‘Now that you have touched the women you have struck a rock.’
SOUTH AFRICAN PROTEST SONG
On Thursday 9 August 1956, twenty thousand women marched on the Union Buildings, the imposing seat of the South African government in Pretoria, to protest against the extension of the hated pass laws. It took more than two hours for the women, led by Sophie Williams, Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph, to file through the beautiful terraced gardens and into the magnificent neoclassical amphitheatre.1 Reporting on the demonstration for Fighting Talk, the influential anti-apartheid monthly, Phyllis Altman, a teacher and labour activist, wrote that ‘Only a camera could record the richness of the scene: the gay headscarves, Pondo women in their ochre dresses; Indian women in bright saris; women from Bethlehem in the Free State wearing embroidered ANC shawls; other delegates wearing skirts in black, gold and green.’ The route was lined with volunteers, dressed in distinctive green blouses, who directed the protesters, and the women – some with ‘old faces, lined by life’; others ‘young’ and ‘made-up in European style’ – struck a solemn and dignified note.2
As they marched, the women carried with them mimeographed leaflets stating that they represented women ‘from every part of South Africa’ and ‘of every race’, who were ‘united in our purpose to save the African women from the degradation of the passes’. ‘We shall not rest’, they declared, ‘until all pass laws and all forms of permit restricting our freedom have been abolished’ and ‘until we have won for our children their fundamental right to freedom, justice and security’.3 To loud cries of ‘Mayibuye I Afrika’ (‘Let Africa return to its people’), an interracial delegation then entered the building to present copies of the petition, containing some one hundred thousand signatures, to South Africa’s prime minister, J. G. Strijdom – the so-called ‘Lion of the North’ and an implacable defender of apartheid.4 According to the ANC’s Frances Baard, they were told that ‘Strijdom was not there and that we were not allowed in anyway because we were black and white together . . . but we knew that he was just too scared to see us!’5 Eventually, five of the women were permitted to enter the prime minister’s office, which they promptly ‘flooded’ with thousands of petition pamphlets, placing them ‘on his desk, and on the floor’ until ‘the room was full of them’.6
On returning to the amphitheatre, Lilian Ngoyi – a forty-five-year-old seamstress and trade union organiser, and the first woman elected to the executive committee of the African National Congress (ANC) – called for thirty minutes of silence to symbolise their defiance. Only the chimes of the clock (identical to those of Big Ben) and the occasional crying of a baby interrupted the silence as the women stood as one in the hot afternoon sun, raising aloft their right thumbs in the iconic freedom salute.7 Then twenty thousand voices joined together in ‘magnificent four-part harmony’ to sing the ANC anthem, ‘Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika’ (‘God Bless Africa’). The effect was electrifying and many wept openly. ‘The singing’, reported Phyllis Altman, ‘reached the sky and then I knew . . . Nothing will defeat these women, these wives, these mothers.’8 The women also performed a song composed especially for the occasion: ‘Heyi Strijdom! [W]atint a bafazi; watint’im-bokotho uzokufa!’ (‘Strijdom beware! Now that you have touched the women you have struck a rock, and you will die!’)9 When it was over the women, still singing, made their way down the terrace steps, through the gardens and out onto the main road, before heading home. They departed, Helen Joseph noted, ‘with the same dignity and discipline with which they had come’.10 But there was a palpable sense of elation at their achievement. Maggie Reesha, an activist from the black Johannesburg suburb of Sophia-town, recalled: ‘The women had done it! Women from the ghettoes . . . from the farms, from the villages, young and old, had dared to invade the very citadel of oppression in order to express their indignation and detestation for apartheid . . .’11
The women’s march, which had been organised by the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and the Women’s League of the ANC, took place during a period of growing resistance to apartheid, a system of institutionalised white supremacy that was designed to control all aspects of the lives of South Africa’s non-white people – from where they lived and worked to where (and whether) they were educated, and even where they died.12 Rooted in scientific racism, and justified as a way to guarantee the survival of ‘western, Christian civilisation’ in an Africa where anti-colonial nationalists were clearly on the march, apartheid (‘apartness’ in Afrikaans) was introduced by the National Party after its sensational victory in the general election of 1948.13 Sanctioned by a range of new laws and enforced by the state’s formidable security agencies, it replaced the more informal systems of segregation and racial discrimination that had characterised South Africa since the Dutch had first established a colony on the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, South Africa’s first apartheid government enacted measures that made various rights and privileges dependent on one’s place in a strict racial hierarchy, with whites (both Afrikaners and those of English descent) firmly at the top, black Africans (known as ‘natives’ or ‘bantu’) at the bottom, and ‘Coloureds’ (those of mixed ancestry) and Indians (originally brought to South Africa by the British to work as indentured servants) somewhere in between. Having classified the entire population according to race, the National Party government then proceeded to heavily circumscribe black educational and employment opportunities and mobility, prevent blacks from joining trade unions or participating in strikes, outlaw interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations, confine racial groups to separate territorial areas of the country, restrict access to various public amenities (including beaches, public transport and parks), suppress dissent – ruthlessly if necessary – and ensure that only white South Africans would enjoy economic and political power.14
Among black Africans – who, in 1956, made up two thirds of South Africa’s population of 13.9 million – the pass book was one of the most loathed features of apartheid.15 Long used as a means of regulating the movement of blacks, the whole pass system had been reorganised on a national basis in 1952. All black men aged sixteen and over were issued a ‘reference book’ (known colloquially as a ‘dompas’), which contained a photograph, together with address, date of birth, marital status, record of employment and tax payments, a list of any criminal convictions and details of any influx control endorsements, which were used to regulate the movement of blacks into urban areas. The failure to produce the documentation on demand, or to have the correct permits in hand, was a criminal offence – punishable by fine, imprisonment and even deportation to rural ‘reserves’ or farm colonies. Ostensibly designed to control and regulate the right of blacks to live and work in ‘white areas’, the pass system undermined the dignity of black Africans and reinforced the country’s official racist ideology.16 Pius Langa, who became a senior judge in post-apartheid South Africa, experienced ‘the frustration, indignity and humiliation’ of the pass system first-hand. He was ‘merely one of tens of thousands who peopled those seemingly interminable queues at the end of which . . . bad-tempered clerks and officials might reward one with some endorsement or other’. He recalled, at the age of seventeen, ‘having to avert my eyes from the nakedness of grown men in a futile attempt to salvage some dignity for them in those queues where we had to expose ourselves to facilitate the degrading [physical] examination’.17
White officials exercised enormous power over the day-today lives of individual blacks, who, with good reason, quickly came to fear the sudden revocation of residency and work permits. Ezekiel Mphahlele, a university graduate and schoolteacher, explained how the ‘big man’ in the influx control office could ‘send a man packing in twenty-four hours to quit the city. He it was who was supposed to . . . issue a heavily prescribed permit to look for work; to register every employer and his worker or workers so as to control the black man’s movements everywhere and at all times.’ Mphahlele recalled how his book was marked with a stamp that showed he had permission to look for work in Johannesburg. ‘When I found employment, my boss would have to sign his name in the book every month and write “discharged” if and when he should kick me out or I should decide to leave. But this would only be after another rubber-stamp had come down to give me permission to stay in Johannesburg.’ Indeed, if he later ‘failed to get “suitable” employment and the big man got tired of renewing my permit to look for work, down would come his stamp sending me to Pretoria, my place of birth, there to go through the same process’.18
Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were soon falling foul of the pass laws, with 330,000 convicted for violations of curfew, registration and other regulations during 1955 alone. Blacks, in fact, faced a ‘nightmare’ – a constant fear of ‘the policeman or plain-clothes detective at the next corner, of the roving pick-up van; humiliated and wearied by queuing day after day at the pass office where men are herded like cattle for dipping; afraid above all of that dreaded purple stamp across their pass books: “Not to be employed in the urban area of —”’. For its critics, the pass system – with its elaborate surveillance systems and restrictions on black mobility – constituted a modern form of slavery.19
Faced with an avalanche of oppressive, racist legislation, apartheid’s opponents fought back. The ANC, founded in 1912, had emerged during the Second World War as a ‘modern, mass campaigning organisation’ dedicated to securing first-class citizenship for South Africa’s blacks. Inspired by the success of Gandhi in India, it launched a programme of boycotts, unofficial strikes and non-cooperation. In 1952, the ANC joined with the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) to launch the so-called ‘defiance campaign’, which involved mass rallies, ‘stay-at-homes’ and civil disobedience. As one of apartheid’s leading historians has explained, ‘The hope was that by inviting arrest and imposing intolerable burdens on the state’s capacity to police its own regulations, the system would be rendered inoperable.’ More than eight thousand were arrested, the ANC enjoyed a dramatic spike in its membership (which reached a hundred thousand by the end of the year), and public statements and demonstrations of support came from black leaders in the United States. But the campaign was, in many ways, a failure. Participation was patchy, and nonviolent protest too often spilled over into displays of popular anger and even rioting. The authorities responded ferociously: in one notorious incident, police officers gunned down 250 blacks as they attended a mass meeting in the coastal city of East London.20
Three years later three thousand delegates representing the ANC, the SAIC, the Coloured People’s Congress, the multiracial South African Congress of Trade Unions and the Congress of Democrats (a coalition of white liberals and former members of the recently outlawed Communist Party) convened in Kliptown, near Johannesburg, for the Congress of the People. On 25 June they ratified the Freedom Charter, which demanded full racial equality (economic, political, legal and social) within a genuinely democratic South Africa.21 It would remain the manifesto of the anti-apartheid movement until the country’s first free, multiracial elections in April 1994.
In the face of continued protests by the ANC and its allies, the National Party government, spurred on by a comfortable victory in the 1953 election, worked to further entrench the apartheid system – creating sweeping new police powers, enacting a brutal programme of forced population transfers, gutting black educational provision and extending racial segregation.22 Then, in September 1955, H. F. Verwoerd, the minister for native affairs – and an unabashed apologist for white supremacy – announced that from January 1956 African women would, for the first time, be issued with pass books.23
Black women, who understood all too well that new restrictions on their freedom of movement would make it much more difficult to find the menial or unskilled jobs on which they – and their families – relied, were alarmed. They also feared that they would be prevented from living with their husbands in urban areas – a move that would strike at the heart of family life.24 Moreover, there were concerns that black women would be exposed to sexual abuse at the hands of unscrupulous white officials. As one anti-pass leaflet put it, ‘a man only has to come into any home or stop a woman on the street and say he is a policeman or detective and the law of the country empowers him to take away that woman and to touch any part of her body . . . under the pretext that they are searching for a pass’.25 The pass system would, declared its critics, not simply ‘bring as much misery’ to African women ‘as it has to the men’, it would be ‘far worse’. FEDSAW, which had been founded in April 1954 to co-ordinate campaigns for equal rights and equal opportunities for women as well as men, irrespective of race, warned: ‘In this year 1956 we are faced with the carrying out of a law that will arrest women indiscriminately in the street, remove mothers from their families, leave infants and young children without care, imprison pregnant and nursing mothers, and humiliate all African women.’26
Faced with this threat, the political consciousness of black women was stirred: as the popular black magazine, Drum, put it, the extension of the pass laws had ‘started pots and pans rattling’ in kitchens all over South Africa.27 Anti-apartheid activists quickly sought to channel the widespread fury at the proposed changes in the pass laws into a co-ordinated mass movement. Writing in Fighting Talk in January, for example, FEDSAW’s national secretary, Helen Joseph, declared that the ‘coming year’ would ‘be a vital one for the liberation movement’. If the ‘women [and] the mothers of South Africa’ could wage a ‘courageous and determined’ campaign against the extension of the pass laws, then there was a real possibility of rendering ‘passes for women inoperable’ and, more broadly, of striking a ‘mortal blow’ against apartheid itself.28 With thousands attending meetings, rallies and demonstrations during the early months of the year, there was every sign that a genuine mass movement was in the offing.29 In January, for example, six thousand attended a giant rally in Port Elizabeth and in March two thousand attended an anti-pass conference in Johannesburg. That same month, three hundred women marched to the offices of the Native Affairs Commission in Germiston, in the north of the country, where they declared that ‘even if the passes are printed in real gold we do not want them’.30 Then, as dawn broke on 9 April, several hundred women in Winburg, in the Orange Free State, marched to the local magistrate’s court and, in a spontaneous and public display of defiance, burned their newly issued pass books.31 Between January and July more than fifty thousand women participated in almost forty anti-pass demonstrations right across the country – and it was amidst this extraordinary upsurge of activism that the decision was taken to stage a national demonstration in Pretoria.32
In South Africa, black women were in the vanguard of the struggle against white supremacy. It may have been a male ANC leader, Walter Sisulu, who had called for ‘continuous campaigning among the people’ against the pass laws but it was South Africa’s women who were the backbone of the anti-pass movement.33 Like their counterparts in the American South, these women sought to combine a commitment to nonviolent protest (including the use of peaceful marches, non-cooperation and civil disobedience) with a politics of ‘respectability’ that used their gender, and especially their status as wives and mothers, as a basis for political organising. By conforming to middle-class standards of behaviour and dress (thereby challenging pervasive negative white stereotypes about black women), emphasising the importance of the family, and organising and protesting as women and as mothers, these courageous and determined activists crafted a ‘bold and respectable brand of political resistance’.34 As the popular cry ‘Give us your pants, the women will wear them!’ illustrates, these women also offered a provocative challenge to the patriarchal views of many black men.35
The women’s march of 9 August was hailed by FEDSAW as ‘a rock, a monumental achievement by the most oppressed, suffering and downtrodden of our people – the women of South Africa’.36 The protest certainly came to resonate powerfully among anti-apartheid activists, and 9 August was subsequently declared ‘national women’s day’ (marked since 1994 by an official public holiday in South Africa). More tangibly, the anti-pass protests also seemed to be having an effect on the government’s ability to implement its policy. By September 1956 a mere twenty-three thousand reference books had been issued, and officials had refrained from attempting to distribute passes in ANC strongholds.37
Such success, however, proved short-lived. Indeed, even as FEDSAW and its allies were plotting the next stage of their campaign against the pass laws, the National Party government was putting the final touches to an extraordinary measure that was intended to cripple the entire anti-apartheid movement. It was an inflexible and uncompromising response from South Africa’s white supremacist leaders – but one that would not have been out of place nine thousand miles away in Dixie, where the defenders of Jim Crow were equally determined to hold the colour line, whatever the cost.
A group of African American students (including Bobby Cain, on the left) brave white hostility to attend classes at the newly integrated Clinton High School, Tennessee.
Library of Congress, US News & World Report Collection; photographer, Thomas J. O’Halloran