Obituary in Sechaba, May 1988
"If ever there was a soft target,
Dulcie September was one."
-Alfred Nzo, March 30, 1988
Dulcie Evonne September was treacherously murdered on March 29, 1988, by a hired killer in the pay of the apartheid colonial regime.
Those who knew Dulcie will remember her as an always smiling, friendly, committed, almost impatient ANC activist - a comrade who loved to see things done. This gentle, unassuming Dulcie, who never handled anything more deadly than a pen or a typewriter, was to be a victim of an unknown assassin who shot her five times with a .22 calibre rifle as she was opening the ANC office in Paris after collecting the mail from the post office. For her, that fatal morning was just another working day. In a manner, typical of the cowardly paid murderer, she was shot from behind with a silenced weapon.
Dulcie was descended from the Coloured community in the Western Cape. She grew up in Gleemoor, a section of Athlone, one of the suburbs of the city of Cape Town. It was there, in the region of our country that lies in the shadow of Table Mountain, rich in traditions of struggle that extend back as far as the 17th century, that she evolved her keen social conscience and political commitment to the struggle for national liberation, democracy and social justice.
In 1935, the year when Comrade Dulcie was born, serious developments were taking place internationally. The little place called Gleemoor must have seemed very far away from the sites of these momentous events. Yet it was never so far that it remained unaffected. It was the struggles waged during the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s that shaped and moulded the mind and character of the woman whose memory we honour today.
Many of the fathers, uncles and elder brothers of the community she came from went off to bear arms against Hitlerite fascism during the Second World War.
Dulcie was among the first group of pupils to attend the newly-established Athlone High School. From Athlone, she moved to the Battswood Teacher Training College, where she qualified as a teacher in the mid-50s. It was the profession that she had chosen that first launched her into the thick of the struggle for liberation.
During the 1950s, education had become one of the principal terrains of struggle. In 1954, Verwoerd had presided over the imposition of Bantu Education, and stood poised to debase higher education and the professions by submitting them to the ideology of apartheid. It was in the context of the struggles around education that Comrade Dulcie received her baptism in politics. She joined the Cape Peninsula Students' Union, an affiliate of the Unity Movement of South Africa, in 1957. The political culture of Cape Town during those years was slanted towards the Unity Movement.
It was not long before Dulcie's vision caused her to part company with her erstwhile political mentors in the Unity Movement. She broke with the leadership of the Unity Movement. The Sharpeville massacre, and the consequent political crisis that gripped the country, proved the catalyst. This was time for action, not endless debates and discussions about national and international politics, she thought.
She aligned herself with some young militants around Dr. Neville Alexander. They called themselves the National Liberation Front, or the Yu Chui Chan Club.
It was while engaged in the activities of this group that she was arrested and detained without trial in October 1963. Early in 1964, together with nine others, she was charged with conspiring to commit acts of sabotage, and incite acts of politically motivated violence. In April 1964, Dulcie was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
When she was released from prison in 1969, the Pretoria regime proscribed her activities in terms of a five-year banning order, which not only prohibited her from political activity, but also from practising her profession. She left South Africa in 1974, to pursue her studies in Britain.
She joined the ANC. It was in the ANC that Comrade Dulcie found a movement that did not merely propound theories but also had a comprehensive strategy for the total destruction of the system of racist domination. It was a movement that could effectively harness her profound political commitment and energies, in a programme of political action based on a sober appreciation of regional and national realities. She threw herself body and soul into the work of the movement, and quickly won recognition for her contribution. In 1984 she was appointed Chief Representative in France, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Before the ANC sent her to Paris, she had worked for some time at the ANC headquarters in Lusaka, and before that for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London.
In the course of her work in Paris, she suffered physical assaults, manhandling by fascist thugs and a mugging. None of these daunted her or turned her away from the path she had chosen to follow. Courageously, she soldiered on in the full knowledge that the cause she upheld was just, and, come what may, must in the end be victorious.
The bitter irony about her murder is that, though Dulcie had received death threats over the past eight months, and had reported this fact to the French authorities, she had been given no protection and, as a result, there are no clues to the identity of the killer, no traces of the assassin. All we are told is that this was a "professional job"...
Comrade Dulcie died at her post as honourably and with as great a dignity as any fighter who falls on the battlefield. That is the memory of her that we must always cherish. Long after the misanthropic scum who plotted her murder are forgotten, her name will live on as an inspiration to men and women the world over.
The only real monument we shall erect to Comrade Dulcie and all other martyrs who have fallen is the future we will create in South Africa. Let us all bend our efforts to make it worthy of their sacrifice.