A distressing feature of the scourge of detentions was the number of children who were swept up in the dragnet. According to the South African Institute of Race Relations, during the eight months of the 1985-1986 emergency, 7 996 people were detained, 2 000 of whom were under the age of 16. “What kind of society needs to be protected from its own children?” the Black Sash asked.
The Sash participated in a national campaign entitled Free the Children, which eventually spread to France under the patronage of Madame Mitterand, wife of the then president, and to Sweden where it was launched by Lisbet Palme, wife of the Prime Minister, Olof Palme. In Grahamstown our contribution to the campaign was to drape a gigantic banner down the spire of the cathedral bearing the biblical words, “Suffer the children to come unto me.” The banner was visible all the way up High Street and for as long as it hung there, Sash member Val Letcher and her family, all keen campanologists, tolled the cathedral bells.
One response to the banner came in the form of an anonymous letter addressed to “My fellow Anglicans,” and distributed in the cathedral. “It is with deep concern,” it read, “that I noticed our beautiful cathedral used by the Black Sash for a protest of a political nature. A house of God is not a place for expressing political aspirations, or its spire for political propaganda against authority. Black Sash has again shown its true colours.”
The dean’s response to the letter was to use the banner again, this time inside the cathedral, as part of the Mothers’ Day service. Roy Barker was a man of great humility and a gifted preacher. Standing in front of this imposing backdrop with its logo of a child peering out through prison bars, he encouraged the congregation to pray for children in detention, for parents of detainees, for those who issued the decrees governing detention without trial, and for those responsible for holding the detainees. Congregants were given sprigs of rosemary for remembrance and he invited them to light candles as symbols of hope. The Black Sash distributed a Mothers’ Day message in the form of a card bearing the words, “On Mothers’ Day all children should be home. Did you know that in South Africa more than 1 500 children are in detention?”
The cathedral was an important home for many liberal activities and we were blessed with extremely sympathetic clergy. Almost without fail the wives of successive bishops and deans were members of the Sash and after the ordination of women had been introduced, we even had clergy as members.
In 1987 David Russell was enthroned as bishop of Grahamstown. Because of his courageous quest to draw attention to the plight of the poor, his name was often spoken of in liberal and radical circles. As a young priest he had lain down in front of bulldozers set on destroying a squatter camp at Crossroads in the Western Cape. Later he had chosen to live among the discarded people in the Dimbaza resettlement camp in the Ciskei, subsisting on the same rations doled out to them. He undertook several extended fasts to raise awareness of poverty in South Africa. Not everyone was pleased when a man of such clear commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle was elected bishop of Grahamstown, but for many it was an enormously heartening appointment. The stone cathedral was aglow with gold and purple stoles and mitres and rang with the sound of marimbas and full-throated Xhosa singing. "There will be no peace,” he said in his charge, “until we share equal citizenship in this one country of our birth, no peace until there is a just sharing of the goods of the land.”
People like Bishop Russell who used their voices to speak the truth were indispensable at a time of a muzzled press and a state-run broadcasting corporation. The Black Sash too had a bold and respected voice and we never lost an opportunity to speak out, whether in high-profile campaigns or in the dissemination of suppressed information. We tried the idea of a massive banner again in 1987, this time draped on the building that housed the Anglican diocesan offices halfway up High Street. We had to talk hard and fast to convince the lawyers occupying offices in the same building that the banner should be allowed to hang there. On a drizzly day we unfurled the cloth bearing the words, “Remember those in prison as if you are in prison with them," and handed out fliers bearing the same Hebrew text to passers-by. Not everyone received them willingly. I was rudely pushed aside by a high-ranking Grahamstown clergyman, not on the cathedral staff and clearly not sympathetic to their support of us. Some of our leaflets were returned to us, defaced with rude scrawls.
We once embarked on a “carcade” through the centre of town. Ten cars decorated with black ribbons and posters calling for “No More Emergencies” drove slowly down High Street at lunchtime with their headlights on. The event drew a lot of attention and it was certainly a change from our silent stands in the cathedral doorway. We spoke at schools whenever we could, but it was often difficult to get permission. The hearts and minds of the country’s white children were zealously guarded, and monopolised by state propaganda. Any kind of alternative thinking was viciously demonised. Nevertheless we did find that the private schools would sometimes encourage debate and at one government school we had the occasional opportunity to speak thanks to the principal’s wife, who was a firm ally.
Our younger daughters Charlotte and Lucy belonged to the Grahamstown chapter of the Pupils’ Awareness Action Group (PAAG), an organisation led by young people. As their name proclaimed, they attempted to promote awareness among white scholars about the situation in the country. One evening after a meeting in the leader, Christopher Kenyon’s home around the corner, the girls returned breathless and wide-eyed. They told how special branch officers had raided the meeting, marching in and searching the house. We could picture the show of dramatic bravado, designed to intimidate the gathering of youngsters. Charlotte described how the policemen had even examined the small suitcase belonging to Christopher’s preschool brother.
We were a bit slow to realise the potential of the National Arts Festival for our awareness campaigns. I suppose we always viewed this event as a kind of holiday from the usual demands and concerns of our work, though the arts were increasingly politicized and it was never possible to escape entirely. Many artists and theatre companies were boldly using the festival to relay the anti-apartheid message, sometimes at considerable risk, so one year we decided to mount a photographic display showing scenes of repression and violence in Grahamstown. It was not very prominent but it attracted attention and we took the opportunity of selling buttons bearing human rights messages and car stickers with the words “East Cape Emergency Blues”. When festival-goers were asked to complete questionnaires with comments and criticisms, someone wrote, “Since when is the Black Sash an art form?” On another occasion we organised a film festival featuring a compelling series by South African filmmaker Kevin Harris. These included a documentary on the life and work of Beyers Naude, the well-known Afrikaans theologian and rebel Dutch Reformed Church minister, and another entitled, “Witness to Apartheid”, on responses to the security police during the states of emergency. The films elicited considerable interest and we counted ourselves lucky that only one show was banned.
Once, at the end of the 1980s, we held a protest during the festival. We chose to stand at night just before show time, on the steep road up to the monument theatre. As the bumper-to–bumper traffic turned into Lucas Avenue to make its way up the hill, the stream of raised headlights picked out our posters in luminous pink: “No Detention”, “No House Arrest”, “No Death Penalty”, “No Group Areas”, on and on for hundreds of yards up the hill. It was an exhilarating stand in the cold and dark, with headlights boring into our faces. The first night we stood without interference but on the second the Special Branch arrived and we were instructed to disband. We were satisfied that our bit of street theatre had made a striking visual impact on many festinos and hoped that it had given some of them pause for thought.
A popular feature during the festival were historical tours of Grahamstown. These tended to concentrate on the town as a settler city, “a little bit of England nestling in the foothills of the Eastern Cape”, as the SABC described it. Visitors were shown the churches, schools and museums, the stately homes and the quaint, white-painted cottages. The Black Sash decided it was time to present the other, less romantic view, the version of Grahamstown’s history as a frontier city where various cultures had settled and mingled and clashed for centuries. Thus in the early 1990s, using borrowed kombis and Sash volunteers as guides, we began to offer a social history tour which encompassed the pre-settler history of the town as well as the story of the townships.
We were surprised at how popular our tours became, especially among foreign visitors. From the top of Gunfire Hill where the Settlers’ Monument stood we asked our groups to imagine the confluence of peoples in the surrounding Zuurveld, from San hunter-gatherers and Khoi pastoralists, through Xhosa stock herders to European hunters and farmers. All of them were seeking the same resources and establishing a dynamic kind of cultural and commercial frontier that might have evolved very differently had it not been for the decision by the British to demarcate and settle the Eastern Cape. The story then became a military one. From Fort Selwyn we drove our guests past the old Drostdy building and the iconic Drostdy Arch that marked the entrance to the British military barracks. From there we could look down the High Street to the Cathedral of St Michael and St George, which is built on a natural spring near which the Xhosa chieftain Ndlambe had "a great place" when Colonel Graham arrived to eject the inhabitants of the region and establish a settlement. From there we drove to Artificers' Square, where we pointed out the neighbourhood that housed the hapless working class settlers who had been lured to the Eastern Cape to strengthen the British presence. Down the road from there, the old marketplace was a reminder that the town grew into a thriving centre of trade before the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior sidelined it, turning it into a commercial backwater. Since then Grahamstown has been characterised by the more cerebral pursuits of education and law.
Passing through the District Six of Grahamstown, a “frozen zone” where people of various races lived in a mixed community until as late as the 1970s, we told the story of the Group Areas Act. Then we crossed the Kowie ditch into the townships. In Fingo Village, amid the dismal slums that are the result of massive population pressure and uncontrolled rack-renting, we related the events that led to the amaMfengu being granted freehold rights after the last of the frontier wars. At St Philip’s church I always enjoyed pointing out the black Madonna in the stained glass baptistery window, evidence of the emergence of black consciousness in the Anglican Church as early as 1945. I also made a point of showing where the GADRA office had stood before it fell victim to the conflagration at the adjoining beer hall. Then up the hill past Makana’s Kop and into Joza township, where we told the stories of the 1950s defiance campaign, the zenith of apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s, and then the 1980s revolt and the successive states of emergency. After a two-hour drive we returned to town via the Coloured and new Indian areas. It always gave me great pleasure leading one of these tours and I was fascinated each time to reconsider the history of the town and the region through a new audience’s eyes.
In time, the demand for our tour grew beyond our capacity as a volunteer organisation, and we published a do-it-yourself guide, which ran to two editions and several reprints. As always, it was the hard-earned substance of our message that gave it its power. Information-gathering, monitoring and research were fundamental to everything we said or did. Our knowledge was our power and we believed that knowledge would empower others, some in their struggle for dignity, others just to throw off their blinkers.
This relentless pursuit of information was illustrated in the Sash’s monitoring of all pass law cases, and until the 1990s we had volunteers who attended every political case that appeared in the magistrate’s and Supreme courts, sometimes raising bail funds from friends and sympathisers. This kind of dedication, applied in a range of areas, enabled us to produce informative booklets which became widely used and respected on topics ranging from the plight of prisoners on death row to community resistance in the Eastern Cape. One, on the role of the municipal police in the Eastern Cape, was a good example of the nature of our work. In a region where fear and ignorance often prevented police abuses from coming to light, this booklet served to highlight the activities of a particular branch of the police, while also advising readers on their rights in the event of arrest.
In late 1986 we became aware of men in royal blue uniforms milling around in town. They turned out to be the new kitskonstabels (or instant officers), a hastily recruited municipal force attached to the South African police. Fresh from mere weeks of training, these black auxiliaries arrived in townships across the country to supplement the riot forces already deployed there, and quickly established a reputation for random and brutal operations. Their many derogatory nicknames bear witness to the disrespect with which the communities regarded them. In our area they were known as greenflies and wild rats. In fact, so unpopular were they that they often had to live in protected compounds on the edges of townships, or be deployed to areas where they were unknown. Many of those deployed in Grahamstown, for instance, were Zulus, while Xhosa men were sent to Natal. Nevertheless many volunteered for the work, lured no doubt by the combination of money and guns. Unemployment in the Eastern Cape was running at around 80% in some regions and the average wage was low.
The shifting of law-enforcement responsibility to the municipal police was part of a cynical state strategy. Under the guise of encouraging more self-determination, the state was handing over more and more unpopular functions to the black local authorities. They had previously already been given the unenviable task of rent collection. Functions such as these generated untold resentment among the people and bred internecine conflict, exacerbated by the arrival of the municipal forces. It is possible that the black-on-black and inter-tribal violence that threatened the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994 had its roots in this situation. Our research revealed that municipal policemen sometimes interrogated suspects for up to 12 hours before handing them over to the South African Police for formal investigation. Yet they kept no crime registers, observation books or cell registers. One policeman told us frankly that when he’d heard a job advertisement on the radio for law enforcement officers, he thought he'd be settling quarrels among people, not getting involved in “robbery and assault”.
Our booklet warned that entrusting lethal weapons to untrained people was a recipe for disaster. The Commissioner of Police dismissed our fears as sensationalist but there were soon several incidents to confirm our fear. One chilling event left an indelible impression on me because I personally took statements from witnesses and survivors. Four people had been killed and five wounded when three kitskonstabels opened fire at random on an unsuspecting household. A grandmother was listening to her favourite serial on the radio. She was sitting at the table peeling potatoes and chopping cabbage for supper, her shoes kicked off her feet. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and a cry, “Open up, open up, it is us.” The door was kicked open and three drunken greenflies burst in. They accused someone in the house of throwing stones and began to fire wildly. Paraffin lamps were peppered with bullets, plunging the scene into darkness, and in the ensuing mayhem three families were dislocated forever. Years later when this case resurfaced during interviews for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it was again the poignant minutiae of the domestic scene that struck me, as well as the sudden and brutal fracturing of lives.
As the South African press became more and more muzzled, the Black Sash found itself becoming something of a conduit of information to the outside world. An unexpected interview on New Zealand radio one early morning was my first of many lessons in how to think on my feet. For calls like this we often took care to use “safe phones” that were unlikely to be tapped. We also made strong connections with embassies and foreign offices, some of these facilitated through contacts that Malvern and I made during his sabbatical leaves in England. Feeling as we did that the Eastern Cape had become a war zone, we in the Black Sash were eager for foreign eyes to witness the facts for themselves, but were frustrated when foreign officials limited their visits to Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town. An exception was David White from the Foreign Office in London, who stayed with us from time to time. He was meticulous in his research and we knew we could rely on him to get the facts straight. I also grew very fond of the Amnesty International representatives who sometimes stayed with us and were always crisp of intellect and well informed.
An issue that put me in the spotlight but ended in some worthwhile international publicity was the 1986 boycott of Grahamstown businesses. The purpose was to put pressure on the Chamber of Commerce to add its voice to the demand for restrictions to be lifted and troops to be removed from the townships. The boycott was a black initiative that spread throughout South Africa and was potentially a powerful means of protest when all other avenues were being cut off. In only a few towns was the white community asked to participate. The Grahamstown Action Group coordinated the local white effort. They published a stirring pamphlet appealing to whites to “give a clear signal to township residents that we are genuinely sympathetic to their grievances and support nonviolent means of addressing them.” They were not inundated with support, pulling in a modest gathering of white lecturers, student leaders and some Sash members. Many liberal whites were becoming increasingly alarmed at the violence in the townships and felt that boycotts were the work of agitators. There were stories circulating of boycott defaulters being made to eat their purchases raw or having newly purchased clothes ripped to pieces. Furthermore, township shops were generally more expensive than the supermarkets in town, rendering the boycotts a cruel punishment on the poor.
In spite of these misgivings Malvern and I decided that the boycott was a worthwhile symbolic act and decided to throw our weight behind it. Fortunately it didn’t last long, because shopping became a difficult undertaking. Only certain shops were exempt and they had a dearth of goods. There were attempts to form a co-operative that would buy products in bulk from outside Grahamstown, but this didn’t get off the ground. Our meals became rather meagre for a while and my load of meetings only increased. Then London ITV decided to do a piece for the Six O’clock News on a society under siege, and they chose Grahamstown. They wished to include an item on the white boycott and asked for three people to be interviewed. The Action Group selected two articulate heavyweights who would state the political case, and then they needed someone to present the human face. That lot fell to me. The interview was to be done in our garden in front of the rockery and I carefully selected a bottle-green jersey that would look good on screen. In the event, an unseasonal berg wind blew and I ended up feeling rather hot. Trevor MacDonald, the ITV presenter was urbane and to the point but he asked none of the difficult questions we’d rehearsed. My two fellow interviewees were articulate and polished, whereas I just tried to tell it how it was. The boycott was difficult as many of the targeted businessmen were my friends, but participating was a matter of principle. The interview was shown that night in England and several of my friends and family, my aunt Miriam in particular, were startled to see me on the news. Even more startling for me was the fact that the two heavyweights had been virtually cut from the clip and all the focus was on me!
A dynamic new organisation that was also enjoying a higher public profile and helping to spread the message, was the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), which was launched in 1983 with the backing of various anti-apartheid organisations including the Black Sash. Its aim was to stop compulsory conscription into the apartheid army. Malvern and Matthew both participated, though neither became prominent in the movement. White South African males between the ages of 18 and 30 were conscripted for two years, after which they were liable for call-up as army reservists to do duties in their hometowns. By 1983 13 young men had been sentenced to prison for refusing to do military service on political and/or religious grounds. A small victory was won when the 1984 Defence Amendment Act allowed objectors with compelling religious reasons to appear before a tribunal. If non-military service was granted, they had to serve one and a half times the length of normal service.
Conscientious objection always stirs up a lot of emotion. I had read about the white feathers of cowardice that were presented to pacifists in the First World War, and I remember a distant relative being spoken of in hushed tones at family gatherings because he had appeared before a military tribunal and ended up working on the land instead of in the army. In the Zimbabwean civil war, those who left the country instead of fighting were referred to as taking the "chicken run", a term which became part of South African parlance too, as many young men left the country rather than face two years’ compulsory service. After 1984 the South African Defence Force began sending troops into the townships to exert control, pitching South Africans against each other in a way that many were not willing to participate in. Registration for national service happened at school, making it very difficult for young men to escape the call-up, though somehow a few always did. In most social circles it was considered unpatriotic not to do one’s national service.
Anna had a boyfriend who came from a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and although at the time he was no longer a member of the sect, he registered for non-combatant service. This did not mean that he would never find himself in dangerous situations, however. He described an incident in which his army vehicle had been trapped in a narrow alley surrounded by chanting residents carrying home-made weapons and lethal pieces of roofing. Non-combatant or not, he was perceived as part of the occupying enemy and was in mortal danger.
President PW Botha had convinced the nation that it was facing what he termed a “total onslaught” from hostile, mostly communist forces. In this context the phrase “on the border” conjured images of boys defending the homeland against a besieging enemy. Many went to the border with this heroic scenario in mind, only to find themselves deep inside Angola or Mozambique, plundering villages and participating in operations to destabilise communities. These incursions were vehemently denied by South Africa, but their legacy was a generation of brutalised young people both in South Africa and in the neighbouring states. It was a war that had no winners. An army chaplain once told Malvern and me of his revulsion and despair when men returned to base from an expedition into Mozambique with dead bodies draped over the bonnets of their vehicles like trophies from a springbok hunt. For 20 years the South African Broadcasting Corporation ran a Forces’ Favourites programme to keep up the morale of the troops on the border and their girlfriends back home. The radio presenter was awarded the Order of the Star of South Africa for exceptional service of military importance. Much more lasting than Forces’ Favourites, however, is the large body of literature by young writers haunted by their experiences in the army.
The remarkable thing about the ECC was the broad spectrum of support it attracted. Many participants came from outside the usual liberal groups. Of course the campaign faced repression, its leaders were detained and meetings were banned, and yet it flourished. With its signature yellow ribbons it had a national impact and was blamed for contributing to a reported low morale in the army. Lucy had a friend who was undergoing his army training as a volunteer officer. Part of the course was entitled “Enemies of the State”, which included a condemnation of the ECC. Lists of names were handed out of people to take note of in the ECC, and there was Malvern’s name. Our young friend enjoyed conveying the news to Malvern that he’d made the grade. Even more amusing was the news that Malvern’s photograph had been spotted in an army camp in northern Namibia. A friend of Anna’s was summoned to see his colonel and while waiting in an outer office he saw the photograph on a notice board. Closer inspection revealed that it had been torn from a section in the Rhodes Rag magazine headed “Studs on Campus”.
As a member of the ECC Malvern refused to participate in “dad’s army”, an auxiliary force of middle-aged men that went away on weekend camps to practise their shooting at imaginary enemies. He was equally unwilling to patrol schools at night with armed and trigger-happy patrols. But a civil defence option he was happy to consider was fire-fighting, so he joined the auxiliaries. He was issued with an overall, which looked as though it was meant for the Michelin Man, seen so often in adverts at the time. It wrinkled, bulged and flapped around his white boots. With his splendid fireman's helmet, peaked at the front and back, hard, shiny and white, he looked as though he was off to a fancy dress party, rather than to fight fires in defence of the nation. Uniforms and helmets simply did not suit my academic husband’s shambling white-haired persona.
Still, Malvern took his new duties seriously and for several weeks he went off to lectures and drills at the fire station. Then the great day arrived when the recruits were to fight their first fire. They set off with clanging bells and wailing sirens for the place where a magnificent blaze had been lit for the purpose, but on their way the clutch on the fire engine broke. They were left ignominiously sitting by the roadside waiting for another engine to come to the rescue. When it finally got them to the scene, all that was left were a few smouldering ashes. In the end, Malvern didn’t see active service during his short spell as a fireman.