1. Early Years ...

I was married in 1947, and then I stayed at home. I was a housewife. My first child was born in 1949, and thereafter I had another baby in 1951, and another in 1952, and another in 1954, so it was just babies, babies, babies, all the time. My last baby was born in 1956. I bore six in all, but three died within days of their birth. I didn’t know at the time what had caused their deaths, although I can see now it must have been yellow jaundice. Then, in my ignorance, I didn’t see that anything was wrong with them. At that time black people wanted their skin to be lighter. Those children seemed to me beautiful, with their lovely light yellow complexions. And the jaundice was never diagnosed.

It might surprise some people that I could lose three babies, each time soon after birth, and not know the cause. But it is typical of white doctors working in our black hospitals to treat patients, and cram them with pills and mixtures, without ever telling them the cause of their illness. Even when you are brave enough to ask, the doctor gets irritable and asks you not to waste his time. I don’t know whether it’s because our hospitals are overcrowded and therefore the doctors cannot cope with the workload; or whether they think they are doing us a favour because black doctors are few, and so we should be grateful and shut up. To me, on the contrary, it seems that we are doing them a favour, because all our hospitals are training hospitals attached to their medical schools, and with all the peculiar diseases we suffer from, we make excellent guinea-pigs. Sadly, though, some of our own black nurses have fallen victim to this bad habit of not discussing the patient’s illness and are spiteful when you ask what is wrong with you. They have even coined a word for a patient who wants information: they call her ‘i Grajuf meaning you are a graduate, too educated for your own good.

I remember when the first of my children died. The nurse came from the clinic to wash the baby and so forth. I think it was the third day or so that she’d visited, and she said we must go to the clinic. I asked why, and then thought it must be something to do with the baby’s extra finger, which they’d tied off, to cut off the circulation.

When we got to the clinic we were taken by ambulance to Baragwanath. I was holding this lovely baby of mine—she was very plump, and everybody was taking her hand saying, Took at this lovely baby.’ I wasn’t the only one who thought she was beautiful. Then the doctors took her and examined her, and said they had to rush her to the ward. And when I got to the ward, that lovely yellow baby of mine had turned almost blue, and no one told me why. There was a drip, and I was upset, and I remember my husband had come looking for me—and the next thing the baby was dead. That beautiful yellow baby.

This thinking that anything that is light-skinned is beautiful has caused so much harm. I don’t think anyone escaped it. I myself used skin lighteners when I was working, but I’m one of the lucky people who didn’t get cancer from them. Most of my people have damaged skins, just because we thought that if we were light we’d have the same privileges as the whites. When you’re working side by side with someone with a lighter skin in a factory and you find they’re given preference, it’s hard not to believe a lighter skin is better for you. Now black consciousness has saved us from hating the colour of our skin. We used to wear wigs, too, to help give the appearance of being fair, and we used to have terrible struggles with our own hair, to make it straighter. And when we had our photographs taken the negatives would be lightened for us, to make us look as much like white people as possible. I have a photograph of myself wearing my wig, and it saddens me. Even then, looking at my face, I don’t think that wig made me too happy.

The only thing we still have a quarrel with, even today, is our weight, and that we continue to fight against, because to be overweight is bad for our health. We know it is the food we eat that is to blame, and that the cheapest food is the most fattening food, and the least nutritious. So we can fight this problem with pride, because we want to be healthy and to look good as people—not as white people. Many young black people are very slim, including my own children. They take exercise, where we just worked and didn’t have enough money for food, let alone sport.

When I met my first husband, Roger, I thought he Page 393 →was very nice because he was handsome and he used to dress well. And when he chose me to be his wife I was proud, because he had chosen me from all the women he could have had.

It was the tradition then that a newly married woman should spend much of her time staying with her in-laws, on her own. It was a point of pride to be able to say, ‘I am well accepted. My in-laws love me? If your husband sent money to you, he didn’t have to send it to you as his wife, but would send it to his mother, who would tell you, or not tell you. 1 was lucky with my mother-in-law, who lived in a rural area in what was once known as Mafeking. She would pass everything he sent on to me, and although she wasn’t working, she was ploughing and had some stock cattle and so on, so we lived from all that she could get as produce. I went to live with her when I had Molly, and I lived quite well there.

Then I went back to my husband and brought up our children in our one-roomed house in Kliptown. We lived behind the landlord’s cottage, in one of the rooms at the back of the yard. There were three houses like ours facing the front, and three facing almost the back, and ours was a corner room facing the back. A fence divided one house from the other. I had a bed and a wardrobe, and I’d put empty apple boxes one on top of another. In the bottom one I’d store my pots, and in the top one the plates and cups, and on top of these boxes I’d put the two water buckets, and a pot and kettle, which were all aluminium. We had a small black stove in the corner, and two benches and a table.

I would spend the whole day at that table. There were the nappies to be changed, and the children and myself to feed, and then I’d clean those buckets and the pot and kettle with Brasso or whatever until they glittered like mirrors. And I’d polish the black stove, and scrub the benches and the tables. Cleanliness, you see, was another matter of pride among us. We polished in order to keep some self-respect, because the conditions we lived in were so terrible.

I was fortunate that in the yard where I was living there was a well. The others had to come to this same well, and some people had to travel a long way for water. Then came a time when we were told we shouldn’t drink the water, as it was polluted, but should use it only for household and laundry work. So I would put my glittering bucket on my head and travel a long way to another well to draw water, but we could never be sure that well was clean, and whether the person doing the inspection was reliable. Looking back, I realise how often my children were ill, and wonder about that water. And of course the toilets were also in the yard, and they weren’t drained properly but were really just another well. They smelled very bad.

To my disappointment, within five years I had to admit that my marriage was no longer what it had been. There were just too many quarrels. Always it would be one problem that would lead to the quarrels, and that was money. He was working in the clothing industry, in the cutting room, and so was earning slightly more than some of his colleagues, but still we could not manage on his pay. It would be used up before pay day and there would be no money to pay for food for the babies....

In 1955 we moved into our own four-roomed house in Orlando West, which is in Soweto. The arrangement was that you would pay rent, and if you could afford to pay for thirty years then you would be granted the lease of the house, but never the freehold, because the law forbids black people to own freeholds. That is the privilege of whites only.

Well, it was our pride to have such a big house. Such luxury! We even had our own yard, for a garden or vegetable plot. But the financial problems came with us. These new homes were not electrified, and this added to our difficulties, because just to have light in the evening cost us money we did not have, and the rent was always increasing.

I kept on thinking, ‘It will improve? When we had our fights I would try hard to get money together so that I could take my kids and travel to Mafeking, which was just twelve hours by train, to go to my mother-in-law, who always welcomed me.

In our tradition, when a girl married she was married, body and soul, into the family of her husband. And after the wedding, before she went to live with her husband, all the elderly women—grannies, aunties, mothers—would convene a meeting where she was told what to do when she got to her new home. All the taboos were spelt out—how to behave to her husband, her parents-in-law. And especially she was told never to expose the dirty linen in public. This is why it was always to my mother-in-law that I would go when things got really bad between Roger and me, because wifebattering was regarded as dirty linen, and a woman would suffer that in silence and never admit to a doctor what was the real cause of her injuries. Only nowadays, and this I am pleased to be able to say, this practice has been exposed to such an extent that we have refugee centres in our townships, something that was unheard of a few years ago. But then I would say to the doctors, ‘I fell,’ or ‘I tripped myself? And his mother would be furious, and even when he’d calmed down and wanted me to come back she’d say, ‘No,’ but she didn’t mention divorce. That wasn’t the language we spoke. For her, the way to get away from him was to stay with her.

But one day we started arguing and I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to leave you. I’m going home?

And this man knew I cared about my family, my family unit, and he thought I’d never leave him. So he just said, "If you want to go, why don’t you?’

I took my bag—no clothes or suitcases—and I left. I walked to the bus stop and took a bus all the way to my father’s place, and that’s the last time I walked away from my husband.

My children came afterwards. My people had to go and fetch them. It was not possible to do it any other way.

2. “Push Your Arse!”

. . . The church was my one pleasure, until we working women got together and had what we called stokvels. A stokvel is a neighbourhood group that is very supportive, socially and financially. Many black women earn meagre wages and cannot afford to buy the necessary comforts of a home, so we set up these stokvels, where we could pool our resources. You have to be a member to enjoy the benefits of a stokvel, and they are properly run. The members decide what is the greatest need. It could be a ceiling, a refrigerator, or pots, or anything that you could not pay for yourself. The members collect money in proportion to their wages, and put it into a pool for one person in the group to purchase what has been decided. After that they pass on to the next person, and the group identifies another pressing need, and so it goes until you find that each person in the group has managed to buy some household gadgets without getting into a hire-purchase contract, which has been disastrous to many a housewife.

Another important aspect of stokvels is social. Women in the townships are very lonely because their husbands tend to leave them at home when they go to soccer matches, or to the movies, or to taverns to have a drink with the boys. The stokvel meetings change from one member’s house to another, and you are obliged to serve tea or drinks. After the money has been collected the women start conversing about current affairs, sharing their problems, which leads them to politics. And that is why African women are often much more politically aware than their Coloured and Indian counterparts, who do not have the opportunity of meeting in such a way.

That was the way my neighbourhood was. My house was the second from the corner, and there were no fences dividing the houses from each other. The woman in the first house from the corner worked in a white kindergarten, and she would be able to bring leftovers of sandwiches from rich children, and as she had no young children of her own she would pass those leftovers to me. And so we sustained each other, woman to woman—a woman-to-woman sustaining....

I struggled from the first day I got into the factory. After I had learned the machine better I thought that perhaps the most important thing was to do whatever I had to do perfectly, but because I wanted to do this I couldn’t produce the number of garments I was supposed to. It was not possible to chase perfection along with production. They made the choice for you, and they wanted production.

As a result of my attempt to work in this way I was screamed at more than anyone else, but still I couldn’t get myself to work as fast as all those other people. Every morning when I walked into that factory I really thought, "Today it will be my turn to be dismissed.’ But then I was elected a shop steward, and soon after, to my surprise (though looking back it does not seem so unexpected), I was promoted. It was after about three or four years, and I was promoted first to be a set leader and then a supervisor, which was unheard of—a black supervisor in that factory. Instead of dismissing me, they were trying to make me one of them.

We were members of the Garment Workers’ Union Number 3. There were three garment workers’ trade unions at that time. The Garment Workers’ Union Number 1 was for whites, headed by Johanna Cornelius, and Number 2 was for Coloureds and Indians. Number 3 was for blacks, headed by Lucy Mvubelo, who had sent me to Henochsberg’s in the first place. The union for Africans wasn’t registered, of course, but the employers accepted it was there. Our subscriptions at that time were deducted from our pay and went to the Number 1 and 2 unions, who would negotiate for working conditions and wages for garment workers. We had an agreement which served for all three branches—whites, Indians and Coloureds, and Africans —and we would benefit from their negotiations in that whatever minimum wage was set we would be paid that amount. The other workers would get over and above that wage, but they would be sure to set a minimum wage for the African workers. In my factory we black women workers made up about 70 per cent of the work force, all earning that basic flat wage. There was no machinery to challenge that wage. It was for the employer to decide to pay over the minimum wage. It was purely voluntary, and that is in fact what it was called, a "voluntary increase.’ So our union just had to sit and wait for what came out of the negotiations with the Industrial Council. Any action we took over their decision was illegal. For us to strike was illegal.

None the less, on occasion we did strike, or go on a "go slow.’ I think the strikes that meant the most to me Page 395 →were in the early 1970s, when we fought to earn an extra cent, and also to narrow our hours. When I first started work the day would be from seven-thirty to four-thirty, and we fought, all of us, for the narrowing down of the time, and succeeded in bringing it down to five minutes past four for leaving the factory. We were fighting for a forty-hour week, and in the course of the fight we did go out on strike....

On the occasion when we fought for our extra cent, I remember what a struggle we had, and how hostile the employers were. We went on a go slow strike, and they were so angry, being used to dismissing us for the least mistake, for being late or whatever. It took months for us to win—but when we did, we felt joy, great joy....

It was not easy to act for the workers at that time. A lot of awareness has been created over the last years, but then they were often frightened to say aloud that they were not happy with their salaries. Also, they didn't always tell their plans to me, as shop steward. They would always be surprising me. They would say to each other, without my knowledge, Tomorrow we are not going to start work until a certain demand is met.' I would always be early at work, because I would arrange things before the workers came in, and when I got there I would see people were not coming to start work, and I would stand there like a fool. I, a black person and a worker, would be inside with all these whites standing around with me and saying, ‘Why aren’t they coming in to work?’ And when the whites would address the workers and say, ‘What is your problem?’ perhaps somebody would answer, ‘We do have a problem.’ So they would say, ‘Who are your spokespeople? Let your spokespeople come in and talk to us.’ And they would say their spokesperson was Emma, meaning me. So the whites would think I had instigated the stoppage, that I was playing a double role, making the workers stand outside and pretending I didn’t know.

They could have sacked me if they had wanted. I was a shop steward, but if they wanted to sack you they could still sack you. Instead, they would try and use me to stop the trouble. They would use me like a fire extinguisher, always there to stop trouble. I would have to go to meet with the workers and ask, ‘Now what is actually going on?’ And they would tell me they wanted money, or they wanted that person who had been shouting and yelling at us to behave him or herself. I would listen to all that, and then I would convey it to the employers. They would be adamant, and so the workers would stay outside and not come in. Often the police would arrive with dogs and surround the workers. Many times with the help of the union we would eventually receive assistance, and perhaps the people would achieve a part of what they wanted and go back to work. But during those days, in the factory I worked in, there was one strike after another. And this has followed me all my life. Wherever I am it seems there must always be trouble.

3. Speaking Back

I don’t know exactly when I became politicised. In 1955, for example, I was in Kliptown when the Freedom Charter was drawn up there, and the square that became known as Freedom Charter Square was like a stone’s throw from where I was living. But... it was only when my friends approached me that I really took notice of it....

The ANC had a uniform then, and these women were wearing black skirts and green blouses. The gold colour was not anywhere in them then, just green and black. So my friends were all in their colours, and I didn’t have that, but every other thing which affected them and made that occasion so wonderful for them affected me as well. I was not a card-carrying member, but at that meeting I was a member in body, spirit and soul.

It was so good to be there, just to hear them speaking. Every race was there, everybody, intermingling. I would sit under the shade of a tree and listen to everything, and it was as though everything I heard was going to happen, in the next few days. I feel the same when I listen to the Freedom Charter now—just for those few moments I take heart that it will all come true, that there will be houses for everyone, schooling, prosperity, everything we need.

There were speeches against the pass laws, and cheering, and clapping, and we sang ‘Mayitniye Afrikal’ —‘Africa come back!’—and ‘Nfcosi Sikelei i Afrika’— ‘God Bless Africa.’ It was a moving meeting, yet with all this—the shouting, the strong talk, the mixing of races—it was a peaceful meeting. It has been a long time since we’ve had those kinds of meetings, with no interference or people having to run. I don’t know if they’d invented tear-smoke, nobody running away from anything. I can’t even remember seeing any police present, and the police station wasn’t far from where the meeting was held. Maybe the police were there, enjoying the meeting as well, because Kliptown was the right place for this meeting to be held. It was a non-racial area. There were very many Indian people, and it was almost like a coloured area, but we were there as well. And there must have been some whites and so forth. So everyone was there. It wasn’t like in Soweto, where you find only Africans, or Lenz (Lenasia), Page 396 →where you find Indians, or in other areas with so-called Coloureds only. It was total racial harmony.

So I think that congress was really an eye-opener for me. That, maybe, is when I started to be politicised. Although there is another thing, which I have always felt, which is that I have always resented being dominated. I resent being dominated by a man, and I resent being dominated by white people, be they man or woman. I don’t know if that is being politicised. It is just trying to say, "I am human. I exist. I am a complete person.’

The 1960s were a bad time for unions. Many were forced to go underground by the government, which was arresting people and banning meetings. The ANC and the Pan African Congress were banned in 1960, after the Sharpeville massacre, and because of the close ties of SACTU [South African Congress of Trade Unions] with the ANC very many union leaders had to go underground or to leave the country.

In 1962 the Garment Workers’ Union, which was an all-women union, combined with the Men’s Clothing Union and became the National Union of Clothing Workers, and I was elected to sit on the national executive of that union, where I stayed for twelve years. We would meet with the workers and look at their demands, and then pass these demands on to the non-African unions to negotiate for us.

Soon after this, it happened that we went on strike in our factory over our wages, which were still so terribly low, and during one of our meetings somebody came from the Labour Department to drive away the representative who was addressing us at the time, one of my colleagues on the national executive. He said we had no right to go out on strike at that time, because there was an Industrial Council contract in existence, and we were therefore breaking the law. We knew nothing of this, and to us it wasn’t important which law we were breaking. The important thing was that we were starving.

These meetings were an opportunity for us to speak out, and say some of the things that had been boiling up inside us, so this man—I remember he was an Afrikaner, and he had only one arm—found himself faced with perhaps more than he expected. His attitude was so rude. He didn’t even introduce himself properly. The first thing he did, instead of explaining who he was and that he was supposed to be representing us, was to send our union people away, and to tell us that unions weren’t recognised—meaning black unions weren’t recognised—and that he was the only one who could speak for us.

Well, we challenged him, and all the workers booed him, and I, because I am not so good at booing, spoke back instead. It was very satisfying to be able to speak out and say we didn’t even know who he was—that since we were seeing him for the first time we didn’t see how he could be our representative, and that he was driving away the only people who had come into our factory to help us and organise us. I also asked him which law it was that we were breaking, and in what circumstances that law would not be operating, making it possible for us to go out on strike, because the Industrial Council made sure an agreement was always in operation, and that before one expired they would always have negotiated another agreement, leaving no gap in between. This was a law we had always known about. It existed already and had done since I had become a union member. But because of the suppression of the unions in those years it was not being strictly enforced. And this man, instead of giving us due warning that this was the case, chose to come to our meeting and try to bully us, and drive our representatives away.

At that meeting was Tom Mashinini. He was there as an organiser, and he also was driven away by this man. We were to come across each other soon after this, when Tom was standing to be a full-time union organiser. In fact I voted for the other candidate, but I must have grown to appreciate Tom more over the next few years, since we eventually married, in 1967. He has always respected my independence, and this, I am sorry to say, is unusual in South Africa....

... I think it was on that day that the employers really took heed of me, because soon after I was called in to Mr. Herman, the top man in the factory, who told me he had information that a strike was going to take place within a week, and that I was the one who had instigated it.

I thought he was lying, because I had no idea there was going to be any strike, and he said he’d got the information from the people in the Labour Department. They worked very closely with the police, he said, and the police had informed the Labour Department that they had been investigating the Henochs-berg workers at this factory for a long time, and that I was the one who was inciting them to strike illegally. I said, You’ll be proved wrong, because nothing of that nature is going to happen.’ But unfortunately, and to my great disappointment, the workers did go out on strike that week, and Mr. Herman called me in and said, There it is now, you see, there it is.’

Strangely, though, they still didn’t dismiss me from work.

Always, when I addressed those whites, I would have to Page 397 →stand. We wore uniform for our work, and so I would stand there, dressed in my blue overalls, with my hands behind my back. In all the nineteen and a half years I worked at Henochsberg’s I was never once asked to sit down. You just accepted that was the order of the day when you spoke to the white boss—standing, in uniform, hands behind your back, completely deferential....

... around 1970 ... I was earning around 15 rand a week, and that was after fifteen years. I used to take five rand home with me, and the other 10 rand was kept by the factory, so that I would get it all at once at the end of the year in January and be able to meet all my school fees for my children and so forth. It was very hard to live on five rand a week, but I didn’t want my children ending up in the factory like I had. I didn’t have much knowledge of these things. I didn’t know that if I had taken the money to the bank myself there would have been some interest, which I did not get from the factory....

One thing that was worrying me at this time was that I could not understand why we black workers were expected to take tablets against TB, which were handed out to us as a group in our workplaces. I had heard of many bad experiences of "medical attention,’ and because I felt suspicious of these tablets I protested at one of our shop steward meetings. Little did I know that the whites also were getting the same tablet, but that they received theirs person to person, and not publicly, in a group. It will always be difficult to convince us to believe that anything supposedly done for us is really to help us when it is not done for all the people as one. Among my people there are those who have learnt to be suspicious even of family planning methods, and we will always blame the side-effects that have been suffered by some of us on the fact that our treatment is of lesser importance than of the whites.

However, after that meeting a man called Loet Douwes Dekker, a trade unionist working for the Urban Training Project (UTP), approached me and said, "Emma, I think you would be the right person to go and start a union for the textile workers.’ Now all this was a foreign language to me then, and I thought he must be joking. I said no, it wasn’t for me, I was okay where I was. But that wasn’t the end of it. Next I was approached about a glassworkers’ union, and again I didn’t accept. But then I was approached by the senior people of the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), the union for white shopworkers, and this time I accepted. I still don’t know why, but I did. I discussed it with Lucy Mvubelo and handed in my notice....

4. Birth of a Union

Morris Kagan and Ray Altman were my first real experience of friendship between whites and blacks. I had met them before, along with other white trade unionists, at TUCSA [Trade Union Council of South Africa] meetings, since the NUDW, was an affiliate, and I had admired the brilliant speakers there. One woman especially, Bobby Robarts, who was working for the NUDW, was a fine speaker, and she was one reason why I accepted the job—because of the challenge. But it was those two, Morris and Ray, who supported and helped me in a new way, especially Morris.

They acted as officials for both NUDW and the National Union of Commercial and Allied Workers (NUCAW), which was formed in order to represent Coloured and Indian shopworkers. I was starting the union for black shopworkers from scratch, most of the leaders for the original union having been detained or having left the country. My starting salary was 200 rand a month, which was a big jump, and to cover our first few months Kagan’s union gave our union a 1000 rand loan, interest free. We were to be called CCAWUSA: the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa.

The union offices were in Princess House, in the centre of Johannesburg. My office was on the second floor. Because of the Group Areas Act we could not, as blacks, rent offices in town, so Morris Kagan rented my office in the name of NUDW. I had an office, a desk and a chair.

My first day was a terrible experience. I had come out of a factory of over a thousand workers, with the machines roaring for the whole day, everybody busy, people shouting and so forth, and here I found myself all alone. The silence was deafening. It was spring, and I was very cold in that office. I was afraid. There were no formalities to be gone through, I just had to get myself ready to go out and find some members. I didn’t know where to start or what to do. When I went home that afternoon I thought I’d made the worst mistake of my life.

I had never been a shopworker and I knew nothing of the ordinances and regulations. I was an ordinary factory worker. I would listen to Morris Kagan speaking and quoting and quoting, and I just thought, "My God, will I ever catch up?’

In a way, this was my university education, at last, my chance to study. And I was lucky to have a man like Morris Kagan to talk to me and say, "Here are the books. Read.’

Morris came from Latvia, and arrived in South Africa around 1929, when he was about twenty. He Page 398 →started working as a bus driver and bus conductor, and ended up working in a shop, and from there he became very active as a union member, eventually becoming a full-time union official. He was a junior to Ray Altman, who was a very educated man. Altman was in Cape Town, and Kagan and I were in Johannesburg.

All my admiration goes to Morris Kagan, who struggled with me. He used to say that I reminded him of his late wife, Katie Kagan, who was as short as myself and was a trade unionist ahead of him. He would say, "Until you are as efficient in your work as the capitalists, you will never beat them? Even the last time I saw him, the day before he died, in 1983, he scolded me because the name of CCAWUSA was not correctly spelt in the telephone directory. After that he said Tm tired and I want to sleep. You will all have to go? (I was there with Alan Fine and Morris’s son-in-law.) "First, Emma, put me properly on my pillow and cover me with my sheet. Okay. All of you—go? And by the time I got home there was a call from his daughter to say he had died.

I invited many black unionists to his funeral. There were more blacks than whites there, and we sang ‘Nkosi Sikelele.’ I thought it was important that Morris Kagan should have a funeral that would show what kind of life he had lived. I remember one elderly white union colleague asked me, "Emma, could I have the same as Morris Kagan at my funeral?’ But Morris had deserved it. . . .

There were other black trade unions that were being set up at that time. Every union was busy getting on its feet, and although their focus wasn’t on the particular industry we were representing, at least it was on other problems that we shared, like legislation or recognition. That was very helpful and good—to work as black unions together, not just with Morris’s union which was registered and recognised. Even when we worked with unions belonging to FOSATU [Federation of South African Trade Unions], for example, we weren’t tempted to federate with them because the FOSATU leadership was dominated by white intellectuals, and although we valued the support of its unions we did not want to be swallowed up by their way of thinking....

The obstacles management put in our way! They were so determined not to let us near the workers. Not only did I have no access to the stores, but even distributing leaflets out in the different shopping centres brought me to my first brush with the police.

The best way of getting the leaflets distributed, to get information across to the workers about the fact that there was a union called CCAWUSA, and where the headquarters were, and what it could do for them, was to go to their workplace and wait for them to come in to work. They had their meals in the canteen, and it was difficult to catch them going home because most of the stores had several different doors, and you wouldn’t know where to wait. So I would try to catch them in the morning, as they came streaming in to work.

Management was very upset by this. They used to blame me for making the workers late, even though all I did was hand them the leaflets as they went in. Then they challenged me with trespassing on private property, which was quite interesting, since if I wasn’t trespassing as a shopper then I wasn’t trespassing by being there with my leaflets. But then the management would phone the police, and the police would come with their dogs, often very many of them, and bundle me into their van, leaflets and all. Oh, it was disheartening to see all those leaflets disappear into their hands, with all the printing that had gone into them. And they would mishandle me, but there was nothing they could charge me with, and that was more important to me than any fear of being injured. I remember the first time they came roaring up to me with their vans and packed me off to the police station, I was horrified, thinking I was now a criminal. I had broken no law, but that was my main fear.

I was married to Tom by this time, and he would help me out, either standing with me to hand out leaflets or driving me around to the various points before dropping me at work and then going on to his own work. He would sometimes be taken to the police station along with me, but we kept on popping up the next day, at a different place, and a different set of police would come and take us away again.

What the police were not aware of was that by intimidating me in full view of the workers they were in a way assisting me, because the workers became interested in this woman who was being arrested, as it seemed, and wished to know who I was and what was going on. So I didn’t give up, and when I managed to save up and buy a very old second-hand Fiat car and to learn to drive it properly I could visit many more people. It wasn’t easy learning to drive at the age of forty-six, but I was glad I did!...

One thing I insisted upon, when asking NUDW to convey a message from us to management or when management, in trouble with their workers, called upon me to help them out, was that CCAWUSA was for black workers only, and when I spoke for shopworkers, I was speaking for black shop workers. This was not simply keeping clear the distinction imposed by the South African government, between blacks, who Page 399 →could in theory not be union members, and other workers. Our insistence on CCAWUSA’s black identity was important for other reasons too.

Our problems were very different from the problems of those white and Coloured workers, and this was vital to us as a group, to keep together in order to tackle injustice. We felt this in 1979, when the chance came to join with NUDW and NUCAW. They could not have included us before and stayed registered, but when the law changed they began to tell us they wanted to form a single union.

Decisions in trade unions are never made by the officials but by the people who are making up the union itself. Decisions come from the workers, and in this case the workers voted against forming one union. It was hard for us to forget that in the 1960s, when blacks were ousted from trade unions, the white trade unions acted very quickly in that process, and did not demonstrate for us....

... we remained a blacks only union until 1984, when the CCAWUSA constitution was amended to admit Coloureds and Indians, and in 1985, a few months before COSATU was formed, we removed all reference to race from our constitution.

It is hard for black workers in South Africa to identify with other workers' problems. Other workers are seen as human beings, and the black workers are seen as underdogs. And it was not exactly a common thing to see a white person speak out against their own promotion for the sake of a black fellow worker. It is all the menial jobs, all the lowest jobs in the workplaces, that are the jobs of the black workers. And as a black worker, if I speak about a transport problem I am speaking about a different transport problem from anything the white worker will have to suffer. We have these very long distances to travel, and we have the poorest possible transport facilities, and our problems concern the pass laws and schooling and hospitals, exhaustion, and poor diet. And while white mothers have problems of their own, such as having to see one of their boys leave to fight on the border, we can understand them, because we also must lose our children—to the security forces, or to fight against apartheid. But white mothers in this country do not have to suffer anxiety over what we call breadline problems. There is no other word for them. Breadline problems are questions of who will care for the children when their mother goes to work? Who will pay the bills when the grandmother or friend cannot come one day and the mother must stay at home, even though she is not paid enough to be able to afford to lose that one day’s money? Who will pay when she has to spend a day at the hospital waiting for an appointment?

No. Our problems are not the same. We had to fight for our identity as a black union. And we had to fight the dependency we had on the white workers and their unions. It was vital that we should be recognised for who we were, and that we should fight for our identity and respect as human beings. That was the battle we had to fight then. And human dignity is the battle we still must fight....

6. The Arrest of a Commie ...

They said to me, ‘Emma Mashinini, we are detaining you under Section 22,’ and that I still take exception to, because they should have made that statement in the presence of my family and not to me alone.

They searched the house, the dustbin, outside in the yard. They took complete charge of everything while I stayed in my nightie. With the shock and everything I wanted to go to the toilet, and whenever I went there was one policewoman who came with me, accompanied me literally into the toilet—as though something would come out of that place to attack them and she had to be there all the time. And they went on searching. They searched through the piles of letters from my children, and from the friends I had made all over the world, and from the shopworkers’ unions in different countries.

The letters were very interesting to them, and the books, especially all the books that had something to do with trade union work. They took piles of them, piles and piles of things, and put them on the table, and just at the time when they were about to leave the house my family was called in and they said to my husband that he should attach his signature to a form saying they were taking these books and materials that had been found in the house.

Tom refused to sign. 1 am not going to attach my signature to this when I don’t know whether you brought these things along with you or what.’ They were very rude to him and said he was not making life easier for me, but he said he would not do it....

They took me out to their cars. Now I was in the street, and my neighbours were standing on the corners to see what was happening. It was as though they had come to arrest a murderer, a criminal. It was only about six-thirty in the morning, and I was busy working over in my mind why it was they had come to arrest me, what offence I had committed. And after some time it came to me—oh no, maybe it is like the other trade unionists who were arrested in September. And then I thought, Section 22 is fourteen days. I was counting—oh my God, fourteen days, two weeks’ time, in two weeks’ time it’ll be ... I’ll be back, I’ll be out, Page 400 →just before Christmas, Fll be back home .. . But why, why?

They drove me to town, to Khotso House, where we now had our offices. They didn’t even ask me where our union offices were. They went straight to that place to search it....

When eventually we did go in, they searched our offices, through all the files—and there was a lot of paper then, not like when I first started the union, when I didn’t have one letter. Again they were interested in all of it, and again they took piles of the files and books....

Finally we went out to the car again, and when the lift stopped at the ground floor we met a group of inmates of Khotso House who were coming from the chapel, because in Khotso House every morning they have prayer meetings held at eight-thirty before people start work. It had been announced that I had been seen accompanied by police and that my offices were being ransacked. Several young men came to say, What are you doing to Emma?’ And even though the police said, ‘Get away, get away,’ they still came, just to show that they were with me....

I was strengthened by these people, and all the goodbyes, the waving at me, and the good things they were saying, that there will come a day when all this will be over, one day. Right in front of the car they were standing, and they sang the national anthem and chanted, ‘Amandla Ngawethu’—‘The power is ours’— and I was raising my clenched fist back.

We went to John Vorster Square, where I was put into a room, and there I was interrogated and harassed and given a number. And after some time I was called in by other policemen, who were looking through all the books and things which had been collected from my home.

‘You’re fat, Kaffir meid,’ one said to me. ‘You’re a nuisance and a troublemaker.’ And afterwards he said to me, in Afrikaans, ‘Are you a commie?’

Well, my understanding of that was, ‘Are you a communicant?’ because I saw some Bibles and I thought he meant was I communicant of the Church. So I said yes.

And he said, ‘Well, I’m not going to give you the damned Bible, because you are a Communist and you admit it.’

I was shocked, and all by myself, and it seemed everyone had an insult for me, that everyone who walked past had a word of insult to say to me. I was just in the centre of a mess. Who was I to argue over anything and say I misunderstood and that the last thing I was was a commie? That is how they work. They put you in a room, and confine you there so that you must just think you are the only person who is arrested and detained. They don’t want you to be exposed to the knowledge that there are other people who are detained as well.

As fate would have it, with all the shock, I kept needing to go to the toilet, and time and time again I had to say to this lady, ‘Now I want to go to the toilet.’

But this time when I went, just before we turned into the toilet, we passed the lift, and it stopped, and someone walked out and said, ‘Hello, Emma.’ It was Neil Aggett. I wanted to respond, to say hello back to him, but the relief of finding I was not the only one who was arrested took it away from me, and I could not bring out even that one word. I always regretted that, that I did not say hello to Neil, because I was not to see him again. But he was being pushed one way, and I that way, and he did manage to say, ‘Hello, Emma.’

From the toilet I went back to the office where they were writing down my details. They took photographs and fingerprinted me, and later on I was taken downstairs to the car, with just the little bit of clothing I had brought with me. They told me, in Afrikaans, that they were going to drive me to the Wilds, which is a place where all the muggers and criminals hang out. One understands Afrikaans, but only as much as one has to. There is not the willingness to learn to communicate very well....

I don’t know where we went. They took me many different ways, just to cause me more confusion, and they were insulting me all the time.

But then we stopped, and I saw we were in Pretoria.

I think it was then I realised I was really in trouble. I was taken to the offices and put into a cell. And I thought then, now I am arrested. Now I am detained.

Because, to me, Pretoria Central Prison was a place for people who have been sentenced to death....

8. Jeppe Police Station

In January I was moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg. Once again I wasn’t told anything. It was, ‘Pack your things, pack your things and you go.’ And I thought perhaps I was going home....

The first day I just said, Yes, yes,’ but as the days went by I complained to say, ‘Can I have an extra blanket or an extra mat?’ meaning just something to make this floor softer. She gave me that. And when I asked her about the food she said everybody ate this kind of food. She said it was the same food, cooked from the same pot as for every other arrested person, black and white. Because I was saying, ‘Is it food just for detainees?’ And she told me detainees and white persons eat the same food. So I got encouraged and started eating again.

But I was so glad—oh my God, I was so glad to see Page 401 →a black person, even a black police person. I was so sick of seeing those white people. To see always white people, white people pushing your food at you through the door, white people pushing you and telling you "Come" or "Go" and what to do—it was making me ill. Because when you are black you have a need for persons of your own colour. And with my envy of white people, now to be surrounded by them made me realise again how stupid that was, to envy their skin or hair. It was no privilege to be among them. It was a misery and a deprivation.

To the doctor I complained time and time again about sleeping on the ground and not having a chair. It meant that all the time I was squatting on the floor. For my age and size, all I had to do was squat. And the doctor said, ‘Okay, I will tell them? I would go for weekly check-ups and each time he would say, ‘All right, I’m going to report that you’ve got to have a chair? A chair, not a bed.

It was for me an outing, to visit the doctor, or the dentist, even if the reason was pain with my back, or my teeth falling out. And this was how I felt about my interrogation when it began. An outing to get out of my cell.

I was fetched one day in February to go to John Vbrster Square from Jeppe, by car. I was manacled again. I soon got used to that. It meant nothing.

And there came now this questioning time.

There could be about four people, at times six people. At times I would stand, at times I would sit, and these people would take turns. This could go on for the whole day. Questioning you about this, questioning you about that. Sometimes they would ask me if I wanted coffee, but I would always ask for water instead. I didn’t want to be seen sitting drinking coffee with these people. They would be at one end of the room with a table. I would be at the far end of the room. They worked in shifts. One shift would go to lunch and leave me with another shift. Once they gave me some lunch, bread and tea, but I wasn’t ever hungry there, and anyway when I went back to my cell my plate of food would be there. Maybe that’s why they didn’t bother to give me any. They knew my food would be waiting for me at the end of the day, and what did I know about lunch-times? I was nothing but a Kaffir. Then, at the end of the questioning, they would just leave me. They wouldn’t say goodbye or anything. They would just go, and the next thing would be another policeman coming to say, ‘Follow me? Not to say where to. Just, ‘Follow me?

Even in the car they would play tricks on you and confuse you about where you were going. They would conceal from you any cars coming in or out with other detainees. There would always be a driver, and one policeman next to him with a gun, and two escorts sitting either side of me—all just to take me from prison to prison. The waste of manpower in this! Sometimes it would depress me very much, the waste of these working people, with more education just handed to them than we blacks could get with all our struggles—for what? To sit there in a room learning nothing, doing nothing, always questioning and never understanding what they were being told. It is frightening. Very frightening.

There were times when I would believe them, that with all that manpower I must be a very dangerous person. And then again I would not believe them, but would see that I was helpless, like a child, and that even to go to the toilet was beyond my powers in that room, because I must ask, and wait for permission to be allowed, and then someone must escort me. At first this was very embarrassing for me, but after a time I managed to make myself see that it was the white women warders who should feel humiliated, to have to watch me wipe my bottom.

I was thoroughly questioned about my trade union work. They weren’t interested in the GWU, just in CCAWUSA. And they seemed very interested in the Allied Publishing strike of newspaper workers, which I suppose was really a turning point for us, and showed how strong we had grown. They were also very interested in my relationship with the other leaders who had been arrested before me. At times they would tell me directly that I had been very obstinate and very difficult to the employers. They would remind me of instances, saying, ‘Do you remember that this is what you were saying to a certain employer?’ One interrogator told me that he was among those people who were talking to me, saying that the workers had to go back to work and that I was being difficult. And sometimes they would leave me and I would hear in another room a tape being played, and I guessed they had recordings of some of the meetings I had been involved with. So it seems that in our industrial relations in South Africa you not only deal with the employers when you negotiate but you deal with the police as well.

Most of them were not intelligent. They were even very stupid. I know I never had the opportunity to complete my education, but they were very stupid, I must say. There was one who had read a lot about trade unions, I think, and one particular man would question me about my friends. What was I doing with Alan Fine, and what was I doing with Neil Aggett, and what was I doing with Barbara Hogan? I knew all these people had been arrested and were in prison. And they were questioning me about our meetings and our trade union centre and where this idea had come from, that Page 402 →somebody must have put this or that idea into my head. They wanted to know if I had ever read certain books—I can’t remember the names, because in fact I hadn’t read them, but they were Marxist books, because Marxists were the sort of people who have that type of thought, of bringing people together. I was interested in a trade union centre for worker education. Not necessarily with any ulterior motives behind it. But I was interrogated for hours to come up with the truth about the idea and where I got it from.

Always they wanted the truth, when I had no more truth to tell. I don’t think they ever really understood that in fact there was nothing to give away. But they always tried to find it, this nothing. They’d make me sit down and write, and perhaps in my writing they wanted me to say things, but there was nothing I could write that would give anybody away, because I’d write about my trade union matters. I would sit and write, and write, and this was better for me. Maybe it was a way of being able to think what to say without for once anyone pushing me and going on—‘Come on, come on, now. Speak.’ And being rough about it.

I was never physically abused by them. Just pushed around, but not battered or assaulted. It was an emotional battery, I suppose. There was a woman who would say, ‘If you tell the truth and nothing else you will be able to go back to your children in good time.’ And then there was a policeman who was very angry and bullying, called Whitehead, who would tell me I was fat, but that I was not to worry because by the time I left this place I would be the size of a marble, I would have lost so much weight. And that I would lose my position with the union, which had made me so hotheaded. And that when I came out my husband would no longer be there....

I was at times going again to John Vbrster Square to meet my husband, but we could not speak of all he was doing outside for me. It was still not allowed. But now I knew that there were still problems continuing about that, and that my husband was still standing firm.

Worst of all was one particular day when I was being driven to John Vbrster Square and we were going down Commissioner Street. Out of anxiety I would always look round to see if I could see people I knew. I would see them, but I couldn't wave to them because I was with two policemen, sitting next to me. That day I saw on the posters, ‘DETAINEE DIES IN CELL.’

‘Detainee dies in cell, detainee dies in cell. . . .’ And I can’t ask these people what has happened or what is going on.

When I got to John Vbrster Square my father, my husband, my brother and my sister-in-law were there, and I was excited to see them, but at the back of my mind my concern was for those posters. ‘Detainee dies in cell.’. . .

When I went back to Jeppe I wanted to know from the policeman, ‘I understand there is a detainee who has died in the cell. Who is this detainee?’ And one policeman said, ‘Okay, I will call you somebody senior who will come in and talk to you.’ I think it was a Section 6 inspector who came. And he said, ‘I believe you have got a question.’ I said, ‘Yes, I want to know who is this detainee who has died in the cells.’ He said, ‘Who told you that? Who told you that?’ I said, ‘Nobody told me.’ He said, ‘Where did you get it from?’ He was becoming aggressive. I told him I had read the posters at the corner of the street. And he said, ‘Can you guess who it is?’

Guessing. How could I guess who it was? He was amused then, smiling and amused.

I started calling names of people who I knew could never have been arrested. I wasn’t so stupid as to call the names of persons I knew were in prison. There would be more demands for the ‘truth’ then, more ‘How did you know? Who told you? Tell us the truth.’ So I mentioned all the other names and he was very amused. I was like a fool.

He never told me who that person was. And this was a torture and a hell to me. But a few weeks thereafter I went to John Vbrster Square again and there was my husband. He was now bringing me fruit juice in five-litre boxes. One time it was peach, orange, apple and so forth. I had these boxes in my cell. When they were empty I kept them. The colour meant much to me—the green, the orange—it was my closeness to nature. It kept me going. It was fun. But then my husband also brought me a transistor radio, which was a gift from my friend David Webster, a founding member of the DPSC who was later assassinated, shot dead by a passenger in a speeding car as he entered his home on 1 May 1989.

He showed me how to put the batteries in, and I was so nervous. I didn’t know if this was going to be allowed and he said, ‘Look, you must have it.’

I took it back with me. Now I had company. There was music. But also I could listen to the news. And one day when I was listening to the news I just heard the radio say that Australian trade unions refused to offload goods from South Africa because of Neil Aggett’s death in detention.

9. Dudu

‘... Australian trade unions are refusing to offload ... because of the death in detention of...’ They said the name and then they linked to say he was a trade Page 403 →unionist. I waited for a few hours and then the news came again and they said it again. I still did not believe what I had heard. I got such a shock. Here was I, all by myself, and I couldn’t tell anyone about the death of my friend.

It was stale, old news. It was weeks since I’d seen those posters, very many weeks. When I questioned the white police who brought the food, saying, "Is it true that Neil Aggett has died?’ they said, "I don’t know.’ And then I spoke to the black policeman and said, Is it true?’ and he said, "Yes. It is true.’ I questioned the black policewoman and the black policeman, and they said, "Okay, we’ll try and see if we can get the newspapers.’

The first cuttings they brought me were from an Afrikaans newspaper. There was a picture of Neil and the name, but I could not pretend to understand what had happened. So I asked if I could see the Rand Daily Mail and they said, "Okay, we’ll try.’

So now they were bringing me the Rand Daily Mail concealed in their clothing. They’d walk into my cell, and speak to me, and then they would just pass on the newspaper to me. It was great joy to read it. I’d read every bit, but I had to be careful. In Pretoria I’d never have been able to do it, but this window was so high nobody could see me through it. They had to actually come in, through the door, and I could hear them, with the keys jangling. I’d read the newspaper and then hide it under the mat. And when I’d read the newspaper I’d tear it into little pieces, then flush it.

In the newspapers I read about the people who were admitted to hospital. I read that somebody from the South African and Allied Workers’ Union (SAAWU) was taken in for psychiatric treatment, and that Liz Floyd, Neil Aggett’s girlfriend, had been admitted to the general hospital. And I started realising that there were many of us inside here. It made me feel braver. I all of a sudden just gained strength....

But under all this was Neil Aggett. His death affected me very deeply. We were very close friends with this man.

I would remember when Alan Fine was detained and Neil Aggett came to take his place in my life. He used to visit my office every day to enquire, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I was very concerned about Alan Fine, because I like him dearly, and I knew Neil Aggett did too. I couldn’t visit him. All I could do was call his mother to find out how he was and she would always tell me, ‘He’s okay.’

Neil was the first white person to die in detention. He had his profession as a doctor, which he could have concentrated on safely, without ever getting himself involved in trade union work. He was supposed to have killed himself, but everybody who dies in detention is supposed to have killed himself. I don’t know what they find to kill themselves with in those cells. There was no chair for me, not even to burn myself to death.

The police hated that white people should work for justice for black people. When they interrogated me they didn’t know I had found out that Neil Aggett was dead. They would time and time again tell me, ‘We’re going to question him about this.’ I remember Whitehead would use very vulgar words when he spoke about Neil. I could see he was furious and mad about him, that there was no more price that Neil could pay, because he had died on them. And in fact it was this man who was questioned about Neil’s death, and as a result was demoted from the security forces and made a policeman, working in the robbery squad. He was mad about Liz and Liz, too: Liz Thompson and Liz Floyd.

Strangely, I was not made more frightened when I went in for my interrogation. Instead I was furious about the whole thing. I was sort of arguing back. I started kicking out to say, ‘I’m not going to be questioned about things I don’t know.’ I’m a very well travelled person, and when I was questioned about my travels I would say whatever I wanted to say because my travels were genuine. It wasn’t to plan for people to come and take over the workers, or whatever it was they thought.

I was still getting the newspapers, and one thing really gave me a lot of pride when I saw it. There was a cutting with a photograph of my husband standing as a lone demonstrator in front of the Supreme Court, demanding my release. Tom standing there, alone, with a placard, demanding. And I read about him even coming to Cape Town and demanding my release, and demanding the release of all the other detainees.

The main important thing they were saying was, ‘Why are they not being charged?’ They insisted we had to be charged, rather than be kept in prison all this time. And he was arguing that he knew of no offence that I’d committed, and that it seemed I’d been arrested for my trade union work. And these people kept saying I wasn’t arrested for my trade union work, but for being a political activist. And the big thing was that Tom seemed to be negotiating as an equal, and did not feel any intimidation. His first act the day they detained me had been to refuse to sign for the books that they were removing from my house, and this was sufficient to prove that Tom was a very strong and conscientious person. But he was not one to speak out. My being detained, him demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court, the police station, demanding my release and going to Cape Town to demand my release Page 404 →there—this Tom was a person who spoke out, which he hadn’t been before. So sometimes when the police think they’re doing you down, they’re building you up. They built me up by harassing me in front of the shopworkers, and helped make the union what it is. And they made my husband speak out, so that today if the police knocked on the door I would look around to say, Who are they after?’—unlike before, when I would always think it was me....

10. A Kind of Freedom

One morning in May a chair was brought to my cell, so the doctor’s orders were at last complied with. I had a chair. But I had not sat on that chair for too long when there was a knock on the door to say, Tack your things. Come with us.’

This wasn’t anything new for me, to bring my things for interrogation. But I had not had any interrogation for so long, I just thought it was a change from one prison to another again. Leaving that chair behind, that chair which I’d waited so long for, I thought, ‘O, my God, I’m going to start life all over again without a chair.’ The cruelty of people. The cruelty of that chair. I ached. My back ached. I needed that chair.

I was taken to John Vorster Square with all my things, into that office, and in that office I was made to sign papers to say that I would appear in court on a certain day. I don’t know what the charges were, and I never did appear in court. It was just a further threat to leave hanging over me. But I did attach my signature, and I was given my things back. My rings, my watch, everything. Only my gold necklace which my daughters bought for me for my fiftieth birthday was not there. I said I wanted my necklace amongst my things, and that it was not there. They said they were going to find that necklace, but they never did. Then an officer made me sign very many more papers. And still I thought I was being transferred to another prison, and stripped again of all my things. It was only after signing all those papers and after being made to make oaths about not talking about being in prison that I realised, "Oh, I’m being released.’

Then they said, ‘How are you going home?’

I asked if I could please phone my husband, to tell him that I was being released. They knew the number. Of course. They knew everything about my husband, and myself. During the interrogation they used to tell me about my husband and myself. They rang him and told him that I was released from prison.

We went down into the basement and out with all my things, and I was left alone at the gate....

It was not long before my husband came. He came accompanied by a friend, Athol Margolis, who was in the National Union of Garment Workers with him. And Athol Margolis jumped in the air because he was so excited....

So now it was time for me to go home. It was so exciting. My child Nomsa was there, and my neighbours. My neighbours came in very great numbers, and there was one visit especially which was very important to me. Morris Kagan, who until that time had never been to Soweto, came to my house. He said—it was before the permits were abolished—‘Permit or no permit, I’m going to Soweto. I’m going to see Emma.’ All this was very wonderful, but also too much, because in the evening, when I went to bed, I was very exhausted from being alone for so long then all of a sudden having so many people coming.

At night the cars driving back and forth seemed to me now to be interrogators. Every time there was a car I was terrified, and thought that they were coming back to collect me. These people know what they do when they lock you up. You torture yourself.

So the excitement was short-lived. I now had a period when I was very concerned and worried and wanted to run away from my home. My home was no longer suitable for accommodating me safely, because they knew where it was and I thought they were coming back to get me.

We called the doctor, and he gave me something to put me to rest, to sleep. But still that feeling went on, for days and days. And all the time people were coming to see me. They were coming in their tens, in their hundreds. We actually had to have arrangements to say which people were going to visit on a certain day. People from trade unions, people from the Church, from prayer meetings. It was just traffic, one after another. And international friends. I was one of those lucky people who had a telephone in the home, and all the time there were telephone calls from all angles.

I’m sure the people could tell from my speech that I wasn’t normal. And in the end my FIET colleagues in Geneva said, ‘We want you to come to Geneva, and we are prepared for you to travel with your husband. We are not going to take the risk of you travelling alone.’

In May I was out of prison, and now in June I was to travel to Geneva. And from Geneva I was whisked away to go to Denmark, to a clinic for detainees and people who had been tortured.

In Denmark I was given the most royal treatment one could expect. I had wonderful doctors who paid the most important attention to me, I had a ward which was like a suite, I had everything I wanted.

But to me it was yet another detention. Tom had to Page 405 →leave me there, and he went to Germany to spend a few days with the children and then went back to South Africa. And mostly I just felt I’d been away from my family for too long, and now again I was away from my family. So in spite of all the good work that was done by this clinic—the good work which I appreciated very much—the fact remains that I wanted to be with my family again. I think this was bad timing, for me to go to that clinic then. I think, for all their good treatment, it was another disorientation.

I was with other people who were torture victims, coming from other countries. We could not speak because we knew different languages. Only the doctors and nurses could come and speak to me. And when you look at these people who are themselves tortured and derailed, it does not give much courage. It just put me off.

There were mostly men, from Chile, South American men. Some of them had brought their families with them. You could see their wives and children, and there was a lot of unpleasantness. These husbands had been away from home in prison, where they were derailed, and they were different people now—they were not who they had been. There must be unpleasantness in such a circumstance. So these families did not come excited. There was misery all around.

The doctors there were very nice. I remember they tried to keep my presence a secret, so that it would not be known in South Africa that I was having this treatment. They didn't want to use my real name. They wanted to give me a name to cover up who I was. This I refused. It was important to me that I had come and that my name was Emma Mashinini. I wanted to go down on record. This was very important. I wasn't going to accept another name.

The doctor who started the clinic was Inge Genefke, a woman about ten or twelve years younger than myself, and a very brave, intelligent person. She said the idea had come to her with the aid and help of another woman, who was in Paris. When I was there the clinic was still in a hospital, in a separate wing. But they were building a separate hospital for torture victims.

Inge Genefke used to want me to speak out, to tell her what happened during the whole time of my imprisonment and what the torture was. I had to dig it out. I forgot some of the things, but she was so patient. She wanted me to dig and dig and speak about everything.

But for me I was speaking to a white doctor, and I had spent so much time with white police, surrounded by white people. It was a white woman who had refused me chewing gum, and a white woman who had put those bracelets on me. And it was hard, very hard, to trust her, this new white woman. As well as that, I had been told when I was released never, never to speak about my detention. So whenever I spoke I was leaving something out. I was fearful, terribly fearful, that this would leak out and get to them, and I would be rearrested and charged for having spoken about things.

Then the newspapers found out I was in that hospital, and again I had that fear of being betrayed and that the people who said they were helping me would hand me over and return me to prison. The journalist who most hounded me was black. His name was Z. B. Molefe, and he printed an article on 18 July 1982 in the Golden City Press in Johannesburg under the headline: ‘MYSTERY OF SICK EMMA': ...

11. Just a Tiny Giant...

So by the end of that year we had won these four big battles, and with these recognitions we really had in our hands the power to change things. In reaction to this, from their fear of us, the management did all they could to discredit CCAWUSA. In 1983 a magazine called Hard Labour, edited by Gavin Brown, a legal adviser to OK Bazaars, produced a pamphlet discrediting CCAWUSA that had been widely distributed in shopping centres, parking lots and ware-houses. In it were questions like: Who is controlling CCAWUSA? Where does the subscription money go? And so on. It was ‘signed’ by the Edgars shop stewards, but at a meeting of the Edgars shop stewards shortly after they all said the pamphlet was not their work. I am glad to say that our members were not so easily fooled! ...

Those six months brought about a great change in me. I tried to get it all out at the time, all the bad feelings and memories, but I could not, and even now there are things that come up, and I remember. These are long-term effects. I have had long-term physical effects, and long-term mental effects.

The first time I had caught sight of myself in a mirror after all that time I had been shocked. I was a different person altogether. I am a very big person by stature, a fat person, though not tall. But now I was so thin and small, and my complexion had gone so fair from being in the shade for all that time, that I couldn't believe my eyes that this was me. It shook me a lot. I thought it was my sister in that bathroom with me, my sister who is very fair.

After the loss of my teeth, caused by the terrible food I was given in Pretoria, I had to be fitted for dentures when I was in Denmark. And I have to put something on my nails to patch them, because they are always splitting and they hurt. And I have a problem Page 406 →with my bladder, from sitting flat on concrete floors for all that time. I’d never had these problems before, not like most women. I’ve always been a person who was troubled with tonsils, but never with gyn problems. But now I was advised to have a hysterectomy, much earlier than I should have had it because I was suffering with fibroids.

I was admitted to the Johannesburg General Hospital, which was originally a hospital only for whites. But the white community built a very modern, up-to-date hospital for their community and turned over their rundown hospital to black patients. The white-only hospital which dominates the horizon of Johannesburg stands as a symbol of the attitude of whites to their own health-care and welfare: for their comparatively small community they have built an enormous hospital; our infinitely larger community has inherited their rejects.

On my day of admission a young male white doctor came to my bedside and a tray with instruments was brought. He was joined by another white doctor, an elderly man. They stood on either side of my bed and the young doctor started examining my vagina and was taking notes. While the young doctor was inserting something into me they were talking. Then the elderly doctor left and the young doctor was joined by another white male doctor. The young doctor was now relating what he had previously done to me in the first examination and I realized that he was being examined by a professor. I was inwardly fuming, and when they had finished and were about to move away I said to them that I regretted that their bedside manner was so horrible. I asked why they never informed me that I was going to be used as a guinea pig for their exams. I added that I had been humanely examined by a gynaecologist the previous year in Denmark, where I was treated as a human being. I said that they had also failed to prepare me for what they were going to do—that the speculum would feel cold and that it would hurt as they inserted it. They answered defensively, saying they did not know that I could speak English, but neither was at all apologetic. ...

Two other bad things were the exhaustion and the loss of memory. When I went back to work that first time, in August, I was almost like a cabbage. I, who had always been a very productive person, now had to struggle to keep going. For a long time I felt like this. I felt that although I was free, I was still a condemned person....

Perhaps the effects of my detention would not be so unpleasant if I was not constantly bothered by the security forces. But since I have been out of prison, practically every eve of every black commemoration day—like 16 June (Soweto Massacre), 26 June (Freedom Charter), 21 March (Sharpeville Day)—I have been reminded of these dates by the shining torches and loud knocks at my door which mean I am once again being visited by the security branch. They search my home as though I am harbouring people who are their targets....

12. Violent Times

When I started CCAWUSAI can remember I told myself I would give it ten years and then it would be time to move. Well, after ten years, in May 1985, I announced I would leave the following year, and I did. I felt it was time to go, and not once since have I looked back with regret that I left at that time. To have gone before, when I came out of detention, would have been to tell the government that they had won. And to have stayed for longer would have been to wear out my strength and my energy. I felt I had seen CCAWUSA through its opening, from being a union with no members to being a union with over 80,000, with power and influence and with great achievements behind it....

No country that lives by a system of apartheid can claim a sense of justice for itself, not in the area of black and white relations, and not in the area of relations between men and women either, whether white or black. The segregation, the setting of one off against another—this breeds a corruption from which none of us, whatever our colour, can be free. This was brought home to me when I left CCAWUSA, and I wanted so very much for my position to be filled by a woman. It would have made me so happy to see a woman ready there, wanting to do that job, and prepared to jostle the men around her for it. I had had a bitter experience in the time when COSATU came to be formed, when I had taken such a lot of interest, and worked so hard, and had seen how all the men were very happy to consult with me because of the size and importance of my union. It didn't matter then that I was a woman. But then came the day when the names were put forward of those who would go on the National Executive. And each and every one of those names were men’s names. Even CCAWUSA was represented in the end not by me, who was its General Secretary, but by Makhulu Ledwaba, who was the President, even though he was to be the youngest of all the people on the executive, and most ironic of all, when they were having an important person to come and meet them, from abroad or whatever, then they would say, ‘Oh, Emma, please, you must meet them.’ And I would say, ‘Am I again just to be used as a valve, just to patch up what you have done wrong?’

There was in fact worse to come, because the next step was to choose a logo for COSATU. And all the logos that came about, every single one, had the image of a man. There was not a single image of a woman. So it means that our presence—our efforts, our work, our support—was not even recognised. And CCAWUSA, which is regarded as a very strong woman-oriented group fighting for women's rights, with a majority, 60 per cent, of women as members, had to speak up for the very rights we had fought for from the different employers.

All this must be the concern of the union movement. The trade union movement is a very powerful organisation, and it is not there just to look at the bread and butter problems of workers. The trade union movement is concerned with the liberation of the people in South Africa. Because if the trade union organisation cannot take on the issue of the liberation of the country, who will? Much as they have abolished the pass laws, who wants to be a member of the Nationalist Party? Who wants to be a member of the PFP? No black wants to be a member of these organisations. There have been two organisations for my people and they have been banned. These are the Pan-African Congress, the ANC, and now the UDF. So the government has got to unban these organisations, and allow the people the choice of saying which political organisation they want to belong to. But until then, in the absence of these organisations, the trade unions are the people who must fight their battles. The whole life of a worker needs trade union involvement. And together with that goes the whole question of equality between men and women....

Sadly, as black determination to be free increases, so does the virulent right wing grow in number. Their fear and greed increases their hatred. The numerous right-wing organisations in South Africa may differ on certain issues of policy, strategy and tactics, but one idea is common to them all: they identify blacks as the enemy. The grotesque slaughter in Pretoria in 1988 epitomises the right wing. Mr Strydom, a member of the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB), simply woke up one morning and with his sawn-off shotgun went on a hunting expedition. He killed seven innocent black people and wounded many others. He is a man in his twenties. He has been declared sane and will stand trial. He smiles and waves to his family and friends in the courtroom and looks distinctly proud of his achievement on behalf if the Boere Volk (Boer Nation). One lives in a constant state of fear of these people. They cannot be underestimated, and as their numbers grow they remain a very real and dangerous threat to black people, and even to those white people who stand up to be counted with us in the struggle and are labelled by their right-wing white brethren as Communists and Kaffir-boeties (black brothers).

This is the kind of violence which surrounds the apartheid regime. This is the kind of society we live in—a society where children disappear, where mothers go from prison to prison to try and find their children, where some of those picked up by the troops or the police are as young as eleven years old. And in this kind of society it is not difficult to fan hatred, mistrust and revenge. The authorities have skillfully manipulated black people, creating ethnic divisions by encouraging malicious rumours, and turning black against black rather than against their real enemy, which is apartheid. The horror of South Africa is that the life of a black person is very cheap. Under this brutal regime, the saddest turn of all is that some of our own people have become brutalised and a prey to violent feelings....

13. Justice and Reconciliation?

Among the delegates present at the meeting of the Eminent Persons Group in 1986 which I attended was Sheena Duncan, who was at that time President of the Black Sash. At the end of the meeting she approached me to say that she had read in the newspaper that I was now retiring from the union, and she wanted to know what my qualifications were. I told her with pride that I am a self-made person with very little and low qualifications, as I had left school at the age of fourteen years, without completing my Junior Certificate, after my parents divorced and our home was broken. Sheena told me then that the Anglican Church requires the minimum of a Matric pass of its employees, but that in spite of my low educational level she urged me to apply for a vacancy in the Department of Justice and Reconciliation.

Although one of my major fights on behalf of CCAWUSA workers was for pension rights, especially for women, I failed to negotiate any pension for myself. I needed to find another job, and this should have seemed a great opportunity, but because of my non-qualifications I did not do anything about it until Sheena phoned me and insisted that I should. I will always be grateful to Sheena for her faith in me.

I was awarded the post, to my great surprise,... My work as Director of the Department of Justice and Reconciliation is to guide and co-ordinate all resource persons in the eighteen dioceses of the Province, consisting of South Africa, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique and St. Helena, in the Indian Ocean.

One of the very important challenges in my new Page 408 →job is working with detainees. I am part of a task force which draws up a register of detainees and political prisoners, and I suppose it is because I have served many months in detention that I am so acutely aware of the plight of detainees since the State of Emergency. Many people, especially our young people, have been detained, without a crime necessarily having been committed, and they are often subjected to violence and abuse. In the absence of detailed official figures, the DPSC keeps the most comprehensive records available to the public. In 1986 the DPSC knew about the detention of 2840 people under security laws. The police later revealed that 4132 had been detained under security laws that year.

One of the shocking revelations made by the DPSC was the detention of school pupils, some of whom were as young as eleven years old. The children’s consciousness of the discriminatory laws, and of the harsh security measures used by the government to suppress their requests for change, has led to an inevitable clash between the victims and the enforcers of the laws. A very popular campaign, Free the Children Alliance., was very active in highlighting the plight of children in detention. It is a crying shame to see children who are ten years old relating their nasty experiences while in detention. I grieve when I think of them as fathers and mothers of tomorrow; what are they going to tell and teach their children? The two predominating effects of detention, say social workers who have observed the results in children who have been released, are depression and anxiety, resulting in loss of interest in life, a loss of esteem, terror, sleeplessness, nightmares, lack of trust and serious medical problems. Some of these effects could last a lifetime.

I notice that their methods with detainees have changed, and I can, even despite all the terrible feelings I suffer because of my detention, count myself lucky to have been able to pick up my life and try to go on with it. The dying in detention seems not to be growing rapidly, as it was, but the people who come out from there are literally vegetables. The methods of torturing people are different.

They are also developing another way of damaging us more. You can see the trend—first it is trade unionists, then it is one-time students. Now—after the restriction on other organisations speaking against apartheid, which society used as their windows for ventilating their oppression and suppression—it is the Church which has emerged to speak on behalf of the people. They never used to detain so many people who work for the Church.

Another ingredient of South African society is the very high numbers of people killed with capital punishment, a means of retribution I can nowhere find it in my heart to condone, however bad the crime committed, or said to have been committed. On 26 February 1988 the South African Barometer published the figures for executions in South Africa since 1977. They are as follows:

In 1988 (up to 5 January 1989) 213 death sentences were pronounced, 117 people executed, 48 reprieved and 27 appeals against the death sentence were successful. The South African figures for capital punishment are among the worst in the world.

They kill them seven at a time. And the sorest part of it is that the black families do not believe that their people have been executed, because they cannot see the bodies. It is an absolute African tradition to see the bodies of the dead. We pay our last respects by seeing the body. If you don’t see the body inside the coffin, then how do you know what is in that coffin? People could just be removed. Who knows what could have happened to them?

It is very bad for the mothers, not to see the body. The grief at never knowing what is in that coffin, of not being able to see for the last time a child of yours, is just horrible. Terrible grief. I remember I was in Pretoria when Solomon Mahlangu was executed. Immediately after that execution we women from Soweto went and wanted to be with his mother, and when we got there they didn’t even give her that sealed coffin or her child to be buried. This body was chased all over, from one cemetery to another, but never was there access to it. And all we could do to sustain her was to share her anger. To identify the solidarity and to share her anger. And at every memorial service of an executed person all the mothers of those who have been executed come to that service and give support to the one whose child has been executed. All the mothers know one another, and have met, and can link together, so your problem is never your problem alone, you are never an island in your problem, and the divisions the government has been trying to create, they are all gone. We unite, and especially we unite in our crisis times....

I have heard white liberals say, "The black children are throwing their lives away thinking that liberation is just round the corner. And it’s not round the corner. The South African government could hold on for five, ten, fifteen years.’ And this is so. But this is still only a delay of what will happen. It’s just delaying tactics, so Page 409 →that more of us will die. And our black children, they are not afraid to die. None of them. They are prepared to die now. I have heard young girls speaking and saying, ‘I definitely am not afraid to die. Because many children have been killed in South Africa. And many are in detention because of fighting for the struggle. So why should we question which child should die and which child should be arrested when all of us are fighting for the same cause?" And I have heard of a boy who said, Tm not afraid to die now, but when Mandela’s released, then I’ll be afraid to die.’

The youth are prepared to die now, but they are not prepared to die when liberation comes. And I have been afraid to die, but when liberation is achieved, then, I must say, I am prepared. I’ve lived a hard life, in many ways a horrible life, but I have always wanted to see the day of liberation. And when we get there, as a coward, perhaps, I am prepared to die, to say: I’ve lived and struggled for all these years. Now that we’ve achieved justice—now that we’ve attained that—now may I not rest in peace?

End