Not forgetting the women who helped usher in democracy of 1994
THERE was a time when history was an engagement involving the dead and, to some extent, the living.
Today, thanks to the loose use of -isms (capitalism, socialism, et al) and of prefixes (post-colonial, post-apartheid, neo-liberal, et al), the story of the human experience has been reduced to conversations involving tiny groups of “professional” and “amateur” historians.
The wider public that should, ideally, have informed perceptions of their heritage and inheritance have been disdainfully left out of the process.
That is what Shanthini Naidoo, columnist and author of debut book Women in Solitary – Inside the female resistance to apartheid observed in documenting the experiences of four of the seven women in the Trial of 22 in 1969. It was the fact that the women in her book did not share the sense of history that prevailed in the country. They are Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin (former colleague at the POST), Rita Ndzanga, Shanthie Naidoo and Nondwe Mankahla.
The book is an enlightened yet critical view of how our women coped with punishment, trauma and torture in solitary detention during shameful periods of our history. Those experiences, challenges and uncertainties have sadly been replaced by either idyllic or prejudicial fantasies.
Shanthini has helped to rekindle interest in the events of 1969. It needed heroines like a Shanthie Naidoo to nurture a sense of nationhood.
By far one of the most bypassed Indian South African victims of the
dreaded Security Branch (SB) policemen was Shanthie. Like hundreds of women freedom fighters, her name is oblivion in the pages of our history.
Almost her entire family participated in the liberation Struggle against colonialism and apartheid. Her grandparents, Thambi and Veerammal, were among the first Indians to join Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha movement. Shanthie’s brother, Indres, was jailed on Robben Island. Kuben, a third generation and current deputy-governor of the Reserve Bank, wrote his matric exam in prison.
Confronted by the jail experiences of a Fathima Meer or a Shanthie Naidoo, the Security Branch (SB) of the apartheid police force looked like incarnations of Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police, Gestapo of Hitler, or the secret police of Stalin or Pol Pot).
Any appreciation of what these women experienced in solitary confinement cells is the emotional scars of torture like electric shocks to their genitals the women live with today.
In contrast, the lives of the all-male political prisoners on Robben Island have grabbed a lot of media and book space over the years.
Yet, the absence of a face or a name which should have equally captured the disquiet of the activists detained and tortured in Pretoria Central prison in 1969 has also meant that the stir hasn’t made the same impression on our imagination as did their comrades incarcerated on the Island.
Shanthie does not fit the stereotype. The SB swooped on her Rocky Street home in Yeoville in a dawn raid on June 13, 1959, and told her to pack her bags for detention under the Terrorism Act.
“She didn’t think she was a terrorist. But she’d read Winnie Mandela, Sikhakhane and Ndinga were taken in a month earlier,” the book continues.
“When Shanthie came to the stand, Prosecutor JH Liebenberg instructed her to speak. She looked Justice Simon Bekker in the eye. I have two friends amongst the accused,” she declared. “I don’t want to give evidence (against them) because I will not live with my conscience if I do,” writes Shanthini.
Years later, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela wrote: “When she declared in a firm voice which left no doubt… How I loved her always, even more now. My admiration and respect for her doubled. Only a person who has been through solitary confinement would realise the amount of sacrifice that lies behind those few words. To my horror, hot tears rolled down my cheeks in the Supreme
Court when Shanthie said those words.”
There is a hidden reality to suggest that not only were Robben Island prisoners and mainly the men in exile but the revolutionary women who also made sacrifices that helped usher in democracy in 1994.
And a basis for the perception that the grand narrative of the “Struggle” doesn’t accord due recognition to the little struggles that either complemented the liberation movements’ battles or followed an entirely different course.
Textbook history, which aims at turning the past into a manageable package, can accommodate the different strands and many loose ends. That Shanthie’s family history, as of many other Indian women stalwarts of the Struggle, has been downsized by capsuled media reports and history, is undeniable.
Indian women in the Struggle, in particular, are victims of the country’s failure to document their roles with historical rigour. Since 1894, when Gandhi established the Natal Indian Congress, justice and equality became accepted goals of Indian men and of women.
These realisations were themselves the culmination of the many campaigns in which women either took part or waged since the 1900s.
In his eulogy at the funeral of the anti-apartheid defence lawyer, George Bizos, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the facts behind people in detention “must be laid bare”.
What Shanthini – like some – has realised in writing Women in Solitar,y was that the biggest impediment to our self-awakening to the role of Indian women in the Struggle, was passivity.
The history of Indians in South Africa does not date back just to the shipment of reinvented slavery or indentured workers from India in 1860. Indian men and women slaves – who made up the majority of the slave population in the Cape – dates back to the 17th century.
There is evidence of Indians in this part of the world earlier with artefacts of civilisation unearthed at Mbombela (Nelspruit), Mpumalanga in the 1980s.
The history of South Africans of Indian origin has moments of pride and shame. Unless we understand their struggles of the past, we will not understand the liberties of the present.
Women in Solitary… is an enlightened message that could just as well be relevant for all South Africans.