PART IV

»Although men may say it is sexism in reverse,
I think women's organizations are very important.
Women have to encourage one another as women
so that they can go out and face the world,
including men. They need to talk to each other
about the intimate issues that affect them and that
they can't talk about in front of men.«
SETHEMBILE N.

Although feminism in South Africa is still at an embryonic stage of development, women's organizations are a very significant force in the anti-apartheid movement. Even the large majority of women's organizations, which are not feminist, have been formed in recognition of the fact that women do not play anything like an equal role in gender-integrated groups, and that women's organizations are therefore likely to be more successful in mobilizing women.
The chapters in part IV are presented in order of historical occurrence. Helen Joseph, in describing the formation of the Federation of South African Women in 1954, sets the stage for their two most dramatic actions involving marches of two thousand women in 1955 and twenty thousand women in 1956. Joseph, an active participant and organizer of these historic marches, brings them movingly to life.
One year after the federation was formed in 1954, six women started an organization that has come to be known as the Black Sash because the women in it wore black sashes when they demonstrated as a symbol
of mourning for the laws they were protesting. The women believed that if there was a substantial public outcry about the unjust laws being passed, the government would have to desist from whatever they intended to do. Although Di Bishop does not describe the early history of the Black Sash (Sheena Duncan, whose mother was one of its founders, does so in chapter 24), she gives a lively and humorous picture of the kinds of activity she has undertaken as a member of that organization from 1978 or 1979 when she joined it, until today. Despite a conservative beginning, this still largely white women's organization has radicalized over the years, with several of its members now in detention. It remains, however, adamantly nonfeminist, an issue addressed by Bishop in her interview.
Anne Mayne, the woman who initiated the movement against rape in South Africa in 1976, describes the trials and tribulations entailed in the development of Rape Crisis into a national organization that also now assists women battered by their partners. Rape Crisis has almost become synonymous with feminism in South Africa, with budding feminists gravitating toward that organization even if they have no particular interest in rape or battery.
Feminism in South Africa is frequently dismissed as a white, Western, bourgeois movement, thus making it very difficult to take root in a country where progressive people are understandably preoccupied with the anti-apartheid struggle. But once the issue of rape has been forced out of the closet, it may be less easy than with some other issues to include women's work on it in the general disparagement accorded to feminism. For example, Mayne has informed me, since my interview with her, that the women in Rape Crisis have recently been invited to train both men and women who work in anti-apartheid advice offices all over the country, as well as in Namibia, in how to counsel rape victims.
The Black Women's Federation was founded in 1975, one of the many organizational manifestations of the Black Consciousness movement [started by the charismatic Steve Biko and others]. In 1977 it was banned along with all the other Black Consciousness organizations. However, shortly afterwards, the United Women's Organization was formed in the Cape in 1979, the Federation of Transvaal Women was started in the Transvaal, and the Natal Organization of Women was founded in Natal.
In May 1987, the UDF Women's Congress was formed in an attempt to bring together groups affiliated with the UDF on a national level. A year after my departure from South Africa in May 1987, a new National
Federation of Women — much talked about during my visit — was also successfully launched. These are but a few of the many women's organizations in South Africa.
Gertrude Fester describes in her interview the evolution of the Cape-based United Women's Organization, from its beginnings in 1979, into the United Women's Congress (UWCO) in 1986. Of great historical interest is the fact that UWO »was largely instrumental in the formation of the United Democratic Front in the western Cape«, according to Fester (as well as Hettie V. [see chapter 21]).
Although UWCO, like UWO before it, is a women's organization that deliberately excludes men from its membership, it would not consider itself feminist, in part because of the negative connotations of feminism for many black women. For that reason, I rarely asked a black woman whether she defined herself as a feminist. In South Africa, I met several black women who, though fitting my definition of feminist, didn't identify themselves that way. For example, I did not ask Fester whether she would describe herself as a feminist, but she certainly appeared to be both conscious of sexism and committed to doing something to change it in a way that fits my notion of that term.
Rozena Maart is one of those rare women — a self-defined black feminist. She is one of five black women who founded an organization called Women Against Repression (WAR) in April 1986, just a year before I interviewed her. WAR gives priority to street actions against child sexual abuse in schools. Maart focuses on this issue in the context of gender oppression because she considers sexism to be, not a more serious problem than racism or classism in South Africa, but the most neglected form of oppression. Thus, she and her group have made it their priority.

The National Federation of Women

»I think it's very important for [progressive] white people
to stay in this country. They are needed here. What those who
leave are losing sight of is the tremendous rewards and
riches that you get from feeling that you are part of
the same cause.«
HELEN JOSEPH

As the first person in South Africa to be subjected to the unusual punishment of house arrest in 1962, Helen Joseph—a warm, intense, and vivacious white woman of eighty-two with a wonderful sense of humor—has been called the »mother of the struggle« by some members of the anti-apartheid movement. Her interview provides, among other things, a thumbnail sketch of the history of some of the early anti-apartheid women's organizations in South Africa, including some of the women who have dedicated their lives to the liberation movement. Annie Silinga, for example, was one of the three women to be accused in the 1956 treason trial. Silinga refused to carry a pass all her life (she died in 1984 at the age of seventy-four), despite the severe consequences her refusal entailed, such as constant police harassment and not being able to claim a pension (Bernstein 1985, p. 110). Lillian Ngoyi, a former president of the Women's League of the ANC and the second president of the Federation of South African Women, was a charismatic leader who »spent the last eighteen years of her life (she died in 1982) banned and silenced, struggling to earn money by sewing in her tiny house« (Bernstein 1985, p. 113). Silenced, but not broken, according to reports (Bernstein 1985). Ruth First, author, teacher, and ANC organizer, was blown to pieces by a letter bomb in 1982 while living in exile in Maputo, Mozambique (Bernstein 1985, p. 110). Her assassination is assumed to be the responsibility of the South African government, which has made it a practice to kidnap and murder anti-apartheid activists, successfully extending this policy as far away as France. Joseph describes Ray Alexander, born in Latvia, as a legend in trade-union circles for her tireless efforts as an organizer in the early days of union organizing. Alexander was elected to Parliament as a Communist Party member by Africans when they (Africans) were still permitted to have three representatives, but was »barred from taking her seat through the provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act« (Joseph 1986, p. 3). She now lives in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, working full-time for the ANC. Hilda Bernstein, who was born in London in 1915 and emigrated to South Africa in 1934, became in 1943 the only communist ever to be elected by whites to the Johannesburg City Council. Arrested three years later for assisting striking African miners and detained in 1960 during the state of emergency, Bernstein now lives in exile in Britain as an active ANC member (Bernstein 1985). Dora Tamana was a founder of the Federation of South African Women and its national secretary after Ray Alexander had been banned, and until she also was banned (Joseph 1987). Mary Moodley, an organizer in the Food and Canning Workers Union, had — from the time she was banned in 1963 — only three days in which she was not restricted and silenced until she died in 1979« (Bernstein 1985, p. 79).
Joseph vividly describes the historic demonstration of the Federation of South African Women in Pretoria, in 1956, in which twenty thousand women protested the issuing of passes to African women. Unfortunately, time, as well as Joseph's diminished energy (owing to a recent heart attack), did not permit her to tell me about her experience as one of 18 women out of the 157 people accused of treason, also in 1956. In her recent autobiography, Side by Side (1987) (though banned in South Africa, it is now available in the United States), she describes at length the four-year treason trial, along with numerous other remarkable experiences that could not be included in our one-and-a-half-hour interview.

Growing Up British

I was born in England in 1905. My parents were very ordinary, run of the mill, middle-class people. My father was in the civil service, and I grew up in a suburb in the London area. There were two of us: my brother, who is fifteen months older than I am; and myself. Only one of us was destined to go to university because my father couldn't afford to pay for both of us. It was never intended to be me. I was going to be a music teacher because I was good at the piano. Then my brother failed his matric. Being a very stubborn young man, he said he wasn't going to write it again. He went into the insurance world and stayed there for the rest of his life. This opened the door for me, and I went to King's College in London and took an honors degree in English.
On graduating, I was told by a big scholastic agency, »Although you don't have the training, you'll be able to get a job abroad.« So I got a job in India, and out I went on a three-year contract. When I was near the end of it, I had a riding accident and fractured my skull. I was advised to get a light job for the next two years. I was engaged to be married to somebody there who was tied up by his contract with Imperial Tobacco Company. I was going to marry into this big capitalist firm which sent their men out into the bundu [boondocks] in India to teach the Indian villagers how to smoke so that they could sell them their cigarettes. To tell you the truth, I couldn't see anything wrong in it then. I was totally apolitical. I was drunk with the lovely life I was living. We few white teachers were terribly spoilt and absolutely unaware politically.
While my fiance was away on an extended leave during the Depression in 1931, I cast around for something to do for another year. I wrote to a friend in South Africa who had been at university with me in London, and she said, »Come over here. My father's got a little school. I've just married, but you can come and stay with my parents and do a bit of teaching until you want to go back to India.« So I went there, but I didn't go back to India. I met somebody in Durban and married him instead.
Then I moved into Durban society. My husband was a very popular dentist, and we lived a very gay and totally apolitical life. I played bridge. I played with my garden. I was very interested in languages, so I studied Afrikaans. And so it went on until the war came. My husband joined up in the dental corps, and the following year when I was in my late thirties, I thought it might be fun to do the welfare information officers' course, and to my amazement I was accepted. This meant I was in the air force, which was a wonderful experience for me. I had to give information lectures on current affairs to the women in the air force. Amazingly, our mandate was to inculcate a liberal, tolerant attitude of mind, and we were fed with masses of left-oriented material from England. So I learnt about conditions in South Africa, and that's when I began to realize that I was living in the middle of a totally unjust society.
I was about thirty-nine when the war ended, and I didn't go back to my husband. Our marriage had packed up, and I took a job as director of a community center here in Johannesburg. Then I went to Cape Town for two years and worked amongst the Coloured people. Gradually I realized that all I was doing was giving aspirin for a toothache. It was wonderful to build these community centers, but it didn't do much for people's lives. I began to feel it was the whole system that had to be dealt with, and that means engaging in political action.
In 1953, I accepted a job with the Transvaal Clothing Industry's Medical Aid Society in Johannesburg. There I met a man called Solly Sachs who had an enormous influence on my life. He put my foot onto the political path. I was dealing with an enormous clothing industry in which seventy-five percent of the workers were black. So I got very close to black workers and began to get the feel of black society.

The Congress of Democrats

Within a couple of years, I was visited in my office by Ruth First who invited me to be on the founding committee of an organization called the Congress of Democrats. She, Trevor Huddleston [an Anglican priest of Sophia town who left South Africa in the 1950s and currently heads the Anti-Apartheid Movement in England], Padre du Manoir—a very well known Roman Catholic priest — Cecil Williams, and Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, were also on the founding committee. This was a very small, very radical organization. It was not communist, but inevitably it provided a political home for some of the people who had been members of the South African Communist Party before it was banned. We were called into action by the African National Congress when it became evident that there was quite considerable white sympathy for the defiers in the Defiance Campaign. The ANC didn't accept white members; the Transvaal Indian Congress was confined to Indian members; and the South African Coloured People's Organization worked amongst the Coloured people, so there was no place for white radicals. Look, none of these organizations had a color-bar clause in their constitutions, but they did state that their organization was for a specific group.
A meeting for whites was held in which the ANC took the chair. Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and people like that spoke. They called upon whites who had been moved by the Defiance Campaign, who had understood its goal to highlight the grievances of the people, to form themselves into an organization. There was a good deal of argument at the time about what form the organization should take, but finally, at the request of the ANC, it was decided that it would be an all-white organization whose job would be to work in the white areas. The ANC made it quite clear that they didn't want us nosing around in the townships recruiting black people into our organization. We would try to work on changing white opinion. The ANC has always said, »We want a South Africa for all people who live in it, black and white together.« They never worked for an Africa for the Africans only, but as Z. K. Matthews [professor and former ANC leader] put it at the treason trial, for »Africa for the Africans, too.«
The Congress Alliance was formed to link all these groups together on an equal footing, including COD. Incredibly so, because we were very small. We never had more than a few hundred members. Here in Johannesburg there were perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty. I think the ANC was very gracious to us, although I must admit when I say equal footing, some were more equal than others! The ANC was accepted as the mother body.
We organized into branches and had weekly branch meetings. We were great propagandists. There wasn't an issue on which we didn't bring out a pamphlet or a little booklet or something to circulate. We had to try to sell our literature like Counter Attack and Fighting Talk and all the Congress journals. I used to go on these selling expeditions, but I was hopeless. I couldn't put my foot in the door unless I was invited. So I made more use of my long legs and just shoved pamphlets under doors and scuttled down the corridors.
Nobody had any money in the 1950s. We had to earn every damn penny, which meant book sales, food sales, and jumble [rummage] sales. We also did an enormous campaign of writing letters to the papers on every possible subject. And we had our national conferences. Our total support of the Congress Alliance meant that our members also actively worked on the campaign against Bantu Education, helped to organize cultural clubs, and opposed the forced removals of black people. We spoke up publicly, organized meetings, educated the public, got people to sign postcards and send telegrams. I was so frightened that we might get arrested at my first political activity that I literally prayed, »Please, dear God, let it rain tonight so I won't have to sit there!«

The Federation of South African Women

Then in 1954 the Federation of South African Women was started by Ray Alexander and Hilda Bernstein—two very brilliant women. Ray was one of the most famous women trade-union organizers that we have ever had, and a very outstanding woman. Hilda was the only member of the Communist Party who ever got into the city council. She was also a commercial artist who was very busy bringing up a family. I was called in to help Ray and Hilda organize for the launching of the federation. About 90 percent of the women at the launching conference were black. We elected a national executive committee and then those of us on that committee went to our own provinces and started drawing women's groups together to form the federations regionally. And that's how it grew. I was on the executive committee and became a regional secretary as well.
Hilda Bernstein and Ray Alexander wanted to bring women's rights into the forefront, and we had a fantastic women's rights charter. But we didn't actually work to implement it. It didn't get as much attention as it should have, because the organizations that were affiliated to the federation were basically national liberation organizations, and we were so involved in the general struggle that women's rights got pushed aside to a great extent. But we firmly believed that when we got our freedom it would be universal freedom. I think we were very naive about this, but don't forget feminism wasn't all that established in the 1950s. It certainly wasn't in South Africa. And the fight for women's rights in South Africa really had been conducted by white women for white women. For example, Olive Schreiner [well-known novelist and feminist] turned her back on the League of Women Voters because they were only fighting for the rights of white women. The Business and Professional Women's League was really confined to white women from its inception. I withdrew from it for that reason. So women's rights hadn't infiltrated into our political thinking very deeply. Although the Freedom Charter doesn't say there shall be votes for men and women—it says there shall be votes for all—it means the same thing, and we were satisfied with that. We'll fight for women's rights after we get our freedom, if we still have to.
I had been more or less ordered by Johanna Cornelius [an Afrikaner who became general secretary of a militant union] to join the Defend the Constitution Women's League, which eventually became the Black Sash, at their two-day protest in Pretoria. They were protesting the fact that the Coloured people's right to vote had been taken away by an unconstitutional maneuver by the Nationalist Party. Several of us from the federation went to join that protest and slept at the foot of the Union Buildings [the government's administrative headquarters]. There were about two or three hundred women camped out in the middle of winter. It was bitterly cold except that we had mattresses and lots of blankets. I shared a bed with Johanna Cornelius and nearly died of suffocation, not cold. Every time I pushed the blankets back, Johanna pulled them up again. But she was bigger than I was!
I was very impressed with this protest: women coming together to defend the constitution and to protest against the rape of the Coloured voter. So I reported on it to the next federation meeting, and when I had finished, Margaret Gazo, the chairwoman of one of the ANC Women's League branches, stood up and said from the floor, »The white women went to Pretoria to protest against their grievances, but they did not invite us. Now we will go to Pretoria to protest against our grievances, but we will invite the white women.« It was a very historic statement.
And within no time it had turned into a resolution, and the whole conference was talking about going to Pretoria and staying at the foot of the Union Buildings. I sat on the platform with my knees literally knocking together. All I could think about was babies and loos [bathrooms] and things like that, but all these women were determined to go to Pretoria and stay there. Finally, it got whittled down to one afternoon. Thursday afternoon was chosen because that is nanny's day off, so domestic servants would be able to attend.

The Women's March of 1955

We called for all women to come to Pretoria on 27 October 1955 to protest four different laws: the pass laws, Bantu Education, Group Areas, and Population Registration. These were very general issues chosen to include as many different racial groups as possible. Our letters to the various ministers saying we were coming were, of course, ignored. A person who must be mentioned here — though, alas, she is dead — is Lillian Ngoyi, because she was the great leader of all time. She dwarfs all other women leaders. For me she always will. She was the Transvaal president and I was Transvaal secretary, and we worked together to organize the march. How we worked!
I was one of the few people who had a car, so we went night after night to townships, sneaking in at the back door. We didn't aim at anything really grand. We thought if we got a thousand women, we would be doing very, very well. We applied to the Pretoria city council for permission to hold a public meeting, but the government got alarmed. Only three days before our protest was due to start, the city council turned down our request. We didn't know what to do. All these women would be going to Pretoria to hold a meeting, and now the meeting was forbidden.
I consulted with sympathetic lawyers in Pretoria, and we hit upon a scheme. I said to them, »Look, if I want to deliver a letter to the minister in Pretoria, not send it by post, and if Mrs. Van der Merwe down the road also wants to take a letter to the minister, and also doesn't trust the post, and if Mrs. Sibeko in Orlando also wants to do it, and if we all go on the same day, is that a gathering?« And they scratched their heads and said, »No, you are all going there on your individual purposes. But see that every woman has a letter in her hand, signed by herself.« We only had about forty-eight hours to organize this. Two days before the protest, the transportation board rescinded all the licenses for the buses that the women were hiring to take them to Pretoria. So a comrade, Robert Resha, and I leaped into different cars, and we rushed madly to all the townships up and down the east and west Rand saying to the women, »No buses. Go by train. Put the word out. No buses. Go by train.« But I thought it was the end of our protest. However, I was wrong, as I so often was.
On that Tuesday night, the ANC called a meeting in Brakpan. They filled the local hall, and they explained that the government had taken away the buses and the women would have to go by train, and that it was going to cost twice as much. The traditional way for political meetings to raise money is that, in the middle of the meeting, you have a session of freedom songs and, while we are singing the freedom songs, practically everybody leaves their seat, walks up, and throws money on the platform. It is so impressive. They raised four hundred pounds [1] at that meeting, and they went to the station and bought a composite ticket for four hundred or so women to go to Pretoria. So when people ask me, »What support did you get from the ANC?« I answer that the support was unlimited. Some researchers say that the men wanted to hold the women back. It's not true. That is how they supported us.
Two of us drove out to Orlando at six thirty in the morning on the day of the protest to pick up Lillian Ngoyi. On the way there, we came to the great railway embankment, and what do you think we saw? A train with all these arms stretched out of the windows and women singing freedom songs! The women were on their way to Pretoria! You know what I did? I burst into tears. I knew then that it couldn't fail.
Afterwards we heard what happened to these women. They went down to the stations in Soweto, and the booking clerks refused to issue them tickets. They had been forbidden to issue tickets for women to go to Pretoria. So the women walked along the tracks to the next station, got on the next train without tickets, and paid when they got to Pretoria. Then they all massed together at the foot of the Union Buildings. We still didn't know exactly what we were going to do, since we weren't permitted to have a meeting. We had the letters and pencils ready for every woman to sign. Someone would be at the top of the amphitheater steps to receive the women's protest letters, and then we would come down again. I could see a beautiful never-ceasing flow of women up the steps, then down, which I thought would be wonderful.
Next we got a report that the taxi drivers were overcharging. So I went tearing out to the railway station with a couple of ANC assistants. We got the taxi drivers to agree never to charge more than sixpence. When I came back, the women were gone. I learned that when they got to the top of the steps, they said they were tired, so all two thousand of them marched into the amphitheater and sat down. They took their babies off their backs and said they would stay there for a bit. I've never been up any steps so fast in my life. I got to the top and saw the women sitting there hand in hand. We then collected all the protest letters that had been handed in, and went off to the offices of the ministers. The ministers weren't there, so we left the letters outside their door, then came back, and told this to the women. With that, they stood up and sang the African national anthem — »Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika« [»God Bless Africa«]. Then down the stairs they went.
When the four hundred women from Brakpan got back home, the men were waiting for them at the railway station and escorted them through the location with a band. Such a tribute to women from African men is very rare. I believe some of the husbands actually embraced their women in public, so overcome were they by what the women had done. The whole demonstration made a tremendous impression.

The 1956 March of Twenty Thousand Women

Passes started to be issued to African women in 1955. There were great protests against it and resistance from the women, and by March of the following year, 1956, we held a meeting in the city hall. I think it coincided with International Women's Day. Our feelings were running very high about passes at that meeting. Representatives were there of the Winburg women [2] who had burned their passes when they discovered how they had been tricked into carrying them. Somebody from the floor at that meeting said, »Last year the women went to see the ministers to protest. Now we must go to the prime minister and say that women do not want to carry passes.« And before we left the meeting, everybody was talking about our organizing a protest of twenty thousand women from all over South Africa. And me? I was nearly paralyzed with shock.
I want people to understand that neither of these protests were planned. They were proposed absolutely spontaneously from the heart, which is very unique. Having been proposed to us, we now had to organize it. So we wrote to the national committees and did a tour around the country and organized people as we went. We knew what to say this time: »No buses. Travel by train. Get to Pretoria the day before.« And it happened. Twenty thousand women of all races came to the Union Buildings. We collected their protests and took them to the office of the prime minister. He wasn't there, so we dumped them all over the floor and came back. Lillian Ngoyi was our great leader of this protest. She stood on that little rostrum and said, »The prime minister was not there. He has run away from the women.« And for almost the only time in my life, I experienced what a groundswell means. I could feel the rage of these women that the prime minister had run away from them when they were so angry. Then Lillian simply put her thumb up as she said, »We shall now stand in silence for thirty minutes in protest.« As she said it, the clock struck a quarter to three, and twenty thousand arms went up and stayed up for thirty minutes. I couldn't do it today. I stood with my hand up on the platform, and once again the tears were pouring down my cheeks. I couldn't even blow my nose. There was dead silence for thirty minutes. I heard the clock strike three o'clock, then a quarter past three. Then Lillian began to sing »Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika.« Ah! I've never heard it sung like that before or since. Never ever! And then they sang a new song that one of the women had composed. It is a song that was addressed to [Johannes] Strijdom, the prime minister then. It is well known now. »Strijdom, you have struck a rock. You have tampered with the women«, and it went on to say, »You shall die.« Sure enough he did, a year later. And the women are convinced that they had something to do with it.
It took them seven years before they dared make passes for African women compulsory. That lapse in time was simply due to the stand of the women, not only in Pretoria, but all over South Africa. But the federation became nonviable in the 1960s because wave after wave of our women leaders were arrested, banned, exiled, jailed, and in the end we really couldn't function. The federation itself was never banned; it never dissolved itself; it just fell apart.

House Arrest and Imprisonment

I was the first person to be house-arrested in South Africa, though I have never understood why. It happened on 13 October 1962 at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning. It was initially for a period of five years, then it was renewed for another five years. I lived in this house which I love, but for nine years I couldn't go out at night or at the weekend, and I wasn't allowed any visitors at all. I had to be here from half-past six in the evening to half-past six in the morning and all weekend. I could go out in the daytime to earn my living because the government wasn't going to support me. I managed to meet my friends at work, but I wasn't allowed to be with more than one person at a time. But you can't do a job and keep to that, so I broke my ban all the time. I had to report to the police every day at midday when I wasn't under twenty-four hour house arrest at the weekend. I forgot to report once, and I had to go to jail for a few days for that.
Certain things happened that made house arrest difficult for me, like telephone threats and obscene calls which were absolutely horrible. But I learned how to recognize the voices and how to deal with them. Occasionally I still hear the same voice, and I just put down the telephone receiver. Then there was the violence that was aimed at me, like when gun shots were fired at my house. I now have plastic sheeting over my bedroom window so I can at least sleep safely. Then a bomb was tied onto the gate, and there were a few other things like that. But it is all in the past now, and I think that it's terribly important that one leaves these things in the past. Also, you must realize that at the time when I was under house arrest, the people who were closest to me were serving life sentences on Robben Island. How could I be sorry for myself?
By the fourth year of the second term, I went to have a mastectomy. Cancer is such a frightening word, it even frightened the government! They thought, »This old girl [she was then over sixty] is going to die in the hospital, and it won't look very nice if she's still under house arrest.« So they lifted the banning and the house arrest while I was in the hospital, but I remained listed,[3] and I still am. I also had another two-year banning order served on me in 1980.
I was in prison in 1978, long after the house arrest. Barbara Waite [a friend of Joseph's], Ilona Kleinschmidt and Jackie Bosman [both old friends of Winnie Mandela's], and I went to Brandfort, the place where Winnie Mandela had been banished to. We all refused to make any statements to the police because they would have been used against Winnie. They subpoenaed me to make a statement, but it was unthinkable for all of us. Ilona went to jail for three months as a result. I spent two weeks in Klerksdorp jail. I was alone there for the simple reason that I was the only white female prisoner. They were really very good to me. They were so frightened that this old woman was going to die at the wrong moment and cause an international scandal that they wrapped me up in cotton wool. They even brought me paperbacks to read, and the time really didn't pass too unpleasantly.
Out of my participation in the struggle, I have received so many incredible riches in the way of friendships and sharing. Being designated the »mother of the struggle« is the most wonderful thing. And I have known people like Lillian Ngoyi, Dora Tamana, Annie Silinga, and Mary Moodley as my sisters. These are riches beyond anybody's deserts.
If I didn't believe in what the revolution will bring, I wouldn't have been able to carry on for as long as I have. I have never doubted it for a moment, in part because I know the people in the struggle. I went through the 1950s and through the treason trial with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Moses Kotane, and Ahmed Kathrada [ANC leader sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964]. All these people are my personal friends. We became very much a family during the treason trial. It is all these experiences that have made me so convinced that we are walking toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
I also don't doubt for a moment that the revolution will result in a nonracial society. I have just come from being a patient in Groote Schuur Hospital [in Cape Town] where they now have integrated wards. For the first time in my life, I have seen it working. The patients were mixed, the staff were mixed, and the medical officers were mixed; it was totally integrated. It was beautiful. White and black together. And it works. To me that is terribly exciting.

The Black Sash: White Women Confront Apartheid

»I struggle terribly with the whole issue of violence.
One cannot expect people against whom the government
has armed itself not to want to defend themselves.
I know that change could come about peacefully if the government
laid down its arms. But it's not going to, and therefore it's within that
context that I absolutely understand the use of violence on the part of
people who are directly exposed to it every single day of their lives.«
DI BISHOP

OF ALL THE WOMEN interviewed, Diana Bishop—Di, as everyone calls her—has held the highest position in the white power structure in South Africa. She was elected for five years to the Provincial Council—which she described as ''the second tier of government"—for the Progressive Federal Party in 1981. She is also a leader in the Black Sash, a largely white women's anti-apartheid organization.
Bishop's husband, Brian, was killed just over a year before the interview, at the end of 1985, in a tragic car accident, in which she herself was seriously injured. In the accident, Molly Blackburn, a well-known white woman activist, political colleague, and friend of Bishop's, was also killed. In her interview, Bishop describes how this tragedy has deepened her relationship with an African woman, Nyami Goniwe, whose husband Mathew had been assassinated just months prior to Brian's death. This relationship illustrates the deep bonds that can develop between black and white women in South Africa, despite all efforts by the government to prevent them.
Bishop was born in Cape Town, where she has always lived, except for three years when she attended Stellenbosch University* about sixty miles away. She obtained a B.A. and an honors degree in social work there, then worked as a social worker for ten years before becoming involved in politics. Bishop struck me as a woman of profound integrity, who combines a sharp intelligence and thoughtfulness with great empathy, feeling, and sensitivity. She was also exceptionally open about questioning some of the policies of the Black Sash. For example; while, on the one hand, she felt that the Black Sash has demonstrated that women have an equal contribution to make to society and political work, on the other, she admitted that »because our concern and activity is focused on political issues, we haven't grappled with women's issues in the way that we might otherwise have done.« In elaborating on this point, Bishop mentioned that one member of the Black Sash became actively involved in the rape issue and tried to get the Black Sash to discuss it. But, while Bishop agreed with the way this woman had related the issue to the problems of racism and sexism, »I only have so much time«, she said.
Bishop went on to say that, »because the Sash leadership has taken a position against abortion personally, they seem reluctant to move into areas where the majority of the organization may decide to support the demand for abortion. But that's undemocratic, and I think it would be healthy for us to be addressing women's issues in a more comprehensive way.«

Growing Up White

I first experienced apartheid when I compared the way we and my friends were allowed to speak to the women who worked in our homes as domestic workers. My mum worked full-time when we were children, and Doris looked after us when we came home. She came to work for us when I was about nine or ten. I remember the day she came. She loved it when we went to meet her at the bus stop. I also remember very well Mum saying to us, »You know, Doris is not a slave. She's our friend.« We were never allowed to give her any instructions. We had to make our own beds and help with the washing up. She was an integral part of the family, and we had to treat her as such. Because of the training that my Mum gave us, I was very conscious of the wickedness of treating a woman with disdain who is really another mother figure in the home.
My first political statement was at the age of eleven. It was 1961 when South Africa became a republic, and all the school kids were organized into various activities to celebrate this. Amongst other celebrations there was a military display, and I refused to go to it. That wasn't so much a sin in the eyes of my dad as that I influenced my younger brother and sister not to go. We had our pocket money cut for a week. I cannot recall why I felt so strongly about it, except that I hated apartheid.

The Black Sash

In 1975 at the age of twenty-five, I married Brian—who was fourteen years older than me. It was through Brian that I joined the Black Sash. Men don't have full membership in the organization, but Brian had an enormous admiration for it. After we were married, he said to me, »Why don't you think about joining the Black Sash?« My image of the Black Sash was formed by derogatory remarks that were made about an aunt in my family who had been a member in the early years, and who had participated in the demonstrations. She was regarded as rather quirky for having done that. The thing that pushed me to join in 1977 or 1978 was related to my work as a social worker. The majority of people with whom I was working in Cape Town were classified as so-called Coloured. I realized that an enormous gap in my understanding of African people must exist, as I had had virtually no contact with them. In my training at Stellenbosch, I wasn't taught anything at all about the particular problems that African people struggle with. The Black Sash had for me the image of relating very closely to the problems and the struggles of black African people.
In 1979, Brian's business started to be very successful, so it wasn't necessary for me to do salaried work full-time. I started to work in the Black Sash's Advice Office on a voluntary basis, and I took a part-time job at the University of Cape Town doing social work student supervision, which was marvelous. Working in the Black Sash revolutionized my thinking. My social work experience had been mainly focused on pathology as opposed to the inequalities of society and the devastating problems that people have to grapple with because of the laws in South Africa.
One of the things that I plugged into virtually straight away in Black Sash work was going to the Langa Pass Law Court on a regular basis. The Black Sash monitored what happened in these courts so as to create an available presence there to people who may want to consult with one of us. Or if someone felt they would like to be defended legally, they knew that they could consult us about how to approach a lawyer. We were also anxious that there should be a white face in those courts, other than the white faces of the magistrates and the prosecutor, as a demonstration of our concern for and solidarity with people who landed up in this kind of situation. This exposed us to the way in which those courts functioned, which enabled us to put together information which we made more widely available. We used to take many visitors to these courts. I believe that whole process contributed toward the exposure of the terrible, visible injustice of the pass laws, which in turn contributed toward their being changed.
I used to go to the Pass Law Court once a week. I remember the first time I was there, I saw a woman who had been arrested on the street with a babe in arms, another baby tied to her back, and two other little ones. They had been kept in a police cell overnight. They had been transferred to the court cells and brought into the court that morning, totally bewildered by the experience. And that mother stood in that dock with her four children accused of not having a pass! It was such an incredibly powerful, poignant experience. It was unbelievable that this was happening to people, unbelievable unless you had the direct experience of it yourself. I couldn't quite grasp that people who are just being human could be exposed to that kind of treatment. This woman was being charged as a criminal. She was given a warning and a suspended sentence. Generally the sentences at that time were seventy rand [$35] or seventy days in jail. If the magistrate was in a particularly compassionate mood, he might suspend the sentence. We were unable to monitor whether our presence in the courts had an affect on the sentencing, but we believe that it did. Some of our African workers in the Advice Office were involved with our court monitoring. When we were unable to be there, they would see that the whole procedure was more hasty, the remarks that were made in the court were more indiscreet and the sentences were harsher.
I found that if I missed a week in the court, the intensity of my commitment to working for change was not as great. It was that exposure which kept me involved and prepared to speak out and to stand on the streets and address meetings. People often ask me, »Why do you do it to yourself? What motivates you?« Although I am not a mother, I felt very deeply for those women who are mothers, and an immense amount of empathy with them.
Of course many of these people could not pay the seventy rand, which is why the jails were so full. I never came across women who carried around that amount of money in their pockets. But a lot of men who were working illegally in Cape Town regarded the possibility of arrest as a very normal hazard and something to be expected. Rather than getting a lawyer and going through the rigmarole of having a case remanded and taking that much more time, maybe causing them to be dismissed for absenteeism, they would carry seventy rand in their pockets. If they were lucky, they would be processed through the court on the same day as their arrest. Maybe they would lose no more than a half day or a full day of work.
If the person didn't have the money on them, they would either land up in jail or they would organize to get the fine paid. There was a type of prisoners' friend at the court who could contact family members, and the township networks are very effective at getting messages out. The courts were full of family members who'd get to the court on the day that somebody had been arrested. Or if somebody didn't come home at night, the first place they would go and look for that person the next day would be in the Pass Law Court. People knew that they should have seventy rand with them so that they could immediately pay the fine and the person could be released. Seventy rand is a lot of money today. In the 1970s, it was an enormous sum. But it still paid people to come to town despite the hazard of repeated arrests. If they could work in-between the arrests, they would still earn more and have a better chance of survival or of supporting their families than if they stayed in the homelands.
By the time I joined the Black Sash, demonstrations with people holding placards no longer occurred because the laws had been changed to stop this. The only legal way we could demonstrate was to stand singly, but we were not allowed to stand at all within quite a large area around Parliament in Cape Town (the government introduced special legislation to try to prevent this). We started to stand individually around 1980. If you can see another person standing, then you may be construed to be a part of a demonstration or gathered for a common purpose, which is illegal. It's quite ridiculous, but a lawyer's advice was that it was legal to stand in relays, so that's generally what we did. We would stand for either half an hour or an hour, depending on how good our legs were, and then somebody else would come and take over. But if one were seen handing the placard to the next person, one would be considered a »crowd« and gathered for a common purpose. So at the end of your time of standing, you had to sit in your car or meet your follow-up person somewhere else, and then she would put on her black sash and you'd give her the placard and beetle off very quickly.

Election to Public Office

I was elected as a member of the Provincial Council for the Progressive Federal Party in 1981. The administrator of the Cape made a direct appeal to me in the Provincial Council to stop standing with the Black Sash. He made a long speech about the fact that it wasn't dignified for people who hold public office to demonstrate on the streets, but I refused to comply.
I haven't enjoyed being in the public eye, although Brian was enormously supportive of my public role. There were vituperative attacks on me and Molly Blackburn, who was elected at the same time as me. We were accused of raising issues that were poisoning the image of South Africa overseas. They said they were trying so hard to improve and reform and that we were undermining all of their efforts by talking about the black people—the struggles of little families and ordinary individuals. Black people hadn't been talked about in the Provincial Council in that way before. Both Molly and I believed in the power of personal stories. For example, Molly stood up one day in the Provincial Council, and held up a bloody T-shirt of a child who had been shot by the police. It was a very dramatic act, and they were very angry about it. They said that we were doing things like this for publicity, which was partly true. We used this platform to reach the public, especially the white people who have no idea what is going on in the black townships. It's a deliberate not knowing on the part of whites, and for those who do know, a deliberate putting it out of their minds. It is a consequence of the effectiveness of the Group Areas Act [forcing the different racial groups to live separately]. I hate saying this, but apartheid has worked by keeping us separate. Requiring whites to have permits to enter black areas had a completely intimidating effect on people wanting to enter those areas. And the government has built up such a fear of black people in whites that even today when the permit system only exists in an amended way, the vast majority of white people have never even been into a black township.

Looking for Missing People

I suppose it was through my social work experience that I felt a need to not only work in the Advice Office, but to actually go out when I heard about a problem and to be present in a situation of conflict. In 1980, there was an enormous crisis at the Crossroads squatter area,* and I used to go out there a lot. The Black Sash was quite actively involved in looking for missing people in the wake of police raids on the squatters. I remember the first time that Molly and I ever did anything together was in May 1981. A marvelous rapport developed between us, and our friendship grew very quickly. On this occasion I asked her at the end of a Provincial Council meeting, »Would you like to come with me? I'm going to try to find a woman.« So we went to the police station together, and Molly was amazing. She handled the status that she had through being an elected member of the Provincial Council in a very positive kind of way. When we were messed around by the police at the police station, she just puffed herself up and said, »How dare you speak to an MPC [member of the Provincial Council] like that?"
We said that we were trying to find a man's wife, and we kept being told, »You're in the way here. Get out of this police station.« We said, »We may be in the way, but we have been asked to do this, and we have the right to see the register of people who are being held in your cells.« We stood our ground, and of course they didn't like that. Eventually we hatched a typical South African plot. We'd gone out and bought a whole lot of milk and Pronutro [a protein-rich additive] because we'd heard that the children inside were not being fed properly. So we said to the man whose wife we were looking for, »You carry the goodies, and nobody is even going to notice you. Pretend that you are the 'boy' in the background who is carrying things for two white women.« Eventually we were granted permission to go into the cells, and the man who was carrying all the goodies saw his wife and baby and took the baby out. They hardly even noticed him; he was just »the chappie carrying the goodies.« That man had searched for his wife for three days, and amongst other places, he had been to that very police station a couple of times. He had been told that she wasn't there or he'd been pushed aside, but there she was!

Arrest and Civil Disobedience

I've been arrested a good few times, mainly for being in black areas without permits which I never used to get, on principle. The first time Molly and I were arrested was in December 1981. It was the same year we were elected, and it was in Port Elizabeth. It was for being in New Brighton without a permit. We went to a church service which was addressed by Helen Joseph who had just been unbanned. There were about thirty-one whites there, and we were all arrested, but the charges were subsequently withdrawn. I wasn't really worried about that kind of arrest. Molly and I were arrested together in Cradock for the same offense and we refused to pay the admission of guilt fine. So we stood trial in Cradock and we were convicted, but we weren't actually given a sentence. We were warned that we must get permits in the future. But I still never got a permit.
Things really caught up with us after the state of emergency was declared in 1985 and Molly and I entered the township in Fort Beaufort. It had been included as one of the thirty-six magisterial areas which were declared to be under a state of emergency. This required of nonresidents special permission from the police to enter certain townships. We didn't realize that Fort Beaufort had been included under those regulations just the day before we went there. We were arrested in Fort Beaufort on a Saturday. The police were hopping around filled with glee at the possibility of our getting ten years in prison or a fine of twenty thousand rand [$10,000]—the penalty for contravening any regulation promulgated under the emergency. They were saying to us, »You know what you're in for, don't you?« We were standing in the street trying to meet with the people we'd arranged to see. There had been a very, very effective boycott of the white-owned shops in Fort Beaufort. The emergency regulations gave the police the power to close any business that was deemed to be a threat to any other business. This allowed them to close black-owned businesses which were being supported by the black community. But rather than just closing down a business, what they had done in Fort Beaufort was to detain the shop owner and his wife. When that couple was detained, the wife's parents who had experience in helping to run the business, had moved into the shop and were running it. So the police detained them. One of the assistants in the shop then kept the shop open, so they came and detained her. The son of the family, who was working in Port Elizabeth, had approached Molly and asked, »If you are going to the area, wouldn't you see if my granny and grandpa are all right?« The granny and grandpa had been released by then, but were also too afraid, I think, to go back into the shop. So we'd gone to see the granny and grandpa, but they were too afraid to be seen with us because of the possible repercussions for them.
We were standing in the street talking when an army vehicle full of soldiers came past, then another, then a third. Four loads of soldiers drove past us—which was an amazing experience. They were clearly having a look at what we were about. On this particular occasion, we'd been asked to take an American appeal court judge, Nathaniel Jones, to various places in the eastern Cape to give him an experience of what it's like there. He had hired a very flashy Mercedes Benz which wasn't the kind of car we usually travel around in. I suppose the police and the army weren't quite sure how to handle people who drive this kind of car. The soldiers were, of course, white [South Africa's conscripts are all white], and I remember thinking to myself that I could well have known some of those young people who had been posted to the eastern Cape and who were having to patrol those townships for the first time. Some of them had been in correspondence with me and shared the agony of being drawn in whilst politically they were on the other side. I remember these young soldiers going by and some of them obviously feeling embarrassed about us also being white. Their attempt to demonstrate their friendship toward the people was to wave to the children, which was very poignant.
After the army had gone by without interfering with us, the police zoomed in on us, first a police van, then a casspir full of policemen all wielding guns. Two of them actually trained their guns on us while the officer got out and said, »Do you have permission to be here?« When we didn't produce permits, he said, »Follow us. You're under arrest.« We were in the Mercedes, and the police van was in front of us, and a casspir was behind, again with all the guns trained on us. And we were conducted like that to the police station. I remember passing some of the children that we'd been playing with and chatting to. As we were driven away, a very brave little child gave us a clenched fist in such a way as to look like a wave instead of a fist. We were told by the security policeman who interviewed us that we were going to be locked up.
The best part of this experience was that Judge Jones is black. Of course, there is no such being as a black judge in South Africa. The furthest thing from the mind of the security police was that he was such a prestigious person. The warrant officer asked for our names, and when he got to the judge, he addressed him in Xhosa. This officer was a real showoff and was using his position of power as much as he possibly could. We tried to contain ourselves from laughing. The judge was dressed in a very American lumber jacket with a camera around his neck, and he just stood and said nothing. You could see that the thought that was going through the policeman's mind was »Why doesn't this cheeky black reply to me?« Then he said in English, »What is your name?« So the judge said, »Jones«, with his obvious American accent. You could see that the policeman's reaction was, »Don't mess around with me!« It was an unreal scene. Then the policeman got to asking, »What's your occupation?« So Nathaniel said, »I'm an appeal court judge«, to which Molly added, »You can't get any higher than that.« Nevertheless, they refused to allow him to make a telephone call from the police station, and he was fingerprinted along with us.
We were all charged, but something changed their minds about locking us up. I think that they must have decided it would be quite difficult to find a suitable place to lock up an American judge. I'm sure that the police cells in Fort Beaufort are awful. Where they'd have locked up two white women, I'm not quite sure either. The other thing that irritated them terribly was that Molly and I were very complacent when this kind of thing happened to us. We were held in police stations so many times while they decided what to do with us, and it was so time consuming, that we used to take our knitting. On this occasion, too, we sat and knitted. My little niece has lots of jailhouse jerseys as a result. Of course, a contravention of the emergency regulations was a bit more serious than contravention of some of the apartheid laws. Also, since it was untested we weren't quite sure what they were going to do. But we were together, and that helped us not to be fearful. Another thing that saved me from being afraid is that those men represented visible evil to me. We were simply responding to a call from desperate people, and there's no way that can be wrong. There's no way that the love and the friendship and the acceptance which we experienced everywhere we went in the townships that we visited could be wrong.
I employed a woman for a very long time to help me at home without ever registering her or paying the levy that one is required to pay, because I objected to it. But the acts of civil disobedience in which I have participated have been as an individual. I think one of the reasons why the Black Sash has survived so far is that it has always acted within the law. There's a tremendous debate about whether we ought not to be participating increasingly in acts of civil disobedience as an organization. And many other members besides myself participate in individual acts of civil disobedience. As the options narrow, I think we will inevitably be drawn more into this form of resistance.
In 1985, there was another death in detention. Two of our Sash members who are mothers—one was pregnant with her third child— were outraged by this. They had decided that the next time somebody died in police custody or in detention, they would chain themselves to the railings of Parliament. A thirteen-year-old youngster was the next person to die in police custody, so these girls made their demonstration and were arrested. Brian and I, Molly Blackburn and a couple of other white people from the eastern Cape, went to the funeral of that youngster, Johannes Spogter, and his cousin, Mzwandile Miggels, who had also died. I think the most important aspect of the demonstration of these two women was the effect that it had on the little black community that the victims came from. Although it was publicized in the press in Cape Town, I'm not sure what effect it had on the white community. But people in the black community they came from knew about it and they couldn't believe that two white women, one of them pregnant, had actually done something like that and had been arrested for somebody stuck away in a little rural town called Steytlerville. The young people there kept asking us, »Is it true that they were white?« »Is it true that they were women?« »Is it true that they were arrested?« »Is it true that one of them was pregnant?« »Are they still in custody?« »Are they all right?« And we felt very privileged to be able to say yes to all of those questions—that yes, we knew them, and that yes, it was their very deep concern for the situation that had caused them to do what they did. That was the first time that those people who were fighting for a nonracial future actually had any kind of an experience of nonracialism.

The Consequences of Anti-Apartheid Work

I was absolutely appalled when tear gas was fired at our house in September 1985. Then, in November 1985, I was away addressing a meeting when my car was burned right outside our house. Brian's car also had petrol [gas] poured over it that night, but the perpetrators were alerted somehow by the neighbors' dogs, and they pushed off before they'd managed to ignite it.
The threatening phone calls are pretty awful, though you kind of get used to them. We had a couple of death threats on the phone, and I had death threats through the post as well. I could handle this because we had each other. Brian and I were very, very close and involved in so much together. Having each other helped us to cope with these attacks and the exposure to danger. We took the death threats seriously initially, but we laughed about them later. Some of the letters were so illiterate, and some of the things that were said were so stupid, like »You're a bitch and a lover of black babies.«
Whenever I was quoted in the press as having said something, I could be sure one man would ring the next day. He was quite clearly a policeman. I think the middle-of-the-night calls were also probably bored policemen. Last year when I was struggling in the aftermath of Brian's death and living alone at home, I didn't get the calls. But the minute I started to become active again, I got a couple. Now I get calls where the phone rings once, twice, or three times, then stops. If I get to the phone in time to pick it up, I hear somebody putting the phone down. It's a terrible irritation. Recently it's started to happen in the middle of the night, but it's usually in the wake of some kind of publicity.
I also see Brian's death as one of the consequences of my work. I don't believe that our accident was caused by the police, although there are many people who do believe it—particularly our black friends in the eastern Cape who wouldn't put anything past the government. But I cannot help feeling that I would still have Brian and Molly if it wasn't for the fact that we were fighting against apartheid. We were driving back to Port Elizabeth on the Langkloof Road on a Saturday night after visiting a township to gather affidavits about police brutality. Suddenly in front of us there was a pair of very bright headlights. The car was traveling on the wrong side of the road. The driver was found at the inquest to be under the influence of alcohol. He was a man from a little town nearby who gave people lifts, and was apparently on his way to fetch some people. Some people believe that this chap had been killed before being put back into the car, and that it was possible the police had programmed the car in such a way that it drove into us. I suppose it is a possibility, but I have put it out of my mind because it's easier for me to feel that it wasn't planned by them.
Both my legs were broken in the accident, and I had a couple of broken ribs. I had a cracked skull, and I was unconscious for a while. But I think the person who suffered most terribly because she never lost consciousness was Judy Chalmers, Molly's sister, who was sitting behind me in the back. She was alone in that car before help came, with Molly, who died instantly, beside her—with Brian who lived for about twenty minutes, unconscious, and myself unconscious. When I came around, people had stopped and it wasn't long before the ambulance came. Judy was also injured. She had a couple of broken ribs and gashes, but she wasn't hospitalized.

A Black-White Friendship

Although the loss of Brian is obviously devastating, it's amazing how, even out of such situations, new opportunities are born. I feel that something very exceptional has happened to me through Nyami [Gon-iwe] having lost Mathew and my having lost Brian, with us both struggling with the problems of early young widowhood. We have developed an amazing friendship. Both of us are social workers, and we are now employed by the University of the Western Cape in an action research project. We are working in two new posts which have been created to look at whether the university can relate more closely to the struggles of communities and towns in the rural areas. We've only been at it six months in my case and Nyami for four months, so it's still very new. But it's fantastic to have a whole university supporting us.
My first knowledge of Nyami was through Molly, who had met Mathew in 1983 for the first time. I remember her phoning me and saying, »Di, I met somebody who you have got to meet. I know that you are going to love him. And he has a wife who is a social worker, and I know that you are going to want to meet her, too.« After Mathew died, Nyami came to stay with Brian and me for two weeks, and that's when we got to know her. Because of Nyami's interest in and commitment to political struggle, unlike many other friends, she has been a very, very special person for me in this period as I have tried to find myself.
Being offered the job at the University of the Western Cape (which occupies such a unique and important place in South Africa today [because it is both black and politically radical]) with Nyami, and the exposure that I have had to the richness of life in South Africa through having been able to cross some of the barriers that divide us—these experiences have contributed toward the fullness of my life. And I don't exclude from that the experiences to which 1 was exposed when Brian died. There were the most incredible demonstrations of solidarity toward me and my sufferings when I was struggling with loss. I didn't realize before how important friendships—particularly those across the color line—are to me. And the things that people did, and have continued to do, to demonstrate their support for what I'm doing, mean so very much to me. For example, in the middle of the night on Old Year's Night last year, a very ordinary chap that I'd met in the course of my travels, phoned up and said, »I'm just thinking of you at the end of this very difficult year for you.« Then he gave me a little pep talk on how to stay strong in the struggle. When I was so incapacitated last year in a wheelchair and with my legs in plaster, one of the women I'd met in my work moved into my house and helped to run my home for me. These demonstrations of solidarity have the long-term effect of keeping me involved. There is no doubt for me that I am committed to living and working and staying in South Africa because of experiences like these.

Feminism and the Anti-Rape Movement

»The police take rape very lightly, especially in black areas.
They repeatedly let even the most violent men out on bail.
Some rapists attempt to rape the same woman again to intimidate
her into dropping charges against them. The police don't even
withdraw the bail in such circumstances.«
ANNE  MAYNE

RAPE CRISIS is the most significant feminist organization in South Africa. It was started by Anne Mayne, together with four other women, shortly after she took a crash course in feminism at the United Nations International Year of the Woman Conference in Mexico City in 1975 and a subsequent visit to the United States. Indeed, I believe it would be accurate to say that Mayne was the original impetus behind the anti-rape movement in South Africa. In this chapter, as well as describing how Rape Crisis began, she talks about her personal history of gang rape and battery which led to her organizing efforts. Her experience of incestuous abuse in her own family has also played a major role in her life and work, but space considerations preclude inclusion of her account of this ordeal.
Born in Egypt in 1940, Mayne emigrated to South Africa with her parents when she was seven years old, settling first in Johannesburg and then in the Cape Province. Mayne, who is an English-speaking white woman, left school after completing standard eight (tenth grade). Her academic performance was unimpressive, and her headmistress discouraged her from completing high school. Although clearly an unusually bright woman, Mayne has not yet fully recovered from her headmistress's misassessment of her talents, and has never gone to college. She studied graphic art for a while, then dropped out in her second year to go to England. Of her work history, she said, »I worked in all kinds of odd jobs, never staying in any of them for long because I wasn't interested in them.«
Feminism totally changed Mayne's life, unleashing some of her remarkable creativity. »Before the UN Conference«, she said, »I was a complete nonentity. I never took responsibility. I never initiated anything. I was very unhappy most of the time. I was very frustrated. 1 just drifted. But after 1975, I really achieved things. I did a lot of educational work, and I did it well. People listened to me. I became effective. From being a total nothing, I became a very focused person.« This kind of radical transformation through feminism is a familiar phenomenon to feminists.
It wasn't only Mayne's experience in Mexico City, but also her travels in the United States afterward that changed her: »I feel I was able to resolve my sense of having been damaged by the rape. It would have taken years of therapy and education to achieve this understanding.« One year later, Mayne became a lesbian—not an easy identification to have in homophobic South Africa where homosexuality is outlawed. Being a feminist there also takes a lot of courage.
As well as describing the founding of a Rape Crisis center in Cape Town, Mayne explains in her interview how the Battered Women's Shelter began and continues to operate. In addition, she offers a critique of the sexism she experienced in the United Democratic Front, as well as her experience of arrest and detention for merely trying to publicize a UDF celebration. Although the punitiveness of her prison experience is insignificant in comparison with what black South Africans commonly suffer, it nevertheless shows the trivial activities that can cause one to be detained in the South African police state of today.

Growing Up White

I didn't come from a political family, so I was a typical white South African racist who bought all the myths. My father saw himself as quite upper class. A lot of people in his family are listed in the British Directory of National Biography. Many of them were in the military. My mother comes from a more working-class background. Her uncles and aunts were gardeners and shoemakers and small-time farmers in Lincolnshire. Many of them couldn't read or write. But my mother's father became a company director, so she was brought up in quite a comfortable home. But a class war went on in my family the whole time I was growing up. My father was always putting my mother down in terms of her class and implying that he was better bred than she was. He used to talk about women, children, Coloureds, and dogs, as belonging to the same subgroup. I took my mother's side, and I also always felt an affinity with the servants. I didn't enjoy my father's ghastly wealthy friends with their terrible attitudes toward women. And I always gravitated toward people whom I felt were being badly treated.
I was totally unaware politically until I went to Britain when I was twenty-one years old. I got a terrible shock when I met people there who spoke to me about the racism of the regime I lived under. And I met black women who didn't know they were supposed to be inferior! So I came back to South Africa with my eyes wide open.
After returning from Britain, I met a man who ended up beating me very violently. I first worked for him and then lived with him as a lover. I stayed with him for eight years because he taught me so much about politics and history. He politicized me enormously. But it was a disastrous relationship. He beat me up badly and totally terrified me. I was a complete nervous wreck when we split up.
When I was thirty-two or thirty-three, I was gang-raped by gangsters. I was extremely frightened and didn't expect to live. My rapists didn't injure me physically, possibly because I didn't panic, but they injured me psychologically so badly that I was in shock for years. I almost went psychotic. I was completely out of control. I was very scarred emotionally, and there was no one to go to for help. I couldn't speak to my mother because I didn't have a good relationship with her, nor with my father, so I went to see the first psychiatrist listed in the telephone directory. He helped me work through the experience, but he also did the bizarre thing of making me get undressed and examining me. I couldn't understand why he did this because I had no physical injuries.
I was radically changed by my experiences of battering and rape, and I became obsessed with finding out why these things had happened to me. I even asked my rapists, »Why are you doing this?« I also kept asking the man who battered me, »What are you doing this for?« His violence didn't make sense to me.
When I told some of my friends about the rape, they responded in a completely blank or inappropriate way. I didn't feel any support from anyone until I read a book a friend gave me for my birthday, The Sourcebook on Rape by the New York Radical Feminists. Reading it was the most incredible experience because it broke my isolation.
I started becoming political at the time that the Liberal Party was banned in 1966 or 1967.1 realized it was the party I should join the very week it was banned. I joined the Young Progressives instead, and I worked with total dedication canvassing door to door. But I experienced a lot of abuse by males within the organization. My ideas were stolen. I was confined to being a shit worker. I was sexually harassed. It was the same story that every woman who has worked with the male-dominated left has to tell. Although the Progressive Party was a new and quite exciting nonracial party when I joined, I found that I had terrible problems in getting close to people across the color line in that organization. No real connecting was going on.

The Rape Crisis Center

The first Rape Crisis center in South Africa began after a brief article was published in the Cape Times newspaper in late 1976 saying that a group of women were interested in talking to and helping women who'd been raped. We expected only a few calls, but the phone rang nonstop for three days. It was overwhelming. There were only four or five of us to handle them, though I and another woman called Ann Levett took the brunt of the early work. But the other three women—an Indian doctor (the only woman of color in the early stages); a medical receptionist; and an accountant—also stuck with the organization.
Two women who had been raped, one very young woman who was in a terrible state and the other a middle-aged woman, came to talk with us. Some of the other women who phoned just wanted to talk for an hour about their experiences, which they did at all hours including late at night. We became very scared. We felt we weren't strong enough to handle the response, but we managed somehow.
Our first public speaking engagement was at a Rotarian luncheon. The accountant and I went together, but I did all the talking. I spoke very emotionally and very angrily about the situation that women are in when they are raped. It obviously had an effect because they paid for the printing of four thousand information leaflets for us. Then a pharmacist phoned and gave us a medical beeper so we could answer calls. Armed with four thousand leaflets and a little beeper, four or five naive women took on the system.
We didn't have to work to find rape victims. There was obviously such a need for this kind of service that we were phoned endlessly. We were also constantly invited to give talks. Having spoken at one Rotarian luncheon, all the Rotarians wanted us to »entertain« them. So we went from luncheon to luncheon, from the Rotarians to the Lions, to all the different service organizations, then to the women's book clubs and the women's Christian groups. The invitations to speak never stopped. The director of the National Institute for Crime Prevention contacted us and gave us a lot of clout and credibility by supporting what we were doing and by confirming that our statistics, gleaned from U.S. studies, could be applied to South Africa, although no comprehensive study had been done at that time. The National Council of Women took us under their wing and gave us public platforms, as did the business and professional women. I found myself unable to stop and think because the demands were so constant.
A lot of women came to work with us. We would sit around at meetings in a small women's center and discuss how to deal with cases. We used to tell the rape victims, »Look, we've never done this before. We've never taken anyone through this particular procedure. But we'll be with you and support you all the way.« The women were always so grateful for any kind of support that they always welcomed our efforts.
One of the things that excited me about getting Rape Crisis going was the opportunity to work closely with people of every ethnic group. I thought it would help to break down our racism. Most of us had been raped ourselves, and I felt that our sharing and supporting each other and working on a very gut level with women in serious emotional crises would break down all kinds of barriers. And indeed it did.
We helped the women who came to us enormously. We got them proper medical treatment. We sometimes managed to get them an abortion if they needed it. We got them better treatment in court and told them the kinds of things they would have to put up with, so at least they were prepared for what happened. The rapists usually weren't convicted, which always horrified them [the women] despite our warning them about the likely outcome. We also developed really good relationships with them which both we and they very much appreciated.
Very few studies of rape have been done in this country. But a well-documented study on crime shows that there's a very high crime rate in the low socioeconomic areas. The people there have been completely disrupted by being moved without their consent from long-established homes and family networks into dreadful, low socioeconomic housing schemes where they don't know their neighbors, where they're suspicious of everyone, where they are very vulnerable, and where very organized and ruthless gangs attack people. Most of the townships are controlled by very violent gangs who do a lot of the raping that occurs. People say that a large percentage of the Coloured male population in Cape Town is involved in gang activity. The women in these areas are absolutely terrified of these gangs. Neighbors are even terrified to help a woman who has been raped, to even let her use their telephone if they have one, because they don't want the gang members to know that they support the rape victim. They're afraid the gang will turn its attention on them.
The incidence of crime across ethnic lines is very low. We were responsible for a question being asked in Parliament about this. The answer was that, according to a police report, a significantly higher incidence of rape of black women by white men was reported to the police than vice versa. If a police report is saying this, you can imagine how many more cases of black women being raped by white men there really are! Very few black women report their experiences of rape by white men because they're usually laughed out of the police station. I remember in about 1980 the police statistics gathered by the Johannesburg central police station showed that there were eighty reported rapes by white men of black women in that area and only twelve reported rapes by black men of white women.
Both white and black audiences are surprised when we report these statistics because they've really bought the myth that blacks are more inclined to be rapists, and that whites don't do such nasty things as rape and batter their wives. We spend a lot of time trying to undo these myths. We speak to a lot of black groups about them. When we talk about this to domestic workers, tremendous activity immediately starts in the audience, and everybody starts telling stories and agreeing and saying, »Yes, yes, yes. We know.« They know more than any other group how badly white men rape black women.
I had an extraordinary experience when I spoke in Paarl—a completely Afrikaans rural town. I told the audience that more white men rape black women than the other way around, and a woman came up to me afterward and said, »I totally agree with you. We know that it happens here in this very town. Many white men go to the pub for a couple of drinks, then they cruise the routes that domestic workers take home. We've had reports of these men forcing these women into their cars or driving to a place where there are bushes, then jumping out and raping the domestic workers«, she said. »We know this happens a lot.«
Domestic workers are seen as people whom whites can use for anything and everything. Some sons of white employers force the domestic worker to have sex with them. They see the situation as providing them with an opportunity to practice having sex. They know the domestic worker won't talk because she has no power and no rights whatsoever. This happens often at all levels of white society. We have had many domestic workers come to us with these kinds of stories, and pregnancies as a result of these rapes.
A substantial number of black and Coloured women come to every training course we offer. They are mostly women in professions like social work and nursing who are concerned about the problem and want to learn to deal with it more effectively. Some black women and Coloured women have been working in the organization for five or six years. But they seldom come to meetings, and as a result, they're not very influential in terms of forming policy. They don't come to meetings because of residential segregation, the long distances they have to travel, and the long hours they have to work. They can't come to an evening meeting that ends at midnight and then drive back alone to the dangerous areas they live in. Even though most of them have their own cars, it's not safe. But they are on the counseling roster, and we meet with them on various occasions. If they generate a talk in their area, they usually come to it. And we work on cases together if a case needs two people.
At one stage we had our meetings in Mitchells Plain [a Coloured area], which is a good half-hour drive away from most of our homes. But the problem was that we sometimes have forty people to a meeting and the women's houses were too small for such large groups. This was the case even for the middle-class women. For example, we quite often went to the home of one of the senior social workers at the child welfare agency, who did her master's degree on battered women in Mitchells Plain. Although she had one of the more comfortable houses in Mitchells Plain, there wasn't room for all of us to sit down. Her children were in one room, her mother in another, while her husband was trying to work in the bedroom. So it was too difficult to meet there. It was also very dangerous to travel at night in those areas because of the gangs. So we normally meet in the child guidance clinic in a white area—not in private homes. It has a nice big conference room where we have access to video machines and any other equipment that we might need. And it's accessible to people who don't have cars.
A lot of the women who came to Rape Crisis for help were Coloured women. Still today about sixty percent of them are Coloured and the rest are white. Very few black [African] women seek our help because they don't hear about us. Many of them don't have time to read the papers, and they don't have telephones. The black women who do come to us usually come as a result of their employers who phone us and say, »My domestic has been raped and I'd like you to come and see her.« I don't think black women expect to be helped by anyone for free, and they rarely have money to pay, so that is another factor that keeps them away.
We have spoken about our work to various nurses' associations and teachers' associations in the black townships, but they haven't called on us very much. We've tried for years to encourage black women to set up Rape Crisis services in their own communities. We share our information and discuss the whole process and hope that they will adapt what we do to their situation. Because many of them don't have phones or cars, they need to work out a different system from ours. But because they work very long hours and are forced to live very far from their work, they don't have time for volunteer work, so almost nothing has happened so far.
Aside from Cape Town, there are rape crisis groups in Pietermaritz-burg, Durban, Grahamstown, and Bloemfontein. Every year we have a national conference in a different city. We [in Cape Town] trained the group in Grahamstown, but the other groups developed on their own. We gave them literature and all kinds of information. The Johannesburg group, People Opposed to Woman Abuse, focuses more on battering than on rape.
We in Cape Town are the biggest organization. We've had an office for three years now. There are usually only about seven women at a major policy-making meeting in Johannesburg or Durban. Pietermar-itzburg and Grahamstown are even smaller, while we always have over twenty-five and quite often as many as forty women at our meetings, and we have approximately sixty active members. We have a very good comprehensive training course with two sessions a week for six or seven weeks. This includes a political section that covers how to act in a democratic way. By the end, people are very knowledgeable about legal and medical issues pertaining to rape.

Feminism and Rape Crisis

In the old days a lot of the women in Rape Crisis didn't identify as feminists. I was constantly told by some of the other women that it was very important that we don't identify as feminists because otherwise we'd be seen as a bunch of loonies. After about three years of this painful debate, those of us who disagreed said, »To hell with this! We are a feminist organization and we do have a feminist analysis.« A lot of the nonfeminist women dropped out after that. Nevertheless these women were empowered by their experience of working in Rape Crisis. They all moved up notches in their work or improved their lives. They became more assertive and rose to more challenges. More recently a couple of liberal feminists dropped out because they didn't think we should align ourselves with the democratic struggle [the anti-apartheid movement]. They felt that our doing so would stop many women, like policemen's wives, from coming to us. They thought we should remain a service organization. They left Rape Crisis after we decided at a national conference that we couldn't use the state media any more because they are a propaganda machine for the government.
In the early days of Rape Crisis, I went on national television with the director of the National Institute of Crime Prevention, a member of Parliament's wife, and a professor of law. Our debate made quite an impact. I was stopped in the streets by people saying, »We saw you on TV and we thought what you said was wonderful.« But the second time we were on TV was a disaster. They distorted our information and reinforced the myths. So we didn't ever use them again.
The women in Rape Crisis today are all feminist activists, and they're usually involved in some kind of anti-apartheid work as well. Feminists gravitate toward Rape Crisis in order to work with women. And a lot of left-wing women came into Rape Crisis because they were very unhappy about the male domination in the left. They are able to express their feminist ideology more comfortably here.
I became radicalized through my work with Rape Crisis. The more I worked with the system in this country, the more appalled and politicized I became.
In 1985, Rape Crisis made a public statement at a national conference about our decision to align ourselves with the democratic struggle. We started an organization called Campaign Against Sexual Abuse and made links with the Repression Monitoring Group. From then on, we were on call if a woman was raped in detention and needed to be counseled. And we linked up with UDF-staffed advice offices located throughout the community that give legal advice as well as advice about rent and other daily life concerns. They call us if they have rape cases that they can't deal with. We also run training courses on rape for the people working in these offices so they can be more effective in counseling people. And we always send somebody to make solidarity statements at major political meetings. So we're making ourselves more visible than we used to.

The Battered Women's Shelter

Two years ago [1985] we developed a section of our Rape Crisis training on battered women. This was followed by a twenty-four-hour phone-in. Again, we got an alarming number of calls, but this time we had many shifts of women fielding them. There were seven phone lines coming in for twenty-four hours. Listening to the stories of so many women who have been battered is a shattering experience. We were shell-shocked. We really felt ill. Another three hundred calls came into the office over the next week because we'd leafletted at railway stations and bus terminals. Quite a lot of black and Coloured women came into our office or called us from the townships.
Our next step was to launch a big public campaign to get a shelter started. The community responded amazingly supportively, and we were given a house for which we only have to pay twenty-five rand [$12.50] a year. The place was totally furnished within days by donations of fridges and stoves and carpets and curtains, and it was full of battered women within a week. It can take up to twenty-five women and their children.
Our shelter is only a year old. Except for having different bank accounts, it is totally integrated with Rape Crisis. There are three paid workers, and every battered woman who comes into the shelter gets a support worker. When people answer the Rape Crisis line, they may get a call from a battered woman or a rape victim. With battered women calls, counselors have been trained to assess whether she needs a shelter and if so, the counselor becomes the support worker for that woman. She visits her in the shelter and works with her throughout her stay there. Unfortunately there's a waiting list, but women can stay for three months once they're admitted. We work very hard to get their divorces through or whatever it is they need to get their lives reorganized. There are weekly house meetings to iron out any problems that come up in the shelter.
The shelter has been a very empowering place for women. Men aren't allowed there, so women do whatever work is needed. Rape Crisis volunteers have made bunk beds for the children and done all the house repair work and painting. The women who live there get a tremendous kick out of learning to knock in nails and glue wood. It's great fun when we have a work party there from time to time.
There are some basic rules, like no men, no violence if possible, no beating of children, and no alcohol or other drugs. And we don't take any psychiatric cases because we can't deal with them. Most of the women who come there are Coloured, though we've had quite a few black women and some white women there, too. The atmosphere there is often wonderful. Many talented women have stayed there; for example, we had an upholsterer who did a superb job upholstering all the second-hand furniture that we were given. The lounge looks beautiful now. And there are some wonderful cooks. The smell of cooking makes you weak when you go there at supper time. There have been pastry makers and dressmakers, a psychologist, nurses, and other professional women. The wives of two leading activists in UDF are in the shelter at the moment.
Of course, tensions do arise. There's only one bathroom for all those women, and sometimes the plumbing doesn't work very well. But often there's an amazing atmosphere and an extraordinary bonding occurs between the women. They say, »I was so isolated. I've never had friends before.« And they keep up with these friends after they leave.

Participation in the United Democratic Front

I joined the UDF within the first month or so of its being launched in 1983. Their first public meeting was the most exhilarating experience that I have ever had. It was so wonderful to be able to participate in the mass excitement and to shout slogans that I normally only whisper. Most of us are so frightened in this country. It was wonderful to hear statements like »The people shall rule« said loudly. It was exciting to see how high people's confidence was. It was always so orderly. There were never unpleasant experiences or incidents. I'd never before been with mobs of people of all colors in this country. It was so peaceful, and there was so much goodwill. It was wonderful to let off steam and to dance and to sing and to learn protest songs.
Once a month or once every two months, there'd be a massive meeting at a big stadium addressed by some prominent leaders. Then there'd be lots of small meetings every weekend at public halls or church halls or cinemas where not-so-prominent people would speak. But after the initial excitement of hearing so many articulate black people speaking, I became increasingly bothered by the sexism in the organization. The men were usually the organizers and the speakers at the meetings. I became sick and tired of the fact that I never saw women on the platform, except for Cheryl Carolus [a former member of the National Executive of UDF]. I realize that I can't work in organizations with men because they can't hear women. And I couldn't bear the sexism that I was experiencing in my area meetings. The guys seemed to be posturing most of the time. Some of the UDF women in my area had husbands or lovers who were talking about women's rights and feminism, but they didn't really understand it. So I began to fade out of UDF after about six months.
In 1985, in the early days of the United Democratic Front, a »People's Weekend« of activities was planned all over the western Cape. I had joined the UDF group in my area, and twenty-six of us went in a motorcade, two people in each car, to advertise the People's Weekend. We planned to drive through business areas with UDF banners on our cars so people could see us. We looked quite spectacular, but the police stopped us after we had driven only a very short distance. They impounded our cars and took us to jail. We were fingerprinted and photographed and warned that we had been part of an illegal gathering, though no motorcade had been seen as an illegal gathering before. They set our bail at two hundred rand [$100] each on a Saturday afternoon when very few people had access to that amount of money. But people lent US money SO we all got out at about 2 a.m.—sixteen hours after our arrest. They were thinking of holding us the whole weekend because they wanted to spoil the People's Weekend, but they didn't succeed.
It was a very interesting experience but very frightening. I was locked up in a women's prison with the other women in our group. It's terrifying to be so powerless: not being able to use a phone; having to ask permission to go to the toilet. There were big iron bars that slammed behind us, then a steel door slammed on top of the iron bars. We couldn't see anything. There was heavy mesh over everything. I felt that the place could hold a herd of rhinoceros or elephants. »What on earth are they doing having bars this size, a door this thick, for us?« I wondered. I felt like a squashed insect. It was the most dreadful feeling. I felt as if I'd been raped again.
Maybe if I'd known that I was going to be put in jail, I wouldn't have been so shocked. One mother looked ten years older as a result of the experience. Her child had expected her back home at midday so she was desperate for someone to look after him. She finally managed to get a message out, but the experience wrecked her.
We were made to stand in a filthy, smelly area where people had vomited. We were stripped of everything—earrings, glasses, shoelaces, belts, and any kind of jewelry. It made me feel so stupid. We were told not to speak, so we stood there watching the police eat sandwiches. When they'd finished eating, they threw their garbage at us. We begged them for food at about 10 p.m. because we had had nothing to eat all day. The police finally brought us some food from a nearby hotel.
Our cars were confiscated for two weeks and held as evidence, so we had no transport during that period. But the people in our area were wonderful, and a car pool was set up so we knew who to phone if we needed a car for a certain number of hours. Those of us who had been detained got to know each other and were very supportive and enjoyed each other's company. And then we went to trial. Our case was even taken up by the Supreme Court because it was a test case of what constitutes an illegal gathering.
There was quite a bit of publicity around the trial. A wonderful gray-haired old black man who had been on Robben Island for years came to support us. I was so touched when I thought of the nonsense that we were being tried for compared to what he had suffered. He'd had nervous breakdowns because of all the torture he'd been subjected to. But he wanted to give us his support. We all stood around him and asked him about his life, which he was very happy to tell us. In the end, we were fined only fifty rand [$25] each.
Three of us who had been detained, and who were born outside South Africa, were phoned by the Special Branch and instructed to bring in our passports. They told us that we would be deported. I was absolutely terrified. Luckily, our lawyer told us we didn't have to follow their instructions. It was all a bluff. But had I done what I was told, the police might have held my passport for six months. The truth is that I'm a naturalized South African, and I have no other country.

The United Women's Congress

»(The revolution is) going to be hard, it's going to be long,
but we are all committed to it. We know that we're going to suffer.
We know that we are suffering. Lots of us are in detention.
Lots of us are not sure whether we can actually give our address
on the telephone. So our lives have been changed.
We aren't naive about the struggle. We know it's going to be hard,
but we're prepared for it.«
GERTRUDE  FESTER

AFTER SPENDING two hours with thirty-five-year-old Gertrude Fester and other friends, and explaining my project to her, I asked her whether I could interview her. Fester, who is Coloured, said she would have to tell the United Women's Congress, of which she was a dedicated member, about my project, and, if they wished to cooperate, they would let me know whom I could interview. Since she was in hiding from the security police at the time, she instructed me to wait for her to call me. Weeks went by. Finally, a cryptic message took me to the house where Fester was hiding out.
I found her there with sixty-five-year-old Mama Zihlangu and fifty-two-year-old Mildred Lesia, two of the founders of the United Women's Organization which had preceded UWCO. Both Zihlangu and Lesia were then in deep hiding, staying at different addresses for a few nights at a time; »on the run« would well describe their situation. I had the impossible task of trying to interview all three women at one sitting—an interview situation that I had told Fester wouldn't work, but the requirements of a totally democratic process took precedence over this reality. At the end of it all, I asked her whether I could come back to interview her further, since she hadn't gotten to say much out of deference, I believe, to her two colleagues; and this time she agreed.
Fester received a B.A. from the University of the Western Cape, after which she studied at the Third World Institute in Holland from 1980 to 1982. She teaches at a training college for teachers in Cape Town. Ever since her first political involvement with UWO in 1982, she has been extremely active in the anti-apartheid movement. She was on the executive of UWCO in 1986 and has been part of the Area Committee of UDF and a member of the Western Cape Teachers' Union. Although she has been asked to be on WECTU's executive committee, she decided to give all her attention to UWCO »because women are my first priority.« Fester, who believes that »women are much more militant than their male comrades«, commented that »If you divide your attention, the women's issues often get lost.«
Fester divorced her husband a few years ago after he became violent. She speaks eloquently in this interview of the pain of being a black child in a white world, of her student days, her participation in the Black Consciousness movement, and her gradual awareness of sexism, especially owing to having had a violent husband. She described how frightened she was when she was detained for the first time in 1983 for going house to house with six others to gather signatures against the tricameral parliamentary system being proposed by the government. »The most frightening thing«, Fester explained, »was the feeling that no matter what we said, no matter what our rights were, no matter who we were, we had to do what these people [the police] wanted us to do.« When Fester tried to insist on her right to make a telephone call, she was smacked and told to »shut up.«
Fester was arrested a second time the same year when she and two other women put up posters at night, an illegal activity in South Africa. »What is frightening in South Africa«, Fester explained, »is that if people don't know where you are, there's nothing that can be done about it. No one saw us being arrested. We could just disappear. We'd heard of people who had disappeared.« However, on both occasions she was released after a few hours.
When I interviewed her, Fester was staying in a house with other women friends. She believed that the police were not aware of her whereabouts, and was trying to keep it that way. For example, she mentioned that she usually plays music to prevent conversations from being recorded through the telephone. Despite such precautions, she wasn't sure how much longer it would continue to be safe for her to remain there.
In July 1988, I learned that Fester had been in detention for a month, and that she was likely to be accused of terrorism. No one has been allowed to see her—not even her closest friends. In April 1989,1 was told that her trial was about to begin.

Growing Up Coloured

I come from quite a comfortably off Coloured family. There are five of us. I have two sisters and two stepsisters, and I'm the second youngest. My family is not politically involved, although they're very sympathetic. My parents are very conservative and very religious, but my mother now understands why people are involved and she gives the necessary support. My sisters, however, are not politically involved at all. One of them is studying for a master's degree in clinical psychiatry and has a family, and my youngest sister is a bom-again Christian who emigrated to Australia last year because she felt she'd never get a chance in this country.
I remember going to the park to play as a child. Although there were no »Europeans only« signs up, we knew we weren't supposed to enter, so we went in when no one was around and played quickly, feeling very scared. When the white children came, we'd sometimes be defiant and stay there and fight them.
My mother comes from a rural area, and I remember going there every holiday. It was really terrible because we couldn't go into shops. We had to use a little window at the side. We couldn't go into cafes to get a cold drink. We couldn't even go to a public toilet. These restrictions became part of my consciousness. I will always be scared to go into a restaurant. It's not easy to unlearn these things. Experiences like this give you a permanent inferiority complex. For example, I was studying in Holland in 1981. I'd been living there for a year when I walked down the street one evening looking for a pub with a whole group of mostly black students. But every time we came to one, I'd say, »No, we mustn't go in there.« I rejected about ten or twelve pubs in this way, so people asked, »What's wrong with you?« I realized that I was scared to go in! I've had these kind of scared feelings my whole life. Most of the cinemas in South Africa are open to black people now, but I don't have the courage to go to many of them. It's the same with a new restaurant.
My sister, a radiographer, was living in England for sixteen years. She came back here with her husband on holiday two years ago. We traveled up the coast stopping at a lovely restaurant. My mother was hovering outside until I brought her in. She is normally a very confident woman, but she became completely subservient. Before we left, my sister said she wanted to go to the toilet. She asked us, »Are you sure it's safe to go in?« In the end, she didn't go because she was scared despite having lived out of this country for sixteen years.

Becoming Politicized

I started to realize that something was wrong about all this when I was thirteen or fourteen. But there were no anti-apartheid organizations around then for me to join.
I went to the University of the Western Cape [a black university] at a time when male students had to wear ties and we had to wear dresses. All our lecturers were white Afrikaners with a paternalistic attitude of helping poor black people.* First, there was a tie boycott, and then one day in 1971, I decided to wear jeans to class. I was the first woman on that campus to wear trousers. I remember walking into class and hearing people say, »She's wearing her trousers!« Four other women wore trousers the next day, and today we all wear trousers or anything we want to wear. There are many more black professors now, though they're still less than fifty percent.
Feeling inferior because you are black is something that takes a very long time to get rid of. Perhaps being out of South Africa and mixing with other people in another country helped me to value myself for what I am. And participating in the Black Consciousness movement helped a lot too. That was the beginning of my political involvement. Through it I came to understand that there's nothing wrong with me because I'm black. It's important to be proud of what you are. All of us were involved in it in 1975 and 1976, the time when black students broke away from NUSAS [the largely white National Union of South African Students] and started SASO [South African Students Organization]. Steve Biko was a very charismatic person. I remember the saying we had that »Black Consciousness is not a color, it's a state of mind.« We sought mental emancipation. We were very militant and anti-white at that time. I remember being part of a black theater festival. We were so angry when some whites came in, we threw them out saying, »We need to get together as black people to decide our futures. We have been the slaves of whites for too long.«
Then in October 1977, SASO was banned along with nineteen other black organizations. But there are still little pockets of Black Consciousness all over the country. The leadership can be banned but you can't ban ideas. On the other hand, Black Consciousness only has a very small following today. They are very elitist, and their largest following is on the university campuses. I consider Black Consciousness an important phase of the struggle, but I also think it's shortsighted because there cannot be a meaningful struggle in South Africa without whites. Because some whites have created a fiasco in this country it doesn't mean that we should hate all whites.
My awakening to sexism was a gradual one. It took me going through marriage to realize that I was being oppressed as a woman. I saw that the brunt of the work in marriage has to be done by women. My husband and I both worked, but it wasn't equal. He was supportive of my political work as long as it didn't take up too much of my time, and as long as the washing was done and everything was nice and clean. The reason I didn't want to have children was that I knew I would be the one to have to stay home. And I often said to my husband, »Look, there are so many problems in this country. Do we really want to bring a child into it?« But everyone thought that there was something wrong with me for not having a child. Whether to have children or not is quite a debate among us activists. Some feel that by having children you bring in more cadres for the struggle. I feel that it would curtail my activities. I took a course in Holland on women and development at the Institute of Social Studies with about thirty other women from different countries. I realized that no matter which society, which culture, women are always oppressed whether it's through female infanticide, female circumcision, or whatever.
My husband was violent in the last two years of my five-year marriage. I still get upset when I speak about the violence. I didn't get support from people, even my own sisters. I remember my one sister saying, »Perhaps you deserve it.« It has created quite a lot of tension between me and my family, and I'm still not completely open with them. I was very involved in the United Women's Organization then. I got the understanding and support there that my family didn't give me. That was a very hard time in my life. I didn't have a place to stay. There was no battered women's shelter then. And because of the socioeconomic conditions of black families, there isn't space for additional people to stay. Also, we don't speak about violence, especially not people from middle-class backgrounds like mine. So I felt I had to stay in my marriage.
His violence was definitely connected with my involvement in UWO. He was very threatened by it. Everyone in UWO was a lesbian as far as he was concerned. A woman who is very strong and who doesn't wear makeup is not a true woman in his eyes. Articulate women were threatening to him. And if women prefer other women to men, that was even worse. That was also probably the reason my family supported him. They agreed that it was a bit unsavory for women to be getting together. The time came when the violence was unbearable. He fractured my ribs, et cetera, et cetera. Fortunately, there was a woman I had taught with years ago who had a place for me to stay.

Police Harassment

I've had numerous run-ins with the police. My most frightening experience was when five security police came to the previous house that I lived in with my friend Lynn. Although the state of emergency had not yet been declared, we didn't stay in the house most of the time because our neighbors had told us that the police had been coming there quite often, and we didn't want them to find us. On this particular day I was alone at home and there was a knock on the door. It was a very loud ferocious knock, and I was a bit frightened. I peeped out and saw these five big policemen. I sometimes think they must handpick these people because their mere stature absolutely frightens you. They shouted at me, »Why are you taking so long? Open the door!« I answered, »Who are you? I'm not opening the door.« They said they were security police, so I told them I needed to see their identifications. After they showed them to me, I realized I had to open the door because otherwise they'd kick it down. They've done that with lots of other people. So I opened the door, and they searched the house.
The absolute power these men had over everything in my house was frightening, in addition to the way they pushed me around personally. I was frightened on two levels: as a woman I was scared of them because they were men, and I was also scared that I would be detained. At one stage I was standing alone in a room and all five of them barged onto me throwing questions at me, ready to push me around if I didn't answer soon enough. »Who are you? Where are you going? What is this? Who are these people?« I had never been so scared in my life! I was afraid of being sexually assaulted. I had been doing interviews with some UWCO members who had been in detention, so I had a very vivid understanding of what type of things they can get up to. And I realized that if I shouted no one would come.
After that, the police came to our house about three or four times a day. Fortunately we were out most of the time. We had quite a good relationship with the neighbors who told us about their visits. In black areas there is much more community spirit than in white areas. A black neighborhood is often a tightly knit group, and people will ask you what's going on. Sometimes people haven't been arrested because of the sheer numbers of people asking the police, »Where are you taking her?« or »Why are you taking her away?«

Living in Hiding

On 25 October 1985, we were babysitting for someone when Hettie [see chapter 21] phoned to tell us that the state of emergency would be declared in Cape Town at twelve o'clock that night [so the police could detain people without having to make a charge]. It was then 11 p.m. or 11:30 p.m., and we ran to our house and fetched our clothes and whatever we could grab, and we never went back. Apparently the police were parked outside the house at the time. Later we sent people to fetch our clothes, and on one or two occasions I summoned up courage to go back to the house. It's terrible not having a book or whatever you need with you, but it was so frightening to go back. I didn't put any lights on even though it was dark, and I kept very quiet in case someone came to the door.
We came to this house which was safe at that time. Now I'm not sure how safe it is, because sometimes we forget and use the telephone. And three months after we moved into this house, the police ransacked my cousin's house further up the road though she's completely uninvolved in politics. She heard two policemen saying, »Now which old white house can it be?« She told my mother she thought they must be looking for this house. But thus far they haven't found it. We are still in hiding, but not as seriously as many others. I don't ever divulge any information on the telephone. I won't give my telephone number to many people. As far as possible I don't tell people where I am.
We are trying to avoid detention if possible because there's a lot of work to be done outside prison. Most people who are politically active have to move a lot, particularly around certain dates like before and after 16 June [the anniversary of the Soweto uprising], and before the white elections. The government is scared of activity, so these are the times they really clamp down.

Fear of Rape

The worst thing about living in hiding is being frightened, especially as a woman. I know women who have been stripped while they were detained. They were threatened with rape, and their children were similarly threatened with rape. They are trying to pin a treason charge onto our chairperson, Noma-India, who is detained now. She probably won't be out for ten to twelve years. One day a black policeman walked in and brought her a bowl of porridge with cigarette ash on it. She said to him, »Do you expect me to eat this?« He replied, »Of course, why not?« She said, »I refuse to eat it.« Then he started walking around her and looking at her in a very lecherous way, while touching himself and masturbating. Noma-India was very frightened because his whole demeanor was »I'm going to get you now.«
The police want to break down strong women [in detention] because they don't give them the information they're seeking. Sexual violence epitomizes that whole dynamic of cutting women down to size, which is why it is such a powerful element in torture. Noma-India realized she had to do something, so she took the bowl of porridge and threw it into his face. He left, leaving her cell door open. But she decided that she wouldn't try to escape because she felt that it may be a ploy to kill her in the process. What is strange is that he didn't even report her misconduct to anyone. Knowing about such experiences I must admit that I am frightened.

The United Women's Organization

It is important to organize as women now because we don't want to have a new society where we are still second-class citizens. We mustn't wait for a revolution to organize women. We've got to learn to share housework now. UWO's constitution says that we will learn to share housework, to share childcare, and to work equally.
Although UWO actually started in 1979, it was only formally launched in 1981. I came back from my two years in Holland in 1982, joined the branch of UWO in the area where I live, and immediately became very involved in it. This was the first political organization to emerge after years of repression. I remember being astounded by the way people talked about their oppression at the first mass meeting I attended.
UWO is based in the western Cape, although we have been instrumental in forming other women's organizations in other areas. There were about one thousand members at the time I returned to South Africa. Perhaps ninety percent of the membership today are African women.
My branch is mixed [racially] because different people live in this area, but many of the branches are racially segregated because of the residential segregation that exists in this country. There used to be large white branches of UWO, but after UDF was launched many of the whites became more active in that organization. The branches do projects that are important to people in their area. For example, the KTC branch [a squatter camp] concentrated on getting more taps and doing something about the lack of garbage collection. KTC is still in existence because of the work of UWO. Reaching women through organizing creches [child care] is a very big project in most township branches.
Everything I did in UWO was a learning experience. For example, in my branch we started a children's play group in a very poor, deprived area where the women often have lots of children. It was a very exciting project, but it was very demanding, too. There'd sometimes be four or five of us to look after 150 children who were yearning for attention and love. We would become exhausted. Initially, we thought that a children's group would lighten women's burden, thereby drawing them in gradually to our organization, but we came to realize that the children were just as important as their mothers. We need to give them attention because they are our future society.
We also pursued self-education. For example, a group of us went away for a weekend to consider the importance of feminism and how it relates to women's role in the national democratic struggle in South Africa. Then we held an open forum to which the entire organization came, and we discussed the struggles in different countries like Algeria, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, and the peace movement. We tried to get hold of resources written by Third World women like Feminism in the Third World and National Struggles in the Third World, which was compiled by a number of Third World women writers. We studied the history of the struggle, the ANC, the history of South Africa. We had workshops on media skills, how to compile pamphlets, writing, etc. We studied the Freedom Charter and discussed its relevance fifty years later. And about two years ago, we formally adopted the Freedom Charter.

A Comparison of UWO and UDF

UWO was largely instrumental in the formation of the United Democratic Front in the western Cape. With the advent of UDF, many of us are active in both UWO and UDF, so we have an action-packed program. There were times we only slept three hours a night. We did door-to-door distribution of pamphlets every night for two years. It was work, work, work! If it wasn't writing up a pamphlet, it was printing five thousand posters for our meeting. UDF is very action-oriented, and UDF was where it was at, with the result that all of the other organizations suffered, the youth and civic organizations as well as UWO.
The pace of UWO meetings was much slower than UDF: for example, we had to have translations in English and Xhosa and sometimes in Sotho as well. We dealt with squatter women from rural areas who didn't understand urban politics. We had to explain some things over and over again. But this is part of being in a women's movement. It was a political training ground for women. It has to be slower if you want to bring all your members along with you.
Two years ago women were coming late for meetings or forgetting them, so I said, »Look. We've got to have diaries, and we must write down our meeting dates.« We gave each woman a booklet, but they still didn't write because they couldn't write. So we had to teach them literacy. When we send out letters in English because we don't have time to translate them, there are people who won't understand them. We always try to rotate chairpeople in our meetings so that many women can acquire the skill, but this also slows things down.
In contrast, a UDF area committee can call an important general meeting tomorrow night at eleven, and people will be there. Most of them have cars, and they're not mothers with children. They're not living in the township where there's no transport. So there's a material difference in UDF student-type activists as opposed to a mass-based women's organization where the majority are black. But if you truly believe in trying to actively change the role of women, it's slow work and you've got to be patient. And sometimes I forget that I'm speaking to someone in what may be their third language.

UWO Becomes the United Women's Congress

Women's Front was a small group of township-based women that formed much later than UWO. I don't know if it had even a hundred members. But UDF said that there can't be two separate women's organizations in the same area with the same constitution both affiliated to UDF, so they told us to merge. It took us about two and a half years of discussions to actually do this.
There were personality clashes between two of the founding members who were very strong women. And some people said that UWO was dominated by whites, which was definitely unfounded. Most of our executive members were black people—mostly domestic workers; and all our chairpeople have always been black women. It's important to us that the people who represent our organization are representative of the majority of women in South Africa. We finally merged on the twenty-second of March 1986. We really haven't had any major problems during this first year. When we elected our eight executive members, we made sure that there was a Women's Front and a UWO chairperson and two secretaries from each of these groups. There are about two thousand five hundred members of UWCO now.
UWCO is the biggest nonracial organization in Cape Town and always has been. Because the UDF area committees are area-based,
these committees are mostly one »race"—though, of course, we reject that concept. UWCO is an organization with branches from Guguletu [an African township] to the Gardens [a white suburb], so automatically we are more representative and nonracial. In contrast, the youth and civic groups are only organized in black areas. But the UDF has done wonders nationally to break down barriers. Apart from the UWO meetings in the western Cape, there were never mass meetings with people from all [racial] groups before UDF.
I was on the executive committee of UWCO a year ago [1986], but we're not allowed to be on it for more than two years. Being on the executive committee gives you an opportunity to think things out politically, to speak to people, to gain confidence, so we want all our women to have these experiences. If we believe in a truly equal society, we must avoid developing specialists. I've mentioned to the education and training group that we must have a public speaking course this year because we need more speakers. Apart from the language problem, we have complexes as black women about speaking out publicly.

Sexism and the UDF

At the annual general meeting of the Cape Town region, we looked at questions like: Do we promote nonracialism? Do we promote working-class leadership? Are we democratic? Are we sexist? We were all in small groups, and one comrade said about sexism, »I think that sometimes it's women's own fault because they don't assert themselves enough.« I was so angry I couldn't speak. Fortunately a male comrade said, »I don't think that's fair.« And after further discussion, we concluded that we are sexist. We reported this to the plenary session when everyone came together. The comrade who reported this said that male comrades need to think carefully through their actions, and that »our female comrades will also tell us when we are sexist.« And I said, »That's really nonsense. No one will ever make a racist joke because they know it's too sensitive a matter. So why do male comrades have to be told? Why don't you develop the same kind of sensitivity that you have about being racist?« The chairperson responded, »Look. We don't have much time. We have to go on to the next point.«
The next point was working-class leadership, and the discussion of this went on and on. Sometimes I'm very confrontationalist, but this time I told myself, »Gertrude, shut up!« Then a male comrade got up and said, »Look what's happening now. We didn't have enough time to discuss sexism, but we can go on and on about working-class leadership.« So there is an awareness on the part of some male comrades, but the theory and the practice don't always coincide. An when one looks at the personal lives of some of the comrades, they also leave much to be desired

The Federation of South African Women

At the moment we are involved in trying to relaunch a new Federation of South African Women. The women working on it are encouraging all women's groups to be part of it, including the women's sections of mixed groups like the trade unions. All these groups may not share the same ideology: for example, the Black Sash has agreed to be part of the federation although we don't always agree politically. The goals of the federation are to bring women together and for women to give political input and political guidance to the UDF. Like UDF, it will be an umbrella organization for different women's organizations to affiliate to.
Unity is one of the things we need most urgently in this country. When people are separated as they are in this country, they learn to accept the stereotypes about each other. For example, a woman in a new group I spoke to yesterday said, »I always thought that African people stink because that's what I was taught. I realize it's not true now that I'm mixing with Africans.« Many black people think that all white people are arrogant and oppressive because in our daily lives we only have contact with white people within a very hierarchical structure. For example, when my friend Lynn [who is Coloured] and I lived in a house in Observatory with Louise who is white, Lynn's mother came to visit one day. Louise brought her a cup of coffee, and Lynn's mother went home and told people, »This white woman actually brought us a cup of coffee!« She'd never had that experience of actually being together in an organization and working together with people from other groups.
We are trying to get groups of women like homemakers, et cetera, into the federation. When we approach people we explain that it's important for women to come together, to speak with one voice, and to develop a common understanding in this country with so many barriers and so many groups of people separated from each other. We must develop relationships with each other. There is a draft constitution that needs to be approved at a later date. This will mean discussion of issues like maternity leave and equal salaries. I agree with the woman who said, »Women's liberation is not an act of charity, and it Can never be achieved by men.«

Feminist Pavement Politics

»My reason for highlighting rape and sexual abuse is that I feel people ignore them.
They are not interested in these problems because they think they are personal and
domestic issues. But if so many women experience them, then surely
it can't just be personal and domestic.«
ROZENA MAART

ROZENA MAART was, at twenty-four, the second youngest of the women I interviewed. She was living with a racially mixed group of friends in a so-called gray area of Cape Town where the Group Areas Act, legislating residential separation by race, has not been strictly implemented for a while. Here I interviewed Maart and also subsequently visited her a few times.
Maart, who has a B.A. honors degree in social work from the University of the Western Cape, had been working as a social worker at Groote Schuur Hospital for the past two and a half years in gynecology and the emergency unit. She mainly sees survivors of rape, incest, and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, counseling them within a feminist framework that she says she developed when working in Rape Crisis.
Maart is a bright, flamboyant, and gutsy woman with tremendous energy and independence of mind. For example, her response to the common left accusation that feminism is divisive, is: »It's patriarchy that is divisive, not feminism.« She is a committed feminist whose risky »pavement politics«, as she calls them, are as original as they are daring. In the past, the government has often dismissed feminist politics as not threatening to the apartheid system, but Maart's group, Women Against Repression, engages in unusually risky actions. In this interview she describes the formation of WAR and some of its novel activities such as picketing against child sexual abuse and graffiti spraying, showing in the process how male dominated the society is. Maart has also worked out a political theory of her own to justify her protesting sexism rather than apartheid. She critiques the common defense by people in the anti-apartheid movement of certain customs like lobola—that they are just cultural phenomena—by pointing out that »ten years ago it was culturally acceptable to call a black man 'kaffir' [the equivalent of nigger] and 'boy.' What is seen as culturally acceptable depends on men's definitions, which change when it suits them«, Maart declared.
When I saw her, Maart was expecting soon to interrupt her political activities to go to England on scholarship to do an M.A. in women's studies at the University of York—an opportunity that she felt justified her leaving her work in WAR.

Growing Up Coloured

I am the oldest of nine children. My father had five women. Three of them were wise enough not to marry him, including my mother, so Maart is my mother's surname. I come from District Six,* but we were forced to move from there to Lavender Hill [another black area, but one lacking a sense of community] when I was twelve years old. I lived with my mother, granny, sisters, and uncles. There were about twenty-four of us in a three-bedroomed house.
I felt very, very unhappy about being uprooted from District Six and having to leave all my friends. At the time I thought going to live in Lavender Hill was the worst experience in my life. District Six is less than four minutes drive from where I now live. Whenever I drive past there, I am still upset by seeing the flattened space where my home used to be.
There were no shops for miles in Lavender Hill. There were no schools. We saw ourselves as absolutely oppressed when we went there because it was like a dump, and that's what we called it. We went to school in Cape Town for a year after that, rather than going somewhere nearer by, because we wouldn't accept the fact that we lived in Lavender Hill. When I started going to high school in Lavender Hill, I began to realize what it means to be Coloured. I only learned what it means to be black later on when I made connections between myself and other black people.
The women in my family are very strong. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother had a feminist consciousness long before I even realized what this meant. Their standing up for themselves made a strong impression on me. I was brought up to believe that I can do anything I want to do. But I wasn't interested in school. There were boycotts and marches and placard demonstrations that were ten times more interesting than studying. I only passed by the skin of my teeth with D's and E's.
I wanted to study drama at university. My mother said I couldn't do it, and my friends said I shouldn't because it would have required me to go to the University of Cape Town [a largely white university; the university designed for Coloured people, the University of the Western Cape, has no drama department]. UCT has a permit system for all its black students, now called a quota system, which means it has a permit to have black and Coloured students there. Had I gone there, it would have meant that I accepted this system, so I went to the University of the Western Cape instead.
I participated in the protests at UWC because I felt they were important despite the fact that they never addressed the oppression of women. The fact that all sixteen of the students on the Student Representative Council were men for two years in a row says a lot about this lack of awareness. It took me about two years to decide that I wasn't going to have anything more to do with campus politics. Instead, I got involved outside of campus. But this was also frustrating because there was no place for women there either. At meetings I'd only see the women at the interval because they'd have been in the kitchen all the time preparing for the food break.

Rape Crisis Work and Feminism

I joined Cape Town Rape Crisis in 1982 and was very active in it for a time. It was incredibly influential in my thinking. By acknowledging that »sexual abuse is personal abuse is political abuse«, rape crisis centers have played a very important role in this country. Usually sexual abuse is regarded as something you go to a hospital for and then don't talk about with other people. The community organizations don't do anything about it. Rape Crisis has made people aware that sexual abuse exists and that there are ways and means of handling it.
It was only when I joined Rape Crisis that I regarded myself as a feminist, although I hated that word. I didn't want to be known as a feminist. But now I do because I know what it represents to me. It no longer has an American, academic, white connotation. I do whatever is comfortable for me. I wear makeup because I enjoy it. I wear pants a lot because I like them. Feminism has very little to do with the kind of clothes you wear, whether you wash dishes or not. It's got to do with how you see yourself in relation to other people, whether you are oppressive or exploitative, and how you relate to people.
As a feminist/activist I consider my most important work to be picketing against sexual abuse and drawing analogies between state violence and violence against women. I'm not saying that all the other protests I have participated in haven't meant a lot. But, in the history of South African politics, organizing a feminist demonstration is much more groundbreaking.

Women Against Repression

Five of us got together in April last year [1986] to look at what we felt the shortcomings were of South African women's organizations. We are all black women, and four of us are or were Rape Crisis members. I'm fairly middle class in terms of having a job and earning a professional salary. The other four women were university students, so we all had a university education. We have always been friends who rail about the same things, and we felt that there was a need for another women's organization. So we founded a group we call WAR—Women Against Repression.
There are now thirty people in our organization, so it's grown a lot in seven months. A lot of them are working-class women. There are also a lot of people like Kevin [a housemate and friend] who don't come to meetings regularly, but who take part in actions. Men aren't full-time members. They understand that we want the organization to be comfortable for women. They [men] get involved in the actions but not the other activities like public speaking, workshops, and education. White women are also involved. We feel that white people have a role to play. We are not sectarian in any way. The fight is not against whites, it's against white domination. We want to encourage everybody to take up that fight, and not to exclude anybody because they are white or male.
Rape Crisis looks at sexual abuse and tries to politicize people about the analogy between the state oppressing people and beating them and men oppressing and raping women. The United Women's Congress, a largely black women's organization, believes that black women are oppressed because they are black and tries to encourage women to join mainstream politics. We have a more in-depth approach than either of these organizations in terms of looking at social, cultural, legal, and economic aspects of women's oppression.
If you make a logical argument as to why feminism is valid, why it is relevant, why it should be part of mainstream politics, people will often agree with you. But they'll say that it's not so important and can wait 'til after the revolution. I think it's going to be a long fight, and part of WAR's program of engaging in that kind of struggle is to be very action-oriented. We've only been going officially since August of last year [1986], and we've done a helluva lot of stuff. We've had three pickets [demonstrations] already, and we've spoken to people at schools.
At one school a teacher tried to rape a student he'd given a lift to. There were graffitied slogans on the wall opposite this school like »FIGHT APARTHEID« and »WE STAND BY OUR TEACHERS« because the principal and one of the teachers had been in detention. We said to the teachers at this school, »On the one hand, you're trying to politicize and conscientize the students. On the other hand, you are sexually abusing them. How the hell can you do this? It's denying them the right to control their own bodies.« And they answered, »That's a different issue.« So we organized a demonstration there. Instead of a sign saying, »HANDS OFF OUR TEACHERS/' we made one that said, »TEACHERS, HANDS OFF OUR STUDENTS!« and »HANDS OF THE TEACHERS OFF THE STUDENTS.«
When we went to talk to the principal of this highly politicized school about the fact that sexual abuse of students by teachers is also a political issue, he responded, »But it's not the same thing.« Then he said, »I'm dealing with it in my own way. Do you people want to see blood?« We said, »No, we want dismissals of these teachers, and not just from this school, but from being allowed to teach at any school.« We argued, »If one of your teachers was heard calling one of your children 'kaffir' or some other racist term, what would you do?« He said, »I'd kick him out of the school.« We said, »But why aren't you doing the same now?« He said, »It's different.« We said, »No, it's the same thing.« But the principal saw the rape as the student's fault. He said, »Oh, these girls look for these things. This girl wears long nails and a short skirt. She wanted it.«
The principal wouldn't let the teachers tell the students about the rape. We thought that if the female students knew about it, they at least wouldn't take lifts from these teachers. So at about three o'clock one morning, we graffitied the slogans on the school sports stadium. When five hundred students arrived at school the next morning they all knew about the sexual abuse.
The Western Cape Teachers' Union is an organization that looks at how teachers can work with oppression in schools and in the community. In their constitution, it states that they should fight discrimination on all levels. WAR was told about some cases of teachers sexually abusing students at schools, but when we took this issue to WECTU they didn't want to deal with it. So we told them, »If you don't do something about this, we will have a picket about it.« So they said »O.K., we'll think about it.« WECTU now has a subcommittee on sexual harassment, but they have done nothing else about this problem. It's bad enough if children are sexually abused, but if so-called progressive activist teachers are actually doing the sexual abuse, it's ten times worse.
We have had calls from several schools and teachers from quite a few of them came to our meetings. They asked us to take up the issue of sexual abuse rather than going to Rape Crisis because they wanted to go beyond offering counseling to victims. They wanted the problem to be made public and for people to do something about it. But the teachers involved in protesting the sexual abuse were the ones to be dismissed. The reason for their dismissal wasn't stated, but it was very clear it was because of the stand they had taken before they even got involved with WAR. They didn't participate in our picket, but they had insisted in a school meeting that something be done about the problem. They were told that there would be no position for them the next year. But the teachers who sexually harassed students are all still teaching despite the fact that we spray-painted »GET RID OF EDGAR WILLIAMS AND BRIAN ADONIS« [the perpetrators] on the school wall. Another slogan was »SEXUAL ABUSE EQUALS PERSONAL ABUSE EQUALS POLITICAL ABUSE.«
There have been a lot of child rape-murders of little girls and boys in Mitchells Plain [a Coloured area near Cape Town]. WAR organized a petition against the sexist rape laws with slogans like »SEXUAL HARASSMENT, A COMMUNITY ISSUE.« It's usually assumed that it's women's job to take up such issues. We wanted to challenge why when somebody is called a »kaffir«, it is regarded as a political issue, but rape is not. Our goals were to encourage so-called political community organizations to deal with rape and sexual harassment and to create an awareness about these problems which have been kept very much under cover.
Picketing is scary to do because it's illegal. You have to get permission to picket. But there's no point in our asking because it would never be granted, especially in view of the fact that we make it quite clear that we aren't only picketing against somebody who sexually abused a child, but we draw analogies between this and state violence. Our pickets are designed to get publicity and to put pressure on the schools. I phone people who I know and trust at the Cape Times, the Argus, and all the newspapers the night before a picket and say, »There's going to be a picket. Be there!« They appreciate it and half the time they get there before us. We only actually stand there for about fifteen minutes to half an hour. One time I asked for the photo of me to be cut out of a larger picture because of my job. (The other picketers were all students.) The journalists cooperate with requests like this because they're people that I know. One time we were picketing in the middle of Cape Town and only left a few minutes before the police came. It was a very close call. But the risk involved in picketing isn't as great as it is for doing graffiti.
When we want to mobilize people for an action like a graffiti spree, we phone people and say, »There's a joll [party] tonight. Meet at so-and-so's house«, and they know what it means. They all pitch up with a spray can or two, and we decide on the slogans before we go out so that we don't have any that are not in line with WAR's philosophy. For example, our slogans for International Women's Day were »WE FIGHT MALE DOMINATION« and »WOMEN FIGHT FOR THEIR RIGHTS.« We don't say things like »AS MOTHERS AND CHILDREN WE STAND BY OUR MEN.« We call these actions pavement politics.
We also respond to newspaper articles. For example, there was an article about a woman who was raped by a policeman. He was only fined eighty bloody rand [$40] for the rape. We responded by writing a letter to the newspaper and by doing graffiti.
Spraying graffiti is considered a serious offense, particularly because of the state of emergency. We all know the risk involved. We are always very scared when we do this. We try to be as careful as possible. But we are not going to be dormant because there is a state of emergency. We don't have money to pay for ads in the paper so we have to make people aware by using other methods, because the state of emergency is going to continue until the revolution.
There are only about six of us in WAR who are willing to participate in the graffiti actions. But it's okay that other people don't want to. It's their choice. For me, if I have to think, »I can't do this or that because I may be detained«, I might as well not live. Whether there's a state of emergency or not, I'm still going to do something to bring about change. If I have to go underground at three o'clock in the morning, then that's what I am prepared to do. We've done graffiti actions about six times now. There is always somebody waiting in a car in case we need to escape in a hurry.

Maart's Ideology

I don't regard what I do now as less political than demonstrating against apartheid. I think it is the same thing. I think that women's oppression is political, that the personal is political. But fighting sexism is more significant to me because it is an analysis I have made for myself. I didn't go on our pickets because I felt it was part of being in the mainstream, but because it was my choice and because I believe in it. I am not saying I didn't believe in the student protests, but participating in them was a case of being part of the flow and feeling that if I didn't, I'd be making a statement that was apolitical.
I'm not so thrilled about the whole idea of sisterhood. A lot of politically active women that I know are completely antifeminist, and they commit suicide to their feminist potential because their whole orientation in life has been geared to pleasing men. And then there are a lot of men whose comradeship I share because they have a feminist analysis even while they have problems with the word feminist. Just as the African National Congress is not exclusively African, so our women's organization is not exclusively for women. We believe that the fight is against male domination and the system of patriarchy, not against men and not against whites.
I subscribe to an analysis that challenges race, class, and gender. I think that the fight against male domination must not become a woman's issue in the sense that it must not only be fought by women. When people talk about »the people shall govern, the people shall this, the people shall that«, I wonder if they mean women. Which is why we came up with the slogan »WOMEN'S DEMANDS ARE PEOPLE'S DEMANDS.«
Although I see gender as only one of the three priority issues along with race and class, it is never acknowledged. That's why all the activist work that I do is centered around feminism. I would prefer for my work to have more balance, but it can't because so few others work on sexism.

The Consequences of Political Activism

I'm not afraid of people finding out what I'm doing. Most people know that the organization exists. When we do pickets, people know that it's us because it's in the newspaper. So far nothing has happened as a result of our actions. But we don't see ourselves as an organization that can't be brought in for questioning. The newspapers don't report what we say against the state, because of the press curbs, and they also choose pictures that don't challenge the state. They'll cut out the part of the picture in which the picket says »SEXUAL ABUSE EQUALS PERSONAL ABUSE EQUALS POLITICAL ABUSE« for publication purposes. This is probably why we haven't been hassled more so far.
One of the terrible things about being involved in mainstream politics is that one sometimes finds that male-activist men become the enemy, because gender politics requires one to see how people deal with their personal lives. Of course people don't like this because it's threatening. Men worry: »Somebody's watching how I talk to my wife or somebody's looking at what my wife does.« One of the personal consequences for me of my political activities is that I'm ignored in some circles. For example, when I went to a union gathering, a lot of people didn't look at me or talk to me because they know what I do and they think it's terrible that I'm not fighting in mainstream politics. I go through different phases in my life where I feel I need to get recognition for what I am doing, but I don't feel I need it now. I've got my own circle of friends, and I feel that what I am doing is valid, important, and uplifting. Women's oppression is one facet of the oppression in South Africa, and I don't see my focusing on it as any different than somebody else focusing on trade-union work. But none of the mainstream political organizations address the issue of gender, which makes me feel more and more that there is never going to be a rightful, equal place for women, including after the revolution.
When the ANC is the new government, it will definitely still be a male-dominated government. Maybe the male domination won't be as severe as it would be without the influence of feminists. Quite honestly, I don't think it's all that important which political organization comes into power after the revolution.