PART V

»I always draw a parallel between oppression by the regime
and oppression by men. To me it is just the same.
I always challenge men on why they react to oppression
by the regime, but then they do exactly the same things
to women that they criticize the regime for«.
SETHEMBILE N.

The Speakers in this section focus more on some of the issues some political activists are tackling than on organizations. Sethembile N.[1] [pseudonym], for example, shows why Chief Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha movement is seen by both the government's security branch as well as anti-apartheid groups as a major obstacle to the South African liberation struggle. Since Buthelezi—who has a significant international reputation, particularly in the United States—opposes divestment and indeed encourages foreign investment in South Africa, claiming it is good for black people, the international business community has enthusiastically embraced him. Business leaders ignore the fact that all the black leaders of the anti-apartheid movement are in favor of sanctions and divestment. I realized how important it is for the international community to hear about this other side of Chief Buthelezi. It was impossible, however, to find a Zulu woman who was willing to talk about him without using a pseudonym, so fearful are critics of retaliation by him or Inkatha—the movement that he heads.
While Sethembile N. chose to use a pseudonym to protect her life, Hettie V., a rebel against her Afrikaner heritage, decided not to use her real name in an effort to keep a low profile so as to continue with her political work as long as possible. Although not the only Afrikaner I interviewed, Hettie V. is the only one represented in this volume. She has a fascinating tale to tell, starting with her learning to shoot at the age of ten with other Afrikaner children who were members of an organization called the Young Voortrekkers.
Rhoda Bertelsmann-Kadalie, a Coloured woman, describes the consequences of her marriage to a white Afrikaner both before and after intermarriage became legal. One of the much-heralded reforms of the current government was to repeal the Mixed Marriages Act, which outlawed marriages between members of different races, along with the so-called Immorality Act, which had made interracial sexual relations illegal. Bertelsmann-Kadalie shows how these reforms have not stopped the harassment of racially mixed couples.
Leila Issel, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Shahieda Issel [see chapter 4], describes her political activity from the age of seven, and the police response. Since children are playing such a crucial role in the South African liberation movement, I felt it important to include the voice of at least one child.
Finally, Sheena Duncan, a prominent leader in the Black Sash with an extraordinary fund of information about the racist legal system in South Africa, describes the appalling scope and destruction that has resulted from forcing millions of people, mainly Africans, to move from their homes to uninhabitable dumping grounds. This massive dislocation is part of the government's insane dream and malevolent belief that apartheid can and must be implemented.

A Refugee from Inkatha

»Inkatha is even worse than the Special Branch.
The Special Branch detains you and puts you in prison,
but Inkatha destroys you...
Refugees used to live outside the country,
but because of Inkatha, many people are now
refugees from Inkatha inside the country«.
SETHEMBILE  N

...is, as a Zulu, particularly vulnerable to Inkatha's efforts to punish Zulus who belong to UDF-affiliated groups instead of showing loyalty to their Zulu chief, Gatsha Buthelezi. Thus, she finds it necessary not only to use a pseudonym here [2] but to hide out illegally in the so-called white neighborhoods of Durban. In this interview, Sethembile N. describes the events—including the murder of a friend's father—that led to her decision to become a refugee from Inkatha and go into hiding.
Thirty-four years old in 1987, Sethembile N. is the mother of three daughters, the eldest of whom is fourteen and the youngest, seven. A teacher for many years before her political activities made it impossible to continue, she was also a battered wife who left her husband and has become an able and dedicated leader in the National Education Union of South Africa. Sethembile N. describes both of these experiences in some detail. Although I didn't ask her whether she considers herself a feminist, her active and outspoken commitment to gender equality earn her this label in my mind. The stories of Sethembile N., Gertrude Fester, and Anne Mayne lead me to wonder whether women who are battered or raped are more likely to become feminists, or whether feminists are simply more willing to reveal these experiences. (I did not specifically ask about experiences of male violence.)
I interviewed Sethembile N. in the Durban house I was staying in one day after the election on 6 May 1987. The UDF had called a national stayaway to protest the all-white elections and to highlight their demands for the unbanning of the ANC, the release of the leaders in prison, the return of those in exile, the lifting of the state of emergency, and the withdrawal of troops from the townships. Sethembile N. described herself as »really inspired« by the effectiveness of the stayaway. »Although the South African Broadcasting Corporation would underplay what is happening,« she said, »they reported that sixty percent of the workers in Natal participated in the stayaway yesterday. This degree of support was unexpected because of Inkatha's repression in this province. The participation was highest in the Transvaal, and in Port Elizabeth and East London it was eighty percent to one hundred percent. This morning Capitol Radio said that the participation today is even higher. So it has been very successful«. Sethembile N. has a strong personality - direct, assertive, energetic, exuberant, and very present — and is definitely a leader. May she have the opportunity fully to realize this ability.

Growing Up African

My father is illiterate, and my mother was a domestic worker until her health got bad. When I was only eleven or twelve years of age, I had to work during my holidays for the white holiday makers. I washed dishes and looked after their children to help pay my school fees. My parents had to save all their money to be able to send me to boarding school for standards nine and ten. I started nursing after I matriculated. But I quit after three months because I couldn't take the regimentation. When I was seventeen or eighteen, I went to work in a factory for five rand [$2.50] a week. Then I decided I wanted to be a teacher. Because I had no money, I had to work as a private teacher for five years before I could get my training. I was also never able to study full-time at the University of Zululand for financial reasons. I found it very tough to study for my B.A. courses after work.
I got married in 1972. I was interested in politics during my married years but remained passive because my husband wanted me to confine myself to going to work and household chores. He and I were both teachers, but he would go and drink after work, while I was expected to go home and look after the kids, do housework, then be scolded for having ironed a blue shirt rather than a pink one. He felt threatened if I wanted to go to a political meeting, so I was prevented from involving myself as fully as I wished.
When I tried to further my education, my husband tore up my notes and said, »You want to make yourself better than I am«.  He was violent and drank a lot. I have a scar on my head where he stabbed me with a knife. I was staying with my in-laws and sitting in the lounge peeling a peach with a knife. My husband came into the room and said, »Why are you looking at me?« Then he picked up the knife. Usually I ran away from him in these situations, but that time I wanted to see if he intended only to threaten me, but he stabbed me for no reason.
If he discovered that I was talking happily with his mother, he would say, »Are you gossiping about me? You are against me«.  When he drank alcohol, he felt threatened and inferior. Sometimes he was violent toward me seven days a week. Most of the time I wanted to end the marriage, but society always expects a woman to persevere. I had to wait until everyone realized that things were very tough for me, otherwise I would have become an outcast.
In 1981, I said »To hell with everyone!« and I divorced him. But getting away from him was very difficult. I had to sneak out of the house and leave the kids with him. I knew he was a drunkard and that anything could happen to them, but I had to save my life. I went to the magistrate who was fortunately very sympathetic about my reasons for leaving. He said, »Do you want your kids?« I said, »Yes«.  After about a week, a court order was issued requiring my husband to bring the kids to the magistrate's court and hand them over to me. Then I legally handed them over to my mother. I didn't even need a lawyer to fight the divorce, because I had such a strong case against him. He was very overwhelmed by this and has never been brave enough to approach me himself since then—though he has sent people to tell me he wanted to reconcile.

Political Activity

I taught Zulu [one of the major African languages in South Africa] and became very involved in education politics after my divorce. As a literature teacher I was able to bring up relevant issues in class and to use methods that conscientized the students by encouraging their creativity and critical thinking. Since 1984, I have been the chairperson in Durban of a nonracial teachers' organization called NEUSA — the National Education Union of South Africa. Teachers who belong to NEUSA have to be quiet about their membership because we challenge the government's system of education. NEUSA is the only nonracial teachers' union in Natal. Most of its membership is black because we are the most oppressed. We have a lot of support from students and a great deal of credibility amongst the communities.
In the northern Transvaal and in the eastern Cape, there was a time when the students would ask a teacher, »Are you a member of NEUSA? If not, get out!« We don't separate politics from education but see education as part of politics. Right now we are discussing the question of »people's education«.  We are concerned about education for liberation and education after liberation. But since we are not in a position to take control of the education system, the first step is for our people's education programs to run parallel to the official system of education that exists now. We are critical of the biased history syllabus that only begins after the arrival of Western people in South Africa and that sees black people as troublemakers who stole the sheep of the white people. People's education tries to rectify these kinds of biases.
The government has now banned the very term people's education because they consider it to be teaching communism and revolution, so the materials we compile cannot be used yet. But before the state of emergency was declared, people's education was being taught in some schools in Soweto. After it, the South African Defense Forces have been present in the schools, which has made it very difficult to implement our programs. So we have to plan weekend workshops for students on topics like democracy within the schools, the history of the educational struggle in South Africa, and so on.
The recent state of emergency has hit us very hard. Most NEUSA teachers have been kicked out of school. Last year we could not even afford a national conference. One of our NEUSA members was called into the security offices simply for addressing the teachers about NEUSA. I was forced to resign from teaching in January [1987], which is what so often happens to NEUSA teachers. My school was closed down last year in September because the majority of the teachers there were NEUSA members and the rest were supporters. Many of us were transferred to schools in distant places. My friend Tozi Dlamini was sent to Zululand to teach at a school whose principal was a member of Inkatha from KwaMashu, where her father had been killed by Inkatha. I was transferred to Ermelo primary school, which is near Swaziland. If I refused to go there, I was out of a job.
Some teachers went where they were sent only to find no accommodation had been prepared for them. Others were told by the principal, »I don't know anything about you«.  This is what happened to Tozi. The school chairperson said to her, »I don't want you. If the department is interested in giving us an additional post, they should tell us, and we will look for a teacher we want«.  So they sent her up to Ermelo instead. Our lawyers fought this case, so she was then transferred to Pietermar-itzburg, where she teaches in a primary school, although she is a secondary schoolteacher with higher qualifications than anyone else in the school. They have her teaching sewing.
I have a job now that provides academic support, financial support, and assistance in finding accommodation for disadvantaged, mainly black students. I will have to keep this job, but my main interest is in education, and I miss teaching because I enjoy the interaction with the kids, and they enjoy it, too.

Gatsha Buthelezi and Inkatha

A significant problem in Natal is that most African schools in this province are in the KwaZulu area [the Zulu »homeland« run by Buthelezi], and Chief Gatsha Buthelezi has said that teachers' jobs will be threatened if they join our union. A bill was passed in the KwaZulu parliament saying that teachers who get involved in politics will be sacked. In 1986 the teachers in KwaZulu were forced to sign pledges saying that they would not denigrate or villify Buthelezi's name, the KwaZulu parliament, or Inkatha. As well as the pledge, teachers had to make an oath in front of a commissioner of oaths.
Inkatha is not popular because it is tribalistic, and the chief minister, Gatsha Buthelezi, is not democratic. Most of the people who are involved in Inkatha don't understand politics and what Inkatha is all about. They join to get jobs or for business reasons. A lot of information about Inkatha attacks are leaked by Inkatha people because so many of them aren't very committed to it. Only about two percent of the Zulu people are voluntarily Inkatha members. Pensioners won't get their pensions in KwaZulu unless they are card-carrying members. And at the beginning of each year, when students have to pay school fees, there is a fifty-cent fee for Inkatha. The lists of students and pensioners are then used by Inkatha to make the membership appear very large. But it's not a voluntary membership.
The Amabuthos, the Inkatha vigilante group who physically attack people, are not even members of the organization. They are migrant workers and unemployed people. Inkatha is able to get their cooperation because they need permission to stay in town. They are also rewarded with money and beer. The press interviewed the Amabuthos who attacked those of us attending the National Education Crisis Committee conference, and many of them said, »We didn't know what it was about. We were just told that we must get into the bus«.
In January 1985, the examination results of our standard ten students were withheld by the Department of Education. An Education Crisis Committee consisting of parents, students, and teachers was formed to deal with this, and I was one of the two teachers elected. We demanded that the Department of Education release the results of the students' examinations, but they refused. One day a woman phoned us to say that the police had told her that Inkatha would fix us for being the instigators of the boycotts by the Durban school kids who were protesting the withholding of their exam results. She asked them, »But why do you say Inkatha? Isn't Inkatha involved in the liberation struggle?« The chief of the Special Branch, Drane Meyer, said, »No, Inkatha is working with us. Just give us three months«.  We were very frightened by this threat because we feel that Inkatha is even worse than the Special Branch. The Special Branch detains you and puts you in prison, but Inkatha destroys you.
I lived in a place called Hambanati when I was still married. It is about forty kilometers from Durban. In 1984, Inkatha attacked all the people they considered UDF elements in Hambanati and burned down their houses. The whole UDF community in Hambanati was uprooted and their houses destroyed. I was one of those who lost my house there. I was not staying there at the time because I had to be near Durban for study purposes, but I had intended settling there with my kids after I had completed my degree. I didn't go back there, but most of the people wanted to return, so there were negotiations between Inkatha and the UDF about this. But the people who returned to Hambanati were attacked by Inkatha again, so they had to move out permanently.
In May 1985, I was living with two other women in a cottage in the Umlazi township. We were living under great tension. If there was a movement outside, we thought, »Oh! Inkatha has come«.  Then we thought, »No, these people are just trying to intimidate us and discourage us from carrying on with our activities«.  I was a part-time B.A. student at the university at that time, and one night in May—fortunately for me—I stayed the night in Lamontville where I was teaching. One of my colleagues told me, »Inkatha has attacked your house«.  They had thrown petrol bombs at it and burned it down. The other two women had been in the house but managed to escape with their children—a baby and a five-year-old. I left the township after that because it was too dangerous for me to live there any longer.
We reported the destruction of our house to the police, but when they came, they only asked, »This has never happened in Umlazi before, so why did they come and attack you? Are you involved in politics?« There were some petrol bombs at our house that hadn't exploded and some bottles which we gave to the police for fingerprints. When we asked them later, »Where are the bottles for fingerprints?« they said, »We didn't need them so we've thrown them away«.  This shows the attitude of the police when we report to them about Inkatha. I started to stay in a white suburb after that because I didn't know what would happen next in Umlazi. My kids are now staying with my mother, where they are safe.
Somebody phoned to tell us that there were rumors that Inkatha buses from KwaZulu were on their way to attack people in KwaMashu where Tozi's family, the Dlaminis, lived. Tozi is a close friend of mine as well as a teaching colleague and a member of NEUSA, so I phoned to tell her of these rumors. Tozi said, »But why would Inkatha attack us?« Since the Dlaminis didn't see any reason for an attack, they didn't run away. Very late that night the phone rang, and it was one of Tozi's sisters saying that Mr. Dlamini had been killed. Robert and another friend of ours in the house drove to KwaMashu to try to rescue them, not knowing whether the Amabuthos were still there. When we arrived, they had left and the casspirs were there. The Dlamini family was sitting outside with a neighbor waiting for the dawn. Next to them was some of their furniture and a bundle of things that hadn't been destroyed. Smoke was still coming from their house.
The Dlaminis had heard shots from the front door of their four-room house. There are still gunshot holes along the window sills and around the door. The Amabuthos are not very well trained, so they were just firing at random. There is a small bedroom at the back of the house, where the children stayed. Tozi was recovering from a caesarian delivery, and her two-week-old baby was with her. While some Amabuthos were shooting in the front of the house, others were trying to get in through a back window. Tozi doesn't know how she gained strength, but she took an umbrella and beat the men who were trying to enter through the window. She had pushed the wardrobe against the window and was beating them fiercely from behind it. Then a spear stabbed through her coming out just under her chin. It was very fortunate it didn't kill her.
One of the Amabuthos who had entered the bedroom said, »All the women must move out! Out!« He told the other Amabuthos that they must only fight with men. So the women managed to escape from the house, while Tozi's father and Thabo [Tozi's brother] remained inside. Thabo managed to escape because he is a fast thinker. The Amabuthos started to loot before they killed anyone, so Thabo joined them in looting as if he were one of them. Then he escaped. His father was an old man whom they shot and stabbed to death when he tried to run away. Then the Amabuthos attacked and burned the house. After hiding in people's toilets, the other members of the family returned to find Mr. Dlamini lying outside dead.
Inkatha attacks people suspected of being active in UDF. Tozi was in NEUSA, which is affiliated to UDF; Thabo was in the Youth Congress in KwaMashu; ancj their mother had resigned from Inkatha. Some time back in the mid-1970s, Mrs. Dlamini had been very active in Inkatha. At some stage she discovered that Gatsha was a liar. Her kids had also kept discouraging her from being involved in Inkatha activities. Inkatha might have had a grudge against her for resigning. They might have assumed that meant she had joined a UDF group. But Mr. Dlamini wasn't involved in any political group at all. He had never been arrested or anything. Most people who have been victims of Inkatha are not even activists in UDF, but if you are against Inkatha, they assume you must be UDF. If a boy is in the SRC [Student Representative Council] at school, they think he is UDF. This is why most people have been killed and most houses have been burnt by Inkatha.
During my friend Robert's interrogation when he was in detention, the Special Branch drew a diagram with the state on one side and the opposition on the other. Groups like ECC [End Conscription Campaign], NEUSA, and UDF were written in as members of the opposition. Robert deliberately mentioned Inkatha as opposing the state, and the Special Branch said, »No, no, no! Inkatha is on the government's side«.  He was shocked that the Special Branch would actually say that. The Special Branch has also said to some people, »You must be happy to be in detention, because if we let you out, Inkatha would kill you«.  Clearly, Inkatha and the government work hand in glove with each other. Each time the people take a stand against the government, Inkatha attacks them. For example, when NECC [National Education Crisis Committee] encouraged people not to buy books or pay school fees in 1985 because they pay taxes and there is a high rate of unemployment and the government should provide for education, Inkatha attacked people.
In March last year, the NECC had a national conference here in Durban. NECC announced that the government should respond to their demands within three months; otherwise, there would be another conference where people would decide what to do next. This conference had nothing to do with Inkatha, but Gatsha made a statement that it was being held in Durban to provoke him. Although it was in a white area, Inkatha attacked us. I ran for my life into a shop and asked the owner to close the shop, then peeped into the street through the glass door. The shop owner wanted to phone the police, but I told him, »The police aren't going to do anything against Inkatha«.  Many people have been killed by Inkatha, but no arrests have been made. On this occasion the police came when Inkatha buses were arriving. After the war was over, they escorted them back into their buses.
Inkatha has killed hundreds of people. Last month nine school kids were killed in KwaMashu, and in Claremont, I can't say how many. In December, thirteen were killed in one family on one day. I am only talking about the very prominent incidents. In contrast, the UDF always avoids confronting Inkatha.
I am staying with Robert, who was detained last year. The police now realize that people use the white suburbs for hiding, so during the last state of emergency they concentrated their searches here. Each night we had to move to another house. When Robert was released from detention after about four weeks, he was shocked to find that I was still here to welcome him. He had been told in prison that I was a terrorist involved in the bombings that were exploding around Durban at that time. He had become convinced that I was using his house as an ANC base. The Special Branch had worked on his mind when he was in solitary confinement, and he had come to believe what they told him.
Being in hiding is very, very taxing. I become paranoid. I am suspicious of every car that stops and every telephone call. I can't even go to the shop. I actually detain myself. I can only move at night in disguise. I had to disguise myself yesterday to get my driver's license. I wore a domestic worker's uniform and a head scarf to the driving school. But it is still safer in a white area as far as Inkatha is concerned, and I prefer detention to being killed. Quite a few black people live in white areas or non-KwaZulu areas. Refugees used to live outside the country, but because of Inkatha, many people are now refugees from Inkatha inside the country.

The Consequences of Political Work

I'm not able to live with my kids because there is no place for us to stay together. They stay with me here at Robert's house over the holidays, but we receive telephone calls asking, »What are those black children doing here? Go back to the township«.  When I returned from meetings, my kids would say, »Ma, this telephone caller phoned again«.  It was very tough for them, but even so, they want to stay with me. But if I kept them here, who would look after them? I have to go to work and attend meetings, so it is much better that they stay with their granny, who is always at home.
There used to be phone calls even when the kids were not here. Anonymous callers would say things like, »Kaffirs should get out of that house«.  Last December my kids were in the house when the Special Branch came through the window and raided us. That night there was a telephone caller who threatened, »Remember the necklaces and the hand grenades,« and then banged down the telephone. The three children were sleeping on mattresses on the floor when there was a bang, bang, bang on the window. I jumped up thinking, »Today is our last day«.  I went to the other room where Thabo, Tozi's brother, sleeps and said, »The AWB [3] have come!« The police opened the window and entered the house. They looked around and wanted our identity papers. They didn't want to identify themselves, but we saw they were police because they had guns with them. They said they were going to take Thabo, but they left the house without him.
I think they raided us because Robert's house had become notorious by that time. I am not staying there right now because we were expecting raids there before the elections. I had planned to go back to the house today until I got the message that Robert was arrested at a demonstration this morning, so they might have a follow-up raid on the house while Robert is in prison.
I am now staying at another white man's house with a NEUSA friend, Vusi, whose life has also been threatened by Inkatha. He is also out of teaching now. An Australian guy who is staying there said that there was a street meeting of white people who were complaining about their black neighbors. Although this is defined as a white area by the Group Areas Act, there is a legal loophole according to which a black person can be here for ninety days. So the police have to prove that we have been here for more than ninety days, which is difficult.
Robert's big three-bedroom house has now become a home to me. One room is Robert's, another is mine, and there is a very big room that is used by other people who pop in and out. Tozi's brother started staying there continuously after his father was murdered by Inkatha last May [1986]. There is a difference between a home where I live and a place where I need to go when I am seriously hiding. I still use Robert's house as a hideout as far as Inkatha is concerned, but it is no longer a hideout as far as the state is concerned. I moved out during the state of emergency last year, but Robert stayed because he felt that he was not involved in anything serious. Then he was detained.

The Costs of Sexism

Women are doubly oppressed; we are oppressed by the regime and by our fellowmen. Even within the movement itself we have to fight against male domination. But it is different with NEUSA. I am the chairperson in Durban and the Soweto chairperson is also a woman who has been in that position since it started.
I became aware of sexism because of what I had to do as a wife. One time the classroom I was teaching in wasn't swept. The kids have to sweep the classroom themselves. I said, »Why is the classroom so dirty?« And the boys said, »It is these girls«.  I used the whole period to deal with the issue of sexism, and the following day the boys jumped up to pick up papers to impress me. By the end of the year, their attitudes had changed. My experience of marriage was very useful to me in looking at men and relationships critically, and it strengthened me as well. I always draw a parallel between oppression by the regime and oppression by men. To me it is just the same. I always challenge men on why they react to oppression by the regime, but then they do exactly the same things to women that they criticize the regime for. I tell them that they are doing the job for the regime. The regime wants few people to be involved in the struggle so it will be ineffective, so the men are supporting the regime when they say, »You stay at home while I go out to meetings«.  After the meetings they go back home and tell their wives about it. Often the man actually says at meetings what the wife was saying to him behind the scenes.

An Afrikaner Rebels

»I don't see myself as having any career in this country
other than working for the struggle... That's all I want
to do, and that's all that makes me happy.
I couldn't lead a life that is separate from it«.
HETTIE  V.

...grew up in a typical Afrikaner home, joining the Voortrekker Youth Movement when she was a young child. This is an Afrikaner nationalist, Christian organization which tries to involve young people in cultural activities, including politics and religion, to try to keep Afrikaners on the right path and close to the Afrikaner nation. Most of the small minority of whites who oppose apartheid with any degree of conviction are English-speaking South Africans. Afrikaners who reject the government's conservative, racist policies usually become alienated and cut off from their own people, and thus have more to lose than English-speaking South Africans. Hettie V. has had the courage and motivation to risk such loss.
Thirty-one years old in 1987, and single, Hettie V. is a feminist who lives with a woman friend in one of the »gray« areas of Cape Town. She dropped out of university after only a few months to involve herself in political work more or less full-time, working in overcrowded, impoverished, and ruthlessly persecuted squatter communities. Often supporting herself by working at odd jobs, she finally landed a position as a journalist in 1983. She describes the dramatic political events she covered in this capacity—the 1985 march on Pollsmoor Prison to demand the release of Nelson Mandela, the police harassment of the black squatter camps on the outskirts of Cape Town — as well as the earlier upheavals and stay away of 1976. Active in the women's movement since 1977, she is an acute observer of black and white women's differing attitudes toward feminism. Fearless and committed, Hettie V. lives on the edge, politically and financially. Security is not what she wants, but excitement and meaningful action, and she forgoes white privilege whenever possible to contribute to the struggle.

Growing Up Afrikaner

I grew up in a small Afrikaans community within a larger English community where everyone knew everyone else. I come from quite a middle-class family, but my parents sent all of us children to a very working-class high school to develop a social conscience. The school had been set up for poor Afrikaners, so we were among the wealthiest people in the school, though we weren't that wealthy. It was a pretty conservative Nationalist Party-type of environment, though my family is relatively liberal on both my mother's and father's sides. But even as liberal Afrikaners they were Nats [members of the conservative Nationalist Party] and belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church because there wasn't anything else to be. Although they didn't step very far out of line, they had a more humanistic approach to people and weren't out-and-out racists.
I was one of four children and the only girl. I was always a very rebellious child and questioned things around me, even though it was often interpreted as »cheeky«. I would often stand up for other kids.
I was a member of the Voortrekker Youth Movement until I was about seventeen. We all learned to shoot guns at about ten years of age, and we used to go to camps where we'd participate in staged battles. Some of us would stand guard against the »terrorists« who would attack the camp in the middle of the night. I wasn't a willing or good Voortrekker. In fact, I was quite a rebel within the movement.
We were being prepared to deal with the »black onslaught« [the expectation of being attacked by black people], and we used 22 guns which were loaded with real bullets. We learned about politics, basic survival, how to operate a two-way radio, how to do first aid. It was designed to fit us all into the civil defense system. In general, children learn to shoot in Afrikaans schools from the age of about twelve. It is part of the school cadet system for men, and the Youth Preparedness Program teaches both girls and boys to shoot. In 1976 [the year of the Soweto uprising], the school cadets patroled our school with guns from the school armory. People stood guard at night and over weekends in anticipation that the school would be attacked, though this never happened.
I didn't mind being a Young Voortrekker because I thought it was useful to learn to shoot. Afrikaners are not like English people, who don't like to argue and to get emotional. We talk and argue about religion and politics all the time. Those are our favorite subjects. All my uncles are in the Broederbond [a secret society of Afrikaners dedicated to furthering the interests of their people], and we often went on holidays where a couple of dozen people in my extended family would sit and argue all night. They still liked me because I'm one of them, even though I didn't agree with them. Afrikaners are very political people. You'll never find an Afrikaner who is undecided about anything.
I also had endless arguments with people in the Young Voortrekkers, and I eventually resigned on a point of principle. We'd get these badges like the Boy Scouts do, and one of the tests for the last badge remaining for me to get was to prove that I had a sound understanding of the political situation in South Africa. The person who tested us was the Nationalist Party's secretary for the town I grew up in. I had a blazing argument with him, and he failed me, which finally gave me a good enough reason to resign.
I became politically conscious in primary school at about ten or eleven years of age. But a lot of it was just rebelliousness. I remember during the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, I was the only person in primary school who supported Egypt. I did so because everyone else supported Israel. I always identified with the rebels. My parents were very freaked out about me because I had pictures of Yasir Arafat and Fidel Castro on my wall when I was a child. A lot of this was just to be provocative. But it became more than that when I was about twelve. Because the school was not an academically prestigious place, the teachers were people who cared, and they encouraged us to have debates about politics. I was anti-apartheid then, which wasn't a popular position in the school at all, and my brothers followed suit. We were known as the commies, the reds. When people didn't want to write a math test, they would start an argument with the teacher about communism, and they knew that we'd take up the whole period arguing with him, so they would get out of their test.
Two of my brothers and another friend were also very politically active at school. When I was in standard eight, one of us was in each of the high school classes. We took over certain organizations like the debating society and the school magazine, and we went to things like the Nationalist Party Leadership Training Conferences for high school students and tried to subvert them. We also organized a strike at our school. The girls still had to wear hats at that time, and we decided that this was nonsense, so we got everyone to throw their hats in the dustbins. We didn't have to wear hats any more after that.
I really don't understand why I grew up as I did. The only explanation I can think of is that my parents were more left than their parents, and we were more left than them, and that it may have been a kind of generational progression. Also, the kind of attitudes that they taught us toward people forced us to look at things in a more critical way and to question things. Basically, my parents are very kind, even though they're probably racists. They would never consciously undermine another human being's dignity. If a beggar or a drunk came to the door to ask for money, they treated that person with respect.
I had a very unsexist upbringing. We always did the same chores at home and had the same rights. I got the same toys. My parents encouraged me to stand on my own feet. They told me that they realized that I was going to be an independent type, so I should know how to look after myself. I was confronted with a sexist world when I went to school, so I naturally rebelled against that, too. I was also very involved in sports like rugby and cricket. I was called a tomboy, but there wasn't a stigma against this in the community I grew up in. It was only when I hit puberty that I was supposed to change.

Working in Squatter Communities

I always wanted to be part of an anti-apartheid group, so that's why I went to an English-speaking university. There were no anti-apartheid groups at Stellenbosch [an Afrikaans university]. My parents really wanted me and my brothers to attend an Afrikaans university. They feared if we went to UCT [University of Cape Town], we would become involved in politics. However, we eventually did go to English-speaking universities and did become involved in student politics. But I left university after six months because I quickly became very disillusioned with it.
While I was still at UCT, I started working in squatter camps around Cape Town, and I worked there full-time after I quit university. A lot of my friends supported me financially while I did this work, but I also started a scrap recycling project with a few other people. There was a big rubbish dump just outside Cape Town where we collected glass, bottles, cardboard, and metal, to sell. And we cut firewood, which we also sold. I didn't really worry much about money.
These squatter communities had absolutely no access to resources like sewage systems or water. The people there wanted projects that would strengthen the organizations and politicize people, so together with others I did literacy teaching in a consciousness-raising way using the methods of Paulo Friere [a Brazilian theorist and radical activist who devoted his life to trying to advance the fortunes of impoverished peoples]. We also tried to train barefoot lawyers and barefoot doctors in the community and helped to get vegetable gardens going.
A lot of the squatters where I was working were Coloured people who had been moved out of white areas. Insufficient housing had been provided for them in the areas where they were supposed to go, or they were too far from their places of work, so they had no choice but to squat. At that stage there was a three hundred thousand housing shortage in Cape Town for Coloured people. In those days most squatters had corrugated-iron shacks, whereas today far more of them have plastic and cardboard shacks, which are much worse. A lot of them were quite settled communities that had sometimes been there for years. They were relatively secure on the land because most of the squatting laws hadn't been passed yet. But they were still very poor, very unorganized, and very crime-ridden. Especially in the Coloured areas, there are lots of gangs, and they are also very vulnerable to gangs from other areas.
I remember speaking to one woman in a very small squatter camp who had been raped fourteen times by gangs who came in a truck on weekends. These gangs would go through the community, bash down all the doors, take everything, rape a few women, then leave in their truck. A committee tried to organize a system where someone would blow a whistle as soon as the gangs came, to rally other people for help. But people ran away into the bush when they heard the whistle. Because this woman's house was the first one, she got hit every time. She reported what happened to the Divisional Council which was in charge of the land, and she and others asked to move their shacks closer to a big community to get some protection. But the Divisional Council said, »No. Once you've built a shack, you're lucky if you're allowed to stay. You can move to a proper housing area, but you can't move around here and make it easier for yourself«.
People wouldn't try to lay charges against the gangs for the rape for fear of being killed in retaliation. Gangs are one of the reasons why the Coloured areas aren't as politically organized as the African areas. Someone said that about eighty percent of Coloured boys belong to gangs. Some of the gang members make their living by being drug dealers, but most just engage in petty crime or violence in their own communities. And the police have never tried very hard to get rid of them or to control them because they keep people scared and inside their houses rather than going to meetings and getting involved in the community. The gangs have got a hell of a lot of power and quite a lot of wealth in some areas. Some community organizations are trying to work with them to change their attitudes.
The community leaders and committees in the Coloured areas were almost all female. Women are exceedingly strong in the Coloured community because traditionally they work. The major industries in Cape Town are garment and textile production and food and canning, both of which employ many Coloured women. So Coloured women are often quite stable wage earners, whereas Coloured men often work in more unstable and seasonal jobs like fishing, farm labor, and construction. Coloured women have traditionally worked, brought up the children, kept the house; in squatter camps, they have often also built the house, worked in the community, sat on the committees, been active in churches, and slaved their guts out to get their children educated. A lot of them are fierce, strong women.

Police Brutality and Political Resistance in 1976

Nineteen seventy-six was a very dramatic time. The unrest in Soweto spread to Cape Town, and there was a hell of a lot of action here. The squatter camp I worked at most of the time was close to a lot of it. The repression got much worse around that time. Our tires were slashed outside our homes or outside the squatter camps all the time. We were always being stopped by the police and searched and had to find back ways to go into the camps. A lot of the roads were closed because the cops set up roadblocks. Sometimes I got through by telling lies to the police if they didn't know me. I'd tell them that I was from Stellenbosch University and that I was teaching Bible classes to squatters. I told them I wasn't scared to go in because God was on my side and this kind of work had to continue, especially at this time. Sometimes they'd even give me an escort.
After June 1976, the police told everyone who attended our literacy groups that they would lose their houses if they continued to come. Most of the people didn't come back so we had to change our strategy, which was actually very good. We trained the people who were already a bit educated, and who were in leadership positions, to teach the classes themselves. So the work became less visible, and it didn't create dependency relationships. White people going into communities was always a very suspicious thing to the cops. They knew that we discussed politics because there were police informers in our groups.
In 1976, there were school boycotts, fighting in the streets, barricades. A lot of people were shot. For three days there were riots in Adderley Street [the main road in Cape Town]. A stayaway had been called, and black people decided to go to [largely white] Cape Town because white people had been so isolated from the unrest that they didn't have a clue what was going on.
The stayaway started with a march by a group of Coloured school kids who had taken a train into Cape Town. People from all over joined them, and within half an hour there must have been ten thousand people walking up and down Adderley Street. After a while all the shopkeepers closed their doors and put down their burglar bars. The cops were armed with guns and teargas and truncheons—wooden batons with lead in the middle. They formed two lines on either side of Adderley Street, then marched toward each other so that all the people were squashed up the side roads. Then they shot teargas and clobbered people with their truncheons.
I got clobbered over the head by a cop who had probably been watching me. I wasn't doing anything, but I was with black people so I obviously wasn't a shopper. I thought I had been shot because the cops had started shooting over the heads of the crowd. I was unconscious for about ten minutes. I woke up with everyone running over me, and feeling a pain in my head. I thought, »I have a bullet in my head. I'd better not move because then I'll die«.  I was paralyzed for a few minutes. People carried me into a shop, and a guy said, »No, you weren't shot. You were just clobbered. I saw the policeman do it«.  Then somebody else looked at my head and said, »No, there's a bullet in your head,« and I promptly became paralyzed again. The blow had cracked my head a bit, and I still have a dent in my skull from it. But I'm never scared in these situations. When there's shooting, I just hit the ground. I'm always a bit terrified afterward, when I realize what has happened.
The next day I went back to Cape Town—but with a crash helmet! As soon as a group gathered, the cops would disperse them with tear gas and baton charges. Eventually there were about a hundred people in front of the city hall on one side and the cops on the other side in two vans. Two black guys were walking between the two groups when the cops ran across, grabbed them, and started dragging them to their vans for no apparent reason. About a hundred of us surged forward to go to rescue these two people when the cops pulled out their handguns and shot at us. Two people were killed. Then thirty police vehicles arrived, and the police started charging us. A group of us ran into the city hall followed by about a hundred policemen. Eventually they arrested and beat so many people that the demonstrations stopped. This kind of crisis went on until the end of 1976. They didn't call a state of emergency, but they killed and injured many people. All the people killed were black.
The police did all kinds of other ugly things during that period. For example, they announced that they had found pamphlets that called for a »Kill-a-White Day«.  Every black person was meant to kill a white on a particular day. We knew the pamphlets were coming from the cops to increase white paranoia so as to detract from the real issues and turn the unrest into a racial war. On the »Kill-a-White Day« a lot of white people didn't move out of their houses. They had their overnight bags packed and their guns ready. But not a single white person was injured in the whole country in spite of the wide distribution of these pamphlets. This shows how much maturity there is in the black community despite months of harassment. People knew that the call wasn't coming from their people, or even if it was, that it was something that should be ignored.

Feminism, the Left, and Anti-Apartheid Politics

I joined the women's movement at the end of 1977. It was very small at that stage and not very active. It had started in 1975 when Juliet Mitchell [British feminist author] came out from England to give a lecture here. We confronted white left-wing organizations a lot with their sexism. We organized a walkout of a National Union of South African Students' conference in 1978 by about sixty percent of the women on the grounds that they didn't take women's issues seriously, that they saw us as peripheral to the struggle, that the leadership positions in NUSAS were very male-dominated, and that we didn't agree with the hierarchical nature of the leadership positions. It caused an incredible trauma and took about two years before the women got properly integrated into the left again. We were accused of dividing the left. Despite this, feminism was at the height of its popularity on campuses in 1978-79. The women's movement was much noisier then than it is now, but there are probably more feminists around today. Feminism is now more accepted by the left because of the kind of noise we made then.
But in those days the women's movement was a very white, middle-class thing. Feminism didn't take off at black universities. In fact, there were no active black women's organizations, other than church ones, and there were no nonracial political organizations like UDF. So whites basically worked on campus, and feminists worked in organizations like Rape Crisis. A lot of the criticisms of us—like that we were too Western — were valid because we took feminism straight from America and Europe and fought for the same things here. Nevertheless, we felt that the issues we focused on had to be taken up, and that we weren't just being divisive.
When black women formed women's organizations, they chose to get involved in more grassroots community issues like rent, housing, and food. With the birth of nonracial organizations, most feminists chose to get involved in anti-apartheid organizations rather than to remain an outside pressure group and be branded as lunatics. They worked within these organizations to push for equality of women within the struggle and for other women's issues like child care. Issues like contraception or women's right to determine their own reproduction are more problematic. Although thousands of women have back-street abortions, there's no way that abortion will be taken up as an issue. [Abortion is still illegal in South Africa.] In the black community, people are relatively conservative about things like this and quite religious. This makes it a difficult issue for white women to take up because if we do, it becomes a case of cultural domination. And contraception is a very dicey issue in South Africa because family planning is used by the state against black people in such a racist way.
I don't think the struggle will ever stop for feminists. The conclusion I came to last year, which is quite a drastic one because I see myself as a revolutionary, is that feminism will always be a reformist struggle in this country. Whoever is in power, we will still have to chip away at things. There will never be a mass-based feminist movement that will threaten or challenge the system, whoever is running it. So we have to adapt our strategies accordingly.
Feminists in this country have to commit ourselves very firmly to the struggle in general if we want to have any effect afterwards; otherwise, we're just going to be seen as fence sitters. It's not a question of being manipulative and saying, »O.K., we'll adopt these strategies because that way we'll achieve our hidden agendas«.  It's recognizing that housing and schooling and torture may not be »feminist« issues, but that they are important issues. And as feminists, we cannot ignore the important human issues. Our position is very difficult, because a lot of people who are very strong feminists are also white and middle-class. That means that we have to triply earn our credibility, and we're viewed with triple suspicion.

Working as a Journalist: 1983-86

About four years ago, I became a freelance journalist. I covered politics, labor, education, housing, and a little bit of central government stuff. And I did a lot of features on community issues like removals and demolitions in squatter camps that were very horrifying.
Whites weren't allowed into the black townships in those days, so I often had to be smuggled in. I would put on a balaclava and a blanket, and then the taller people would walk in a group around me so that I wasn't obviously a white person going in there. Had the cops caught me, they would have taken my tapes and thrown me out and they also might have arrested me.
For example, in 1983 a new squatter camp called KTC was started with twenty houses made of sticks covered with black plastic rubbish bags. Because of demolitions in other squatter camps, KTC kept growing. But every day the cops and the administration board would demolish and burn people's shelters. It became a big issue in the community, and some people who had houses elsewhere put up shelters there out of defiance. Within two or three weeks there were ten thousand people living there, most of them women. And it was the women who organized the resistance. A lot of them had come to Cape Town to join their husbands, who had been living in the [so-called] single men's hostels as migrant workers. Other women from Cape Town joined them.
Although it was winter, the cops' raids got bigger and bigger. Sometimes it would be raining, but the cops would still come and bash down the houses, and whole families with kids would have to sit there in the rain all day until it was dark enough to build their shelters again. Eventually people started breaking down their shelters early in the morning and burying their materials so that they wouldn't lose everything when the raids came, because it was impossible to get any sticks or rubbish bags anywhere any more. A lot of people dug holes in the ground and put plastic over the top because they said the police couldn't demolish holes. It was a nauseating business. People would have prayer meetings and sing and watch the cops demolishing their shelters and the cops would then shoot tear gas to get them to move away from the scene. This went on for about four months. One day hundreds of cops came in and demolished the shacks, then put barbed wire around the place, parked a few casspirs there, put search lights up, and stayed there for weeks and weeks so people couldn't rebuild at night. So most of the people moved to Crossroads [the most famous squatter township in South Africa] and the demolitions then started there.
I also covered all the school and university unrest in 1985 until the state of emergency was called in October 1985.[4] It was a very dramatic period for journalists because people were being shot every day or two.
The unrest [in the western Cape] started in August 1985 with the march on Pollsmoor to deliver a message of support to Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned there. The march was meant to start at Athlone Stadium, so I went there at five o'clock in the morning, but the whole of Athlone had been cordoned off with armored vehicles making it impossible to get through to the stadium. There were alternative plans, but no one knew what they were. Some people went to Athlone, but the cops whipped them and forced them away. One segment of the march started with about four thousand people from Hewat, a Coloured teachers' training college. The cops whipped them and trapped a lot of them in a hall, then threw tear gas into the hall causing a big commotion. About a thousand more people marched from UCT. Eventually the planning committee for the march started marching from just outside Pollsmoor, and they were all arrested. After that, all hell broke loose everywhere.
The police became very paranoid about the kind of press coverage they were getting, especially from the journalists with foreign connections. They started shooting at journalists with tear gas cannisters or rubber bullets. Rubber bullets are four inches long and about one inch wide and made of very hard rubber. The police call them rubber batons. They are cylindrical in shape so they've got sharp edges. If they are shot in the air and then drop down on someone, they're not lethal. But if they are shot at someone at close range, they're as lethal as anything. People have been killed by them, especially when they get hit in the throat or in the eye. And I've seen people with furrows cut through their skulls from being hit at too close range with them. Instead of shooting them in the air, the cops shot them right at us.
I was hit by a rubber bullet once on my hip, but it wasn't serious. I had a huge bruise and a mark from it which took months and months to go away. The cops were shooting tear gas at the students at the University of the Western Cape because they were stoning a bus, and I got caught in the middle. Suddenly there were stones raining down on me, so I jumped into a ditch. I was hit by a rubber bullet just as I was jumping. I thought, »Oh, shit, I've been hit!« but I had to get out of there in a hurry because the cops stormed onto the campus and started arresting people and shooting real bullets at them. So I ran with some people and hid in a lab. I put on a white coat that I found lying around, then walked out as if I was a member of the university staff. A group of students recognized me and called me because someone had been shot in the head and they wanted a journalist to take pictures of this. Then we organized one of the caretakers to try to get the victim to a hospital in the maintenance van without being arrested. By that time I'd forgotten that I'd been hit.
It felt a bit like being a war correspondent where, although you're on the sidelines, you're actually on one side. And the cops knew it. You can't maintain a position of neutrality in such a situation. The whole concept of journalist-as-observer disappeared when cops started targeting us. I became totally dependent for protection on the people who could hide me or carry my tapes out. If the cops came toward me, I'd pass all my tapes and my film to anyone and say, »Please keep it«.  And to get my stuff back, I'd give them my phone number and hope for the best.
I've often been tear - gassed, which is the most awful feeling. The police don't use a tear gas that makes you cry, like in the States. It's something that attacks your nerve endings wherever you're wet on your body, like in your mouth, your eyes and throat, your lungs, under your armpits. It gives you a sharp unbearable pain, so you stop breathing. If you put water on your skin, which a lot of people do because that used to help with the old kind of tear gas, your whole face feels as if it's on fire. There's another kind of tear gas they use less often that makes you vomit.
We've discovered all kinds of remedies for tear gas. I always used to walk around with a lemon, because it helps if you put lemon on a piece of cloth and breathe through it. Without lemon, it becomes so painful that you don't want to breathe, and you can't see where you are going because your eyes are aching so much. It's a very effective crowd dis-perser. As long as it's around, you're almost totally immobilized, and you feel sore for hours afterward. If somebody comes close to you and smells it on your clothes, they'll feel sore as well. People have died of suffocation from it, especially when they're in confined spaces. I'm far more scared of tear gas than of anything else, because with rubber bullets you still have a chance to see if someone is pointing a gun at you, or you can hit the ground, or they may miss. I understand why tear gas causes people to panic completely.
I've seen people who've had six-month-old scars from being hit with sjamboks. They cut the skin and leave huge weals. One of the cops' favorite things is to hit women across their breasts with them. When they disperse gatherings, they're meant to only use as much violent force as is necessary, but they'll often hit people until they fall to the ground, then carry on beating them which, of course, prevents them from dispersing. They like doing that to journalists because they hate us. I've covered a lot of white student protests and seen people getting completely freaked out from being sjamboked. This is a very normal reaction in one sense—in that it's a very invasive, abusive, and violent experience, and some students complain of nightmares afterward. But people in the townships [black people] experience it all the time and don't make such a big deal of it.
People didn't understand the concept of a progressive journalist in those days, so the press was seen as part of the system during the first few weeks of unrest. We were in the crossfire a lot, and it became very dangerous. Journalists had their cars stoned and petrol bombs thrown into them, and they were always being stopped at roadblocks—people's roadblocks, not police roadblocks. It took about a month before people realized that some journalists served a useful purpose, and then they started being more protective toward us. Usually what happens is that the people are on one side, in a school yard or at a university or in the street, and the cops are on the other side, and the journalists stand in the middle somewhere, but slightly to the side. We'd go and interview the people, and if we had the guts, we'd go and interview the cops, but we didn't want to be seen talking to the cops. Then somebody would throw a stone or somebody would shoot, and it was like watching a war being played out in front of you.
There had been school boycotts since June of 1985 which all the Coloured and African schools participated in. Every day something awful happened at some school, like the school kids would be having a meeting or a demonstration in the school yard, and the cops would come and shoot lots of people, and some would be killed. The cops were trying to force people to stay in classrooms, so they'd be posted outside the classroom doors or in the classrooms to see that the teachers were teaching. Eventually the government closed down all the African and Coloured schools in Cape Town. They said, »If you want to boycott the schools, we'll close them down«.  People then decided to reopen the schools because they wanted them to be changed, not shut down. So on 17 October 1985, parents, teachers, and children planned to reopen the schools everywhere.
One of my most terrible experiences occurred at a school called Alexander Sinten in Athlone. I went to the Athlone area [a Coloured suburb of Cape Town], because I thought there would be the most trouble there. There were a couple of kids standing around singing in the quad when I walked in, and parents and children were arriving to open the school [Alexander Sin ten]. I went to interview the headmaster, who was standing at the gate when two vans and about six cops arrived and arrested us. They arrested me for trespassing on government property. Then they put guards at the entrances to the quad and said that all the children were under arrest. Next they called for reinforcements to come and take about one hundred seventy of us away. Meanwhile, more and more people kept arriving to reopen the school. There are three other schools in the area and a teacher's training college, and lots of people came to see what was going on. Although the cops had closed the gates almost immediately, about four thousand people gathered outside. By this time I was under arrest in the back of a police van with a lot of other people.
The people outside the gates took all the cars that were parked on the pavements, picked them up, and stuck them in the middle of the road so that the casspirs couldn't come in to take the rest of us away, and they got the local butcher to park all his refrigeration trucks in the road. After about forty minutes the place had been cordoned off by the people and was absolutely impassable to traffic. I was still sitting, as hot as hell, in the back of a van with the teachers and headmaster and some of the students. By this time the cops were absolutely panicking because it was only three days after a cop had been killed by a Muslim crowd at a funeral in Salt River [a neighborhood nearby]. Cops don't often get killed in South Africa, and there were a lot of Muslims outside the school shouting for holy war. The cops were standing right next to our van, not knowing what to do.
An imam [Muslim priest] came to try to negotiate for our release. He said that the people would stop the blockade if those of us inside the gates were let out, but the cops said, »No, we're never going to get out of here alive unless we have these people in the back of our vans«.  And it was true. By this time the stones were raining down on that place, and we were kept there for four hours. They wouldn't even let us go and wee or get water or anything. Then a huge army truck that's used for towing broken-down casspirs and other large vehicles drove over the back fence of the school, flattened it, and brought in a lot of troops and riot weapons, because up to that point the cops only had guns.
We shouted from the vans to try to warn people that these guys were coming in from the back. Then they started firing tear gas at the crowd to try to clear them away. I stopped counting after about fifty-six canisters, but the people just picked them up and threw them back. All the cops had on gas masks, but we had to sit in an open police van in an absolute cloud of tear gas. We thought we were going to die. Cops then charged from all sides, and the people moved a few blocks back. The breakdown trucks came and towed all the cars off the road, enabling the cops to drive off with us in the backs of the vans. They also brought in more vans, loaded about half the people into them, and charged out of there. Somebody threw a stone at the guy who was driving our van, while everyone shouted, »AmandM,« and he pulled out his gun and started shooting.
We spent the rest of the day in jail, until the lawyers came and got us out because they'd arrested us for nothing. I was the only white person there, but it took them a while to figure out that I was white because a lot of Muslim people are lighter than I am. They put all the women, girls, boys, and men in separate cells. In the women's cell there were twenty-three of us, two teachers, myself, and the rest were mothers who had come to support their children. They were people who hadn't been in prison before, and they became more and more defiant as the time passed. A cop came in to find out if anyone had any medical problems, and one woman said she wanted pads. He said, »O.K., I'll see what I can do«.  Then another woman said, »I want maternity pads,« and somebody else said, »I want Liletts [a kind of tampon]«.  They went through all the brand names for sanitary napkins, which made him very embarrassed. He was blushing when he said, »I'll bring toilet paper and that will handle it all«.  That sort of incident cheered everyone up.
One woman said, »I don't know what's going to happen to my house because my children are also here today«.  Another said, »Well, my husband is here, too, so I don't know what's going to happen when my primary-school children get home«.  They'd compare notes as to how many of them were united in this thing. It was very sweet. But eventually the cops put me in a separate cell because they realized I was white.
I have been in police cells a number of times for being in the wrong township at the wrong time, but I've never been in serious trouble. The longest time I've been in is overnight. The cops would tell a crowd to disperse but I'd want to be where the action was to record it. I'd often end up being the last one to get away, and that's how I got hit a few times.
After the 1985 state of emergency was declared, journalists were suddenly much more restricted. We couldn't report on police action. We weren't allowed to take sound recordings or film recordings any more. Restrictions became even worse after the state of emergency was renewed on 12 June 1986. We weren't allowed to be at the scene of unrest.
There were very heavy penalties for breaking this and other rules — like ten years in prison or a fine of twenty thousand rand [$10,000] or both. After that, the restrictions kept getting worse and worse. Basically we could only cover the police's side of things. Then they centralized it all, so that we couldn't even interview local police any more, and we had to get the information from Pretoria. So I quit being a journalist.

On Being White in the Anti-Apartheid Movement

Before 1976, whites were involved peripherally in the labor movement and in work like I was doing in the squatter camps. After 1976, there was a huge Black Consciousness movement, and whites were not part of the mainstream anti-apartheid movement. After 1980, the nonracial democratic organizations were being born all over the place, and the nonracial organizations like the UDF became the strongest. I've never experienced animosity from anyone in any of these organizations on a racial basis, which surprises me.
It also surprises me that I could go into a riot in a squatter camp without anybody threatening me or being hostile toward me. I don't understand it. I think that there is something very, very special about black people in this country. People are prepared to listen to me and to judge me as a human being and not merely as someone with a white skin. It amazes me every time I experience it because I don't think that I would have that tolerance if I were in that position. And I don't think white people in general would put up with so much and then still be open to people as human beings.
I don't have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on my political work. That's all I want to do, and that's all that makes me happy.

Marriage Across the Color Bar

»I don't just believe that the personal is political,
as most radical feminists do, but that the political
is also often very personal, as my story of
>love across the color bar< shows«.
RHODA  BERTELSMANN-KADALIE

...was born in 1953 in District Six, the low-income black community that was completely destroyed by the government's efforts to separate black and white residential areas described by Rozena Maart in chapter 19. »Because of the Group Areas Act, we had to move around Cape Town quite a lot«, explained Bertelsmann-Kadalie, a Coloured woman, thirty-four years old in 1987 when I interviewed her.
After graduating in 1975 from the University of the Western Cape,[5] a black university, Bertelsmann-Kadalie completed an honors degree in social anthropology there, then went to the University of Cape Town to study for an M.A., also in anthropology. She didn't complete this degree, but in 1986 obtained an M.A. in women and development studies at the Institute for Social Studies in the Hague, the Netherlands. Bertelsmann-Kadalie was on maternity leave from teaching at UWC at the time I interviewed her, nursing and caring for her few-months-old baby, Julia.
Although Bertelsmann-Kadalie didn't tell me that her grandfather, Clements Kadalie, had been a famous organizer of workers in the 1920s, other people did. Perhaps pride in her family name, as well as her feminism, accounts for her desire to maintain her father's name. But she also wanted to take the last name of her white husband, Richie Bertelsmann, to emphasize to the South African authorities that she was married to him, despite the illegality of this union in their eyes. There are many different ways to rebel against apartheid, including ignoring the racist laws against interracial marriage, as Rhoda Bertelsmann-Kadalie did. Most of her story is taken up with the police harassment she and her husband experienced owing both to their marriage and to their political activities.

Growing Up Coloured

I come from a big family with nine children. I was aware of apartheid from a very young age. When I was six years old, we moved to a white area in Cape Town because my father was transferred there. He was in charge of the municipal laundries where white people used to come and bring their washing. We were the only so-called Coloured family living in the area. So from my second year of school onward, I was living in a white area while always being made aware that I was Coloured. For example, I used to play with a white minister's daughter in the neighborhood. Her mother used to say to her, »You can only play with Rhoda for five minutes because she's black«.  After school I used to meet a white girl called Paddy to play with her before we went home. One day I walked her home and at the door said, »Bye-bye, Paddy«.  Her mother said sternly, »Miss Paddy to you«. I said, »But she doesn't call me Miss Rhoda«.  »She's saying that to you because you're black«, my mother explained. And one day I was suddenly told, »You can't play here any longer because it's a park for white people«. I registered these experiences as a little girl, though I couldn't make sense of them.
My father became a minister, and when he complained about the apartheid in the churches, another minister—whom he thought was a friend—said, »You sound like a communist«. I had a lot of white Christian friends who would be friendly with me in the church but wouldn't look at me in the local supermarket. I used to run interracial camps. Many of my white friends used to invite me to their parties, and they would say, »Oh, meet my nice friend who's not at all bitter«. I would be asked to address white schools on my experiences as a Coloured student, and when I began to show my indignation and anger about the way I was treated, I wasn't asked as much any more. My younger sister and I have been thrown out of restaurants because they were for whites only or because we went in the whites-only entrance.

Marriage and Police Harassment

I met Richie at the University of the Western Cape when he joined the staff as a new lecturer there in 1980.[6] A colleague of mine was already acquainted with him, and the three of us went to see a very poignant play on migrant labor and the difficulties it creates for family life. I was very impressed by what he thought about the play, though I also felt that he was trying to impress me politically. He kept saying to me, »Well, don't you think I also feel disgusted about the situation in this country?« We dated each other every week from then on.
At that time I was the youth leader of our church in a Coloured township where the crime rate was very high. Richie isn't particularly religious, but he went to our church with me, and he was very impressed by our efforts to provide recreation and political outlets for the people. He loved doing that kind of thing with me. It was the first time in his life that he was involved in a Coloured township activity, because he had grown up in Pretoria and had attended very middle-class white schools. After courting for two years, we realized our relationship was becoming serious. I had wanted to break it off several times because my father was opposed to it because Richie isn't a Christian, and I felt I couldn't cope with my father's pressure. While Richie's father opposed our relationship on racial grounds, his parents were also apprehensive about the problems which we as a »mixed couple« could encounter in a society like ours. When we decided we wanted to marry, they realized there was nothing they could do about it so they might as well accept it.
It was still illegal for people of different races to marry then. We decided to stay because we felt that too many people in our situation had left the country and not opposed that law. We thought the best strategy would be to buy a house, so we looked for one before we even told anybody we were getting married. As university employees we qualified for a subsidy, so it was quite easy to get a house. We bought one in Observatory — a white working-class area [in Cape Town]—because it is more tolerant than most. Communes in which white students live with their black student friends are flourishing here. We bought the house under Richie's name because only he qualifies for a house in this legally-defined white area.
Marriage was the next step. We decided to fly to Namibia [7] over a weekend, marry, then come hack, and move into our house. So in December 1982 that's what we did. The Mixed Marriages Act had been repealed in Namibia in 1978, but that didn't mean that the people there liked marrying us. The white magistrate didn't even look at us, and during the marriage ceremony he asked: »Do you, Richard Bertelsmann, white man, marry Rhoda Kadalie, Coloured girl?« He tried to rub it under our noses that we were breaking the law in South Africa and that he hated having to marry us. I wanted to keep my maiden surname for feminist reasons. But for political reasons I decided to adopt Richie's name to rub it under their noses that, »I am married, and you will have to accept it whether you like it or not«.
After our return, the police drove up and down the street about five times a day to intimidate us. They would stop at the gate and look at us but not say anything. I remember one night we went to a party and came home very late. We were sitting in the car kissing when a cop car parked next to us. The cops looked at us, and we looked at them, and then we rolled the window down to say, »Hey, what's this all about?« but they left before we could question them. They never physically intimidated us as they've done to many other mixed couples. For example, we know of the police having entered the home of a mixed couple and having tried to get a video of them in the act [of having sex]. Maybe they are reluctant to prosecute us because we teach at a volatile and politically explosive university. The students might protest and cause disruption if they do anything to us. We also have a lot of influential friends who would come to our aid if anything happened. People who don't have the connections and the student support we have get screwed by the police for living together.
Once we looked after the children of a well-known anti-apartheid leader while he was away for a fortnight, and the police phoned us the first day we were home. A police officer said, »We would like you to come and report at the Wynberg Magistrate's Court tomorrow at 8 a.m«. I asked why. »Because«, he said, »I have a copy of your marriage certificate, and we would like to question you about contravening the Group Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages Act, and the Immorality Act«. I replied, »If you have our marriage certificate, you know everything about us already, so why should I come?« He got a bit cross and said, »Look, we want to know all the details about your marriage«. I told him I'd consult my lawyer, which made him more annoyed. »You don't need a lawyer«, he said. »You just have to sign a paper«. I said, »You'll hear from us«. I immediately linked this call with our having stayed with this well-known family. Their phone was tapped, and this political leader was hot property at that time. The government tried to get him in all kinds of ways.
The same police officer phoned us again to say that we should fill out a form and come in for questioning. This time we went, and they asked Richie all about his background, his education, his family, where he grew up, and so on. Richie speaks perfect Afrikaans, and their attitude was »How could a sweet, innocent Afrikaner like you go wrong?« The police officer was shocked to learn that he had studied at the Rand Afrikaans University. Throughout the interview the officer ignored me. He didn't even look at me or address me, as if I didn't exist to him. He didn't recognize me as the wife of this man. But when they were finished with Richie, the sergeant looked at me and asked, »Do your friends recognize you as white or as Coloured?« I said, »I have the kind of friends to whom that doesn't matter«. When I wouldn't answer any more of his questions, he said, »You have to sign this form to the effect that you are breaking the Mixed Marriages Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Immorality Act«.  We refused to do this and said we'd consult our lawyer and then bring the form back. But we just kept the form and never went back.

University Protests and Further Harassment

The University of the Western Cape was established by the government in 1960, specifically for Coloured people. Many of us rejected the racist grounds on which the university was founded, but nevertheless enrolled as students since the mainline, predominantly white universities were closed to the growing number of black matriculants. At the time, many of us registered under protest, determined to fight for the deracialization of the university. It is for this reason that the university became an active site of struggle against the intervention of the apartheid state in our daily lives, particularly in our education. In the course of time, the university developed a strong tradition of protest, where demonstrations, boycotts, and marches against repressive laws and undemocratic practices meted out by the government on a regular basis became the order of the day.
I often joined these protests, alongside fellow progressive staff members, by refusing to teach during boycotts. A case in point was when a small group of staff together with students decided to protest against the newly created tricameral parliament and the new constitution in 1984. We campaigned vigorously against the Coloured and Indian elections, and joined students in making posters, picketing and marching, much to the chagrin of the rector. Many of us did not care whether we would be fired or not, and we felt very strongly that our rejection of this new parliament should be recorded for history's sake, no matter what the consequences.
The United Democratic Front asked the lecturers at our university to monitor the polls for the Coloured elections of this new tricameral parliament because we suspected that the polls would be rigged. Richie monitored the polls at Woodstock Town Hall, and I at the Cape Town Civic Center. That morning there were more policemen than voters! The police were angry with us because of our monitoring, so they intimidated us every five minutes. They wrote down our names and phoned the security police to check on our files. When they found out that Richie and I were both monitoring the polls, they said, »So you're not only breaking laws. You're also involved in subversive activity«. I was nearly arrested that day. The police were getting agitated with a friend and me for monitoring for too long, so at noon they came to us and said, »You're under arrest«.  For some reason they took her but not me. To me they said, »See that you get out of here as soon as possible«. I was horrified and frightened, and they followed me until I was out of Cape Town.
The next day the police officer who had been responsible for dealing with our marriage phoned. The police had checked up on us on election day and discovered that we hadn't been prosecuted. Apparently, the sergeant had got into trouble for this. We were then compelled to return the form, but decided to indicate in writing that we were married on 3 December 1982, in Namibia. The government was talking about reforms at the time, and everybody knew that the first item on the agenda was the scrapping of the Mixed Marriages Act. So we were angry with the police and said to them, »If you prosecute us, we will make a big stink about it. Why do you want to do this when the government is trying to get support for reform?« They said, »This is going to the attorney general, and we'll inform you about what he says«.  We never heard anything more, and they never did prosecute us. This happened just prior to our recent trip abroad. Ironically, we left on the day that they scrapped the Mixed Marriages Act—17 April 1985. I went to the Netherlands to study, and Richie went to Germany. Incidentally, there was an article about our marriage in a German newspaper on our arrival in Germany.
Soon after our return from study leave overseas, the Department of Internal Affairs sent us a letter saying, »You must apply for validation of marriage. Here is an affidavit to fill out in front of a commissioner of oaths, and, if approved, we might send you a marriage certificate«.  They are keeping our original marriage certificate, which Richie sent them when he applied for a new identity document on his return here from Germany. If I didn't have a copy, we'd have no marriage certificate. Because our marriage isn't recognized, our daughter Julia will probably be illegitimate. Although they treated us as a normal couple when we registered her at the Wynberg Magistrate's Court, we're now waiting to see if she's going to get her birth certificate. Normally these get issued about two weeks after the registration of birth, but we've been waiting about a month now, which I think is deliberate.
Richie also wrote a letter saying, »We are not applying for validation of our marriage. We left the country to marry because we feel that you have no right to decide who should marry whom«. I phoned »mixed couple« friends of mine who had also married in Namibia and who then divorced. I told them about this letter telling us that our marriage wasn't recognized. They found this very strange because they had divorced like any normal couple. This means that their marriage was recognized.[8] This is how they [the government] force one to submit to their laws; the rule is scrapped, but under the new law, you have to apply for validation. If our marriage is invalid because it has been contracted outside South Africa, then it follows logically that all marriages contracted outside South Africa are illegal. My German friends who got married in Germany should then also be required to apply for validation of their marriages in South Africa. But this doesn't happen, which means that it's purely a racial issue. So I don't care if they register Julia as illegitimate; I'm not prepared to apply for validation of our marriage.
I feel that we should take this up with the newspapers now. It would embarrass them and make the public aware of the cosmetic nature of the changes our country is making. They are now allowing couples of different »races« to marry, but then prosecuting them for breaking the Group Areas Act. They have prosecuted many mixed couples because the black partner was living in a white area. The Mixed Marriages Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Population Registration Act are the pillars of apartheid, but if they get rid of the one, they have to get rid of the others. I think they know this, but they can't cope with it. And they are angry that marriages have occurred across the color line. Implementing the Group Areas Act is their way of punishing those of us who have done this.

Other Problems for Mixed Marriages

Because Richie is white, and I am Coloured, I don't automatically inherit from Richie when he dies. Because of the Group Areas Act, I can't get this house, for example. I'm not allowed a house in a white area, so Richie has to make out a will in order that I at least benefit from the sale of the house.
Another disgusting thing is that they tax us jointly as a married couple. I'm going to challenge them on this. I plan to say, »You don't recognize my marriage, so pay me back all the taxes you've taken from me«. I want to take this to the newspapers as well. Also, men as husbands have property rights, not women. As a married woman, they won't allow me to own a house, so I'm also going to oppose this from a feminist's point of view. I shall not leave this house. They will have to take me out of here physically.
Schools are also a problem for children of mixed couples. Racial classification itself is a problem. I plan to find out more about how this situation affects children—for example, how they're classified racially — because this has a lot of implications for their schooling. I don't care how the government classifies me, but children suffer because of it. Other children might say to my child, »Your mother is black«, or, »Your father is white«, or, »You're a half-caste«, which is unpleasant for a child.
A mixed couple is never anonymous in this country. Many people stare at us when we go to a restaurant or to the beach. In fact, I was kicked off a beach once. Two years ago Richie and I went to Muizenberg Beach. I knocked my toe when I was walking on the beach, so I went to sit in the car because it really hurt. Two policemen came by and circled my car. Then the white policeman told the Coloured policeman to tell me to leave. (Whites are always getting Coloured people to do their dirty work.) So the Coloured cop told me to leave. I said, »Why?« He said, »You don't belong here«. I said, »Why?« He said, »You shouldn't be here«.  But he wouldn't tell me why I shouldn't be there. I kept asking, »Why?« and saying I wouldn't leave. So he went back to report to the white policeman, then came back and said, »My colleague says you must leave«. I repeated that I wasn't leaving. Then he said, »Are you white?« I said, »No, I'm not. And you're not either. What are you doing on the beach?« He said, »Don't backchat me. Just leave«. I said, »I can't leave because my husband is on the beach, and he's swimming«.  This made them even more annoyed because now they thought that there were two Coloured people on the beach! So they waited and waited. When Richie came, they were confused. I told him what was happening, and he went to take a shower. They circled and waited at the exit until we left. But they didn't come up to him and say, »Why are you here?« But I'm not intimidated by the police. Being at the university strengthens me. I think I would probably be chicken if I didn't have that political base.
With the scrapping of the Mixed Marriages Act, it's amazing all the people who are emerging from the closet. In contrast, Richie and I decided we were going to treat our marriage like any normal marriage. We hold hands on the streets and on the beach. And if our marriage doesn't work, we'll end it, like any other marriage. People often imply that we get on well because we want to show the world that this marriage works. People ask me, »Don't you find that there's a big cultural difference between you«.  But Richie has more in common with me than with an Afrikaner woman, for example. Of course, they wouldn't ask that question if he had married an Afrikaner.
The fact that they decided to call us into the police station for questions shows that they felt that we were being too brazen in openly flaunting our marriage, and they just wanted to remind us »to know our place«. If we become more active politically, it's also possible that we could face a Group Areas charge. That is why we have kept a low profile politically since our marriage. We wanted to get our marriage off the ground before having to cope with all these other kinds of political pressures. I would have liked to have been more actively involved with the UDF, but decided it was safer to be involved at the university.
If the government really intended to reform, why do they hassle harmless people like us about the Group Areas Act and the Mixed Marriages Act?

Feminism

I was the only girl for sixteen years with seven brothers, so I've always felt very oppressed by men. I didn't particularly like men, and I decided never to marry. After I graduated, I worked and had a car and dated a lot of student guys who often felt inferior to me. They always measured me by the fact that I earned a salary, and they felt intimidated by that. For example, since I had a car but my boyfriends didn't, they would insist on driving if we were to go somewhere together. I would say, »No, it's my car. Why should you drive?« I think I was a feminist long before I knew it. And then working in a white, male-dominated department at the university made me terribly aggressive about my rights as a woman.
If we women are sure of ourselves and our identity, then we don't need to compete with men. The slogan »women who want to be equal to men lack ambition« is very true for feminists here in this country. We don't just want to be equal to men, but more than that, we want to live a full, self-determined life and have the power to control our own bodies within and outside the home. Feminists are fighting for a more just social and economic order, where all forms of inequality, domination and oppression will have been removed.
What we need in this country is a healthy combination of liberal, radical, marxist, and socialist feminism—so that one realizes that to fight for the right to control one's own sexuality, to fight for better education, to fight against rent increases, or to fight as women for the right to live with one's migrant husband, are all feminist struggles. Women fight not as neutral subjects but as gendered beings. To make a dichotomy between political issues per se and issues of sexuality is to lose sight of the fact that the struggle for national liberation itself has a gender content.
In one of her books, Jackie Cock [feminist sociologist and author of Maids and Madams, 1980] writes that white women have tended to mobilize around issues of rape and violence, whereas black women are concerned about fighting for the vote, democratic rights, boycotts, and things like that. But even though the distinction is there organizationally, black women actually talk about both kinds of issues. Of course, white women don't have to fight for the vote, but they should fight for black people's right to vote.

The Future

When the level of struggle escalated in 1985, I was still overseas and I thought the time for a revolution was at hand. Then when my friends or family came to visit, they'd still be the same. One friend said, »Rhoda, you're going to be a grandmother before you see change«.  Now that I'm back, I really feel like that is true. I saw a documentary on the military might of South Africa, and I am convinced that the government will fight to the death before it changes. So I think I'll be one of the many who will not remain to tell the story.

A Child of the Struggle

»The police began harassing us more and more.
My mother had to take us to see a psychiatrist
last year because we couldn't cope with our work
or with other people any more«.
LEILA ISSEL

...is the eldest of Shahieda (see chapter 4) and Johnny Issel's three children. Her two brothers, Yasser and Fidel, were eleven and nine years old in 1987, and she was thirteen.
I picked Leila up from Alexander Sinten Senior School in Athlone [9] — a so-called Coloured area in Cape Town—to take her to her home for the interview. The walls by the school were covered with political graffiti. The government appears to have given up trying to clean it up in the black areas of town, but I noticed that in the white areas it would often be gone in a day or two. Leila directed me to her mother's home in Mitchells Plain, normally an hour's bus journey for her each way. She said that she used to go to Moslem school after arriving home, but now it's over by the time she gets back and instead she usually plays the piano.
In her interview, Leila describes how it has been to grow up from the cradle being harassed by the police, owing to her mother and father's political activity. She speaks of her own »first arrest«, of how she rescued her father, of how she and her brothers lived during her mother's imprisonment, and of political activity at her school. In South Africa schoolchildren typically wear school uniforms, as Leila did on this occasion. When I asked her what Mitchells Plain and South Africa would be like if she had her druthers, she answered, »They would be like in America, where the children have their free will and can wear what clothes they like to school«.
My father has been gone or arrested most of my life. He was in hiding when I was a few months old. Apparently, the police barged into the house, grabbed me, and asked my mother where he was. They said that if she didn't tell them, something would happen to me. So my father came out of hiding because he has a soft spot about his children being harassed.
There was a mass rally here at the Rockland's Civic Centre [in Mitchells Plain] when I was seven years old. I was asked to speak there on behalf of my father, who was banned at the time. Afterward, the police threatened my mother, saying, »We're going to fetch your daughter at school, and you're never going to see her again«. I had to go to my teacher's home each afternoon after school, then she took me to my home at about six o'clock. Someone always had to be with me wherever I went to stop the police from getting me.
At the meeting to launch UDF [1983] I spoke about my father being banned, and I read from the papers that the police had given to him when they banned him about how he'd be arrested if he went past a particular place. I said how my father could only visit us or take us to the beach one day every three months. Some of the people there got angry and excited and marched out of the hall. They wanted to go to the nearest police station and knock it down.
My father helped me with my talks the first few times, and he'd tell me to be brave. I've spoken more than seven or eight times, and find it much easier now.
I was arrested once when I was seven years old, but it was only for a few hours. Two ladies asked me if I would stand with them with a placard saying »RELEASE MY FATHER AND ALL DETAINEES«, if my mother would allow it. I don't remember what organization they belonged to, but they were white. The police arrested us and took us to the police station, where we were put in a cell for about four hours. It was my first arrest, and I was very scared but the other people in the cell seemed to feel very at home. They were washing their hair and stuff like that. The two ladies were asking how the police could arrest a seven-year-old child. They didn't used to arrest such young children at that time, although now they're arresting children of six or seven years old.
My father visited here [her mother's house] sometimes when I was ten years old. The police sometimes broke down the door at night to look for pamphlets and other things. Once they found an ANC flag, and they put it on the bed with the pamphlets and all the other stuff they wanted to take away. My father told me that he could be arrested if they took away the flag, and asked me to try to take it outside and hide it under a blanket. I used to take drama classes, and I was very good at acting, and I managed to get the flag and hide it under a blanket in my room. There were about seven men standing by the bathroom with rifles, so my father decided not to try to escape. They took him away for almost a year because of what they found in the house and also because he speaks at mass rallies.
Once we were all standing on the steps here, and the police barged in and took my father to their car. I threw a stone at them, and one of them got out, and I almost smacked him because he was saying a lot of nonsense about my parents, like that they are very bad people. The police just drove off.
Last year [1986] my father was on the run. My mother and two of her friends and myself and my two younger brothers were at home after supper on a Thursday night when the police barged in to ask my mother questions. I asked them, »About what?« I told them, »If you don't answer me, then you can't take my mother away«. I got upset and started to cry. We went next door to the friends we go to when my mother or father are detained; then the police took my mother away. My mother's elder sister came to take us to my granny's, where we slept for a few nights. My mother returned after almost a week.
I was playing outside with my brother one night last year when my granny called us in and told us that our mother had been arrested. She was detained for a month, then released, and then detained again. The police used to tell my mother [when she was in solitary confinement] that her family was turning against her and that her children didn't want to hear anything more about her. If my grandfather hadn't gone to visit her in that week, she would have gone mad because of all the things they told her that weren't true. She was very scared when she came out of prison. She looked thin and very different. When I came home one Friday afternoon, everyone was crying. Then I saw my mommy sitting there, and I was very happy that she was home.
Sometimes it makes me very sad when my mother is being harassed, but I don't speak about it much. When I was very young, I didn't understand what was going on. Later my brothers and I felt sad most of the time, and our schoolwork got worse and worse each year because of all our worries. We were always staying with my granny. The police tried to get at us when they looked for my father. They used to come to ask my grandparents where we were. We had to stay in the house and lock the door so no one could come in. The police began harassing us more and more. My mother had to take us to see a psychiatrist last year because we couldn't cope with our work or with other people any more. My younger brother used to come home and tell my mother he had no friends at school. The children at our school know the situation our father is in, and they used to say untrue things about the ANC, like that ANC people are bad, they're »sellouts«. Then they stopped being his friends.
I and my two younger brothers are supposed to stay indoors when there is rioting around here, but we went outside one time because we wanted to see what was going on. People were burning cars, buses, and trains. The police came and threw tear gas, shot rubber bullets, and used their sjamboks. The children ran away, then ran back and shouted »Amandlal« and »May the struggle continue!« The police got angry and ran after us shooting rubber bullets. We came home at half-past five because our grandparents come home at six o'clock. We put the food on the stove and said, »We were in the whole day, Mama«.
Our vice principal at school, Mr. Swarts, was arrested last year in June or July, then released last week after nine months. He is about sixty. He was involved in the struggle and used to speak openly to us about what is happening in South Africa. He is now at home recovering from detention. His son is still detained. We have quite a few teachers like that. The majority of our school is politically involved. At the beginning of the year, when he was still arrested, we had a walkout [in protest]. We had a walkout rather than a placard demonstration to avoid violence. The police would have come and shot tear gas and then said that we had started throwing stones and provoking them.
There was a mass rally today [8 April] at UCT [University of Cape Town] to tell people what is happening in this country and that they should stand together. Quite a lot of students from my school wanted to go, so one bus wasn't enough to take us. A police van was standing there as the children filled the first bus. I was going to go in the second bus, but it never turned up. A student I know said that some of the children were arrested and that those who got away were just lucky.

Forced Removals Mean Genocide

»The women made a plan to dig their own graves and they said,
>We will stand beside our graves because we are not moving
from here. You can shoot and we will lie in our land forever.<<»
SHEENA DUNCAN

I met Sheena Duncan at the annual National Black Sash Conference in Cape Town in 1987 and arranged then to interview her many weeks later in Johannesburg, where she was born, grew up, and still resides. I had previously seen her in a documentary on South Africa in which she spoke eloquently about the massive scale of forced removals imposed by the South African government, and wanted to interview her about this subject to help disseminate this information more widely.
Duncan, a white woman, was born in Johannesburg in 1932. The eldest of five children, she is the only one currently living in South Africa. Her sister married a Scot and lives in Scotland, her two younger brothers became chemical engineers and reside in the United States, and her eldest brother left long ago to make a home in London. Duncan also went abroad, studying at the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science in Scotland and qualifying as a teacher of domestic science in 1953. Two years later, she married a Johannesburg architect and moved with him to Salisbury, in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After living therefor eight years, during which time Duncan gave birth to her two daughters, she returned to South Africa with her family in 1963.
Duncan is one of the 8 women out of 112 political people listed in the first edition of Who's Who in South African Politics, according to which »her political involvement arose entirely from her sudden and adult conversion to active Christianity and her conviction that there could be no justice or peace unless one attacked the political causes of hunger and suffering« (Gastrow 1985, p. 79). The author Shelagh Gastrow also notes that Duncan has published widely »in press articles, reports, booklets, pamphlets, and magazines both in South Africa and abroad«. The main topics of her published works include the pass laws, forced removals, the government's »homeland« policy, the legislation that deprives South Africans of their citizenship, and »the consequences of these legislative enactments for political and constitutional development in South Africa« (Gastrow, 1985, p. 79). Someone told me that Duncan probably knows more about racist South African laws than almost anyone else in the country — a knowledge acquired by over two decades of voluntary work at the Johannesburg Black Sash Advice Office.
Here Duncan describes the founding of the Black Sash by her mother and five other women in 1955; the almost fatal role of the press in ignoring the work of this women's organization; the magnitude and severity of the forced removals still being implemented in South Africa, despite the government's claim that apartheid is dead, and that it is now interested in reforming its policy of racial discrimination; how the reforms that are undertaken are designed to co-opt and divide black people; the effect of the abolition of the pass system; what she thinks about Chief Buthelezi; and the underappreciated role of women in the anti-apartheid movement.

Growing Up as the Daughter of a White Activist

I can't actually remember when I wasn't politically conscious. I was very fortunate because I went to Roedean [a private girls' high school in Johannesburg] which had a very eccentric, but remarkable woman as principal. She had personal friendships with people like Trevor Hud-dleston and Alan Paton [two well-known anti-apartheid writers and activists], and she brought much more content about the South African political situation into our school lives than normally occurred, or than happens today. Also, my mother [Jean Sinclair] became very politically involved in United Party politics after the war, and she eventually became a city counsellor in Johannesburg. So political discussions were constantly going on around the house. She was also one of the founding members of the Progressive Party when it was formed. And she was one of the six women who started the Black Sash in 1955. She did this about the same time that I married and left the country.

The Black Sash

I joined the Black Sash immediately after I came back from Rhodesia in 1963. My children were only three months and three years old at that time, but the Black Sash did things in those days that allowed me to participate while being at home with the children. When they went to school, I extended my activities to working in the Advice Office one morning a week. It was very new, and we used to sit in the office with our knitting and our letters to write, and if a customer arrived, we all jumped to our feet to see who would be the first to be able to help. It took a long time for the idea of an advice office to catch on, especially in the political climate shortly after Sharpeville [see page 8] and the banning of the ANC. The repression and the state of emergency [in 1960] succeeded in crushing black resistance for a whole decade. People have often asked me why I joined the Black Sash rather than something else. The reason is that there wasn't anything else at that time.
In 1955 the government had introduced a senate bill to pack the Senate with its own supporters in order to get the necessary two-thirds majority to change the constitution so they could stop Coloured people from having a vote. It was this act by the Nationalist Party that brought the Black Sash into existence in the first place. Looking back on it now, I think that the mass of women who joined the Black Sash in the early years couldn't have cared two hoots about whether Coloured people lost their vote. They cared about the fact that if the government could maneuver in that very immoral way, it could also stop the English language from enjoying equal rights with Afrikaans.
The Black Sash has had to change quite a bit since those early days in the 1950s, because the situation has changed. In the beginning it was a mass movement of women who really believed that if there was a substantial public outcry, the government would have to desist from whatever it intended to do. After its last major mass protest against the Sabotage Act of 1962,[0] the women realized that the government paid no attention whatsoever to public opinion. The Black Sash then entered a period in the 1960s when the membership dwindled away to practically nothing. At its peak it was about 10,000, whereas by the beginning of the 1970s it was about 1,100, and I think it's now about 2,700.
Another factor in our dwindling numbers was that the Black Sash had changed its constitution in the early 1960s to open the membership to any interested woman resident in South Africa. Previously membership had been limited to voters—which meant white and Coloured women only. This change in our constitution led to a mass exodus from the movement.
In the very beginning [of the Black Sash], women rallied incredibly. The group of six women who met in 1955 didn't mean to start an organization. They were just chatting over coffee and talking about how desperate everything was, and decided that women should do something. Then they got on the telephone, and each of them got ten other women to come to a meeting. Within ten days they had the three thousand or so signatures needed to petition the mayor to call a public meeting. And there was a huge march of thousands of women to the public meeting, where they were received by the mayor on the city hall steps. When I look back at the old photographs, it is very exciting to see this sea of women who turned up.
They called themselves the Women's Defense of the Constitution League in those days. But when they started wearing a black sash across their right shoulders and tied at their waists on the left as a sign of mourning for the constitution, the press started calling them the Black Sash. Because it was obviously a much snappier name than the one they had chosen, they adopted it.
My mother was the Black Sash president for fourteen years, and I was elected president when she retired in 1975.1 told the organization that I would not do it for more than three years because I think it is very important that leadership is spread across a wide range of people. So at the end of three years I refused to stand again, though I did another term later. We now have a whole range of leaders in the Black Sash, so they would have to pick off a lot of people before they could cripple the organization.
During the 1960s, when there was so little opposition to the government outside Parliament, our focus was twofold: one was to protest when particular legislation was introduced. We frequently did silent stands [demonstrations in which women stood still while holding placards] before they were prevented by law. In about 1962 the government banned all gatherings within one mile of the city hall and within a certain radius of Parliament in Cape Town, so we had to find other places to protest. We also protested in all sorts of other ways like writing letters to the newspapers. But we had to struggle with the newspapers at that time because they didn't like the Black Sash. My mother told me that the editor of the Rand Daily Mail once told her that it was very foolish to keep this organization going and that she should rather be working in the United Party. Subsequently the newspapers changed their minds, but it was a real struggle to get any coverage in those years. If you wanted an article in the newspaper, you really had to bleed for it. If it hadn't been for my mother the Black Sash wouldn't have survived the 1960s. It was her determination and drive at a time when people said, »What is the use?« and »What can you do?« that kept it alive at all.
The other activity that developed during those years was the advice offices. The first one in Cape Town began as a bail fund to get black women who had refused to carry passes out of prison while they awaited trial so that they could be with their children. Involvement with those women led to a better understanding of the persecution which the pass laws involved. So advice offices were gradually opened in different cities, and it was this work that really established the Black Sash's credibility. We became the only experts in that field of law in the whole country. There was only one lawyer in Johannesburg—who was banned and left the country—and then her successor who would help with these sorts of cases. Other lawyers didn't know anything about the pass laws; this information wasn't included in their training in law schools. So when the press wanted to know something about the pass laws, the Black Sash was the only place they could come to. We didn't just understand the law. We knew what it meant to black people because we were dealing with the problems caused by these laws. By the end of the 1960s, we were in a much better position because the press was prepared to publish our material and people were prepared to hear us.

The Policy of Forced Removals

In 1962, our East London group discovered a resettlement camp in the Ciskei known as SADA, where black people had been dumped. From that time on, the removal of people to the homelands became one of our major focuses. The dispossession of black people from their land had been going on ever since Jan van Riebeeck arrived [in 1652], but it was only in 1962 that it became public knowledge that the government had begun this process of deliberately moving people as part of a larger program.
On discovering SADA, we started trying to expose it, though our efforts were unsuccessful for a very long time. We found out where the people had come from and why, but it was some time before we realized that this was part of a much larger picture. The real impetus came when the people at Maria Ratschitz were moved to Lime Hill [a resettlement camp] in 1968, and Cosmos Desmond, the Catholic priest at Maria Ratschitz, journeyed around South Africa identifying all the resettlement camps. He published a book about it all called The Discarded People [1971] and was banned for his pains. That book was very valuable because it gave a much clearer idea of the overall picture, but the real breakthrough didn't come until the 1970s when the churches suddenly started taking the issue seriously.
In the early 1970s, I was on the Anglican church's Challenge Group which tried to combat racism within the church, and it was extraordinary to hear ministers in rural areas say, »Oh, yes, those people did suddenly appear«. But they had never asked any questions about why they had suddenly been brought there and where they had come from and what it was all about. When the churches finally did address the problem, the work became much easier because that brought international interest and made removals and resettlement household words.
Since then, forced removals have become very politically costly for the government. Mogopa [in western Transvaal] was the last one — I think it was in 1984 — where the army and police surrounded the community and just picked people up and forcibly took them away. At Mogopa they also dismantled all but one of the water pumps. They tried everything, but the Mogopa people still refused to move so they were moved by force. The government has now devised all sorts of new strategies to avoid using that kind of physical force again. For example, they knock down the schools in July when the children are in the middle of their school year so the people will say, »I must go for the sake of my children«. That is their [the government's] way of »persuading« people to move »voluntarily«. But there have been some major successes on the part of the people in communities like Driefontein, Daggakraal, and KwaNgema, all in the eastern Transvaal.
Driefontein, for example, is a farm that was owned by the members of the community who had bought the land before the 1913 Land Act prevented any more such transfer of land to black people. The government wanted to remove them to Oshoek [an African settlement], but the people said they didn't want to be moved and they weren't going to go. I was reading some of the minutes of one of their meetings with Dr. [Piet] Koornhof [a government minister] who turned to them and said, »But you must go because you are all squatters«. And they said, »But we own this land«. He then made the incredible statement that, »All black people in South Africa are squatters if you are outside your traditional lands«.
The negotiations and meetings went on and on, but the people never faltered. They continued to say that they weren't moving. Then the police arrived at a meeting of the community in the schoolyard, and a policeman called Nienaber shot and killed their leader, Saul Mkhize. That was the turning point in their struggle. Saul had been in the schoolyard, and the policeman was outside a high wire fence, but he claimed he was in danger of his life and that's why he shot Saul dead. The people remained firm and said, »On no account are we going«. The women made a plan to dig their own graves, and they said, »We will stand beside our graves because we are not moving from here. You can shoot and we will lie in our land forever«. This statement had quite an effect on the local police.
The people of Driefontein had come to the Black Sash long before Saul's death because of the kind of resources we can offer, like organizing press conferences and getting press and diplomatic people to go there and meet them and getting foreign governments interested. The government was saying that the community had to move because of a new dam that had been built there. The people said, »But the dam is only going to cover a few of our fields and our houses. Why don't you give us more land on the other side?« A legal action was prepared for their neighbors and at least one lawyer thought it might be possible to force the government to empty the dam. Before that case proceeded the matter had been concluded, but I think the threat of legal action was a factor in the outcome because the government didn't want to lose the enormous amount of water if they had had to empty the dam.
The people of Driefontein succeeded in staying on their land due to a combination of international pressure, public interest inside South Africa, and their own determination. This is one of the few success stories, but it gave a lot of people hope.
Sometimes when people are resettled, they are given tents, sometimes nothing, and usually there's no water or sewerage facilities. The early removals were a particular scandal. The people who were moved to Klipgat were dumped there without water, sanitation, or shelter. They are still living there with no water and no sanitation, but they have built their own houses. Some of these people said that they had been moved there from the farms in the Transvaal as early as 1957, but I think the mass removal to Klipgat happened in the early 1960s. The terrible conditions into which these communities were moved was the first thing that one was able to get public pressure about.
To focus public attention on the issue, David Russell [the author's brother] lived for six months on the very meager rations these people had to live on. This was very important because it raised public interest in this scandal. The government responded by preparing the resettlement areas better, so the first indication now of a new resettlement camp is a sea of tin latrines. And every row of latrines now has its tap. The people are then moved onto a site and told they can build their homes there.
But the terrible conditions are not as important as the fact that people are removed from where they were. Some of them were doing a lot more than surviving: they were producing a surplus of crops, or the people in urban areas were living there because that was where they could work. When you move people, it means total impoverishment for them. They lose their means of survival. The only way of getting work then is to get locked into the migrant labor system.
Because black people didn't voluntarily go to work in the mines in the early days, English-speaking South Africans introduced policies to deprive them of land and thereby force them to work. A whole series of laws were passed—for example, limiting black people to owning land in the reserves. Within the reserves the laws of inheritance were changed so that only the eldest son could inherit the land, leaving the rest of the brothers landless. Hut taxes and polltaxes were also introduced to force black people to need a cash wage. So the motivation for the creation of black homelands was to create reservoirs of labor to force people to work.
But then mechanization on the farms and in the cities and the needs of industry changed, so instead of a mass of cheap, unskilled labor, more settled, more stable, more skilled, better educated, and fewer workers were needed. So the purpose of the homelands then switched to their becoming places to dump the surplus people. In fact, that was the very phrase used by one government minister. And another minister referred to wives, children, and old people whose labor was not required in South Africa as »superfluous appendages«. This has led to the even greater impoverishment of the people who live in those homeland areas, because even migrant labor gets cut down as employers use more workers who are settled in urban areas.
The estimates are that over three million people have been forced to move. About seven hundred thousand of them are white, Coloured, and Indian people who have been moved into residential areas set aside for their own racial groups. The rest are African removals, some of whom have been removed from urban areas. Particularly in Natal and the western Transvaal, whole [African] townships were disestablished and the families moved into Bophuthatswana [an African »homeland"]. The men so moved had to come back to their old jobs as migrants. The government never thought they could actually remove Soweto, but they had a rule that any black township that was within twenty-five kilometers of a homeland border must be eliminated. Some of the townships they removed were actually much further away than that. But I think partly because of political pressure, that process was first suspended and then stopped. It was also stopped because the thinking was, »O.K., if you've got to have black workers, they'll be quieter and more pacific if they are living with their families«. But hundreds of thousands of people had already been forced to move.
Then there was the whole group of [African] people living on white-owned farms who were affected by removals. These were people who may well have been on that land long before the whites ever appeared in the interior. After that they worked as sharecroppers for white farmers until it was outlawed. Then they became labor tenants or registered squatters. Labor tenants were allowed to stay on the farm and had their own fields and cattle in return for doing three months' work for the farmer for no pay. Then both the labor tenant system and the squatter system were made illegal, and all sorts of controls were put on farmers so they could only have a small number of families living on their farms. So there were massive removals from the white-owned farms.
A third group affected by removals are the black [African] people who owned their own land and who were moved into the homelands and lost their land in the process. Even when they were given compensatory agricultural land in the homelands, nine times out of ten it is not as good as the land they left. Secondly, they never get ownership again because, if the homeland is independent, tenure of land in the homelands is invested in the president.
In terms of human suffering and impoverishment and destruction of people and communities, these forced removals must be the greatest evil in South Africa. I once used the term genocide to describe them, and I don't use that term lightly. But if genocide is the destruction of a people, that really is what forced removals does, not just in terms of deaths but in terms of destroying people's spirit. If you go to these resettlement areas now, you see a totally disorganized, apathetic group of people, even in places that have been there for a long time. The establishment of any kind of community and life as it is meant to be lived is totally destroyed, and hopelessness and poverty prevail. I consider that genocide. It has been a terrible, terrible sin, and the consequences for the future are enormous.
Any new government in the future will have to act very fast to respond to the needs of these impoverished people. It is going to mean state intervention in the distribution of land in particular. We are not going to be like Zimbabwe where Mr. [Robert] Mugabe has been able to carry out his land resettlement without expropriating land. Part of the reason this was possible in Zimbabwe is that fifty-four percent of the land was set aside for black people, so he has been able to manage by having the owners of the land offer it for sale. In South Africa less than fourteen percent of the land belongs to Africans, so we have a much bigger problem. I think there is going to have to be massive expropriation here, which, of course, means trouble, because there will be resistance from the landowners. I suppose one would start by expropriating the land of people who own more than one farm, and then the whole world will say, »You see, we knew we'd get a communist government in South Africa«. But how they are going to cope otherwise, I don't know. The solution to this problem cannot be left to the free market. All that the free market would do is transfer the land to other people who are rich.
Nor will being given land deal with the psychological destruction of these people, coupled with the fact that severe malnourishment in the first five years of life destroys people's brains. It means they very often become unteachable and certainly not people who are going to be able to absorb the education required to participate in a free society. Forced removals are causing generations of damage. At the moment Operation Hunger, a private charitable group here, is feeding over one million people every day with about seventy thousand other people waiting for food. And they don't believe they are close to feeding all the people who need to be fed. This is really obscene in a country as wealthy as this.

The Abolition of Passes

Now with the abolition of the pass laws, we have so-called freedom of movement. But what has happened is that the control of people's movements by the government is now entirely, and much more effectively, administered through housing policies. Although a man from a homeland, provided it's not independent, is free to move anywhere he wants to look for work and can take a job without any permission, he can't bring his family with him because there is no affordable accommodation. And the reason for the lack of affordable accommodation is that the government controls the land and is not setting aside new land in the metropolitan areas for massive building of affordable housing. So although it's not written in his pass any more, this man who now is free to move from a homeland and come to Johannesburg to seek work, has to remain a migrant laborer. So he still only sees his wife and children once a year.
The whole reform structure is there with one purpose only, and that is to preserve apartheid. One has to understand that the policy of apartheid is designed to maintain power in white hands, and in order to do this and to entrench it, certain things have been relaxed at the level of social race discrimination. The reform process has been one of co-optation as far as possible—co-optation through improving the quality of people's lives. That is why the Sullivan Codes and the European Community's Code [employment codes for American and European businesses in South Africa] fit in very well with government policy. The government actually hasn't minded those codes because what they want is a stable group of better-paid, better-educated workers in the urban areas. They are doing things like electrifying townships to improve the quality of life so as to create a black middle class which they hope will keep the lid on the revolution. What black people can do, and which black people are in urban areas, becomes much more a matter of what they can afford to do. A black person who can afford it certainly has a much better quality of life now. The humiliations of being excluded from theaters and cinemas and restaurants and so on have disappeared almost entirely in Johannesburg. In another town you might find that it is a bit further back in the process, but that is what reform has been about. The freedom of movement fits in with this because employers have wanted it.
I am not saying that we are not thankful that the pass laws, as they were, have gone, but it has exposed how much worse off the people from the independent homelands are. Although they have been considered aliens in South Africa since the day their particular homeland obtained »independence«, they are now dealt with in terms of the Aliens Act.[11] This means that people asking for permission to work outside their homeland are given the same huge complicated four-page form to complete as an immigrant from Britain wanting to come here on a temporary work permit. An employer is also supposed to get permission from the Department of Manpower to employ a foreigner, and the department only gives that certificate if it is satisfied that there is no South African available to do the job. The employer then has to approach an immigration officer for a temporary work permit, which has to be renewed every year or two. So black people in the independent homelands are in a much worse position than they were before the pass laws were abolished. It is a great boon that other people can work or look for work without being constrained by passes, but their abolition has not resolved the problems that follow in the wake of the migrant labor system—a breakdown of families and community.
Also, we have had reports of old-style pass raids where black people are stopped in the street and told to identify themselves. The police say that they are looking for illegal aliens. We haven't yet been able to verify these reports because what happens is that some white person phones to say that she has seen the police doing this in the street, but she never knows the names of anyone who is arrested, and without that we can't trace them.

Comparing South Africa and Nazi Germany

I've been reading William Shirer's book on Nazi Germany 11959] during the period 1934 to 1938. The Reichstad fire occurred one week before Hitler's election, and I see parallels with the kind of things that happened during the week to ten days before our election [in May 1987]. We saw on our television screens allegations that union members had murdered railway workers, though there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. And I'm jolly sure the murders weren't anything to do with the union because they don't operate like that. Shirer talks about how even though he was a foreign correspondent with access to the international press, which he read regularly plus listening to the BBC every day, he found that his judgment was affected by reading German newspapers and listening to German radio day after day. He began to believe things merely because of the skillfulness of the propaganda onslaught. In this country it is exactly the same now.
Early this year I was sensing a real fluidity in white opinion. By April that fluidity had disappeared. White people were bombarded by television, radio, and the government press, which is where they get their information. Its effect was incredible. White people stopped thinking. They were fed this steady diet about the threat of the ANC-SACP [South African Communist Party] alliance. The ANC was never talked about as a separate organization. Whites just absorbed and repeated what was told to them. The parallel with Nazi Germany at that time is very striking.
The other thing Shirer pointed out was that the early concentration camps in Germany were used for political dissidents; and at that time, he said, they weren't the huge deal that they became. There were only about twenty thousand people in detention. And I thought, »Well, we're at that stage now«. Twenty-four thousand people [12] have been detained since June last year, more than four thousand of whom are still in, as far as we know. But there is nothing to stop the process of more elaborate concentration camps being developed and more and more people being locked away for years and years. Shirer doesn't mention children being detained in large numbers at that early stage in Germany, as we have here. Our system of repression is much more sophisticated than some of the other brutal regimes that have existed around the world.

On Chief Buthelezi

Throughout the history of the Black Sash, we have never experienced antagonism from black organizations or black groups, with the exception of Chief Buthelezi. He doesn't like us at all at the moment because we have been critical of him. We have accused him and his government and Inkatha of using and provoking violence. When there is proof that the UDF has attacked somebody, we have spoken out against that, too. The difference is that the UDF leadership does not like people claiming to be their members using violence against others, and they try to stop it, whereas Chief Buthelezi takes it as a personal affront when one says Inkatha encourages vigilante groups. Also, we oppose his participation in the homeland structures. I think the argument of the early days is no longer valid: that in order to build a power base, in order to be able to operate in opposition, it is necessary to make use of the government's structures. And Chief Buthelezi has never drawn the line anywhere. He goes on taking all the paths that are offered to him, short of independence. Therefore he is very much part of the process of the breaking up of South African society.
One always has a feeling of fear when criticizing Chief Buthelezi. His and P. W. Botha's personalities seem to be terribly similar. Both of them are ruthless. Both of them desire power in a very personal sort of sense. They're very arrogant, and they don't like criticism. But Chief Buthelezi does have another side; he can be the most charming and charismatic person. Some people see one side, and others see the other.

The Black Sash and the Struggle Today

We are a resource for the much bigger black movements that are now carrying the load of opposition and resistance in this country. I have described our role as a resource for people who do not wish to be moved. We also serve as a resource for other issues. Judging by the way we are so widely used, we have information that many people want and need for their work.
Secondly, we try to inform the white community inside South Africa as well as people in the Western democracies. I was in America twice in 1985; and at one meeting with white American church people, a white woman asked me, »Why are you coming here to tell us about what happens to black people in South Africa?« I said, »Because I was invited, but more importantly because you hear it when I tell you. If a black woman comes from South Africa to tell you, you might say 'Oh, shame!' but you don't hear what she says«. And a black American woman said, »Sheena is absolutely right. People don't absorb what I tell them as a black American, but if one of my white friends tells them the same thing, they hear it«. We always try to be as accurate as possible with our information, and people come to rely on it because they know we don't exaggerate. If we are not sure of something or it is unconfirmed, we say so. And they know it is based on our daily work, not culled from the newspapers or other sources.
And the third thing of value that we do is to uphold ideals—the freedom of the press, no detention without a trial, the importance of the rule of law. We have to keep on talking about these principles for the sake of the future. I was up in Lusaka last week, and I saw Mr. Tambo. He was very warm and said many nice things about how people admire the Black Sash. It is very nice to know that people don't think we are irrelevant.

Police Harassment

I take phone tapping for granted like anybody who is in any way actively engaged. In fact, this entire conversation is probably being tapped. I took the receiver off the hook because I thought we'd be sitting outside. I think when I lift the receiver, it activates the tapping device and it stays active for four minutes after I've put it back, so they can pick up what we're saying in this room.
I and my family have received quite a few telephone threats, from heavy breathing to threats to my children when they answered the phone. Somebody said to my daughter, »Aren't you sorry that the newspapers published your mother's address?« It must have been election time when the newspapers have to publish the names and addresses of all those who write letters they publish. My daughter was still young, and she got jolly scared. And we went through a period when they kept chopping up my hosepipes [garden hoses]. I would find the hosepipe with a piece cut out of the middle and another piece somewhere else, which was very irritating.
But I've never been subjected to the worst things, like having a whole load of coal deposited on my driveway, which has happened to other people. The other day, somebody ordered sandwiches for two hundred and fifty people from a little shop near Khotso House [the headquarters for many anti-apartheid groups]. The shop closed down for the day because they couldn't have prepared that enormous order and handled their customers. So these vast amounts of sandwiches were delivered to Khotso House, and the South African Council of Churches paid the shopkeeper because otherwise he would have made a major loss, then took them out to some children's home. Those sorts of things can be frightening.
The Black Sash hasn't been harassed in the way that black organizations have been and continue to be. The security police float in and out of the office from time to time in a very arrogant manner without introducing themselves. Several of our members were detained and then released with restriction orders.[13] I think everybody now is expecting a major clampdown of the kind that occurred on 19 October 1977f when they banned all the Black Consciousness groups, two newspapers, the Christian Institute [an ecumenical organization whose goal — before it was banned — was to unite Christians of all ethnic groups], Beyers Naude [a previous member of the conservative Afrikaner Broe - derbond who became a leader of the anti-apartheid movement], and other individuals. But banning across the board as they did then is not possible now because the UDF consists of 840 or so grassroots organizations all over the country. So another way to achieve a clampdown is to cut off all overseas funding for anti-apartheid groups. We are expecting such legislation very soon.
Who they ban and detain is quite arbitrary. Avoiding any logical pattern to what they do is part of creating an atmosphere of fear and terror. Astonishing people are detained, and people say, »Why him? He's never done anything«, and other people are not detained who have been very high-profile. This leads to an air of uncertainty and fear. One has to not allow oneself to be overcome by these feelings. I'm not afraid of being banned myself, though it would be exceedingly frustrating to be prevented from working. Imagine not being able to prepare anything for publication and not being able to talk to two people at once. But then you look at somebody like Beyers Naude who performed very important work through his years of banning by counseling the people who went to see him one by one. He was never out of the mainstream of the struggle all those years. I guess I'd find new ways of contributing. If I let those sorts of fears weigh on my mind, I would be immobilized.

The Role of Women in the Struggle

Outside South Africa I think the role of women is a bit like Israel and Zimbabwe, with women being part of the army [Umkhonto we Sizwe] just like men. They have exactly the same training and tasks as the men. Nonsexism is much better understood by the ANC-in-exile than inside South Africa. Because Black Sash trains people to work in advice offices inside the country, community groups come to discuss with us whether to open one. Frequently, only men will be on their committees. I am forever saying, »Haven't you got any women where you live?« But South Africa is terribly backward in this regard. Although South Africa has produced some incredible women like Albertina Sisulu, Helen Joseph, and Lillian Ngoyi, there are very few high-profile, high-level women leaders, and women at lower regional and local levels are not given the same leadership opportunities as men.
I think the Black Sash is much stronger because it is a women's organization. We have a much more immediate way of responding to things than men do, and there is a great strength in that. I like working with women compared to my work in the church, which is very male-dominated. My church work is very much more frustrating than it would be if women were accorded their rightful place.
I think women are playing a terribly important role in South Africa, but the potential of women is simply not recognized by most organizations.

Conclusion: The ANC, International Pressure, and the Role of Women

»We are asking the caring world to strangle Pretoria
[the administrative capital of South Africa]
so that the money that is used to finance our oppression dries up.
It is only the caring international community that can help us
realize the dream of a peaceful transition from a government
by the minority to a government by the majority«.
WINNIE MANDELA

As well as asking women about their lives, their anti-apartheid work, and the consequences they have had to pay for their political activities, I asked them how important they considered international pressure to be for the fate of South Africa, and for their opinions on the African National Congress, and the role of women in the liberation movement. After reading these twenty-four stories of pain, of hope, and of courage in the face of a brutally repressive regime, many readers will want to know what they—as individuals and as part of the international community—can do to alleviate this ugly situation, or, better, how they can contribute to real change there. And, since the African National Congress is clearly the most popular and significant of the different strands of the South African liberation movement, it is important to know what a broad spectrum of political activists in that country think about this organization. Finally, since this book focuses on women in the anti-apartheid movement, and since women are often not given the credit they deserve for their contributions to social movements, their differing assessments of their role in this vitally important movement complete the picture.

The Significance of International Pressure

International pressure can take many different forms: economic sanctions, divestment and disinvestment,[14] sports, cultural and academic boycotts, verbal denunciations and resolutions, withdrawal of ambassadorial and other foreign representatives, educating the international community about what is happening in South Africa so as to encourage progressive intervention, and so on. Economic sanctions and divestment are the forms of international pressure addressed most frequently by the women I interviewed, most of whom believe that such pressure has been, can be, or will be crucial to their struggle.
»With international pressure on the South African regime, we would be liberated tomorrow«, insisted the ANC member Connie Mofokeng, now living in exile in Zambia. Those opposed to international efforts to pressure the South African government into dismantling apartheid—on the grounds that other countries have no right to interfere — often ignore the long history of international efforts in support of the apartheid system. As another ANC spokesperson, Mavivi Manzini, put it: »The South African regime has been, and still is being, sustained by the military, economic, and cultural supports that it gets from other countries. It is being propped up by multinationals, without whose assistance we would have been able to deal with the regime a long time ago«.
Similarly, the trade-union leader Lydia Kompe maintained that »South Africa cannot survive without outside help. Countries like the United States and Britain don't put more pressure on South Africa because they make a lot of money from all their investments here. These countries could make it change if they really wanted to«. According to these women, then, the goal of the divestment movement is therefore to withdraw the international support that has bolstered white supremacy in that country for decades.
Almost every woman I interviewed stressed the importance of international pressure in the struggle for democracy in South Africa. »Winning the support of the international world hasn't been easy«, said the ANC leader Ruth Mompati, »because South Africa is a highly developed country, a friend of the Western world, a friend of NATO, and a country in which the majority of the Western nations are heavily invested«.
Albert Luthuli, the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of the ANC, started calling for sanctions in the 1950s. »But the call fell on thin air«, declared the veteran political activist Helen Joseph, who concluded, »If they'd applied economic sanctions thirty years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now«.
Despite these criticisms of the role that the international community has played with regard to South Africa, Mompati also pointed out, »Through the years, we've enjoyed the support of progressive movements the world over, anti-apartheid movements, women's organizations, churches, as well as the Organization of African Unity. The pressure from these groups has definitely made an impression on South Africa«.
Some of the women I interviewed expressed considerable gratitude for international pressure. For example, the co-president of UDF, Al-bertina Sisulu, said, »It is very important that some of the countries that South Africa has depended on are now pulling out economically. We must congratulate the outside world, especially the anti-apartheid movements. They have done a tremendous amount«. And Winnie Mandela expressed even more enthusiasm: »International pressure is extremely important. The international community must realize how much it means to us that they have mounted pressure against the South African government, that they have applied sanctions. I hardly think we would have had the energy to go on without it, particularly when the going was tough, had it not been for the aid of our allies, the caring international community.
»The global protest against apartheid has given us tremendous inspiration by focusing attention on our country and highlighting the black man's problems. It has done a great deal to get the Afrikaner to shift away from his brutality, even if to an infinitesimal degree. For example, although the pass laws haven't really come to an end, at least one no longer sees the humiliation of the ordinary black man and woman in the street being stopped by squads of police to ask to see their passes«.
Although supporting sanctions against South Africa meets the legal definition of terrorism in that country, and can result in incarceration, the trade-union leader Emma Mashinini's response to the risk involved in speaking out in favor of them was typical: »I'm not afraid to support sanctions publicly because I've been detained before without knowing why. People get into trouble for nothing. What have the ten-year-olds in detention done? Anything and everything can be an offense in South Africa. If you give in to that, you will become afraid of your own shadow«.
Most of the women argued forcefully in support of sanctions, although a few also expressed reservations about this strategy. Mandela articulated the view of many women when she said, »We see sanctions as the only peaceful way to force the government to abandon its abhorred apartheid system of government. To us the only alternative to sanctions is a call on each and every one of our people to take up arms against Pretoria. If international pressure is not concerted enough, the only solution that is left for us is the armed struggle. But we will do anything to stop this if we are provided with an alternative. Anything! We know we are going to suffer. But we also know that we are the victims of apartheid. And we would prefer mandatory sanctions to the armed struggle«.
Ruth Mompati also argued that »we in the ANC believe that sanctions are the only international strategy left that can minimize the bloodshed that is going to take place in our country«. The Domestic Worker Union's leader Florence de Villiers explained her support of sanctions even more succinctly: »I prefer sanctions to war«.
Many of the women addressed the common objection to sanctions: that they will hurt rather than help black South Africans. For example, Ruth Mompati said: »We have been told that sanctions will harm us. But how can we be more hungry than we already are? Our children are dying from malnutrition, from kwashiorkor [a form of extreme malnutrition]. If your child is dying from malnutrition, can it be more hungry than that? We are told that people are going to be laid off. We say, >Yes, we know this. And we know that we are going to suffer. But if we suffer so we can win our freedom in the shortest possible time, then we are prepared to go through that hardship.<»
Mompati cited the widely used strategy of consumer boycotts as evidence of black people's willingness to endure hardship in pursuit of political goals: »Our people themselves have decided to boycott certain shops in South Africa, not because they don't need the goods in those shops, but because they've been very successful. They show that people are not only asking others to boycott, but they are also prepared to suffer«.
On the other hand, the former Natal Indian Congress leader Ela Ramgobin objected to this argument on different grounds: »I don't agree with the argument that sanctions affect the Africans most of all. From the early 1980s, there has been a steady increase in unemployment, and divestment has only started recently, so they can't blame it on divestment«.
Two of the members of the Black Sash whom I interviewed expressed some reservations about sanctions. Di Bishop believes »that individual families are being very seriously affected by the reduction in the number of jobs available and the withdrawal of companies from participation in South Africa«. She also argued that »sanctions could be effective if they were very tough and the struggle was for a very short time. They could have a kind of shock effect on our society and bring about change in record time. But I don't believe that it's going to happen like that«.
Nevertheless, Bishop concluded, »I also hear what black people are saying, and I agree to the extent that I am able with their saying, Tor many of us, it couldn't be worse.' When I hear of what happens in rural towns where there has been vast unemployment for a very long time so the people there are only marginally affected by the imposition of sanctions, and when I hear what the quality of life is like for people who are discarded by the government, then I listen when they say, 'Sanctions are a way in which the international community can, in a nonviolent way, demonstrate its rejection of participation in the system in this country.' »
While not arguing against sanctions, the Black Sash leader Sheena Duncan mentioned that »the unions inside the country are reviewing the divestment/sanctions issue. They are trying to decide whether its results so far have been positive or not. This doesn't mean they are turning away from sanctions in general, but they are saying that conditional divestment might be better than the kind that merely sells the company to South African interests and makes our monopoly capitalists more and more wealthy«.
The Afrikaner rebel Hettie V. was the most skeptical about the efficacy of sanctions: »The way that sanctions have been imposed hasn't really affected things because they've been implemented in such a wishy-washy way. The government is laughing about it because Afrikaner capital is buying up the stock of a lot of the companies that are pulling out, and it's strengthening the whole economy. All the American companies that have pulled out make sure that they have very good relationships with the people who take over the companies. They still sell them all their spare parts and import everything from them. We aren't suffering any shortages, which was the big threat in 1985 that made the government consider releasing Nelson Mandela«. Here Hettie V. is arguing not against sanctions or divestment in principle, but against the way they have been and are currently being applied.
The detention expert Audrey Coleman also believes that the efficacy of sanctions depends on the manner of their implementation: »If the outside world gets to the stage where it says, 'It's obvious that the government isn't going to reform in a meaningful way, so we will totally isolate them/ it could have a tremendous impact on this country, because South Africa cannot go it alone. We are a capital-importing country, so when the outside world refused to renew the loans here, this country was in a terrible state. But to be really effective, all countries must unify in their efforts«.
Aside from the isolation of South Africa that rigorously applied sanctions would effect, other women argued more specifically that such isolation would facilitate revolution. According to the United Women's Congress member Gertrude Fester, for example: »International pressure is a very important arm of our struggle. The role of sanctions is important because this government knows that economic crisis is the sure way to revolution. Suddenly businessmen are flitting to Lusaka when they were among those to support the state of emergency. And all these years these very same businessmen were exploiting—and still are exploiting —the black workers of this country. There's already an economic crisis, but the capitalists and the government are afraid of a worse one. And I'm sure that sanctions could bring this about«.
Addressing the issue of why other countries should apply sanctions and other international assistance to the anti-apartheid movement, the ex-detainee Elaine Mohamed argued, »We need people to be conscious of what is happening here so they can't pretend that it's just a domestic problem. Because other countries have dealings with South Africa, their economies work alongside ours. Whatever happens in any country to human beings should be of concern to everybody in the world. People have a duty to other people to help them, to try and make things right«.
Di Bishop also believes, »There's an obligation on the part of the world community to focus attention, as it has done, on the evils of apartheid. But it distresses me that the capitalist countries of the West are unrealistic about how we are going to achieve a radical change in our society, which is obviously necessary. There seems to be a naive belief in the idea that by pushing for the emergence of a black elite of better educated black people, by pumping large amounts of money into certain projects in this country, that that is going to achieve a redistribution of the wealth. But there's no way that it is. I think that is one of the reasons why there's a rather angry reaction against America, which has overtly stated the aims of its U.S. aid scheme in this country as being to sustain and bolster the capitalist future. It's a shame that there isn't a more realistic acceptance of the fact that redistribution of wealth is not going to come about in that kind of way. It's a revolution at that level that we so badly need«.
Albertina Sisulu stressed the watchdog function a concerned international community serves: »When our government does wild things now, they know that there is an eye that is watching them. In past years they used to do all these atrocities knowing that nobody would know about them. They are very shaken by the fact that they are losing friends in the outside world, and we are very happy about this«. Ruth Mompati similarly argued that the South African government has definitely been affected by the international pressure, but emphasized another of its important functions: »Support from international groups gives our people courage. It makes them feel they're not alone in the world, that they've got friends outside there somewhere«.
According to Sheena Duncan, »The more support our government gets from Western governments—even if it is only tolerance—the stronger they feel. I think international pressure could be much more effective than it now is because basically white South Africans want to be loved like everybody else. They want to be part of the Western world«. Duncan advocates, however, the use of other kinds of pressure that »don't have as difficult consequences as sanctions«. For example, »the United States' stopping the South African Airways from landing there so that it is no longer possible to fly direct from Johannesburg to New York is very irritating to powerful businessmen who have been used to coming and going more easily. This sort of action has a greater impact on whites than blacks, and doesn't cause a loss of jobs. Things like visas should be denied to us. Why should we be allowed to travel? Although this would affect me because my eldest daughter is going to live in Britain, it is something I would be prepared to put up with for the sake of trying to find nonviolent means by which we can resolve this terrible situation«.
Elaine Mohamed also mentioned another way to assist the South African liberation movement aside from divestment and sanctions: »It's important that people in the movement can go to other countries if they need to«. Several other women mentioned the need for funds. For example, the ANC representative Mavivi Manzini said, »The liberation movement needs material support. Presently there is an education crisis inside South Africa. We have seen the Reagan administration taking advantage of this need by dishing out scholarships to the wrong people with the aim of building up a middle class in South Africa to dilute the struggle, to create false needs in people, and to introduce the American way of life. But giving scholarships to enable the correct people to further their education is the best way to help us so that when we take over, we're not faced with a nation of illiterates.
"We also have many projects that need financial support. For example, we are trying to build a new kind of person at our school, a person who is different from the one developed under apartheid. We hope this school will be a model for schools in a free South Africa. We need support to buy educational equipment, toys for the children, clothing, food, medicines, etc. And the women's projects inside the country need money«.[15]
And the UWCO member Gertrude Fester also talked about the need for financial assistance within South Africa: »Even though we don't want to be dependent on financial aid, we do need money. For example, people in hiding often have to give up their jobs so they need money to survive. Money is needed to get people out of the country. Bail money and legal fees are needed. The Dependents Conference [an organization that assists the dependents of political prisoners] is refusing to pay for the court cases of people involved in public violence. They say it's criminal to throw stones. But the people who are arrested for throwing stones often haven't done so. Also, if I was confronted by a casspir and a couple of guns and I could find a stone, I promise you, I would throw it!
»I don't want to reduce our struggle to a financial one, and I also want to get away from the idea that the only help other countries can give us is financial support. But we mustn't deny that we are working with people who are either unemployed or receiving a pittance. Sometimes if we don't supply women with bus fare, they can't come to meetings. Paying for telephone calls is often a problem. Getting pamphlets printed and translated into Xhosa costs money«.
While all the women argued that international support of the anti-apartheid movement is important, several emphasized that it is only important as an adjunct to the internal struggle. »It's important that international pressure be put on the government to make it see that what it is doing is not acceptable«, said Elaine Mohamed, »but there's no use pretending that sanctions or any other international pressure will, on its own, make the government change«. Ela Ramgobin put it this way: »International pressure plays a large part in the struggle, but not a decisive part«. And the ANC representative Mavivi Manzini said, »We think that international isolation, by applying sanctions, will go a long way in assisting our struggle—but, of course, there have to be internal forms of struggle to complement this«.
Finally some women—Gertrude Fester, for example—emphasized that despite the importance of international pressure: »We in South Africa must remember that this is our struggle, and that we can't depend on sanctions and international pressure«. Similarly, Elaine Mohamed declared, »It's our struggle, irrespective of what Britain or the United States does or what they're hoping will happen here«.

The Role of the African National Congress

»The ANC is the organization that has the most legitimacy in
this country. If tomorrow the ANC were to be unbanned and
there were a general election, the leadership of the ANC would
definitely be voted into office. Without the ANC there can't be
freedom in this country because it is the legitimate
organization of the people«.
ELA RAMGOBIN

In addition to the subject of international pressure, I asked all the women I interviewed about the role of the African National Congress in the struggle. Some women, like the Black Sasher Sheena Duncan, found it difficult to answer because »inside South Africa it's hard to know where the ANC begins and ends because it is banned and can't operate openly, and I have no way of knowing whether there are contacts between the exiled ANC and people inside the country«. She went on to say, however, »I have the feeling that were the ANC to be unbanned, the UDF would disappear, because the people in UDF also support the Freedom Charter [the basic document that sets out the political philosophy of the ANC and other like-minded groups]. The COSATU unions, which are part of the UDF structure, certainly would never disappear, but they too would be allies if the ANC was allowed to operate«. Many others expressed a similar view.
Almost all women who were willing to risk expressing an opinion on this subject said that the ANC is the most significant of the liberation organizations and is certain to play a key role in the creation of a new South Africa. »I think the ANC will be the ones to lead us there«, said Florence de Villiers. »The ANC is supreme in the struggle. Supreme! It is the organization which leads the people, and rightly so«, declared Helen Joseph, with great intensity. »The ANC is enjoying maximum support from the South African people«, maintained Sethembile N.
Gertrude Fester concurred with Sethembile N.'s assessment: »The average person in this country definitely supports the ANC. And I must say, I'm very impressed with it. It is very well organized. It is addressing the needs of our future society—for example, post-apartheid education. In some countries the ANC even enjoys diplomatic relations and diplomatic privileges. And for many people it is their government-in-exile«.
Ela Ramgobin defended the ANC against the criticism to which it is most frequently subjected: »I feel strongly when people try to dismiss the ANC as communist or communist-linked. The people have the right to decide what they want, whatever the philosophy. They can take bits of capitalism and bits of communism and adapt it to suit the circumstances here. One thing is very definite. The state has created a situation where there is such a big gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' that, no matter which government comes in, if there is going to be peace and justice in this country, there has to be some sharing. How this is effected is another matter that has to be discussed. I would like to see it coming peacefully. But for that sharing to occur, some people will have to make sacrifices«.
Emma Mashinini also protests the view of the ANC as an organization of violent, bloodthirsty terrorists: »The ANC is not hungry for blood. They want to come back home. But who has got the key to them coming home? If people want to avoid blood being shed, apartheid has got to be dismantled. The ANC's constitution doesn't have a clause that says that they have to be violent. They were forced to take up the armed struggle by this government. But who is more violent? The government's own statistics show that they and their soldiers and their police have killed more people than the ANC has killed. The government has said they don't want to negotiate with people who are violent, but they are the violent ones«.
Similarly, Duncan commented, »I don't believe that the ANC wants a violent revolution. Hearing them speak at a conference last week [May 1987], it came across very clearly that theirs is a very reluctant commitment to armed struggle. I also got the very strong impression that armed struggle is quite different in their view from necklacing or petrol bombing people's homes so that children are killed. Someone asked Oliver Tambo [the ANC president] about this, and it was quite clear from his answer that he wouldn't condone these kinds of violent attacks. But he also emphasized that we have to persuade people who think otherwise of the political reasons why we believe they are wrong.
»Whites don't get anywhere in talking to black people about violence if they start off by saying, >I totally condemn violence.< Because even if black people don't believe in violence themselves, they are naturally very sensitive about criticism from whites on this subject, having been subjected to so much violence from whites. And they want to know what have whites ever done to show that there are better ways«.
Of course, a small percentage of South African whites don't disagree with the ANC's methods. Indeed, for several years the head of Um-khonto we Sizwe was a white man, Joe Slovo. As Hettie V. pointed out, »The ANC has always had active white members who have gone to prison for working for them. They also have white people in leadership positions«. Hettie V. shares a common view in appreciating the ANC's strong stand for nonracialism, which, in the South African context, includes their willingness to work with whites as well as members of all other ethnic groups.
Despite the overwhelmingly positive statements about the ANC from most of the women I interviewed, some criticized the organization on the issue of gender. For example, Gertrude Fester commented, »A lot of the people in leadership positions are from the 1950s, and with all due respect to them—they've sacrificed and they've suffered a lot and set a very good tradition—I think they are slightly out of touch with what's going on with women now. I think the traditions and experience of the older comrades need to be blended with the demands of the younger ones. That is why the [soon-to-be-relaunched] Federation of South African Women is so important. It will show that we have more and new demands in the 1980s«. Sethembile N. also criticized the ANC: »We always hear the names of ANC men leaders being popularized. Not a single ANC woman is mentioned. This means that even after liberation women will still have to go on struggling for recognition«. (Other criticisms of the ANC on the issue of gender are presented in the next section.)
According to the ANC Women's Section officer Mavivi Manzini, the ANC is currently engaged in important new policy making about gender issues, including the controversial topic of lobola. It will be interesting to see the results of these discussions about what should go into a bill of rights for women. Despite concern on the part of some women about how the ANC is addressing sexism, there was virtual consensus among those I interviewed that the African National Congress is of supreme importance in the current and future struggle for a new South Africa.

The Role of Women in the Liberation Movement

»The UDF and the ANC will never be able to ensure
women's equal role in the new society. Women have
to be organized to try to ensure that«.
GERTRUDE FESTER

Many of the twenty-four women whose voices have filled the pages of this book commented on the extraordinary strength and tenacity of black South African women. Some believe that women have more courage than men, even when tortured. This conclusion will be devoted to the views of the women whose comments on women's contribution to the struggle to transform South Africa were not included earlier.
All the women I interviewed believe that women play an important role in the anti-apartheid movement. For example, Hettie V. said, »Women have always been pretty active in that they've done a lot of the invisible work and the organizing work in the movement«. Some women even maintained that women play a more important role than men. Thus, Sethembile N. stated, »I think women are the people who are most involved and active in the struggle, but that the men are in control because of the social structure and because women are made to feel inferior. The struggle is retarded«, she pointed out, »when fifty percent of the population is not fully involved in it. How will the movement even get liberation if women are waiting until liberation to be involved?« Ela Ramgobin agreed with Sethembile N.'s conclusion, adding that »It is always the case with any oppressed group that unless you assert yourself, you will remain there. Other people are quite content to leave you where you are. But we must actively participate in the struggle and not just stand back and say, 'You must give us freedom.' We must go and get it and show that we are capable of getting it«.
Elaborating on Sethembile N.'s point, Elaine Mohamed observed, »Many men find it difficult to accept and to work with women on an equal level. Women get put down and often are not taken seriously when they talk, even by political people. But even though women often don't say a lot«, Mohamed continued, »I think they're more radicalized than a lot of the men because they're far more emotionally involved in the pain and the trauma of what's going on in this country. It's there in their daily lives when they pay the rent. They are the supportive base in holding their families together. Like Ma Sisulu [Albertina Sisulu, see chapter 10], for example. She doesn't just have to cope with political life, but with bringing up children and having a husband in prison for life. If men had to cope with the responsibilities that women shoulder, their role would be much more difficult«.
Audrey Coleman further addressed Mohamed's opinion that women contribute to the movement in many other ways aside from direct participation in it. For example, Coleman pointed out that it is women who are most involved with assisting political detainees, particularly those who are children. In addition, while most people understandably focus on the plight of the detainees, that is no reason to forget that »it is the women who are left stranded when their husbands are detained. They have to carry on keeping the household together monetarily, caring for the children, doing the chores. They have to bear the costs of transport to and from lawyers, police stations and service centers to seek aid, as well as maybe losing their jobs because of the enormous amount of time that is spent on these activities«. Coleman went so far as to conclude, »One of the most significant factors in the repression in South Africa is the enormous burden that it places on women«.
Other women disagreed with the view that women are as involved as men—or more involved—including in the nonleadership positions of the anti-apartheid movement. Helen Joseph, for example, said that, »although women have as much to contribute as men, certain age-old traditions and family pressures hold them back, so there aren't enough women in the movement. They have a double job, going out to earn money in the daytime and looking after the family at night«. Nevertheless, Joseph believes that there are many women who are ready to take up leadership positions, and capable of doing so.
When it comes to African women, Winnie Mandela expressed a very different view from Joseph and many of the other women I interviewed. Mandela argues that »the black [African] woman has had to forego the old cultural cobwebs of a woman belonging in the kitchen. This has been imposed by the domineering Afrikaner race themselves since the days of colonialism. When they removed our husbands and our fathers from the rural areas to work in the mines, when they imposed their migratory labor system, they changed the pattern of life of black society. Suddenly the black woman found herself acting as head of her family. As well as raising her family, she had to look after the cattle and till the land. So it has not required any special transformation for women in the urban areas to be in the forefront of the struggle. We transcend sexism because we are not given the opportunity to feel that we are women«. Albertina Sisulu made a similar argument in chapter 10.
Nevertheless, Mandela did concede that »women do need to meet as women«, but only »to meet as mothers concerned about our children«. Women in the ANC and the UDF have tended to talk about women as though the term were synonymous with mother. »Motherhood is very important«, said Gertrude Fester, »but not all of us are going to be mothers. The mother image must be toned down a bit. I'm not a mother, and I have no intention of becoming one, and people like me have got to be catered to«. Mandela went on to elaborate why she believes that »the role of a black mother is ten times more difficult under apartheid«. »We are expected to bring up our children to be the decent citizens of tomorrow«, she said. »We are expected to teach them the difference between right and wrong, that if they break the law they will be jailed. But in our country, the situation is reversed. If you haven't been to prison, if you have never had an encounter with the law, then there must be something wrong with you. You must be on the other side, a part of this immoral system«. It is noticeable that in her discussion of the role of women in South Africa, Mandela sees the entire problem for women as being the responsibility of white society. She is silent about sexism in her own community, perhaps out of a sense of loyalty.
With regard to the ANC in particular, Rhoda Bertelsmann-Kadalie had no compunction about being critical. »The ANC is known to be very patriarchal and very conservative with regard to women's issues«, she declared. »They are certainly very sexist and male-dominated. Sexism will continue to be a big problem in a post-revolutionary society. This is what has happened in socialist countries throughout the world. But women in the ANC [in Lusaka, Zambia] are fighting now to be recognized as equal partners, which will filter through to organizations inside the country«.
Bertelsmann-Kadalie went on to talk about tensions between the older ex-ANC women and the younger ones. »The old women still believe that the men run the show together with a few important females. They don't think that what the younger women are fighting for is as important as the national struggle. I feel that the message often comes from the top that we should subdue our feminist or gender struggle for the broader national struggle, and that there will be time for the gender struggle later«.
Bertelsmann-Kadalie is also willing to criticize the Women's Charter, the women's version of the Freedom Charter: »I wish it would spell out the gender struggle much more clearly than those nebulous statements like, >As women, we're going to fight for our rights.< Implicit in its constitution is the view that >it's a plot of the government to make us believe that our men oppress us. It's the government that oppresses us, and together with our men, we must fight against it and not against our men.< If one even raises questions about these issues, the men in the hierarchy tend to get very cross«.
Florence de Villiers agreed that the ANC should involve more women in its organization, and added »It is still a man's world in the ANC, the UDF, and COSATU as well«. Nevertheless, when it comes to the anti-apartheid women's organizations like the United Women's Congress, the members didn't even debate about whether or not men should be allowed to join. »Even when UWCO was one of the only political organizations that existed in the Cape«, stated Hettie V., »nobody asked, >Why is it women only?< There was no way they would have men in it. It wasn't even an issue. In that way these organizations are strongly feminist«. Nonetheless, Hettie V. went on to emphasize that, for the most part, both women and men in the struggle »consider it very important that women organize around all issues, and equally important that men are involved in women's issues, like organizing for child care in a community. The line here is that women's issues are people's issues and people's issues are women's issues. Anybody who says anything different is seen as divisive«. The view that feminism is a divisive force is common in the anti-apartheid movement—a criticism to which Rozena Maart responded, »It's patriarchy that is divisive, not feminism!«
The role of sexism in the lives of white South African women is different in significant ways, as in any upper class or caste system. As Paula Hathorn said, »I think white South Africa is a very sexist society. White women have pretty much been relegated to the role of looking after men and providing a home for them«. Many employ twenty -four-hour-a-day domestic workers to cook, clean, iron, and garden for them, as well as to raise their children. The function of white women is to demonstrate that white men can afford to own and financially support decorative appendages, many of whom spend their time discussing their problems with their domestics over tea, arranging flowers, hosting dinner parties, and pursuing other such nonproductive pastimes.[16]
Di Bishop expresses a prevalent view in characterizing the situation of white women as »very privileged«. Unfortunately it is frequently a crippling privilege which undermines their creativity and autonomy, resulting in a remarkably passive and timid group of people. Bishop correctly points out that »they have the time and the means to be using their time constructively, not only in welfare-type activities, important as they are, but also in more political-type work. [White] women should be working much harder to make the contribution that they are so very well placed to make«. While granting that white women »are sat upon in many ways, and men aren't going to change that«, Bishop stressed that they »must prove themselves as equals and take up issues and actively campaign«. She is, of course, an example of a white woman who has done just that, as are all the other white women in this book and in the anti-apartheid movement in general.
Typical of the strength and courage demonstrated by the women whose stories appear in this book, Feziwe Bookholane stated that she has never regretted her political work nor the six years she spent in prison: »I learned a lot from it«. Bookholane went on to say that she believes that women have a special role to play in bridging the divisions between the different anti-apartheid groups: »I feel this is something women are capable of doing. Women need to unite and stand up together, then maybe we can earn some recognition«. Emma Mashinini agreed with this view: »Are we South African women still going to be led by men when we get our liberation, although we were oppressed together with them, and fought against this oppression together?« Bookholane's answer to this question is: »People must recognize that women can also be the liberators of this country«.

Epilogue: The Kick of a Dying Horse

»There has to be a revolution some time because repression
like this can't last forever. You can't kill the human spirit
or the ideas. But the longer it is delayed, the more likely that
it will be a very violent and bloody revolution because people
get angrier and angrier. And they say,
>Where has nonviolence got us?<«
SHEENA DUNCAN

Assuming that there is no longer any doubt in the minds of readers that radical change is long overdue in South Africa, the question is what will bring about this change? Only one of the women interviewed believed that reform was still a possibility (Feziwe Bookholane). Most of the other women agreed with Rozena Maart that »there will have to be a revolution here because all other methods have proven to be insignificant«. A common explanation for white resistance to change was—in the words of Florence de Villiers — that: »This government has too much at stake to reform. They will do anything in their power to keep what they have«. Unfortunately this is true—not only of the government but of the whites it represents.
Several women pointed to the insignificance of the reforms undertaken by the government in recent years. Gertrude Fester, for example, pointed out that those that have been made »only affect the most privileged class. All the five-star hotels are now open to blacks, so if I can afford to pay twenty-seven rand [$13.50] for a meal, I can go there. But how come there's no reform in terms of salaries, education, and group areas [residential segregation]? What about the millions of people who don't have work, who cannot come to the urban areas, who don't have houses? Never before have we had children of nine years old in prison. Never before have we had thirty thousand people in detention«.
Sheena Duncan explained how some of the reforms are effective, not in bringing about the radical change needed, but in co-opting people: »The army and the police surround an area and remove the leadership, doing a house-to-house search to make sure they get all of them«. Then they use the vigilantes [reactionary blacks] against them. Having created a leadership vacuum, they then move in with upgrading programs— better housing, electrification, and those sorts of things. So the sterilization and pacification of a community is followed by co-optation«.
Rhoda Bertelsmann-Kadalie and Fester pointed out how the members of the tricameral parliament are also being co-opted onto the side of the whites. »I see them as black Nats [Conservatives]«, said Bertelsmann-Kadalie disparagingly; and Fester observed, »They are just there for the money. In fact, I think they inform on their own people to the government. People are being bought all the time«.
Similarly, although Di Bishop and others consider the eradication of passes to be one of the few significant reforms undertaken by the government, she also believes that »apartheid is just being given a new more acceptable front. The.whole homelands system is still in place, and the government continues to divide the insiders from the outsiders. The new struggle is around citizenship, and the burden for thousands of black South Africans is now to prove that they are South African and not citizens of the bantustans«.
Women's views varied greatly on how soon they believe the revolution will occur. At one extreme was Ruth Mompati who argued, »In a way, we are free already because we have freed ourselves from the fear of brutality. Our people are no longer afraid of the guns of the whites. Even our children are not afraid. So what remains is the day when we take over. And we don't think that day is far away. I can't say it's tomorrow. I can't say it's next week. But as Mandela or Helen Joseph has said, >We are as certain that freedom will be won as we are that the sun will rise.<«
Similarly, Mashinini predicted that »Revolution can be tomorrow. Revolution can be next year. Revolution can come about any time. As long as black people are being pushed into their corners, people will be angry. They would rather die. All I know for sure is that it's going to happen some time«. Helen Joseph was equally confident: »I haven't any doubt that it is coming. But nothing can convince me that it can come peacefully«. A majority of the women I interviewed shared these women's optimism that sooner or later the revolution will succeed. »There is no turning back now«, said Fester emphatically. »I don't envision myself, nor anyone I know, ever not being part of the anti-apartheid movement. In fact, our commitment will only increase«.
At the other extreme (in terms of the timing of revolution) are women like Duncan, who thinks it will take two or three decades before one occurs. Maart figured it may take twenty years. More common was the view that it may take five or ten years. Regarding the quality of these
years, Fester predicted, »It's going to be hard, it's going to be long,... but we're prepared for it«.
As the only Afrikaner to be included in this book, Hettie V. provides insight into why Afrikaners have such a do-or-die attitude, making revolution the only possible means to real change: »Revolution is going to be a hell of a hard and bloody process. The Afrikaners don't have anywhere else to go so they will stay here, and a lot of them are going to fight it out. Many English South Africans have more options. They and Jewish people are the ones who are emigrating. But where can Afrikaners go? I couldn't go anywhere in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or America because I've got no blood ties there and I've got no qualifications that would make them want me. Myself aside«, Hettie V. continued, »no country is going to want a few million Afrikaners. People like my family say, >No one will want us. We'll just have to work it out here.<«
With regard to the participants in the anti-apartheid movement, there seemed to be virtual consensus that, despite the ongoing third state of emergency and the violent government repression, particularly since the upsurge in anti-apartheid activism in 1985, »the spirit of resistance has not been broken, and it never will be« (Di Bishop).
As I write this in the safety and comfort of my house in California, where words like detention, banning, and house arrest have to be explained to most people, I see the faces of the South African women I met for whom these methods of persecution are an all too familiar reality. And I wonder, How much longer will their struggle continue? Will Winnie Mandela and Albertina Sisulu ever get to live with their husbands again? Will Leila Issel be able to spend more than a fleeting visit with her father? When will Ruth Mompati, Connie Mofokeng, and Mavivi Manzini be free to go back to their homeland? When will Gertrude Fester and Shahieda Issel be able to relax at home without fearing a knock on the door? Will Helen Joseph live to see the new South Africa to which she has dedicated the last thirty years of her life?
In 1974, I concluded my Rebellion, Revolution, and Armed Force by applying to South Africa the lessons I had learned from my comparative study of seven successful and seven unsuccessful twentieth-century revolutions. Arguing that progressive international intervention against white minority rule in South Africa is a necessary condition for radical change to occur there, I pointed out, »The nations of the world must choose whether to allow such a regime to continue its oppression for the foreseeable future, or not« (1974, p.89).
Like Mavivi Manzini, I maintained that, by investing in South Africa and by carrying on normal diplomatic and trade relations, most Western countries have been intervening on the side of the white supremacists. Recently progressive, as opposed to regressive, interventions have increased significantly. Important as these efforts are, they are not enough.
The question then is, How long will it take for the international community, particularly Britain (as the biggest investor) and the United States (as a big investor and world leader), to decide that white minority rule in South Africa must end? When will they decide that there have already been too many deaths from starvation, too many people destroyed by forced removals, too many people detained without trial, too many tortured and incarcerated children, too many years of unnecessary suffering? Unnecessary because South Africa is a wealthy country, not one in which a more equitable distribution of income would mean misery for all.
I agree with Connie Mofokeng that, if the world cared enough about the suffering and injustice in South Africa to apply sanctions and other forms of pressure in a rigorous and determined way, there could be change in the very near future. The longer they take, the more frightening are the prospects. And I wonder, with Audrey Coleman and many others, what the next generation of ever more desperate and angry opponents of apartheid will be like. The world must not wait to find out.
It is not enough to be anti-apartheid. We have to recognize that because of the recalcitrance of the white government and its white supporters, because they will not change until they are forced to, we must support revolution in South Africa. Just as it required an antico-lonial revolution for the United States to liberate itself from Britain, so a revolution is required in South Africa in order to obtain majority rule by an enfranchised population. The whites know that if they grant all South Africans the right to vote for freely chosen representatives, their own monopoly on power would end. That's why they will never voluntarily permit it.
White South Africans will change when they are forced to, as most whites did when black majority rule was finally won in 1980 in neighboring Zimbabwe. Those who cannot adapt can leave. If the nonracial politics of the ANC remain the dominant force in the anti-apartheid movement, there will be a place in South Africa for whites who are willing to change, as well as for those who changed long ago—not only because of the magnanimity of black South Africans, but also because the skills and know-how of the white population will be needed in the new South Africa.
Being pro-revolution in South Africa also means supporting the African National Congress, since that is the organization most black people support. Its popularity is well deserved. It is fighting for democracy, justice, and nonracialism. What nobler goals can there be? Even though the ANC has been forced to take up arms — an absolutely essential step given the intransigence and violence of the white regime — its leaders are »not hungry for blood«, as Emma Mashinini put it. It is a strategy that they must employ, along with their other strategies for educating the world and planning how they will turn South Africa into an equitable and just society when they finally have that opportunity.
Apartheid and sexism are, in some instances, so intertwined that fighting one entails fighting the other. They are inextricably linked, for example, in a Nationalist Party leader's declaration that »this African labor force must not be burdened with superfluous appendages such as wives, children and dependents who could not provide service« (Bernstein 1975, p.12). In other cases, sexism and racism can be separated. When husbands expect their wives to be subservient to them, and think they have the right to beat them and force sex on them, we are seeing the horrors not of apartheid but of patriarchy. And when being beaten by a policeman is considered more reprehensible than being beaten by one's husband, we are hearing sexist, not racist, values.
It is clear that inequality in the family, domestic violence, and sexual harassment and assault can obstruct women's political participation in the struggle, and that the overall oppression women suffer outside prison follows them inside.[17] I agree with those women in this book who believe that giving priority to the struggle for national liberation in South Africa does not mean ignoring experiences like these. Acquiring a fuller understanding of women's oppression in the overall picture of black oppression is not divisive—unless men make it so. It would provide an even richer and more devastating picture of the horrors of apartheid.
Although a revolution is in progress in South Africa, its end is not in sight. The timing depends on the role the different players play, and the energy and commitment they bring to their parts. As is clear from the interviews in this book, some members of the anti-apartheid movement are bringing enormous dedication and bravery to the struggle. Since the international community is a major player, I hope my readers will be moved—as I was, by the goals, the caliber, and the courage of the women involved in this revolution—to work in whatever way they can to bring about a new and just South Africa. Let us try to ensure that Ruth Mompati is correct in believing that the current behavior of the white regime in South Africa is just »the kick of a dying horse«.