Adelaine Hain: Activist who dared salute Nelson Mandela in court 1927-2019
Mother of Peter Hain who helped her son disrupt a Springbok rugby tour
● Adelaine Hain, who has died in Wales at the age of 92, was an anti-apartheid activist who was jailed, banned and driven into exile in the 1960s.
A diminutive figure of barely 1.5m, she charged around Pretoria fighting for the civil rights of black people by, among other things, illegally signing scores of passbooks to keep them out of jail.
Her old Volkswagen combi was a familiar sight to local activists in townships like Atteridgeville, Lady Selborne and Mamelodi, and to the security police.
She patrolled Pretoria’s courts looking for teenage defendants who’d disappeared into the system and alerting their frantic parents.
One such defendant was 15-year-old future deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke, who in 1963 was found guilty of sabotage and sentenced to 10 years on Robben Island.
She attended his trial every day in the Old Synagogue in Pretoria and brought him hot soup, hot chocolate and his favourite chocolate bar at every lunch break.
Her son Peter was roughly his age and Moseneke, who had noticed this lone white woman sitting in the public gallery, remembered her tears when she spoke to him.
He remembered how the police often swore at her in Afrikaans. He never forgot this “abundant compassion from an unlikely source”, he wrote in his autobiography . “Her disgust for apartheid and racism was obvious.”
Treason Trial
In 1962, she was asked by the weekly antiapartheid newspaper Contact to report on Nelson Mandela’s trial in the Old Synagogue for his activities in the banned ANC underground.
She was usually the only person in the public gallery reserved for whites.
Mandela, whom she’d got to know in 1958 when she took lunch to him and his fellow defendants during the Treason Trial, would turn to her when arriving in the dock each morning, and raise his clenched fist. She would stand and return the salute.
Years later when he was in the UK, he gave her a call.
“He comes on the phone and says, ‘It’s Nelson Mandela, do you remember me?’,” she told the BBC in 2004.
She was born in Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape on February 16 1927, and matriculated at Victoria Girls High School in Grahamstown.
While working for a building society in Pretoria she met architectural student Walter Hain, whom she married in 1948.
They became politically “radicalised” while living in Nairobi where they were repelled by the naked racism of British expatriates.
Back in SA they joined the Liberal Party of Margaret Ballinger and Alan Paton in 1954. Walter Hain became chairman of the Pretoria branch, and she became its secretary.
Their political activism brought them to the attention of the security police and in
1961 they were jailed for two weeks without charge.
As they were being arrested, she managed to chew up and spit out the incriminating evidence, a draft leaflet supporting Mandela’s defiance campaign.
Isolated on her own in a large women’s prison, with warders leering at her while she bathed, she was haunted by the cries of black women prisoners being savagely beaten.
In 1963 she was issued with a magistrate’s letter warning her not to undertake any more “subversive activity”. When she asked what this was, she was told that she would know.
A newspaper cartoon showed police minister John Vorster instructing his head of security to “Go and find Adelaine Hain, check what she’s doing and tell her she mustn’t”.
Later that year she was served with a banning order. Among a long list of restrictions, she was prohibited from communicating with any other banned person.
Continued activism
When Walter was banned a year later, the government had to insert a special clause in their banning orders allowing them to communicate with each other.
She continued her activism, however. She held parties at home where ambassadors could meet black activists. Knowing the house was being watched by security police, she sat alone in the kitchen while her son Peter brought the ambassadors in one by one to talk to her.
She helped a political prisoner, Jimmy Makojaene, to escape over the border. She smuggled messages hidden in food parcels and stitched into shirt collars to other prisoners, including Hugh Lewin.
When the Hains’ friend John Harris was arrested after planting a bomb at the Johannesburg railway station that killed a grandmother and maimed the woman’s young granddaughter, they took his wife and child into their home.
When Harris was hanged they organised his funeral but were prohibited from giving the address. Son Peter read it for them.
In 1966 they were forced into exile after the government instructed architectural firms in Pretoria, to which they were restricted by their banning orders, to deny Walter any work.
They went to England and threw themselves into the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Their small flat in London became the headquarters of the Stop the Tour campaign started by Peter, which disrupted the 1969/1970 Springbok rugby tour to Britain. This led to the cancellation of a Springbok cricket tour to England and signalled the beginning of SA’s sporting isolation. Adelaine was the campaign secretary of the Stop the Tour movement — organising, plotting and at the forefront of mass demonstrations.
She is survived by four children including former Labour Party cabinet minister Lord Peter Hain. Her husband Walter died in 2016.