Life in a police state: A black South African woman speaks out

Women’sStudies ht. Forum, Vol. 12. No. 2. pp. 157-166, 1989 Printed in the USA.

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LIFE IN A POLICE STATE: A BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN WOMAN SPEAKS OUT DIANAE. H. RUSSELL Mills College, Oakland, CA 94613, U.S.A.

Synopsis- Jean Pease, a black school teacher and anti-apartheid activist, was one of sixty women I interviewed in 1987 for a study of the contribution of women to the South African liberation movement. Although she was engaged in political work that was both nonviolent and legal, she was one of the thousands of activists who was detained during the 1985 state of emergency. Her story, the focus of this article, provides a vivid picture of one woman’s experience of eight weeks detention in a South African prison. She also describes how she became politicized, her experience of teaching in the racist educational system at a time of great student activism and turmoil, the difficulties of being a politically active mother, and her ideas about the significance of sexism in contemporary South Africa.

You have to accept an element of danger if you want to be involved. Either you become involved or by your silence and inactivity you maintain the status quo. (Jean Pease, 1987) School teacher Jean Pease is one of the 7,992 South Africans who were detained in prison during the seven-and-a-half-month state of emergency imposed by President Pieter Botha on July 20, 1985 (Foster, 1987, p. 182). Like so many others, Pease was never given a reason for her detention. But it came as no surprise to her. Actively working for a nonracist South Africa is all that it takes to be incarcerated. Even more shocking is the detention of children. After repeatedly denying that children were being held, the Minister of Law and Order finally admitted that 2,016 of the 1985 detainees were under the age of 16 (Foster, 1987, p. 183). South African law permits detention without trial on the whim of the police. And as long as there is a state of emergency, activists like Pease can be detained indefinitely on the whim of the Minister of Law and Order. Since 1985, there has been a state of emer-

I am very grateful to Marie Hart for accompanying me on my research trip to South Africa and for helping me in so many ways, including the taping of the interview with Jean Pease. I would also like to thank Jan Dennie for transcribing the tape and word processing this article, and Jane Futcher for her editorial assistance.

gency more often than not. Another state of emergency was declared on June 12, 1986, less than four months after the 1985 emergency had been lifted. It is still in effect today. Over 30,000 people have been detained in prisons since then, without ever having been found guilty of any offence by a court of law (Weekly Mail, 1988, p. 41). Women constituted approximately 12% of the 25,000 detainees held in 198611987, and five percent of the 5,000 held in 1987/1988 (Coleman, 1988). Some South African women believe that the state of emergency will only be lifted if international pressure increases dramatically. “The government is using detention like internment camps,” states another activist, Audrey Coleman, an expert who has testified to the United Nations on detention in South Africa. Coleman estimates that only 5% of those detained are ever found guilty of any offence (Russell, 1988). “People involved in democratic opposition are being removed from society because they are political opponents,” said Coleman, in a 1987 interview, “and dumped in prison for x amount of time” (Russell, 1989). As in Pease’s case, there is often no pretense of even attempting to prove guilt. MY STUDY I interviewed Jean Pease as part of a study I began in February 1987, when I arrived in South Africa to see for myself what was hap157

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pening in the country of my birth. Despite the recent “whiteout” imposed by President Pieter Botha’s government, it appeared from the distant shores of the United States that a revolution was at last getting off the ground. As a supporter of revolution in South Africa, I wanted to find a way of contributing to it. Because I had had a brief but meaningful experience in the anti-apartheid movement of the early 196Os, and because I still have some good connections with people in the contemporary liberation movement, I believed I might be able to obtain interviews with women political activists there. I decided to try to interview a representative group of women in the anti-apartheid movement for a book about their lives and the risks they are taking, and have taken for a new South Africa (Russell, Lives of Courage, 1989). For most North Americans, facts and figures about the horrors of apartheid have no meaning because they are without personal reference points. They engage the mind but not the emotions. I wanted to convey some of the lived experiences behind the statistics. And I wanted to focus on the experiences of women. Many people are taken aback when feminists like myself express an interest in the question of how detention and torture or other kinds of oppression might differ for women and men in oppressive societies like South Africa. They see it as an irrelevant concern that only a narrow-minded feminist would wish to pursue. I have encountered the same response when I’ve tried to find out more about women’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Only the belated efforts of some feminist scholars who have dared to investigate this question, despite public disdain, have enabled social historians to start to piece together some of the differences as well as the similarities in the ways women and men have responded to this extreme environment (Ringelheim, 1985). The “gender-is-irrelevant” school never seems to notice when all the accounts are about men; they appear to consider such information gender-neutral. Yet the same people view findings about women as inapplicable to men. A similar double standard has been evident in studies of blacks and whites. Joseph Lelyveld’s Pulitzer prizewinning book, Move Your Shadow (1985), is a note-

worthy example. Apart from a brief mention of Winnie Mandela and Mamphela Ramphele (a medical doctor and colleague of the late Steve Biko), women do not figure in this otherwise excellent book. And in his thirtysix-item selected bibliography, not only is there no book about a woman or women, there is no book authored by a woman. This kind of male bias is so prevalent in our culture that few readers seem to notice. I would be willing to wager that Lelyveld is unaware of his own bias. JEAN PEASE

Jean Pease is one of the sixty women whom I interviewed during my three-and-a-halfmonth stay in South Africa. Her story, the focus of this article, provides a vivid picture of one woman’s experience of eight weeks detention in a South African prison. Forty-seven-year-old Pease is a divorced *black mother of two sons, seventeen and twenty years of age, both of whom were born in Zambia. She obtained a BSC degree and a teacher’s diploma from the University College of Fort Hare in the eastern Cape, a famous black institution which Pease described as “a political hotbed” to which “the cream of African students came.” After completing her education there, Pease wanted to visit the recently independent Zambia, but was denied a passport by the South African government. (Refusal to grant a passport is a common experience for political activists, particularly blacks.) However, she was granted one after she married in 1964, “perhaps because of the change in my surname.” Pease and her husband stayed in Zambia for six years in the 196Os, during a period of great political repression in South Africa, but returned to their homeland in 1971. Pease, like most political women of color in South Africa, identifies as black to protest the government-imposed distinctions between different ethnic groups. But it is important to note that she does not come from the most oppressed black group commonly referred to as “African.” She is considered a member of a group referred to as “Coloured,” or even more awkwardly by politically progressive South Africans, as “so-called Coloured.“* Coloured people constitute only 9% of the

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South African population, compared to the 74% who are African and the 15% who are white (Mermelstein, 1987, p. xi). They are largely a product of miscegination, and most of them speak Afrikaans as a first language and belong to the Dutch Reformed Church the mother tongue and religion of their Afrikaner oppressors. They have enjoyed many more privileges than Africans-legal, economic, social, and political. Nevertheless, their lives have more in common with Africans than with whites. Successive white governments have made many concerted efforts to coopt them, a strategy that the anti-apartheid movement works hard and quite successfully to undermine. After many years of school teaching, Pease switched to working for an alternative educational institution called Sached at the end of 1986. Sached provides students, mainly African, with the opportunity to complete their final high school examinations outside of the intensely racist government-controlled educational system so they can go to universities overseas. I interviewed Pease in the busy Sached offices in a suburb of Cape Town. She had just returned from the International Conference of Teachers in Lusaka. Since the headquarters of the African National Congress (ANC) are located in Lusaka, going there is always suspect in the eyes of the South African government. “I know I will be subject to harassment for this,” said Pease, though she was not one of the five members of the seven-member delegation who had been detained for three hours on returning home. “The police made it plain that they knew that there were other people in the delegation. They picked up some people but not others to try to sow confusion and distrust,” Pease explained. “These are feelings one has to live with in this country.” JEAN PEASE TELLS HER STORY Growing up coloured I was born in Kimberley in the Cape Province in 1940. I remember as a child seeing the police walking around with pistols even in that sleepy town. I also remember my mother being arrested. She used to do sewing for a lot of so-called white women. A woman thought she had lost her pearls at our home

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and reported this to the police. The police came and picked up my mother and a friend who happened to be there in a very crude and rough manner, though they didn’t know anything about the pearls. My mother is one of the gentlest persons I know. When I came from school that day she was in a terrible state because she and the other woman had been interrogated in separate rooms as if they were criminals. Both were told that the other had said that they had taken the pearls when neither of them had said any such thing. My father was in a violent temper about it, and we had to restrain him from going to the police station and probably beating up the police officer. This sort of thing made me resent the police. I always felt we had absolutely no protection from them and that we were seen to be criminal simply because we were black. Eventually, they came and apologized to my mother because they’d found the pearls somewhere else. Becoming politically conscious My political awareness crystallized at Fort Hare. I chose to go there because the fees were quite low, so it was my good fortune that I couldn’t afford any other university. Many black students went to the largely white universities like Wits and UCT for their academic work, but their social life there was impossible (because of racism). Fort Hare was unique because we were all black and all in residence there, and the cream of Africa academically went there. It was a place of resistance, and both staff and students got on very well. Then, in 1960, the University Extension Act was passed and Fort Hare was taken over by the government. All those of us enrolled there were allowed to complete our courses, but after that only Xhosa-speaking students were allowed to go there. As well as the cream of Africa, some of the most disadvantaged people in South Africa also came to Fort Hare as students. The first year I was there the son of one of the cleaning women in my hostel graduated, and she went absolutely wild with joy. It was quite an eye-opener for me, because the Group Areas Act insulates us from knowing the problems of people in other ethnic groups. Because I am classified Coloured, the only contact I’d had with so-called Afri-

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can people was with someone who worked in my home. Although this person’s son grew up with us and we were friendly, there was no political content to the relationship. So the four years that I spent at Fort Hare changed my life. There were quite a number of student strikes at Fort Hare when I was there. When I was doing the final year of my BSC, the students decided to stay away from classes for two days in protest against the proclamation of South Africa as an independent Republic. After a day or two of boycotting we were summarily told that we had to get off the premises within 24 hours. The campus swarmed with hundreds of troops and policemen and the next day we were all expelled and escorted at gunpoint onto the trains. We had to wait for permission to return so we didn’t write our midyear examinations that year. We were finally allowed to come back after six weeks. Some of the students were punished for their role in the protest, so we went on strike again to get them reinstated. The Cape Action League I’ve been associated with a political group called the Cape Action League. It is anticapitalist because we see the apartheid system as a disguise for capitalism. Capitalism and apartheid are so intertwined in South Africa where the majority of the people are both oppressed and exploited. We believe that the four main principles under which we must operate in this situation are noncollaboration in any way with government structures; striving for one person one vote, because any other form of suffrage would be discrimination against the people who are left out; non-racialism not multiracialism, by which I mean not accepting the concept of race at all; and working for a society that’s free of exploitation as well as oppression, and where everyone has a job and a living wage. l’krmoil in the schools There has been a lot of turmoil in the schools. When I attended school, so-called Indians and Coloureds and Chinese were all there together, but later very rigid laws were passed- the Bantu Education Act, the Coloured Education Act-to segregate schools and compartmentalize ethnic groups as they

were classified by the government. Having been involved at Fort Hare, it was very difficult for me to restrict my involvement to Coloured people, so I became involved in teachers’ organizations which were quite resistant to government interference in the schools. I have taught for about 22 years of which six were in Zambia. I see my role inside the school as an educator, not just teaching the three R’s and science or whatever. I feel that students need to be able to understand the society in which they will function as adults. This view got me in trouble because you’re not allowed to criticize the Coloured Affairs Department. In 1976 there was quite a lot of unrest at the school I taught at because of the Soweto uprising. The authorities were looking for scapegoats at every school. If you sympathized with the children, then immediately you were labeled an instigator. In 1981 there was another upsurge of unrest in the schools especially in the Cape. I was told confidentially that there had been moves to get me expelled from the school for being responsible for the unrest. Even if all you did was to try to keep the students off the streets, you were accused of all sorts of things. The same was true if you tried to have programs to keep the students interested enough not to leave the premises and get attacked by the police. Some of us felt that it was our duty to protect the children so we went along with them to rallies. By going, we could intervene with the authorities when they wanted to arrest the children or beat them up. Teachers who did these things were immediately subject to harassment. When the schools exploded in unrest in 1985, I saw my students being beaten up even though they were just peacefully singing songs in the quad. I saw casspirs (large army vehicles) and troops come right onto the school premises, bristling with guns and sjamboks (animal hide whips used by police) and being very, very threatening. Having my own children at school as well was quite a problem. The brutality with which people are handled makes me more convinced than ever that the system has to end. I expect to be subject to intimidation for even taking an educational stand in this country, let alone a political stand. If you decide that you want to fight oppression and exploitation, then you have to live with this. I

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constantly look ‘over my shoulder, and I’m not sure what I can say on the telephone. I know I’m being watched and that everything I do is being reported. I try to work as discretely as I can, but a lot of things have to be done in public. Apartheid and education I see education in this country as perpetuating the whole system of inequality. It is a tool of the ruling class because it makes children accept inequality and authoritarian structures. Many of the history textbooks teach a very distorted history of South Africa. A lot of the language books, especially in Afrikaans, define civilization or a civilized person as white. Children are being indoctrinated through the educational system at all levels. Black teachers are also underpaid and we are not given proper facilities in which to educate children. The teacher/pupil ratio in black schools makes it almost impossible to educate children effectively, even in the three R’s. It is a system designed to perpetuate apartheid because black children drop out constantly because of poverty or because they don’t get the kind of attention they need in class. So they have no choice but to go on to the market as cheap labor. But education can also become a tool of people who are fighting against inequality and oppression and the school uprisings are part of the struggle in this country. I see myself in the classroom as having to try to undermine the indoctrination of children as much as possible. If you teach children about democratic practices and their value as a person, you undermine the whole system. And if you teach them about what is happening outside the classroom and how the school fits into this, they become more conscious individuals. The educational system in South Africa is very autocratic. Inspectors in the departments often impose on teachers what we teach as well as the way we teach. They don’t allow us to go beyond the confines of the syllabus even if we are teaching something as simple as genetics. They interfere if they find something in the notebooks of children they don’t approve of, or even in the teacher’s own preparation book. Although teachers have a certain amount of freedom in the classroom,

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we are always at risk of being reported on, sometimes even by children who would be bribed to make statements. I’m not sure if this has happened to me, but it seems that I have some kind of negative record in the department. I applied for the job as head of the department, for example, and I was turned down for no reason even though I was urged to apply. The people who are constantly turned down are always those involved in community work, while sometimes quite inept people are promoted. The impact of my politics on my marriage There were a lot of stresses and strains on my marriage because my husband was not prepared to be politically active. For example, if I wanted to go to an educational or protest meeting, we would have arguments about it. And he didn’t want politics to be discussed in front of my sons, even though the newspapers were full of it. This was one of the major reasons for my divorce in 198 1. His main concern was that it was dangerous. But you have to accept an element of danger if you want to be involved. Either you become involved or by your silence and inactivity you maintain the status quo. The government constantly claims that a majority of people in South Africa are law-abiding citizens, but really they are simply too frightened to give any battle. I feel that those who simply sit on the sidelines or refuse to say or do anything are assisting in maintaining the oppressive system. Detained I was detained at the beginning of November 1985. I was aware that I would soon be a target because I was being followed, and I had noticed cars parked outside my home. Also, I was the secretary of the Western Cape Teachers’ Union (WECTU) and the office bearers of this organization were targets at that particular time. So I went into hiding for a few days because I needed to get some of my family affairs and WECTU’s affairs in order. But because I had to be at school there was no way I could stay away for long without an explanation. So I went back to school on a Friday and was arrested at home the next day. They sent eight armed men to pick up one unarmed woman. They put me in the back of

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a van and drove like crazy over islands in the roads bouncing me around. .I was taken to Manenburg Police Station where I was finger printed, photographed, and questioned. They were particularly interested in finding out which organizations I belonged to. I was left in a cell for the night, then taken to Pollsmoor Prison the next morning where I was held for six weeks in solitary confinement. Quite a number of other women were also detained at that time including some of the Sached staff here. For the first two weeks we had no access to books or any other kind of reading material, and we were only let out for an hour of exercise a day and at meal times. I’m a fairly solitary person, so I didn’t find the isolation very traumatic, except that we were locked up after supper from about 490 in the afternoon until 7:00 the next morning. That was quite a long period to be without any books or anything else to amuse myself with. But I practice yoga and I kept myself occupied with exercises or just being quiet. It was possible to shout to some of the other people who were detained, but it was quite a strain because I couldn’t see them, and obviously anything I shouted was noted by the wardresses. Quite a few women would scream and bang their doors because they were upset by having to spend so many hours on their own, and this was traumatic for the rest of us. Every night the wardresses would come around asking, “Do you want a sleeping pill?” They’d hand them out like sweets. School girls were kept in single cells close to us, and we became quite agitated if they became very quiet because we had seen eight or nine tablets in one young girl’s cell. It was quite a wearing experience and people became very depressed. We demanded to know why we had been detained. The security police eventually answered that we were responsible for the state of emergency, and there was no use in pretending that we were innocent. We were responsible for the deaths of children and people being shot because we had instigated the unrest. After the first two weeks in prison they had to supply us with new orders of detention because they were only allowed to detain us for two weeks at a time.

The death of my ex-husband Although I was divorced, my ex-husband used to visit my two boys quite often before I was detained. One of the worst aspects of my detention was that he died the very weekend I was detained. We’re still not absolutely certain whether it was suicide or not. I was detained on the Saturday, and he died on Sunday night or Monday morning. My brother was given permission to visit me on Tuesday to tell me about it. I was very upset and especially perturbed about the children, although my youngest son was already 15 at the time. I applied to go to the funeral on Friday, but they didn’t reply to my request. My lawyers told me later that their request had been refused. My ex-husband was buried at 3 p.m. on Friday. Two women detectives came precisely at that time to interrogate me because I was most vulnerable then. I decided not to show any weakness in front of them, so I kept myself very calm and answered their questions. But they weren’t really concerned about obtaining information. If I didn’t want to answer their questions they said, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” and “You don’t have to answer.” They were obviously there to see how I was taking detention and the death of my exhusband and whether I was in a state in which they could manipulate me. That was the only time I was questioned during my eight weeks of detention. Our worst experience Our worst experience while we were there was when two detainees, Sheheda Issel and June Esau, were taken away at 11:OO one morning by the security police. They returned in the early hours of the next morning, which we discovered by shouting at them to see if they were back. They were in a frightful emotional state because they had been beaten and abused and insulted and questioned about Sheheda’s ex-husband, Johnny Issel, whom the police were looking for. They needed attention from a psychiatrist as well as a doctor. We were all in a state of fear for quite a long time because we realized that this could happen to us. But they were the only people harassed to that extent. One time Sheheda was taken away, apparently to be released, but she returned the next

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day. They had played a trick on her by pretending that she was to be released. The next time she was told she was being released, she refused to go because she didn’t know whether they would re-detain her again or not. The wardresses assured her that she was definitely being released, so she packed up and said goodbye to us and left. We subsequently learned that she’d been moved to another prison, where she’d been kept completely alone and subjected to interrogation virtually every day.3 So whenever we were called we had to contend with not knowing whether we were to be released or whether we would be re-detained or interrogated. Racism in prison We had difficulties enough, but Africans had even more difficulties. We were supposed to be allowed one visit per week, but most of the African women in detention didn’t get any visits at all for more than eight weeks. My mother told me that when the relatives of the African detainees went to get permits, they were told to come back on another day. And when they returned the next day, they were told it was too late for that week. So it was at the whim of whomever was in the office whether they gave people a permit to visit or not. I was finally released with three others on the 30th of December. My children and detention I was particularly concerned about my children when I was detained and, of course, more so when I realized that my ex-husband had died. But fortunately my mother was in Cape Town at that time so she kept house for them, and it comforted me to know that she was there. But I also knew that Sheheda’s children, for example, were being harassed outside. The police threatened to pick them up or detain them, so I worried that they might also try to harass my children or get information from them. But my friends rallied around tremendously. They visited my children, took them out, sent them cards and telephoned. People who weren’t allowed to see me still visited the prison, and occasionally I caught a glimpse of them out of the cell windows. So I was sustained in prison by the

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solidarity that was expressed by many people throughout my time there. And it gave me some peace of mind when I realized that my children were being looked after. But not knowing what was happening to us was even worse for people outside than it was for us inside. They didn’t know whether we were being beaten up or starved. Aside from the special visit from my brother, I had two visits from my younger son, one visit from my mother, and one visit from a lawyer. My elder son was very angry about my detention. I’d not involved my sons in any of my activities. For their own safety I’ve never told them when I was going to meetings or where I was going, which meant there was a breakdown in communication between us when they were teenagers. My younger son was fairly traumatized by the death of his father at the same time that I was detained, and by my absence when his father was buried. He needed to be treated by a psychologist, but he resisted that. He was a bit hostile when I came out because he was very angry subconsciously about my not being there when he needed me most. Another reason I decided not to involve my children in my political work was that I think they have the right to make up their own minds about how they want to be involved and if they want to be involved, though I would naturally be disappointed if they decided not to be. Also, I realized that I would be subject to more pressure if my children knew what I was doing. The police can hold your children up for ransom, which puts one under tremendous pressure to either talk or stop working politically. So I needed to protect them, myself, and other people with whom I was involved. The effects of detention on me It’s taken about eight months for the effects of my detention to wear off. When I was inside I felt fairly strong; I had to keep a stiff upper lip. Once I came out, the effects of the tension became apparent. My concentration was impaired. I couldn’t read very easily. I was extremely exhausted. I found it quite difficult after six weeks in solitary to adjust when four of us were put together in a cell and eventually 12 of us. I found it difficult to relate to the other people. I had

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hordes of visitors when I came out, which I also found stressful. I wanted to get away. The impact of detention on others Despite these difficulties, the more the government oppresses and detains us, the more determined we become to resist. I don’t think their repression intimidates anyone who is really committed to the struggle. I’ve seen students after having been beaten and detained become tougher and more determined than ever to fight the system. But the most horrible thing about the detention and brutalizing of children is that I’m not quite sure what kind of a generation we are breeding. I don’t know what happens to the psyches of children who grow up in such a violent society. You can have all kinds of beautiful ideals, but when children have actually grown up under these circumstances, you don’t know what kind of adults they will become. I wonder what kind of contribution white children can make to a future South Africa if they are cushioned off from what is actually happening and are taught to feel that they are superior. Restricted I was restricted after my detention until the end of that state of emergency in February 1986. It wasn’t a banning order but it was equivalent to one. I wasn’t allowed to attend any meetings, to be on educational premises, to contribute to any publications. I was restricted to the Wynberg Magisterial District. These were the conditions under which I was released. One of the women whom I was detained with invited me to her wedding, and I had to get special permission to attend it because it was outside the Wynberg area. I also had to apply for special permission from the security police to go back to teaching, as if I had been charged with some criminal act. They asked me on which route I would go to school until I pointed out that the school was within the Magisterial District to which I was restricted. Harassment of students and teachers The students were very happy to see me again. I’ve always had an excellent relationship with most of them. I think they might have boycotted school if we teachers hadn’t been allowed to return. But they had been so

traumatized themselves in 1985, it was as if they were shell-shocked for at least six months. A lot of their friends had been shot. They were constantly burying people and then being whipped at the funerals. There were frequent patrols by police in casspirs and troop carriers in the area where the school was, and the students were constantly being tear gassed on the school premises. This went on from about July 1985 to January 1986, which is a long period for younger children to be subjected to that kind of violence all the time. There was very little educational work I could do with them in that state. WECTU decided that teachers shouldn’t administer examinations at the end of 1985 because the children hadn’t had a lesson from July to December. The authorities expected us to set examinations on the whole syllabus for the year irrespective of whether the children had been taught or not. I would have been one of those teachers who wouldn’t administer the exams except that I was in prison. All the teachers who refused to administer the exams were suspended from their jobs. They were charged with misconduct-charges that are still pending. I wanted to leave my job because there are too many constraints involved in school teaching. Also, having been detained, I felt I would always be the scapegoat. And I felt my remaining at the school would endanger the students because any of them who associated openly with me would become the target of repression. A number of our students, for example, were not allowed to go to teachers’ colleges if they were known to have been on the students’ representative council. And two of our 1% and ldyear-old female students were also detained for two weeks. I was determined to find a way to continue the struggle more effectively than I could inside a school, so I came to work at Sached. Sached: Working in alternative education Sached was formed by the National Union of South African Students in the 1960s to provide mainly African students with the opportunity to do their matric [final high school examinations] so they could go to universities overseas. Other universities like the university of Cape Tbwn and Wits had become closed to them except by permit. Then

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Sached grew into quite a number of other projects, for example, my job is as a teachers’ resource person. I work with the teachers’ unions and run workshops for teachers on more progressive teaching methods. A lot of students come here for materials to run awareness programs on various events like Sharpeville or the Soweto uprising. We compile packages for them on the history of these events. We lend videos to community organizations and respond to the needs of teachers. But Sached is now under fire. Any kind of alternative educational materials are banned now in African schools. No one can go on to their premises to give any lessons in alternative education. If we put out any publications referring to alternative education, they are seen as subversive and sometimes banned. The government is investigating Sached’s funding at the moment. If they can find ways of stopping the funding of nonformal educational institutions, they will be able to smash educational resistance. Reform or revolution Judging by what the government has done in the past few years, I see the reforms that have been made as merely cosmetic. They don’t touch the lives of people in the street. Opening theaters and five-star hotels is only relevant to those who can afford it. Ninety percent of the oppressed in this country couldn’t care less about such things. Nor do they care whether their children can go. in limited numbers to a few [private, previously all white] schools with exorbitant fees. Allowing some people to vote for a particular chamber in Parliament where the people are dummies without a voice except in giving some kind of credibility to the government structures, I don’t see as change. I don’t think that there can be any really fundamental change in under five years because the economic circumstances are very bad here. People have very few resources except themselves. Anything done above board is subject to repression, so it’s extremely difficult to organize under these circumstances. But any popular uprising is crushed unless it’s very well organized, so I think it will be a long struggle. The problem of sexism Sexism is one of the most deeply ingrained

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prejudices which we come across in the liberation struggle as well. Many people believe that this particular problem should be left until after liberation, but I don’t agree. It’s also a form of discrimination and it needs to be addressed as an integral part of the struggle. This is why we don’t say “one man, one vote” but “one person, one vote.” And in the schools we try to make children conscious of the fact that if they oppress women, they also are part of a repressive system. Sexism has to be singled out and given attention because it’s obscured most of the time. Many people see themselves as liberated when they’re actually very sexist. I’m not sure whether I believe in a women’s movement as separate from a liberatory movement, because when you separate it, the men involved in liberation see sexism as a women’s problem which women have to fight. The problem has to be addressed in each organization by both men and women. People must accept equality as a normal part of all the structures being built for the new society. In so many countries where they’ve had revolutions or civil rights movements, sexism is something that is only addressed afterwards. But I believe we have to work to eradicate it now. EPILOGUE Feminism in South Africa is frequently dismissed, particularly by the left, as a divisive white, Western, bourgeois movement. In a country where progressive people are understandably preoccupied with the anti-apartheid struggle, this attitude makes it very difficult for feminism to take root. Of course, leftists in other countries have responded similarly after hearing feminist critiques of their sexism, as well as the society’s. Their attitudes protect male domination. Although fighting racism is an understandable and commendable priority in South Africa, more people need to recognize that this doesn’t mean other forms of oppression should be ignored. Since I am familiar with prevailing attitudes on feminism in South Africa, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that although most women, black women in particular, did not self-identify as feminists, many were, like Jean Pease, very concerned about

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sexism, and consider it an important issue to be dealt with now. I think many people in the anti-apartheid movement will be surprised to learn from this interview with Pease (and my interview-based book, Lives of Courage: Women for a New South Africa), how many black women there consider sexism a significant problem, in the anti-apartheid movement as well as in South Africa as a whole. As Rozena Maart, a self-identified black South African feminist, put it when I met with her in 1988: “It’s patriarchy that is divisive, not feminism!” ENDNtYITES 1. The Wkek& Mail, an excellent publication that still manages to publish astonishingly revealing information about what is going on in South Africa despite the heavy censorship laws, attributes the figure of 30,006 to “independent estimates,” while pointing out that “the government’s figure for those held for 30 days or longer under the emergency regulations since June 12, 1986 . . . is 17,723.” The Mail goes on to say that Ad&an Vlok, the Minister of Law and Order, refuses to provide information on the number of people detained for less than 30 days under the emergency regulations. 2. Like the term “white,” “black,” and “coloured” are

not typically capitalized by progressive South Africans. But to lowercase Coloured looks odd when the terms African, Indian, English-speaking South African, and Afrikaner are all capitalized. In addition, not to capitalize the word seems inappropriate for an international audience, some of whom may interpret this usage as disrespectful. Prefacing the word Coloured with “socalled” also becomes very cumbersome and awkward, so I’ve avoided that usage here. 3. An interview with Sheheda lssel appears in Russell, Lives of Courage,1989.

REFERENCES Coleman, Audrey. Personal communication, July 26, 1988. Foster, Don. (1987). Detention and torture in South Africa: Psychological, legal, and historical studies. Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip. Lelyveld, Joseph. (1985). Move your shadow: South Africa, black and white. New York: Times Books. Mermelstein, David. (Ed.). (1987). The anti-apartheid reader: South Africa and the struggle against white racist rule. New York: Grove Press. Ringelheim, Joan. (1985). Women and the Holocaust: A reconsideration of research. Signs: J. Women Cult. and Sot., 10(4), 741-761. Russell, Diana E. H. (1989). Lives of courage: Women for a New South Africa..New York: BasicBooks. Russell. Diana E. H. (1988). Detention in South Africa: A woman’s experience. >etninist Issues, a(2), 3-24. Weekiy Mail. (1988). 4(13), April 8-14.