Swimming with Cobras

by Smith, Rosemary

  In 1995 the Black Sash met for its final national conference, to decide on its own dissolution. Our numbers had always been low, certainly relative to the amount of work we’d succeeded in doing, and lately they had shrunk even further. Some women were joining the newly unbanned organisations, some were feeling burnt out and wanted to do other things with their lives, and some felt the victory had been won. Our size had never daunted or embarrassed us. Indeed, the voice of a small group of dedicated women had had a penetrating effect in the call against white domination. But what credibility would such a voice have now, should it need to speak out against the failures or abuses of a majority government? In a free political environment communities were beginning to speak for themselves, and rather than cling to the past, the Sash decided to confront its own demise. Consultants were engaged for a strategic evaluation, and while the advice offices were considered indispensable, the work of the more politically inclined volunteer arm of the organisation was judged to have run its course. At the next conference the Black Sash as we knew it was disbanded. The network of advice offices was transformed into a professional non-governmental organisation overseen by the Black Sash Trust. Already the advice offices, which operated in four provinces, employed up to 50 people and operated on an annual budget of over R4 million.

  It was an emotional moment when the curtain came down. We knew as we agreed to hang up our sashes that we were bidding farewell to something irreplaceable. We had been a tightly knit group, bound by a single and sacred purpose, who had trusted and respected each other implicitly. Even our social lives had become bound up in the association. In many ways the Sash had been my life. In it I had found my own identity and formed many of my closest bonds. The camaraderie had been a very fine experience for me, as had the depth of education I had received. In the three decades that I had by then lived in South Africa, no other organisation could have integrated me so meaningfully into the life of the country or taught me so much about it. Nevertheless I supported the decision to disband. My own involvement in the revamped advice office structure was set to continue, not only locally but also nationally through my continuing role in the Black Sash Trust.

  Transforming a volunteer-driven organisation into an employee-based one proved more difficult than anticipated. At the same time funding started to dry up as foreign donors concluded that the fight for human rights had been won. It was at this critical time that I decided to accept a full-time post as manager of the advice office in Grahamstown. My social work with GADRA had always overlapped with my voluntary work for the Black Sash, so the change felt right. What I did not anticipate was how difficult it would be to manage colleagues who had previously operated as free agents, loosely overseen by a volunteer committee. At first we circled each other warily. The wise and unflappable Gus Macdonald, my friend from our days in Kansas, became the office secretary and was always on hand to tone down my fervour when necessary. But soon the challenges of our day-to-day work in a new socio-political context took our minds off ourselves and began to cement us.

  Fortunately many erstwhile volunteers continued to support and assist the new professional organisation, enhancing our work and ensuring that skills were transferred to new staff. The area in which I most appreciated this support was the realm of finance, my Achilles heel. I remember sobbing quietly in the back row during maths exams at school. Numbers floored - and bored - me. When my exasperated teacher asked, “Rosemary, how are you going to look after your own money?” I airily replied, “I shall have an accountant.” Of course life doesn’t always dish up personal administrative assistants and my innumeracy haunted me throughout my working life. When it came to number crunching, the national director of the Sash described me as “a long-time Sasher but a loud teeth gnasher." Fortunately financial acumen was a skill that was well represented among Grahamstown members of the Black Sash and for years our meticulous bookkeepers watched my back.

  My time as manager of the advice office was another rich period in my life as I formed close and interesting friendships with managers from across the country. They were all younger than me and we tended to keep very different hours at our workshops and conferences, but I enjoyed their dynamic conversation and they seemed to value my experience, also regarding me as a kind of agony aunt who would listen patiently to their romantic turmoils.

  Transition from an unequal society was never going to be a seamless process and it was incumbent on previously privileged South Africans to facilitate the transfer in all spheres of society. Sadly, apartheid had stifled the education of the majority for so long that the task of bridging the gap was enormous. Furthermore, when the new dispensation arrived, the newcomers were impatient and the old hands felt threatened, often taking early retirement packages. It was a shortsighted policy and, as we saw in our dealings with new provincial departments, often disastrous for our clients. It was exciting to see some of our comrades from the struggle now besuited and sitting in high places, but as one of them confessed, many of them had turned into “Guavas”: they were Going Up And Very Ambitious.

  “Where to Now?” was the title of a meeting convened in 1995 by the Social Workers’ Council in the Eastern Cape. For the first time in my experience, the meeting was dominated by social workers of colour who asked all the questions that were on our minds too. There weren’t too many answers yet, but the landscape was definitely changing. The president and registrar, both still of the old guard, tried to respond with the same old tired social work phrases from an outdated era, but they were not allowed to get away with it. The mood of the meeting was captured in the vote of thanks, when the portly registrar was described as “very transparent” but also “very visible”.

  We truly were in a new world, and not an easy one for South Africans to adjust to. A friend once described untangling a clumsy piece of writing as “knitting with barbed wire”. That was what it felt like in South Africa. So many of the welfare and developmental problems required Herculean interventions, but fraud and corruption bedevilled the scene. In November 1996 the Daily Dispatch reported one example: R2,5 million had been stolen from the Eastern Cape Central Health and Welfare Department, with seven officials dismissed for negligence.

  In a rather vacuous but uncannily prescient statement, the Queen of England put her finger on it. "You must be so busy!” she said to everyone she greeted on her royal visit to this country in 1995. Addressing parliament in Cape Town she said, “Ever since my previous visit in 1947, I have wanted to return to this magnificent country. That wish has never deserted me through half a century in which you have seen turmoil and tragedy.” She bestowed on Nelson Mandela an Honorary Order of Merit and referred to the new South Africa as little short of a miracle.

  Part of her tour included a visit to Port Elizabeth and Malvern and I received an embossed invitation to take tea in the presence of Her Majesty. I was thrilled, privately pleased that Malvern and I were to be singled out in this way and always ready to enjoy some pageantry. The royal reception happened to clash with a regional meeting of advice office managers in Port Elizabeth, but I discovered that the manager of the Port Elizabeth office had also been invited, so the two of us broached the subject of having the afternoon off. Our colleagues had little patience with our enthusiasm for the British Queen. “What has she to do with the Sash?” they wanted to know. Nevertheless we won the day, and on a lovely March afternoon, Laura Best, Malvern and I entered the hallowed portals of the Port Elizabeth Club. Malvern and I were soberly dressed but Laura had on a long gown and squashy velvet hat she had acquired at the Grahamstown Festival. She was bent on having fun. A band played on the lawns of the club and out in the street an excited throng was waving flags. When the dignitaries arrived we were thrilled by the equerries’ dazzling uniforms and by Port Elizabeth's handsome mayoral couple in full beaded Xhosa regalia.

  The royal party had spent the morning visiting the Missionvale Care Centre in New Brighton, after which the chartered Rolls-Royce had broken down, hence the Queen�
��s late arrival at the club. Dressed in turquoise, she seemed very small as she entered the room where we were lining the walls, ready with our smiles and curtsies. In fact, her handbag seemed to dwarf her. She promptly circulated, stopping to speak to whomever took her fancy, which sadly did not include the Sash representatives. She did speak to a Salvation Army officer standing near me and to a Rhodes University law professor, both of whom reported that her only comment had been, “You must be so busy.”

  And busy we were indeed. The Truth and Reconciliation process occupied our efforts and emotions for many months, and in 1998 SANGOCO, a coalition of South African non-governmental organisations, arranged a similar travelling campaign entitled “Speak Out on Poverty”. Hearings were held around the country, enabling the poor to speak out in public about their plight. Among the commissioners was our own Black Sash national stalwart Sheena Duncan. We went to a lot of trouble organising the hearing in our local town hall, publicising the event extensively and attracting people from the rural hinterland. Even for us, who were well briefed about the situation in our province, the hearing was deeply moving and revealed new depths to the state of poverty in the Eastern Cape. It also underlined the confusions and difficulties resulting from the devolution of power to the provincial departments, as well as the frequent lack of concern on the part of officialdom. "The clerks always tell us that the problem is in Bisho,” said one desperate woman. “We don’t even know where Bisho is from here." "The officials are not interested," said another. "They are just throwing butter in our eyes.”

  As well as stories of dire destitution the commission also heard many of tenacious survival. People were engaging in small businesses, craft ventures, water projects. Somehow people were devising means to fend for themselves. Some had failed, but many were still full of courage and determination to try again, needing only some development assistance. Sadly, the poverty project came to naught. I still consider it a disgrace that there was no follow-up, after all the publicity and anticipation. The most we could hope for was that the relevant departments had taken note and that more development projects would be put in place. But we in the advice offices felt rather ashamed about the expectations that had been raised, never to be fulfilled.

  Some of the barbed wire snares that entangled our clients were laid by unscrupulous insurance and loan agencies. Over time, our advice office built up considerable knowledge on insurance practices. Margaret Kenyon and Viv Botha, two members who made this their special area of expertise, found that people often mistook an insurance policy for a saving scheme, thus easily falling prey to silver-tongued agents. People were confused about surrender values and premium deductions, and had clutches of insurance policies which ate into their meagre salaries. We became like insurance brokers ourselves as we tried to explain the technical details of the policies, and we listened to endless stories of fraudulent practices. One man was paid out a large sum into his bank account, half of which was immediately withdrawn by his insurance agent who had tricked him into divulging his secret account number. Another sales representative persuaded a whole battalion of soldiers to sign stop orders for long-term insurance policies, leaving them with very little disposable income at the end of each month. Two years after taking out their policies, the soldiers wanted to know where their promised caravans were! Sometimes cases took so long to resolve that one woman compared her saga to a series of episodes from the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.

  When we learnt that road workers were becoming easy targets for travelling agents, our interpreter and I headed to a place en route to East London euphemistically called “Lovers’ Twist”, where extensive roadworks were in progress. We talked along the roadside to men operating picks and shovels, and at lunchtime we spoke to them in the wooden shed, which operated as a canteen. “Taking out insurance is like buying a pair of shoes,” we advised them. “If it pinches, don’t purchase.” Whenever possible we lobbied the insurance industry, urging that companies should be held responsible for the conduct of their agents.

  As the network of advice offices linked into a national one, we were able to pick up common problems and build up dossiers to make the Sash voice stronger. Insurance matters became our speciality in Grahamstown and we produced an easy-to-understand booklet providing guidance on insurance practices. The Knysna advice office received an award for excellence in consumer protection for their work on debt traps and micro-lending. Following their campaign, the Department of Trade and Industry was compelled to pass measures protecting consumers, proving right the Ethiopian proverb, “When enough spiders’ webs unite, they can tie down a lion.”

  One area that continued to be a struggle was pension payouts – a story of bungled administration for many years. Post-1994 the situation became even more dire and the advice office became increasingly drawn into this struggle. I spent many days visiting the social security office in Bisho trying to untangle individual pension problems, and talked to a succession of MECs for welfare. One day as one of them opened a bulging cupboard, an avalanche of cardboard files and papers cascaded to the floor. It was clear that there was no prospect of discovering individual records in that mess. In frustration and embarrassment she shouted at me that I had “too many accusations!”

  We were fortunate to have the Grahamstown Legal Resources Centre as our great ally in the pensions struggle. The director accompanied two of us from the Sash office to meet with the Public Protector, Selby Baqwa, in Pretoria in July 1997. We struggled for 16 months to get access to him, and it was only when we enlisted the help of Carmel Rickard of the Sunday Times that we finally got our interview. Armed with information from our monitoring of pension pay points and social security offices, we unloaded our problems on the Protector’s desk. We told him of long delays in the processing of applications for social grants, and lack of feedback on the progress of applications. Our researchers had shown that the average waiting period after application was 15 months or more. We quoted again the story that had received widespread press coverage, of 800 grant applications dumped outside a pension office, some having been used as toilet paper. One man's affidavit described a typical scene at an East Cape pension payout point: "Officials arrive late, about 11am or 12 noon, anytime they choose. The officials take out two chairs. Then the computer dies down. They tell the people to go home. The same the next day. At one point they announce that the money is finished." Not for nothing were cartoonists referring to the Eastern Cape as the Province of Chaotica. The devolution of power to this province had not been to the benefit of the people.

  The Public Protector heard us out and promised to visit the province, which he eventually did. In the meantime the Legal Resources Centre began to take batches of delayed pension applications to court, with considerable success. We also managed to get some good media publicity. I had an article published in the Mail and Guardian, in which I accused the Eastern Cape government of laying on road shows like Roman circuses to divert the populace’s attention from the issues of the day. This remark had an interesting echo in a later TV show in which I participated.

  The programme Two Ways gave studio audiences the opportunity to ask questions of a panel on a selected topic. On November 1998, I participated in one on pensions. My fellow panelists were a representative of the Disabled Persons Association and the Minister of Social Welfare Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, to whom I had referred in a letter to the Business Day as “the young minister”. She had clearly taken exception to this, for while we were being made up, with a communal powder puff, she accused me of having been patronising. “But Geraldine,” I retorted, “I was appealing to you as a sister in the struggle!” I don't believe she was mollified. During the programme I thought her handling of questions was bright and articulate, but hard, even ruthless. No-one who saw her in action that day would have described her as “the young minister” – or would have had the gall to claim her as a sister!

  The questions from the studio audience were all too familiar to anyone involved in the
pension crisis and, although usually thinking on my feet was not a strength, I did not find it difficult to respond. A member of the audience who had misunderstood my Mail & Guardian piece complained that to his knowledge not a single circus laid on by the government had passed his way. But the best moment came when a disability grant holder stepped forward, waving his identity book, quoting his number, shouting at the minister and asking her why his grant had been stopped. It was a dramatic micro-demonstration of widespread grassroots distress.

  In 1999, after five years in the Black Sash advice office, I began to realise that it was time to retire from the fray. I still felt a strong passion for the work but I could tell that the colour of my skin, the manner of my speech and everything about my image was no longer right for leading the advice office into the future. My much younger colleagues, under the leadership of Jonathan Walton, were more than able to continue the work. So with the millennium approaching, our first grandchild on the way and Malvern’s own retirement coming into view, I took my leave, knowing that I would continue to work for the community but in other ways and perhaps at a gentler pace. We were also keen to travel more widely than we had done in the past. As a little girl I used to lug the heavy atlas out of my father’s glass-fronted bookcase and gaze at the maps, promising myself that I would go to all sorts of exotic places. It was 1996 before I visited India with two friends, and now China and Nepal were beckoning.