As a banned person, Martha’s activism was curtailed. ‘In 1964 I was put under the banning order for fifteen years by the Minister of Justice, John Vorster. I was ordered to report at Bramley police station every Monday between 7 am and 5 pm. When (fellow activist) Florence Mophosho left the country, I was ordered to leave with her but, because my children were too young, I did not go.’14
The banning order gave her little room for movement: ‘I was not allowed to have visitors or to attend any gathering. When my first born got married, I went to Pretoria to ask for permission to attend the wedding.’15 The government prevented banned people from attending funerals and weddings, which were considered public gatherings.
And, in line with the charges of the Trial of 22, she was an ‘organiser’ for the ANC and participated in many of the resistance campaigns of that time.
Rita Ndzanga recalled Martha being assaulted in prison during their detention. Winnie Mandela stopped a security officer from hurting her, incensed by the assault of her elder. ‘You dare touch her, you dare touch that woman!’ she said, and the officer retreated, although theatening her with violence.
After her release, Martha spent her time in activist work as far as banning would allow her, along with her comrade, Thoko.
Thoko, similarly, was a founding member of FEDSAW. She also helped form the Alexandra Women’s Organisation (AWO), after the ANC and the leaders of FEDSAW were banned in 1960. Under AWO, women would secretly convene at Mngoma’s house, hiding from the security branch. These movements, along with many others, were all monitored by the security police and Thoko was constantly under surveillance. This led to her arrest in 1969.
While Thoko remained a banned person and was confined to her home in the 1980s she remained very much an activist. She shared oral histories with young revolutionaries, and, in 1983 she was involved in the founding of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the umbrella organisation of anti-apartheid movements and civic groups. She was also part of the funerals network – when burials became the meeting ground for the organisers, posing as caterers and mourners.
Thoko died in 1995 at her home in Alex, a year after the first democratic elections.
In 2012, a plaque was unveiled in her memory at a Marlboro clinic named after her, the Thoko Mngoma Clinic. According to the City of Johannesburg’s official website, residents of Alexandra came in their numbers to honour the woman considered by many to be ‘the mother of the community, an organiser and a revolutionary’.
It was by chance and fortuitous timing that I could meet the remaining four women from the trial, in person, in the ensuing months after Winnie Mandela’s funeral. It meant travelling between Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth, to Soweto and Pretoria, to piece together the portions of the story where their lives intersected nearly five decades prior.
During the process, as time went by, I was keenly aware that these remarkable women were ageing. I noticed that their memories sometimes became fragmented, that their health was deteriorating. It became urgent to hear their personal stories but also to find their families, some of whom were scattered across the world, in the hope that they could add detail to their rich contributions, what the women sometimes dismissed as ‘duty’ and stopped there.
You will, I hope, have noticed my name – Shanthini Naidoo. Let me say at the outset that it is purely coincidental – not a literary device, as one of the early editors thought – that I do share a name or a derivative of it, with Shanthie Naidoo. There is no bloodline between us of which I am aware. But the connection of our names provided coincidence upon coincidence. Shanthie is retired now and lives in Johannesburg; she returned to South Africa from the UK after 1994. She is one of the reasons why this story found me, and I am glad for it.
Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin agreed to speak to me almost by mistake or perhaps charmed by the confusion about her friend with the similar name. And the same for Joyce’s children, who thought I was a grand-daughter of their mother’s good friend, whom they had never met. For Nondwe and Ma Rita, it was a memory trigger, hearing a name from a story they hadn’t revisited for many years. And the coincidence brought a unique way into their homes and minds. For this, I am thankful for a name that has been mispronounced all of my adult life. That connection binds me to Shanthie Naidoo in a way that is inspiring, but mostly because she lives her shanthi (peace) more than any other human being I have met.
CHAPTER 3
THE TRIAL
They were alleged to have inspected trains and railway installations in the Johannesburg area to find targets for sabotage and to have arranged visits to prisons – including Robben Island, where Mr. Mandela is imprisoned – in connection with National Congress business, to have worked with others in arranging financial aid and assistance to the organization, to have arranged to have contact with ‘guerrilla fighters’ and to have ‘encouraged feelings of hostility between the races’.
New York Times, February 1970
The Old Synagogue in Pretorius Street was repurposed as a court of apartheid. Designed in the architectural traditions of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1897, this was the first Jewish house of worship to be consecrated in Pretoria. After 1952, the Department of Public Works ensured that the building had lost all sense of God; even the windows were boarded up to remove evidence of devotion or beauty.
The space allowed for relatively large numbers, and batches of political prisoners stood trial there over the years for ‘communist acts’ ranging from sabotage to collection of alms for the families of political prisoners by missionaries. Security was tight. Members of the special branch were always in attendance and police officers, armed to the teeth, stood outside with machine guns. Women were not allowed to carry handbags into the building. While it was far off from Johannesburg, families and comrades arrived in numbers, setting up tea and food stalls, singing songs of protest and support, congregating in the streets outside.
Although most of the 22 men and women who stood in the dock in the Old Synagogue that summer’s day in 1969 were unfamiliar to one another, they knew who they were. They were the scaffolding of the anti-apartheid movement – a motley collection, joined together by a common cause.
How they had got there was the result of a large-scale, staggered but finely co-ordinated national raid on the part of the South African security police during the cold early winter months of April and May. Almost all of them had been pulled out of their homes at ungodly hours by the special branch and taken away from their families. To all intents and purposes, they simply disappeared.
An International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) document which captured the details from the detainees afterwards, noted: ‘In each home, police searched for many hours, and took away with them books, private letters, newspaper cuttings, typewriters, and many things which had nothing to do with politics, or which were political, but legal. Some of those arrested were journalists and writers, one was a poet, some were students.’16
‘The police took drafts of short stories, poetry, articles; copies of the London Observer; student magazines; love letters. Security officers testified to finding a number of books, none of which were banned, and press cuttings in the house of one of the accused, a 19-year-old student, Joseph Sikalala. They also recovered two school notebooks in which, in addition to algebraic equations, there were some notes. In all the forty, perhaps fifty, homes raided during May and June, the total of ‘subversive’ documents seemed to be a copy of a pamphlet issued by the ANC in London, and one or two documents said to relate to the ANC.’17
The accused would have made a pathetic picture in the courtroom, some in the same set of clothes they’d been wearing when they were taken. Some were skeletal, most were sallow skinned from the lack of decent food and exercise, sunlight and fresh air. More than a few bore scars