Hogan was detained in 1981. She was held in solitary for a year, then at trial convicted under the Suppression of Communism Act and sentenced to ten years in prison. ‘I was desperate,’ Hogan said of her period in detention. ‘I wanted to kill myself. I saw no way of my getting out of that situation because I knew of many people who died in detention. I had friends who had been tortured very badly at John Vorster Square. I knew what they (the apartheid security police) were capable of and I just saw myself being tortured to death for information I simply could not provide.’ She had tried to commit suicide by stealing the medication prescribed for her injuries, swallowing it all, and tying the cord from her dressing gown around her neck.
Hers is one of many stories of women like her, activists working for justice, journalists, wives of imprisoned cadres, and the female struggle leaders themselves. The women who participated in the movement are ageing now, and many have passed on. But there are a few who can share the stories of what happened in their minds and to their bodies when they were targeted by the apartheid government systematically to break down the machinery that ran on the convictions of those who believed so steadfastly in it that they would risk their lives and their families. The effects would last for years to come.
These women lived through harassment and abuse that was gender specific. Academic research by Professor Kalpana Hiralal at the University of KwaZulu-Natal reveals how female political detainees were treated particularly harshly. Gender sensitivity was considered a secondary weapon.
Strip searches conducted by male officers, threats and acts of sexual assault – inspection of every orifice by male officers alone in their cells; political prisoners told that their children would be murdered; denial of sanitary material – these were meant to batter women as fiercely as possible, attacking them at their womanhood. Hiralal described how ‘pregnant women were threatened with drinking poison by their captors, another had her breasts slammed in a drawer, repeatedly. The nature of women’s incarceration, interrogation, and the impact on their personal lives highlights not only the gendered aspects of imprisonment but also the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Apartheid prisons imposed brutal and inhumane prison conditions that denigrated and humiliated women, thus becoming a site of humiliation.’5 But the worst, many women would say, was denial of visits from or news of their children.
Despite these conditions, women were far from compliant. ‘They negotiated their confined spaces through common sense, tenacity and a steadfast belief in their resistance and the justice of their struggle. The courage and sacrifices they made are important in giving greater visibility to both the tangible and intangible contributions women made in the liberation struggle in South Africa. The gendered prison narratives illustrate not only women’s contributions to the liberation struggle in their own right but also how the prison was another terrain of political struggle, resistance, confrontation, and negotiation by women,’6 Hiralal wrote.
There are suggestions that political prisoners have lived with untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Writing in a paper entitled ‘Truth and Memory’ for the Khulumani Support Group for people harmed by apartheid, Wendy Isaack wrote: ‘… the political compromises made in the South African transition failed to address violence against women and have left women vulnerable and victimised.’7
For me personally, visions of young women ripped from their lives, their families, mothers taken away by police while their young children watched, are haunting and I don’t believe I am alone in feeling deeply troubled by such images. If we pause to think about these women’s children, with long-absent fathers and routinely missing mothers, we may get an inkling of what wounds the current and subsequent generations of South Africans are still having to bear. If, as the science says, we carry them in our DNA, a deeper exploration will allow a deeper understanding. Few of the older generation have sought psychological help for the emotional trauma they suffered as a result of standing up for their political beliefs. It is my view that the outcomes continue to be reflected in South African society today.
In reading up on the Trial of 22 as much as I could in advance of meeting with the four remaining women who went through it, I soon realised that there is lean and scattered information about it. The bare facts were there, and the court record, which is a terse and unenlightening thing. I was banking on the women still having vivid memories of those harsh months 50 years later and being willing to tell me about them. I had interviewed them each telephonically for the news reports following Winnie’s death, but there was more of the story to tell.
I believed that if I was able to talk to these women, whose lives had been bound inextricably together in the late 1960s, the insights they might be able to offer of that time and their experiences at the hands of the notorious special branch would be a gift that I would not take lightly. I wanted to get to know them, to hear their stories, to better understand the context and the times.
CHAPTER 2
FINDING THE WOMEN
It is important to understand the context of the Trial of 22. During the 1960s the ‘second phase’ of apartheid, which was when the separatist laws were deeply entrenched, the oppressive government increased the police force and gave more power to law enforcement by passing the General Law Amendment Act of 1963 – or 90-day detention law. This meant that lengthy and unsubstantiated detentions were written into law. The power of the state control at the time was described as fortified and brutal. The intention was to capture and silence those who were the driving forces behind the liberation struggle. The period was benchmarked by the Rivonia Trial, at the end of which the ANC leadership were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island in 1963/4.
The late ANC leader Govan Mbeki wrote how after the Rivonia arrests, the security police ‘threw a wide dragnet in which they collected a large number of known activists. In the course of detention, some … broke down’.
‘The ANC took a hard knock, which threw it into disarray and from which it took some years to recover. The number of ANC members who were on Robben Island during the (1960s) and the number of women ANC members, especially from Port Elizabeth and Cradock, who served in various jails in the Transvaal, were an indication of the extent to which the organisation had been crippled. Worse still, when they were released after serving short sentences of two-and-a-half years to five and ten years, further charges were trumped up by the police. Thereafter they were sent back to jail to serve longer periods of imprisonment, or else they were endorsed out of the urban areas to … desolate places …’8
Mbeki wrote that the organisation was weakened. ‘It is quite understandable why after such a vicious attack by the government, the organisation had to reorganise and re-group before it could launch its activities again. One of the most significant features of the period was the convening of the Morogoro Conference in (Tanzania) in 1969 at which a decision was taken to open membership of the ANC to all who shared its policies, irrespective of colour or race. This decision marked a new era in that the major national liberation organisation became non-racial.’9
In 1969 it had been six years since the Rivonia Trial. During all that time, with the male leaders imprisoned, long before the larger body became ‘non-racial’, the women who remained behind had been at the coalface of the struggle. They were friends and comrades, carrying themselves and the organisation covertly. Ordinary women, with children and jobs, hopes and dreams. Their reality was years of harassment, long periods of detention, isolation, torture and abuse.
Their stories have largely gone undetected, untold, in the shadow of the mainstream narrative – that of the Rivonia triallists and Robben Island political prisoners. Some have been unsympathetically told, as Winnie Mandela’s has been proven to be. Perhaps these women wanted it this way, to be silent contributors, and that is the reason why we know only a handful