Unlocking women ’ s history, cell by cell
On the way to and from the Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill, murals of prisoners line the walkway, their words accompanying the women’s portraits.
“We were sleeping on the floor, a cold floor. The roof was very high. You know when you lie down in that cell and you look up, you feel like you’re in a grave. ”— Mmagauta Molefe.
“I could hear the doctor screaming at her saying: ‘You say your baby is sick, but if you cared about your baby, you would carry a pass’. ”— Barbara Hogan.
“So we asked: ‘Why don’t prisoners wear panties?’ And we insisted until they gave the mothers panties and they gave the babies proper milk. We changed the situation in that prison hospital. ”— Deborah Matshoba.
“Jimmy Kruger, he was the Minister at that time ... If he thought that by throwing thirteen strong women together he was going to intimidate and terrorise us, well he did the absolute opposite, I can tell you. ”— Jeannie Noel.
These descriptions of the dire and oppressive conditions the women faced and their spirit of defiance and solidarity are supported by visual interpretations of daily routines in the prison. Fatima Meer’s paintings, as you enter the red-brick building, depict what waiting looked like and capture the lineups of the prisoners — those awaiting trial lining up for breakfast; newly convicted women, some with babies on their backs. In the solitary confinement cells are exhibitions and video recordings of former prisoners telling their stories. Here their humanity — from what they lost, sacrificed and mourned to what still aches, angers and gives them hope — brings history to life. It demonstrates the heartbreakingly inhumane nature of apartheid.
The archival material forms the core of Stephanie Jenkins’s research for her latest museum theatre production, Whispers in the Corridors, due to be staged at Constitution Hill this month.
Jenkins is a Durban theatre practitioner and academic who is interested in bringing history to life with museum theatre. She has staged plays in Durban, among them Our Footprints, which looks at settler and indigenous histories, and Beer Hall, Pass Laws and Just Cause, which demonstrate apartheid’s unjust policies.
Speaking about her interest in stories embedded in historical buildings, Jenkins says: “I have always enjoyed an eclectic focus. I like literature, history and drama. I wanted to find ways to combine them. I like the idea of what happens when we move into spaces and we connect to them in ways that engage the senses and the body. Thinking about how we can speak to those things and let them speak back to us. Performance became a natural avenue to explore and allow that to happen — to try to find embodied encounters with history.
“I think in South Africa that is quite pertinent because we have difficult and different relationships with history. Some people don’t want to talk or know about it. Some people think it’s just about facts. Some people are living it. How do we find ways to stop history from being cold or too distant so we can engage with each other and with the histories as a way to move forward and as a way to learn?
“In the case of the Women’s Jail, this performance offers an opportunity for us to encounter some of the stories of the inmates who were interviewed in the early 2000s, some of which are difficult to hear but important to grapple with as we ‘commune’ with those who spent significant time stuck in a place in which we can now freely move,” Jenkins says.
To grasp the historical impact of the Women’s Jail is to understand it within the fuller context of the Old Fort and black men’s prison, Number Four, which form part of the museum experience at Constitution Hill.
The Old Fort , formerly the Johannesburg Jail, was the city’s first. It was built by president Paul Kruger in 1893 to house criminals from the growing mining town. It became Johannesburg’s first military fort to protect the Boers from British military invasion in the 1896 Jameson Raid. In 1902, after the second AngloBoer War (the South African War), the fort again became a prison, this time under British rule for white prisoners. In the same year, additional sections, like the infamous Number Four, were built to house black prisoners. In 1910 a women’s jail was constructed for black and white women. The inmates, common law and political prisoners, were segregated.
Black women were jailed for illegally brewing beer, violating pass laws or holding hands with white men. A large number were arrested for protesting against pass laws in 1958. More women, some with infants, were arrested during the 1960 state of emergency. After the 1976 Soweto uprising, black women and teenage girls were held at the prison without trial under “indefinite preventative detention”.
Around the same time, more than 10 members of the banned Black Women’s Federation were imprisoned under the Internal Security Act. This group included iconic anti-apartheid activists like Fatima Meer, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Cecile Palmer and Deborah Matshoba. When women and girls were refused underwear and sanitary pads, these prisoners fought against the indignities and won.
Women also experienced horrific sexual violence in the prison. Claire Ennis illuminates this in a South African History Organisation article titled “The Women’s Jail at the Old Fort and its Impact”. She writes: “Following the end of apartheid, the new
South African government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which sought to allow victims of human rights violations to describe their experiences. At one of these hearings, Dr Sheila Meintjies spoke on women’s experiences, describing horrific examples of sexual violence and torture in the jails against women and girls as young as fourteen. She spoke of widespread torture such as ‘assault, electric shocks on pregnant women, inadequate care leading to miscarriages ... tear-gassing, of solitary confinement, of body searches and vaginal examinations, we talk of rape and forced intercourse with other prisoners, foreign objects, including rats, being pushed into women’s vaginas’.
“Rape and other forms of sexual torture served as ways for those in power to assert their dominance over these women.
“This dangerous atmosphere in South African prisons kept women in a constant state of fear — fear of rape, fear of bodily harm, fear of endangerment to one’s children ....
“Shame and embarrassment often accompanied this omnipresent fear. Many women described being forced to strip naked before warders or guards in order to shame them. Because basic feminine care was inadequate, those undergoing menstruation would perform this horrific act with blood dripping down their legs and be forced to answer questions.”
Jenkins works with these stories and many others of women who were tracked down and invited back to Constitution Hill to explore what happened to them.
“There were many more women who were involved,” she says. “Political prisoners tend to receive more focus because they are better known. But they also did interviews with some common-law criminals, such as Jeannie Noel, who is such an interesting woman.
“I found it fascinating that the warders were also interviewed. Both black and white warders. We get to see how they saw the space vs the prisoners. Some of those things clash and some of them affirm one another. And I find that fascinating,” says Jenkins.
She is working with three actresses (or actor guides, as she calls them) who go in and out of character to relay the narratives of the women, while also engaging with the present. The immersive experience also works with the space to explore various themes. The main area of the Women’s Jail, The Atrium, has multiple levels in an oval. This panopticon was used to make the prisoners feel as if they were being watched all the time.
On what she hopes for Whispers in the Corridors, Jenkins says: “I always think that the hope is to create a different experience in a museum. We can all go into the museum and still have an interesting experience by reading the panels and walking through. But it’s to create another way of experiencing it. To learn things that are not necessarily available in the museum. To think about history in a way that is alive and real. And how that is affecting us still now. To think about how we engage with it in a personal way.”
Jenkins’s museum theatre practice holds transformative potential in that it humanises history, allowing space for those especially affected by aspects of it to engage with its effects.
Chilling tales unfold in Stephanie Jenkins’s ‘Whispers in the Corridors’, a play staged inside the Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill, writes Kgomotso Moncho-Maripane