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About the book:
The story of a remarkable organisation of South African women who carved out a unique role for themselves in opposing the injustices of apartheid and working towards a free and democratic country.
As told by Mary Burton
This excerpt from The Black Sash: Women for Justice and Peace was published with permission from Jacana media. The book is now available at your nearest bookstore.
It is true that the founders of the Black Sash were brave, intelligent and dedicated.
Yet when I look back, 60 years later, I feel disappointment that they did not embrace opportunities for action on a non-racial basis.
The African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were building strength during that decade.
In June 1955, at the very time when the Black Sash was being formed, the ANC was holding its Congress of the People at Kliptown, at which the Freedom Charter was adopted. There is almost no reference to it in the contemporary publications or statements of the Black Sash.
Their manifesto announced, ‘Let all women…heed this call’, but they excluded those who were not classified white.
The original decision in 1955 that membership would be open to ‘all women voters’ meant that only white women, who had obtained the vote as recently as 1930, could belong to the Black Sash.
The argument for this restriction was that it was the electorate that bore responsibility for the government and, therefore, it also bore the responsibility for challenging unjust laws: ‘it seemed reasonable and proper to most of our members… they saw themselves as the conscience of the White electorate, whom they held primarily responsible for the state of affairs’.
It was not until 1963 that membership was opened to all women over the age of 18 who were South African citizens or permanent residents.
By the mid-1950s other women were becoming more and more militant.
The African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) had been protesting against the pass laws for a considerable time.
These influx control regulations, which had governed the movement of African men, and restricted their rights to live and work in urban areas, were increasingly being extended to women too.
On 17 April 1954 the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) was founded after more than a year of preparations.
It adopted a Women’s Charter, setting out its broad aims: ‘This organization is formed for the purpose of uniting all women in common action for the removal of all political, legal, economic and social disabilities.’
The ANCWL was a strong participant, as were women members of the Transvaal Indian Congress and the Natal Indian Congress, as well as the (white) Congress of Democrats.
Other affiliates included the Cape Housewives League, the South African Coloured People’s Organisation, the League of Non-European Women (Cape), and the Food and Canning Workers’ Union.
Records in the Helen Joseph collection show that in Johannesburg Miriam Heppner and Muriel Fisher were among the women who signed the FSAW inaugural launch invitation, and Cape Town signatories included Nancy Dick and Jean Bernadt.
All four were members of the Black Sash, but would have signed in their personal capacity.
On 9 August 1956 FSAW in their turn held a march to the Union Buildings, bringing many thousands of women from all over the country to protest against the pass laws.
Forty years later, 9 August became South Africa’s Women’s Day – a national holiday.
Sophie Williams de Bruyn, one of the four leaders who presented their petitions on that day, said, ‘We were inspired by the women of the Black Sash to organise the march, as they had done. They had not invited us to join their march, but we invited them to join ours.’
The white women who did take part in that march were mainly members of the left-wing Congress of Democrats, though some of them were also members of the Black Sash…
In a 40th anniversary publication of the Sash, Jo MacRobert commented, ‘The hand of friendship that was extended to the Black Sash by the Federation of South African Women was rejected.’
A number of explanations can be found for this. The first lies in understanding the main reasons for the remarkable response to the Senate Act and the Separate Representation of Voters Act, which abolished the coloured vote.
The outrage felt at the tampering with the Union constitution was based not only on the removal of the rights of male coloured voters, but also on the fear that the next step would be the denial of other rights, particularly the equal status of English with Afrikaans as a national language (which was protected by the other entrenched clause, section 137).
In December 1956 the editorial in the Sash magazine lamented ‘Nothing is left of the work of our Founding Fathers but a worthless scrap of paper, for nobody believes that the present generation of Nationalists or subsequent generations will honour the one remaining Entrenched Clause a day longer than it suits them.
The guarantee of the rights of the English language is worth nothing. The Nationalists dishonoured their pledges about the rights of the Coloured voters.
Why should they bother about any other pledges?’…
MacRobert wonders ‘how the history of the Black Sash would have been written if the organisation had not taken the conservative decision in those early days to restrict membership to white female voters’.
Indeed, the American academic Gwendolen Carter considered that the Black Sash’s greatest mistake was to remain aloof from FSAW. Jean Sinclair, the first president of the Sash, had responded that if this had been attempted ‘there would have been no Black Sash’ because agreement would never have been reached.
Many Black Sash members at the time were timid politically, and in later years Jean Sinclair herself very honestly acknowledged her own early conservative standpoint, and her change of mind.
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