politically less secure than the men. Patriarchal ideology was deeply entrenched in all strata of society, and both men and women in Congress were conditioned to accept the limitations of the supportive role of the women.
The widening of the scope and the activities of the Women's League came in the 1950s and was a reflection of both the increasing activities and importance of the ANC itself, and also the threat to women of the pass laws.
The organisation that was to play the key role in activating the women against the pass laws was the FSAW (or just 'Womens Fed.') established at a national conference in Johannesburg in 1954. There had been previous attempts to draw women of different groups into one organisation; the Transvaal All - Women's Union was a forerunner of FSAW.
From the beginning, FSAW clearly indicated its double objective of fighting for freedom and liberation for all through the overthrow of apartheid, and of fighting against women's special disabilities. The conference adopted a Charter of Women's Aims, the opening words of which declare: 'our aim of striving for the removal of all laws, regulations, conventions and customs that discriminate against us as women', and went on to declare
We women do not form a society separate from men. There is only one society, and it is made up of both women and men. As women we share the problems and anxieties of our men, and join hands with them to remove social evils and obstacles to progress.
Thirty years on, women who were not born when the Charter was adopted are reprinting it, finding its aims of emancipating women from the special disabilities suffered by them and of removing all social differences which had the effect of keeping women in a position of inferiority and subordination, as apt and relevant as when the Charter was framed. The FSAW embodied both the idea that women have common interests, and also a strong political attitude.
The FSAW not only linked women's demands firmly with the struggle against apartheid laws, but also fought consistently for trade union rights, and against racial divisions in the trade unions. 'We are women, we are workers, and we stand together.' A number of the leading Federation women were trade union activists.
The first President of the FSAW was a leading member of the Women's League of the ANC - Ida Ntwana; and the secretary was Ray Simons. Later Ida Ntwana resigned and Ray Simons was banned. Lilian Ngoyi was elected president, and Helen Joseph secretary.
The Federation provided for women's organised action on a continuing basis; previously, as in bus boycotts and food committees, it was sporadic.
The Federation was central to the tremendous mass movement among women against passes in the subsequent years; and also thrust to the forefront of the political scene women of exceptional gifts and strong personalities, who not only proved themselves in the women's organisations as able speakers and organisers, but at the same time raised the status of all women within the national liberation movement. The history of the Federation is told in Cherryl Walker's book.
In 1955 the then Minister of Native Affairs stated 'African women will be issued with passes as from January 1956'. In fact the law had already been amended in 1950 to enable the regime to introduce passes for women.
Women had reason to fear the carrying of passes, having been forced to witness all their lives the effect of the pass laws on African men: the night raids, being stopped in streets by police vans, searches, jobs lost through arrests, disappearance of men shanghaied to farms, and the prosecutions. It was not even known at the time the degree to which the pass laws would be used to separate family groups and break up homes. But women did know the devastating effect the laws could have on some aspects of their lives. For men, arrest for pass offences could mean loss of job; but for women? They might or might not have a job to lose, but most of them had helpless dependants, often very young babies, who could not be left totally unattended when the mother was whisked off the streets and into jail.
The first big protest against the pass laws organised by the FSAW took place in October 1955 with 2,000 women, mostly African, but including other women, converging in Pretoria, seat of the administration of the Government. The demonstration followed one organised some months before by the Black Sash, white women protesting against pass laws. The black women said, 'The white women did not invite us to their demonstration, but we will invite all women, no matter what race or colour.'
The women's anti - pass movement began to grow. In Durban and Cape Town women marched in their thousands through the streets. The men were amazed at their independence and militancy, but Lilian Ngoyi, one of the leading women, explained:
Men are born into the system and it is as if it has become a life tradition that they carry passes. We as women have seen the treatment our men have - when they leave home in the morning you are not sure if they will come back. If the husband is to be arrested, and the mother, what about the child?9
The regime began the issue of passes by selecting sections of the women least likely or able to protest: farmers brought lorry - loads of women workers from their farms to get their passes and the women knew what would happen if they refused. Even these country women would sometimes subsequently burn their passes as protests grew all over the country, culminating in a mass demonstration in Pretoria, one year after the first one, on 9 August 1956 - the day that has since been designated 'Women's Day' by the liberation movement in South Africa.
A year before it had been 2,000 women. Now 20,000 women assembled, overcoming tremendous difficulties imposed both by their personal positions and by the authorities, to join the assembly. Despite the most ingenious forms of intimidation the women saved and worked together to raise money to hire trains, buses, cars, to bring them thousands of miles to the capital. All processions in Pretoria were banned that day, so the women walked to Union Buildings to see the Prime Minister in groups of never more than three. All Pretoria was filled with women. This was four years before the national liberation organisations were banned, and thousands of women wore the green and black Congress blouses; Indian women dressed in brilliant saris; Xhosa women in their ochre robes with elaborate headscarves.
They arrived in trains, on buses, by cars and on foot and gathered in the amphitheatre of the Union Buildings. Each woman had signed a petition protesting against the new pass laws. Nine leaders, representing women of all groups in South Africa, carried the piles of petitions to the Union Buildings in search of the Prime Minister, Mr J G Strijdom. They were stopped by a commissionaire who eventually let five of them through. Among these five were the late Mrs Lilian Ngoyi, then president of the Women's League of the now banned ANC and Mrs Helen Joseph (the first woman to be placed under house arrest).
When they were told the PM could not see them, they left the petitions at his door and returned to the other women. We were so angry, very, very angry. We had written to him for an audience. He was expecting us. But he was not there. Earlier a helicopter arrived at the back of the Union Buildings. We think he fled from us on that.
He had so much power, but he was scared of us and all we had done was to come peacefully and tell him that we, the women of SA, said "No" to passes. The women then stood in silence for 30 minutes as a sign of protest. The only noise in the whole amphitheatre was the cry of babies. Then we went home and organised in our communities.
The women opposed the passes because it meant that homes would be broken up and mothers separated from children when women were arrested under pass laws; that women and young girls would be exposed to humiliation and degradation at the hands of pass - searching policemen; and that women would lose their right to move freely from one place to another. We have seen all this come true and it continues to happen. Look at KTC and Crossroads. Everyday the black people suffer because of pass laws.
(Dorothy Zihlangu, a member of the United Women's Organisation in the Cape, recalled the 1956 demonstration - Argus 8.8.84)
Union Buildings is designed in classic style, with pillared wings on either side of an amphitheatre on a hillside, with trees and gardens in steps down the hillside and a vista to the town far down below a long avenue of lawn. The women slowly converged up this avenue and filled the amphitheatre. Their leaders went into Union Buildings and left hundreds of thousands of signatures on petition forms at the office of the Prime Minister who, of course, was not available to see them. Afterwards they stood in complete silence in the winter sun for thirty minutes, then burst into magnificent harmony to sing the anthems, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and Morena Boloka. The singing, as they dispersed, echoed over the city, and the women began a new freedom song with its refrain 'Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo, uzokufa' - 'now you have touched the women you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed'.
The protests continued, but so did the issue of passes. The authorities made it inevitable. Old women who went to collect their tiny pensions were told 'No pass book - no pension'. Mothers could not obtain the registration of the birth of a child unless they had their passbook. Teachers and nurses were dismissed if they refused to take passes. Gradually more and more women were forced to accept them.
Not only did the more sophisticated women of the towns organise in protest. Remote country districts were involved, and the struggle was most bitter in the area of Zeerust in the Western Transvaal. There, the issue of pass books fused with deep opposition to the Bantu Authorities Act that was being implemented in the district. The Act incorporated the office of chief of the tribe into the hierarchy of government, making him virtually a civil servant. When the issue of passes began, many women accepted them, but others refused. In one village only 76 out of 4,000 women accepted books. The Government arbitrarily removed the chief, who sympathised with the women, and replaced him with their own appointee who was supported by a gang of strongarm thugs. The revolt against the passes became involved with the opposition to the stooge chief, and to the changes in laws brought by Bantu Authorities. The women's resistance became open confrontation. Women who had accepted the passes burnt them. Those who had not yet taken passes refused to do so.
The displays of militancy by traditionally subordinate women had a profound effect on men - white as well as black, comments Joanne Yawitch.10
Action by women was fundamental. For women are conceptualised as being the centre of stability and security. The arrest of the women radicalised the men, and in the case of the white men, rioting by African women was perceived as a threat to the entire social structure and to all order.
Dr W M Eiselen, secretary for Bantu Administration and Development, stated that:
Recognition of the women's demonstrations on the lines that have found favour among the whites, that is, where women already have a status altogether different to that of Bantu women, can at this stage only have a harmful and dangerous effect which can undermine the entire community structure.11
Action against the women was taken under the direction of a police sergeant, van Rooyen, who was a gross and sadistic man. Under his direction, utilising the new chief's strong - arm men, a terrible punishment was exacted from the people. Some were shot, many more beaten, their homes burned to the ground and all their possessions destroyed.
The women in the first group were slashed raw. They said that 23 other women were similarly injured 'but we do not know where they have run'. Injuries were distributed mainly about their arms, backs and shoulders, but their faces, breasts and bellies and thighs had suffered too. The standard injury was a sort of gash of varied length. Clothes clotted with blood adhered to the wounds.12
The wounds had been inflicted by bodyguards of the government's stooge chiefs, with strips cut from tyres and sharpened at one side like a knife.
Mrs Mak Maletsoe, who burned her pass book, was sent to jail and on release crept quietly back to her village at Witkleigat. She knew the chief's thugs were beating up those who had resisted the pass laws. On her return, she saw another group of women being arrested, and among them a friend who she knew had an unweaned infant. Makgoro Maletsoe ran to her friend's hut and fetched the baby, which she handed to its mother before she was taken away. This aroused the bodyguard who surrounded the women and then attacked them with clubs. The group were then cast into a hut where they spent the night, 'Mrs. Maletsoe hovering between an agonizing wakefulness and insensibility. She had entirely lost the use of her right arm, and her face and body were smashed and torn.'
These women were not charged with any crime. The next morning the regular police came, brandishing guns, but eventually set them free.
By devious routes, despairing friends managed to get Makgoro Maletsoe out of the sprawling village, into a car, and away to Johannesburg; for a month she lay in a hospital bed. Besides the injuries inflicted on her face and torso by boots and kieries [clubs], her right arm was broken in three places.
When she was well enough, she laid a charge of assault. The Attorney - General declined to prosecute.
This was the price of political struggle for women in South Africa. More than two thousand women and children fled from the persecution over the border into Bechuanaland (now Botswana) where the women did not have to accept passes. Individuals were sent into banishment, others went into hiding for months on end. The police units had wide powers of search and arrest, and sealed off the area so that reports of what was happening filtered out with difficulty.
But even in this atmosphere of force and terror, the women still resisted. At times they even taunted the police, as the incidents below illustrate.
Police who arrived in a country village in 1957 to arrest about 20 women who had burned their pass - books, found 200 women patiently sitting together under the trees.13 The sergeant demanded the women for whom he had come. 'We are here', the women replied.
He asked them to step forward. 'If you arrest one, you must arrest us all', they said.
The sergeant had to hire railway buses to transport the women to jail; their number had increased to 233. They filled the yard of the police station - singing. Food had to be provided; the jail could not cope with them, nor the sanitation. When they were told they were being released, the women demanded buses to take them home. The crowd of arrested women had unaccountably increased from 233 to 400.
The women formed a procession around the sergeant and his aides, singing a new song with many verses, and the refrain:
Behold us joyful,
The women of Africa
In the presence of our BAAS
The great one
Who conquers Lefurutse
With his knobkerrie,
And his assegai,
And his gun.
On another occasion, in July 1957, in Gopane Village in the Baphurutse Reserve, some women burned their passes. When 35 women were arrested, 233 more volunteered to be arrested. When officials arrived in Motswedi and Braklaagte to register the women, the villages were deserted. In June, 1957, at Pietersburg in the Northern Transvaal, 2,000 women stoned officials who came to register them. When the officials returned in July, 3,000 women greeted them, again forcing their withdrawal.
The dominant part played by women in these campaigns was due to various factors, one being the absence of so many of the migratory males, so that a large part of the rural population was female. The men's absence also increased the burden of responsibility on the women, and the women bore the brunt of the new legislation. While seeing the women as subordinate and inferior, the authorities were keenly aware of the women's action as a fundamental threat to their authority. Eiselen declared:
Officials of the department have been instructed not to have discussions with the masses of women and their so - called leaders, but to make it clear to them that they will always be willing to have discussions with the recognised bantu authorities, the tribal chiefs and responsible male members of the community.14
In an account of women's protests in 1959 in rural areas of Natal, Joanne Yawitch15 relates how in October 1959 in Ixopo, 500 women from surrounding districts marched to the town demanding to see the Native Commissioner for a reply to grievances they had submitted two months earlier. Dr Margaret Mncadi, a woman's leader who commanded great respect, organised this march.
The Native Commissioner's response was to tell the women to return home and give their demands to their husbands who could then take them to the local headman, and in this way official (masculine) channels could be followed until the message was relayed to him. The women refused to disperse until they could speak to a 'Native Women's' Commissioner, and their strategy of going down on their knees in prayer when told to disperse resulted in arrests, with fines or imprisonment.16 The exact number of women involved in the Natal rural unrest is not known, but Yawitch quotes the figure of 20,000 women, with nearly a thousand being convicted on various charges. The women were responding to threats by the authorities to what they saw as traditional roles, and also to their traditional economic function in the brewing of beer.
The authorities refused to listen to the women because to do so would have meant not only accepting their grievances, but also accepting women on an equal basis with men - an acceptance that threatened fundamental social and political assumptions.17 In these ways the revolt of the women in the countryside had a significance beyond the immediate issues that ignited them.
The officials failed to see the extent to which women were being driven by the currents of economic change. The war years brought industrial growth demanding a constant supply of labour. The stagnant bantustans were now increasingly under pressures that accelerated the crumbling of their economic and social order. Not only could they no longer give even limited support to their populations, the conventions on which their inhabitants' lives rested were also disintegrating as the customs that had sustained them became increasingly irrelevant to the women's lives. Not only irrelevant, but in their distorted forms, a barrier to any improvement.
The conditions in the urban areas, where industry had caused a dramatic increase in population, were made more tolerable by the neglect of essential housing and other needs during the years of the 1939 - 45 war. War brought inflation, a rising cost of living, periodic food shortages and, most of all, an acute housing shortage. All these are areas where the burden is felt most keenly and personally by the women, and in all these areas the women became increasingly active. In the 1940s food committees were formed in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and also co - operative food clubs in working - class areas for the purchase and distribution of vegetables, and with the aim of forcing local authorities to open suburban markets.
The organising of food purchases at the wholesale markets, the sorting, pricing, distribution in the co - operatives; the direct attacks on food hoarders, the organising of deputations to local authorities and other protests - all these activities were training schools for women.
In 1943, 15,000 men and women walked 18 miles a day for nine days in protest against a one penny rise in bus fares. They lived in Alexandra Township, nine miles outside Johannesburg, and worked in the city. In mid - winter, in the sharp cold of the highveld, domestic servants and washerwomen with heavy loads of clothes on their heads marched together with factory and shop workers from early morning when it was still dark until late at night. A year later there was a second boycott, this time lasting seven weeks. More men than women work in the city, and therefore more men marched. But the participation of the women was significant. Women who were not working in the city stationed themselves at the bus terminus in Alexandra to make sure that no young men weakened in resolve and entered the buses that were lined up and waiting for passengers.
Particularly during the long second boycott, some middle - class white women drove their cars to and from Alexandra in the mornings and evenings, specifically to give lifts to women, where possible to the older women who obviously suffered from the long march.
The drivers were stopped by the police, who charged them with carrying passengers without a permit. These white women encountered for the first time in their lives the sharp edge of opposition to authority, and the abysmal poverty and hardship of the lives of the black women. Their action was a gesture of solidarity with other women, transcending the formidable barriers of apartheid.
The huge influx into black townships reached bursting point in 1944 when, in the words of one of their leaders, 'the people overflowed'. A series of squatters' movements began, in which families who had been living as sub - tenants in small houses already overcrowded, set up their own shacks in shanty towns on the hillsides outside the black township of what was then known as Orlando (today incorporated into the whole complex called Soweto). Men were in the leadership of these movements, but without the commitment of the women they could never have taken place. Corrugated iron - where it could be obtained, flattened tins, cardboard and sacking were the building materials in the shantytowns. Within these homes, women cared for the family, fed the babies, cooked for the children and the men, washed clothes in basins among the earth and rocks, confined day and night against the sacking of the shacks around them. The men had some relief; they went to their jobs in the city. Whether in paid employment, or not, the women had the burden of their 'housework' and their responsibilities to their families.
On many occasions the municipal authorities sent officials during the day with new orders and demands on the women. On one occasion, they tore down a whole section of shanties, piled wood, sacking and other materials on to a lorry (where they 'caught fire' and burned). The women and children huddled into the grounds of a church, trying to erect some protection for their children when it began to rain. It was only the toughness and determination of the women that kept these mass movements going. Nearly two decades later, they are again setting up their homes in shacks, and again having them destroyed.
The participation of women was also a key factor in the campaign in 1955 against the introduction of 'Bantu Education' (see Appendix). As a protest against this inferior form of education for Africans the Congress movement organised schools in the townships in which white women also participated; in almost all of these the teachers were women. The regime made it illegal to teach children (or adults) at unregistered schools. The township schools became 'cultural clubs'. Inspectors were sent round to the clubs, many of which were held in the open air, and if there were any school materials - books, slates, pencils - the teacher would be arrested and charged. In court cases the evidence handed in would be a blackboard and chalk, or slates, and the claim that the woman in charge was actually trying to teach the children to read or do sums. To circumvent this, the teachers devised rhymes and games that would teach numbers and letters, and used a pointed stick to write in the dusty sand, so that it could be instantly obliterated if the police arrived.
Of course, the Congress movement had not the resources to provide a proper system of education as an alternative to the bantu education of the State, but while these schools lasted they were an effective form of protest against one of the most pernicious features of apartheid.
Women's deep resentment against municipal beerhalls was another source of demonstrations and clashes with the police that flared up from time to time in many different urban townships.
The issue was not a simple one. The brewing of a beer with a low alcoholic content was traditional, the serving and drinking of the beer being closely bound up with tribal ceremonies and customs. The women wished to continue their home - brewing when they came to the towns, and in addition, it was an important source of supplementary income for them. But up to 1977 the laws prohibited not only the sale of 'intoxicating liquors' to all Africans, but also their introduction into the townships. The local authorities opened beerhalls where men could go to drink municipally - brewed beer in bleak surroundings, but could not take it home. For thirty years the issue of home - brewing had fuelled women's oppositions to local authorities. Beer boycotts were perennial and vigourously pursued. In 1945 in Springs, on the Witwatersrand, police fired on women who were demonstrating, and assaulted many of them. Later 111 Africans appeared in court, the majority women. In 1949 in Krugersdorp a beerhall was destroyed by fire during protest riots. There were many more incidents in which the beerhalls were the targets.
The black township of Cato Manor in Durban was the centre of largescale protests. It was an area of shacks; the women complained that the administration provided no lights and no sewerage; that their husbands' wages were grossly inadequate; that the police constantly raided their homes at night. Protests began to centre around the beerhalls and, in June 1959, discontent exploded when 2,000 women marched to express their multiple grievances. The police, loathed both for their own behaviour and as instruments of oppressive laws, charged the women with batons, striking them to the ground, even hitting the babies tied to their backs.
By 1958 passes were being issued in the major centres, and although there was still resistance, it had become isolated and fragmented. Towards the end of 1958, the 'reference book' units finally reached Johannesburg and began to issue passes cautiously, at first to those sections of women least able to refuse. But women in the ANC Women's League reacted with fierce resistance in a campaign of civil disobedience. Women who marched to local Native Commissioners' offices in protest were arrested for holding illegal processions: 249 the first day, 584 the next, and by the end of the week 934. The following Monday another 900 women were added to those already crowding the cells in central Johannesburg. 'The prisons and police stations of Johannesburg were in an uproar, their facilities stretched to breaking point with the enormous intake of women.'18
The arrests were splashed across the newspapers. The black magazine Drum said it seemed like a festival, with the defiant women singing and dancing. The Johannesburg Star headlined its report 'No Nannies Today' - a crisp statement of how most white South Africans viewed African women.19
Although the demonstrations had arisen almost spontaneously, once they had begun both the ANC Women's League and the FSAW gave wholehearted support to the women. Impressed by the militancy and discipline of the women, they wanted to adopt a policy of 'no bail and no fines' for those already in jail, while maintaining outside support.
Helen Joseph recalled the situation:
Their attitude was they're not going to accept passes. That's when the first mass arrest took place. Within the space of a week there were 2,000 women in jail. It was incredible. [They] left their children, left their husbands, left their homes, went to jail and simply would not pay the fines.
The men felt they couldn't cope with the home situation any more. All they had to do was to go up to the jail and pay the fine,. And if you're in jail and your fine is paid, you're put out. The women were very angry but they couldn't do anything about it.
The campaign was discontinued and superseded by a general anti - pass campaign. The deeply - felt opposition of the women to passes had not lessened, but the overwhelming authority of the state and the many different tactics used to make women accept them gradually broke down resistance.
We have to carry passes which we abhor because we cannot have houses without them, we cannot work without them, we are endorsed out of towns without them, we cannot register births without them, we are not even expected to die without them.20
The Sharpeville massacre marked the end of an era of non - violent protests, and a new, more repressive time began in March 1960 and with the subsequent banning of the ANC and PAC.
A proclamation was issued in October 1962, making it obligatory for women to carry passes as of February 1963, and by that time, the FSAW had been virtually silenced and driven underground.
It had taken the government 11 years to impose its pass legislation (first passed in 1952) on the women of South Africa. The courage, the discipline, the unity of women had been demonstrated over and over again. The issue of passes for women was fundamental to apartheid policy, it had to be imposed if the Bantustan strategy was to be inaugurated. The women had to be contained. But the inspiration of their prolonged fight and the deeper understanding it produced were passed on.
'Among us Africans', stated former ANC President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Lutuli,
the weight of resistance has been greatly increased in the last few years by the emergence of our women. It may even be true that, had the women hung back, resistance would still have been faltering and uncertain . . . The demonstration made a great impact and gave strong impetus . . . Furthermore, women of all races have had far less hesitation than men in making common cause about things basic to them.21
In her summing up of the FSAW's achievements, Walker describes it as a political organisation that broke new ground for the women of South Africa, three main aspects of its programme being its commitment to the emancipation of women, its commitment to the national liberation movement and its non - racialism. Its rejection of colour - consciousness that had permeated other women's organisations was strengthened by its more developed feminist consciousness. Because women were seen to suffer serious disabilities on account of their sex, the FSAW could envisage the possibility of a universal women's movement aimed at removing those disabilities and cutting across existing colour lines. The legacy it has left is one of 'an open - hearted belief' in a free and non - racial society, a legacy of hope and courage.22 Helen Joseph described the legacy of the FSAW as one of self - confidence, for none of the women had any doubts about the ultimate future; 'I think we inherited a legacy of hope and defiance, and passed it on.'':23
In September 1959, at a special conference convened by the ANC - the last before it was banned - a bright red banner proclaimed: MAKABONGWE AMAKOSIKAZI - Honour the women.
From the 1960s onwards laws of increasing harshness were matched by accelerating ruthlessness in the police and security forces. Many women as well as men have suffered prolonged solitary confinement, indefinite detention without trial, torture and years of imprisonment. Some were detained to try to make them give evidence against others; or simply because the police thought they might have some 'information'. Some were directly involved in activities that led to arrest and political trials. Many more have been affected by the long and often uncertain imprisonment of husbands, sons, fathers and friends.
Women have been prosecuted on a wide variety of political charges reflecting the range of their involvement in the struggle against apartheid; including treason, 'terrorism', sabotage, membership of or assistance to a banned organisation, helping people to escape from the country, recruiting guerillas, breaches of banning orders and similar charges. Among those who are serving or have served jail sentences are women of all colours, ages and religions. There are young girls, many mothers, and grandmothers, some over 70 years old.
Some of the cruellest punishment is administered without any charge or trial, simply for outspoken opposition to apartheid. Many women have suffered indefinite detention without trial, in solitary confinement; have been subjected to torture during interrogation; served with crippling restrictions; put under house arrest; placed under extensive bans on their activities.
For many women in prison the punishment is compounded by separation from their children and uncertainty about their fate. When Jane Ntsatha appeared in court in August 1982 charged with recruiting members for the ANC, she highlighted a problem which may be faced by women political prisoners, for with her in the dock was her 16 - month - old son, Mayibuye. The child had been detained with his mother the previous November, and had spent most of his life behind bars. The presiding magistrate refused to let the trial commence until a woman in the public gallery offered to look after the child.
When Khosi Mbatha and her husband Alex were both detained in 1981, their youngest child, three - year - old Dudu, was taken into custody with them. They were told 'The child is also a terrorist and communist so she must go to gaol.' Two days later mother and child were forcibly separated. Khosi was told her daughter had been taken to a reformatory. In fact the child was dumped outside their house by security police, and was only later rescued by friends.
Two women political prisoners, Montshidisi Serokolo and Thandi Modise, were pregnant at the time of their arrest in 1978 and 1979 respectively. Thandi had left South Africa after the Soweto uprisings, intending to study abroad, but instead she underwent military training and had been on active service within South Africa for 18 months before her arrest. At her trial she related how she had been repeatedly assaulted by three policemen during her pregnancy. She is serving eight years' imprisonment and her daughter is being cared for by relatives.
Rita Ndzanga had to leave four young children when she and her husband were both arrested in 1969, and with others became the victims of a prolonged police operation of solitary confinement, trial, discharge, re - arrest, a second trial; during which period she suffered the torture of repeated assaults and sleeplessness. When the second trial collapsed she was released, but later she and her husband were both arrested, and he died at the hands of the security police. Both before these events, and afterwards in the 1970s, she was placed under five - year banning orders.
......They would come in the middle of the night. The last key in the succession of prison doors belongs to security police - all other doors can be opened by prison staff.
So they would come at night. I couldn't sleep flat by then I had to elevate myself with the few blankets I had. You just heard someone interfering with your neck, they came with a wire. He says I'm going to strangle you, because you don't want to tell the truth or tell me about other people. I will tell the whole world that you've committed suicide. Then he'd walk out.
Some days I'd feel cold steel next to my temple. He would say I'm going to shoot you and nobody will ever know about you because I've got the power, the privilege, and the protection, as a policeman. Then he walks out, just like that.
Some days they would come in and beat me up in the cells . . .
(Khosi Mbatha, at a press conference in London in November 1982, speaking about her detention in 1981)
Despite all this, Rita Ndzanga remained an active trade unionist. In June 1984 she was once again in detention, under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act, which allows no access or contact with a lawyer. She was detained for four months. At the time of her arrest she was treasurer of the General and Allied Workers' Union and Transvaal treasurer of the United Democratic Front (UDF).
Joyce Dipale, after leaving South Africa, described how she was kept in solitary confinement in 1976 and 1977 for 500 days under terrible conditions. She was subject to many agonising forms of torture, including the 'horse' - she was handcuffed to a pole and swung round and round until she lost consciousness - electric shocks on her bare breasts, buttocks and genitals ('I got used to the pain, but never the humiliation'); beatings; prolonged standing with deprivation of sleep, food and water; and being kept in a dark room, she does not know for how long - 'I lost touch with time'.
Shanthie Naidoo, held in solitary confinement in 1969 with the intention that she should be forced to give evidence at a political trial, refused, and was sent to jail for two months. In court she gave a graphic account of the effects of interrogation coupled with prolonged sleeplessness. She stood for five days and five nights, interrogated all the time by relays of police. 'I lost track of time and for periods my mind went blank.' At one stage, during such a blackout, she dreamed she was being interrogated, and answered questions in her sleep.
Lilian Keagile was 25 when she was detained in November 1981. After eight months in solitary confinement, she was brought to court and charged with furthering the aims of the ANC. She gave evidence of beatings, choking with a wet sack, and sexual assault. Her cousin, Ernest Dipale, who was to have been her co - accused died in the hands of the police.
Dorothy Nyembe, a leading activist and organiser for the Women's League and the FSAW served her full sentence of 15 years for 'harbouring guerillas'. She was released in 1984. A tireless organiser, who took the lead in many struggles in Natal, she kept her spirit of defiance during 15 long years, fighting for better conditions in prison and going on hunger strike. She emerged unbroken, as strong in her determination as when she defied unjust laws in 1952.
Information on the conditions and treatment of women political prisoners is scarce, but the experiences of individual women prisoners indicate that their conditions may in some respects be even harsher than those endured by male political prisoners. Their isolation from the outside world is accentuated by the difficulties and obstruction which relatives face in locating and visiting them in prison. Dorothy Nyembe, released after 15 years' imprisonment in March 1984, said that she was not allowed to study throughout her sentence. Newspapers were denied to all the women prisoners in the prison where she was held for the final years of her sentence. Nyembe also said that while she was initially held in Barberton Prison, visits from her family were forbidden and letters at first did not reach her, because they were not written in English.
Five women political prisoners gave evidence in court of their harsh treatment. Caesarina Makhoere, serving five years, was held in solitary confinement for two and a half years from April 1979 to October 1981 after she had participated in a hunger strike. During the whole of this time she saw no one except prison officials, save for one ten - minute visit from her mother. Another of these prisoners, Elizabeth Gumede, 60 years old and suffering from hypertension, found her isolation so claustrophobic that she screamed for long periods. Eventually, in October 1981, the five women submitted an application against the Minister of Justice to have their detention in isolation declared illegal. They reported how they had little exercise, were refused all reading matter except the Bible, and were allowed few letters or visitors. Their appeal was dismissed.24
Barbara Hogan, sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for treason in 1982, brought an action against the officer commanding the new Johannesburg Prison and the Commissioner of Prisons, stating she was being maltreated by prison staff and 'may not survive mentally and physically the cruel and inhuman treatment'. She said certain rights and privileges were being denied her, complaining that she was kept in isolation, frequently denied exercise and that letters and visits were withheld. She also said she had had difficulty getting study materials.25
Women serving long sentences face years separated from their children, and in many cases are also deprived of news of them. For others, a long sentence may rule out the possibility of motherhood.
There are many more women who are the dependants of men political prisoners. The conviction and imprisonment of the man often leads to the endorsing out of town of his family, who may lose the right to live in a township outside a Bantustan and are sent to resettlement camps. Many young women - eldest daughters - are left to cope with families of small children when both parents are arrested; frequently it is the grandmothers who carry the burden.
Thus the participation of women in the political struggle in South Africa is not confined simply to those who are directly involved, but spreads to encompass wives, mothers and grandmothers throughout the country. Often they are left alone to contend with all the problems of poverty, work and child - rearing with the additional problems of homelessness, expulsion to the bantustans and all the distortions of life that these impose.
Soweto
In June 1976 a demonstration of schoolpupils protesting against the enforced use of Afrikaans in their schools began a chain of events that rapidly became a national uprising of schoolpupils against apartheid.
It is not necessary here to describe the heroic and tragic events that started in Soweto and spread to towns and townships throughout South Africa, but simply to record that girls and women were involved in all phases of the uprising.
This was seen in the photographs of the students on their protest marches, with girls in their old - fashioned gym - slips well to the fore; in the number of women held as detainees under the new Internal Security Act; and in the grim evidence of the mortuaries, where parents sought the bodies of their daughters as well as of their sons.
One morning I decided I also had to participate, I also had a part to play - and I joined the crowd . . . there had already been lots of killings, and the children were playing in the streets, when suddenly a police van passed, a seven - year - old child raised his fist and said 'POWER' - whereupon the policeman got off the van and aimed at the child and shot at him directly . . . When the police started to shoot that is when students picked up stones, hit back, and took dustbin lids to protect themselves . . .
(Sikose Mji, speaking about events in June 1976 - 'The Role of Women in the Struggle for Liberation in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa', Paper prepared for UN Conference on Women, Copenhagen, 14 - 30 July 1980)
It was a black woman journalist, Sophie Tema, who gave the world the first eyewitness account of the initial police massacre of the children. And during the three days and nights of unrelieved horror that followed, as well as during subsequent weeks while clashes continued, it was a group of women members of the Black Women's Federation, who organised in the most practical way possible. They went into the thick of the fighting to try to help families. As they drove round the township, groups of children told them where they would find the dead and the injured. These women went into a nightmare of smoke and shooting to help other women find their children, often dead or hideously wounded, sometimes blinded or paralysed by gunshot.
Even initially, during the peaceful demonstrations, parents supported the pupils. But what really thrust the parents into action was the brutal police killings . . . Nobody expected the cold - blooded murder of young children. So besides their solidarity with young people they were angered - and their hatred and rejection of the whole system came to the surface. They were completely with the students in their militancy.
(Nkosazana Dlamini, formerly Vice - President of SASO, speaking of the events of June 1976 - Southern Africa (New York), March 1977)
Among those identified as 'agitators' and flung into detention as the upsurge continued were a number of well - known women: Winnie Mandela - once again; Dr Fatima Meer, a sociologist and first president of the Black Women's Federation; Joyce Seroke of the South African Young Women's Christian Association; Sally Motlana, vice - president of the South African Council of Churches; Dr Mamphela Ramphele, who ran a black health clinic in the Eastern Cape; Dimza Pityana of the South African Institute of Race Relations; and other professional women prominent in their communities - social workers, nurses, teachers, churchwomen, journalists. Some, like Mamphela Ramphele and a journalist, Thenjiwe Mtintso, were banned on their release from detention.
Many young people were detained, and many of them tortured. Too numerous to list here, their experience is illustrated by that of Mpho Theoabale. She was a 16 - year - old Soweto student who lived through the events of June 1976, including the original decision to boycott classes and the planning of the march on 16 June, when she saw many of her friends killed or wounded. The police violence prompted the students to further demonstrations against buildings and beerhalls owned by the government; they appealed to their parents to stay away from work and join in their demonstrations. Mpho was arrested herself, held incommunicado for six weeks, during which she was beaten in attempts to make her 'confess' to sabotage or turn state witness against her friends, and finally released, when she fled the country. She is one of a large number of young people who have left South Africa to carry on the struggle outside. Another was Thandi Modise, mentioned earlier, who returned as an ANC combatant and is now in prison.
The Black Women's Federation was one of those organisations which had emerged in the wake of the repression of the 1960s when organisations opposed to apartheid had been either destroyed or driven underground. When it had still been possible for organisations to operate legally, the influence of women in national liberation organisations had begun to grow, and their participation at all levels had become more and more important. The Women's League of the ANC was no longer simply fulfilling the role of background support for the activities more usually organised by men; and individual women were achieving positions of importance and influence. Impetus to the growing strength and importance of the women's role was given by the FSAW. But with the period of intense repression that followed the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, the Federation found its leading members all banned or placed under house arrest. The ANC was outlawed, and this meant that the ANC Women's League was also illegal, cutting away mass organised support for the Federation, even though it was not declared illegal. For years leading women lived under precarious conditions, frequently detained, always restricted - most of them were, by law, not even permitted to speak to each other.
With the end in 1961 of the long era of non - violent activities, women, and their former organisations, became part of the underground resistance and the general preparations for armed struggle to end apartheid. Other women turned towards activities to ease their day - to - day burdens, organising self - help associations and establishing day - care centres for children, and feeding programmes.
In the 1970s a new generation of young people, women and men, began to organise around what became known as the black consciousness movement. In December 1975, 210 delegates representing 41 organisations gathered in Durban to found the Black Women's Federation (BWF). Its purpose was outlined by its first president, Dr Fatima Meer. It was mainly 'to galvanize black women, to bring them together and consolidate grievances and create opportunities for them to do something to help themselves and to help the general South African situation move towards change'.26 The BWF worked in both urban and rural areas. They compiled a booklet for African women to inform them of their legal rights. They started literacy, nutrition and health classes, and tried to establish small cottage industries. They worked on practical issues, launching a scheme to slash the expense of compulsory school uniforms for black pupils by buying material wholesale, making it up and selling direct to the parents.
Within a year, seven leading BWF women were detained. Fatima Meer was banned. And in October 1977, the entire organisation was banned. Other black consciousness organisations suffered a similar fate.27
Raids were followed by prolonged detention, and finally charges against some. Several women activists were banned.
Re-organising
The vacuum left by the banning of the BWF was soon filled, as new organisations formed or old ones re-emerged.
During recent years a number of women's organisations have been struggling to the forefront in various parts of the country. As yet there is no national organisation of the scope of the Women's Federation, and the formation of a nation - wide organisation under today's especially repressive conditions would be a formidable task. The systematic banning, exiling or jailing of women who emerge in political struggle is only one of the many handicaps.
The United Women's Organisation (UWO) was established in the Cape in April 1981 at a conference attended by more than 300 women from 31 different localities in the Western Cape. Many were women who had past experience of political, trade union or community organisation. 'We cannot abstract ourselves from political issues because they are our daily life . . . Our place must be as part of the struggle for fundamental rights.' Both the policy and constitution of the UWO stress the need for women to fight for 'the removal of all laws, conventions, regulations, customs, that discriminate against women'. The need for democracy and the need for the liberation of women are the foundation of the UWO.28 Two thousand people organised by UWO celebrated 9 August, Women's Day, in 1981.
People could see that we were doing good, but we were still weak. But the things that were happening here now have really opened the people's eyes. We women were locked up because we cannot afford the rent increases. We suffered together.
In the police vans we told the women about UWO and why they should join. They can see that it is important to come and fight our problems together.
So now more and more women are joining UWO. We have had enough of suffering. We have had enough of poor conditions. We have decided to fight all our problems together with one voice.
(Lucy Ninzi, a member of the United Women's Organisations, active in the Western Cape - Grassroots, October 1983)
The FSAW has re-emerged, and continues as far as possible in the tradition of the original Federation. Calling itself FEDSAW, it was one of the initiators of the Free Mandela Campaign launched in 1981 to call for the release of Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners, and has been involved in campaigns to save the lives of ANC members sentenced to death, and has mobilised support for their families, as well as for political prisoners, detainees and banned people and their families. It was one of the initiators of a call in 1981 to set up regional committees to co-ordinate a campaign to boycott the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the founding in 1961 of the white republic. It has also taken up 'grassroots' issues, fighting against rent and bus fare increases, against forced removals, and for health and childcare facilities. When school pupils have been engaged in protests and boycotts, it has expressed its solidarity with them. In 1981, on the twenty - fifth anniversary of the 1956 demonstration against the pass laws, it held a very successful celebration.
The UWO and FEDSAW, the one based in the Western Cape and the other mainly in the Transvaal, are the most prominent of the organisations mobilising women on the basis of resistance to apartheid. There are others, such as the Natal Organisation of Women, formed in 1983 with similar aims and objectives. The organisation Black Women Unite was founded in 1981 in the tradition of the earlier black consciousness organisations; based in Soweto, it was said in 1984 to have committees in a number of towns.29
The best-known and most active organisation among white women is the Black Sash. It was established in 1955 with the limited objective at that time of protesting against the removal of Coloured voters from the common roll. From the first, the women's actions took the form of silent vigils, and the protestors were recognised by the black sashes which they wore draped across from shoulder to waist, a sign of mourning for the Constitution.
From this their vigils extended to protests against other apartheid laws, particularly those that had the harshest effects on family life. Today the Black Sash has opened its ranks to women of all groups and has concentrated its work on the evils arising from mass removals, migrant labour and the destruction of family life. It conducts Advice Offices for those caught in the net of apartheid laws, and publishes a magazine. The Black Sash is not a political campaigning organisation, and does not set out to organise women as a whole. But its work has resulted in keeping some of the most potent issues affecting women before the white public, and the reports resulting from its investigations are of great value. Some of the despair felt by women who have battled for years against heartbreaking injustice is reflected in the words of a leading member in October 1980:
We have failed abysmally, not through want of trying. Peaceful protest and reasoned arguments have failed and young people today have lost their patience and resorted to what seems to be mindless violence. [They] are tired of waiting to be given their rights peacefully . . . However, believing that 'for evil to succeed it is sufficient for good men to do nothing', we will . . . go on bashing our heads against a stone wall hoping for a miracle.30
Yet the Black Sash continues with research, advice and propaganda and with its silent protests, as the voice of those white women who, while living in well - endowed conditions, cannot accept the cruelty inflicted by apartheid on their black sisters.
There has never been a parallel organisation among white men, although the issues on which the Black Sash campaigns are of equal interest to men. This may reflect the fact that the men of the white middle class have a much closer involvement in the economic structure of apartheid than do the women.
A number of women's organisations grew out of white women's concern at the Soweto uprisings of 1976. Women for Peace, convened by Mrs Harry Oppenheimer, wife of the diamond and gold millionaire, heard at its inaugural meeting first - hand accounts of Soweto massacres, such as that from Mrs Sally Khali of a Soweto nursery creche, whose tiny charges saw police shoot down eight children on the open space near their creche. The women hoped to bring about change through peaceful cooperation and understanding. But there is a chasm between women who pray for peace and those whose very lives are a form of war. 'Contact with white women has given black women very little reason to feel a shared sense of oppression', stated Ms Janet Shapiro, a lecturer at Rhodes University. 'There does certainly seem to be not much basis for sisterhood, and unless and until such time as black and white women share the same economic reality I cannot see much hope for any movement in South Africa that takes universal sisterhood as its starting point.'31
Mobilising today
The revival in the early 1980s of the FSAW, and the development of other women's organisations opposed to apartheid have been a major factor in advancing the unity and active involvement of women on all fronts.
In every region organisations have emerged which stand for a non - racial undivided South Africa and which share the view that women's organisations have a key political role in the total struggle for liberation.
Their response is shown by the fact that women's organisations opposed to apartheid reflect the broad trends in the general mobilisation of resistance during this period, by mostly being oriented towards, or affiliated to, the United Democratic Front. Amongst the exceptions is Black Women Unite, which has linked itself to a smaller national grouping of organisations, the National Forum.
In other ways too the mobilisation of women has paralleled the mobilisation of general popular resistance. In 1981 the organisations, in particular FEDSAW and UWO, took up issues as they came up, supporting campaigns or protests of a temporary and limited nature. These included protests at rent increases, boycotts in support of strikes and the campaign against the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the apartheid republic. But soon both organisations were explicitly seeking forms of more permanent mobilisation and organisation of women. They set themselves a double objective. Recognising the social barriers to the organisation and political activities of black women under apartheid (described in this book), they gave their attention to promoting the organisation of women into smaller localised groups dealing with immediate issues. This included encouraging women to join and work in trade unions. In this way the women in smaller organisations, concentrating on local and grassroots issues, could also be drawn into the national political campaigns.32
The effects of this were evident by 1984, a year of general mass mobilisation of popular resistance. In the early part of the year, for example, FEDSAW was active in promoting the establishment of local organisations of women in black residential areas throughout the Transvaal, from the industrial areas of the Pretoria - Witwatersrand - Vereeniging Triangle, to rural and semi - rural areas in the Northern Transvaal. Depending on the area and the needs of women, the organisations brought women together on issues ranging from increases in rents and other aspects of the cost of living, or educational demands, to the setting up in rural areas of co - operatives for the production, distribution or purchase of daily needs. In Coloured and Indian residential areas organisation centred around opposition to the regime's constitutional proposals and the elections in August 1984 to the Coloured and Indian chambers of the segregated parliament. In areas with anti - apartheid civic associations, the new local women's organisations were often linked to them. They were also generally affiliated directly or indirectly to the UDF, which was engaged in mobilising people in opposition to the new parliament and to the regime's local government structures for administering African residential areas outside the bantustans.33
Taking a similar path, the UWO issued a call in 1983 for women to bring the organisations they were part of into the UDF.34
Thus the mobilisation of women into local activities with immediate and limited demands has become woven into the total resistance to apartheid.
In line with these developments, the meetings in 1984 to mark South African Women's Day (9 August) took place in more areas than previously. They attracted more people and involved more campaigning activity. These meetings, held in the weeks preceding the parliamentary elections, highlighted opposition to the new parliamentary constitution and related issues. In the Transvaal women's groups came together after local celebrations for a mass rally under the theme 'Women unite against Botha's new deal'.35 At a meeting in Cape Town where the focus of activities was on support for squatters threatened with removal from the Western Cape, a speaker said: 'People are being attacked once again by the government. Today we do not just celebrate the women's action in the past: we ask how women will fight against the new constitution.'36
While the participation of women in the open, legal sphere of the liberation struggle has become increasingly visible in recent years, the role of women in the underground struggle is more difficult to discern. It can be glimpsed only fragmentarily through the repressive actions of the regime and its agents, directed both at those working in underground structures and against those in exile.
Since the mid - 1970s, as noted in an earlier section, women have appeared in trials - and in some cases been imprisoned - on charges ranging from possessing banned literature, recruiting people to join the ANC, recruiting people for military training, or undergoing military training and participating in armed action. At the time of writing one woman was being held in detention in connection with the find of an arms cache in the Eastern Transvaal, while another was facing trial in the Northern Transvaal on charges which included recruiting for the ANC, and a third had been convicted in Johannesburg of furthering the aims of the ANC.
The regime and its agents pursue those who oppose it even in exile. The deaths of Jabu Nzima, of Ruth First, of Jeannette Schoon and her six - year - old daughter Katryn, show the price that women may pay for unyielding opposition to apartheid. These three women and Katryn were all blown to pieces by bombs while living in exile.
Jabu Nzima was living in exile in Swaziland. She and her husband, former organisers of SACTU and ANC activists, were killed in 1982 by a bomb planted in their car. Ruth First, writer, academic, teacher and organiser, was killed in 1982 by a letter bomb in Maputo, Mozambique, where she headed a research team at the Centre for African Studies. Jeannette and her daughter were killed in 1983 by a parcel bomb in Lubango, Angola, where she and her husband had gone as volunteers to teach English at the university.
Voice of women
In spite of the intense repression the voice of women who have always been deeply immersed in the struggle of their own people still emerges. Young and angry, old and undefeated, their continuing defiance in the face of prosecution, torture, and terrible loss, challenges apartheid, destroys myths of female submissiveness and subservience.
'I stand unafraid! I stand defiant! I stand sorry for the government, its supporters and puppets . . .!' declared Florence Mkhize, formerly active in the ANC Women's League, and an organiser in the first FSAW, as soon as her ban expired in 1980 and she was able to appear in public.37
Eighty - two - year - old Dora Tamana (who died in 1983), a founder of the Women's Federation, spoke at the inaugural conference of the United Women's Organisation (UWO) in 1981, calling on the women to organise.
You who have no work - speak! You who have no homes - speak! You who have no schools - speak! You who have to run like chickens from the vulture - speak! We must free ourselves! Men and women must share housework. Men and women must work together in the home and in the world . . . I opened the door for you - you must go forward!
Annie Silinga, who died in 1984 aged 74, defiantly refused all her life to carry a pass, despite the harassment and hardship that this brought, including the fact that without a pass she could not claim a pension, although she was both old and disabled. A life - long activist in the ANC and Women's League before they were banned, an accused in the 1956 Treason Trial, and a patron of the newly - formed United Democratic Front, she was addressing meetings up to two days before she died. 'I will never carry a pass', she said, 'All people of this country should have the right to move freely.'
Seventy - two - year - old Mrs Greta Ncapai stated in the Rand Supreme Court that she had been arrested so many times in her life she had lost count. 'I was in and out of John Vorster Square, Marshall Square, Protea Police Station so many times, it has been too often to count. When I was arrested again last year it was just one of those things.' Cross - examined on her attitude to the ANC and violence, Mrs Ncapai said, 'I will support anything that will bring change in this country.'
While the struggle for justice and freedom in South Africa is constantly renewed by courageous young people who, unarmed, face the guns and tanks of the regime, it is also astonishing how older women maintain their activities in the face of years and years of bannings, imprisonment and other forms of action against themselves or their families.
Where young ANC militants have been sent by the apartheid regime to the gallows, personal loss and grief do not deter the women from voicing their hatred of apartheid.
After her son, Solomon Mahlangu, became the first guerilla fighter to be executed, Martha Mahlangu appeared at a public meeting in Soweto. Defiantly draped in the green, black and gold colours of the illegal ANC, she declared it was disgraceful for black mothers to stand and watch their children dying for their motherland without joining the struggle. 'Nothing is going to stop blacks from being free', she said.
The words of Sarah Mosololi, mother of Jerry, on the morning her son was executed in 1983 together with two other young ANC fighters, resound like a poem: 'Go well my son, I love you. I am proud of you because you are to die for your people. We'll meet where you're going. You must know the struggle will not end even after your death.'
The mother of Naphtali Manana (saved from the gallows, with two others condemned to death, after a world - wide campaign) asserted her militant faith in the future despite her son's lifelong prison sentence: 'I see a future holding victory for us. Our great - grandfathers fought with their hands and they were defeated. Our children fight with guns, and they will win.'38
Faith in the inevitable destruction of apartheid has given Albertina Nontsikelelo Sisulu strength and courage during 40 years of political struggle and persecution. She joined the ANC Women's League at the time of its formation, and later was a leading figure in the Women's Federation. She was banned for longer than anyone else - 18 years - during which time she brought up her own five children, together with the two children of her deceased sister, while her husband, Walter Sisulu, has spent more than 20 years on Robben Island - sentenced to life imprisonment together with Nelson Mandela. She and her eldest son, Max, were arrested and detained in 1964 (Max was then only 16) during the trial of her husband. Her daughter, Lindiwe, is in exile after being detained for 11 months, assaulted and tortured. Her son Zwelakhe was detained for a year. Yet as soon as her bans had expired Albertina was once more in the thick of the fight against apartheid. She was elected one of the three Presidents of the United Democratic Front, and has endured subsequent arrests.
Winnie Mandela exemplifies the creative capacities of women under the most adverse circumstances. When she was finally banished from her home after years of harassment, detention, imprisonment and constant arrests, she was sent to live in a tiny matchbox of a house, without running water, a bathroom or electric light, in an area for Africans behind a small hill, out of sight of the white inhabitants of the country town of Brandfort. The place where she lived had no name. It was called 'the black location'. There she was forced - and this was still the case at the time of writing - to exist under severe banning orders that prohibited her from speaking to more than one person at a time, or from receiving visitors in her own home. Yet there she organised a mobile clinic to tour the district and a babycare centre, and taught the miserably paid workers how to grow their own vegetables and how to demand higher wages.
A New Zealand journalist interviewed Winnie Mandela in 1982 in this remote place. She spoke of how resistance to racialist laws had helped build the stature of the black woman. She spoke of the retrogressive aspects of the culture of her people, and how women had both to fight the racist regime and to fight against traditional customs. 'I, as a black woman, am an eternal minor.' But these issues had conscientised the black woman, and she has emerged fighting all the way - 'one of the greatest resisters and, I believe, when we shall bring about the liberation of this land, the women will be in the forefront, emerging not only as martyrs . . . [but] as one of the greatest weapons, the greatest instruments, of liberation'.
Dr Ramphele, taken from her home in King Williamstown and dumped in an isolated place in Lenyenye over seven hundred miles away, in six years of this banishment built a clinic to serve 50,000 poor people scattered around the area; and among other achievements established a literacy programme, a brick co - operative run by women, a library, a bursary fund, and in - the - field lectures on sanitation and dental care.39
Persecution does not necessarily cease with release from detention or the completion of a jail sentence. Fatima Meer's home was attacked by gunmen; another woman, Sheila Weinberg had to have a seven - foot wall built round her house as protection against continued attacks.
Lilian Ngoyi, former President of the Women's Federation, lived the last 18 years of her life (she died in 1982) banned and silenced, struggling to earn money by sewing in her tiny house. Yet in one of the brief periods when one set of bans had expired and the new ones had not yet been imposed, she told a journalist of the hardships, then rose to her feet and said, 'You can tell my friends all over the world that this girl is still her old self . . . I am looking forward to the day when my children will share in the wealth of our lovely South Africa.' 'For her', wrote a journalist on her death, 'the freedom struggle was like a call'.
Back to Contents