Do we celebrate Women’s Month in SA, or do we use it to mourn all that is not right in the country related to women?Struggle veteran Shantie Naidoo returned to SA after 1994. Picture: ALAISTER RUSSEL/SUNDAY TIMES/GALLO IMAGESis a true SA story of four women — Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin, Rita Ndzanga, Shanthie Naidoo and Nondwe Mankahla — and their refusal to testify in the apartheid-era “Trial of 22” in 1969.
But there is a uniquely SA impediment to this. How do we divvy up labour in a country that is plagued by the worst gender-based violence in the world, which is likely to be linked to unhealed generational trauma? The women in my book had a unique, gender-specific experience around resistance and activism. When Madikizela-Mandela passed on, we were reminded that the female narrative of the struggle against apartheid, and in all history, is vastly different to that of the men.
We are either not aware of stories like these, or do not acknowledge them. And what of the emotional impact on women here, and the women in the trial and all the others? Where does that leave us today?Shortly before Rivonia trialist Ahmed Kathrada’s death in 2017 he questioned why his life partner Barbara Hogan, a former minister and former detainee, had not told her story of incarceration and struggle. He believed it was time.
Hogan was detained in 1981, held in solitary confinement for a year, then sentenced to 10 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 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.
There are suggestions that political prisoners have lived with untreated post-traumatic stress disorder . 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 these wounds in our DNA, a deeper exploration will allow a deeper understanding.
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