By the time Lilian enrolled in 1928, conditions for miners, appalling at the beginning of the century, had improved. But 2 per cent of the average number of black mineworkers were still in hospital at any given time,6 suffering from a variety of work-related ailments – heatstroke, pneumonia, tuberculosis – as well as occupational injuries. Since payment was suspended for the duration of their hospital stay, Lilian would have nursed reluctant patients.
The hospital employment hierarchy was deeply authoritarian, with a white matron and sisters overseeing the native nurses’ training. Because of a morally fastidious concern over the implications of European women nursing native men, the probationers carried out what the 1915 acting director of Native Labour referred to as the ‘actual work’ associated with the more supervisory role of the European sisters.7
The social lives of the trainee nurses were also closely monitored; after three women fell pregnant in 1922, the establishment proposed employing a ‘dependable, middle-aged native woman to take charge of the native nurses’ quarters, messing arrangements, &.c, with a view to generally supervising them’.8 There were several cases of desertion as well as dismissal because of ‘insubordination’, leading to even stricter disciplinary measures after Lilian’s time.
Despite the constraints of her workplace, Johannesburg was also a thriving hub, a boom town whose status formally changed to ‘city’ in the year of Lilian’s arrival. She would have enjoyed aspects of the fast-paced and increasingly modern culture of the city, with its 200 electric trams, newly established public amenities and growing number of automobiles. Soon after she began work as a nurse, she met John Ngoyi, a van driver. She is careful to note in her autobiography that John was in fact a qualified teacher who chose not to take up that profession because of its poor wages. For Africans, both teaching and nursing – despite their high status – were notoriously badly paid, and Ngoyi abandoned her training after three years. She took up dressmaking instead, imitating her mother and sewing items for neighbours.
Several carefree years followed, during which Lilian and John fell in love. They shared a passion for ballroom dancing and frequented the dance halls that had sprung up to cater to urban black communities. The pair even danced competitively and would have enjoyed dreamy evenings, listening to popular bands such as the Jazz Revellers and the Merry Blackbirds. These glamorous dance events, described in a 1932 Bantu World article as ‘making everybody happy and carefree’,9 provided much-needed escape from the hardships of city life.
The couple married in 1934 when Lilian was in her early twenties, and it seems that her marriage provided some financial relief for the entire family; she recalls that it eased a ‘burden’ from her mother’s shoulders. At some point, she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Edith.
The reprieve from poverty was short-lived, however. While John Ngoyi’s job paid decently, it was also high risk in a city whose infrastructure was struggling to keep up with the rise in automobiles, and when Edith was three, he was killed in a car accident. ‘I was now back to where I started,’ Ngoyi later wrote. In fact, as a young mother, she was in an even more vulnerable position.
In her autobiographical letter, she spends remarkably little time – less than a paragraph – describing the next, crippling period of her life, seemingly eager to move on to her political career. But the following decade must have been extremely challenging for the young widow. The loss of her husband plunged her deeper into poverty, and she moved with her ailing parents to a Soweto slum referred to as the Orlando Shelters or Shanty Town. The Shelters had arisen to accommodate the swell of urban job seekers, unwelcome in the city. While legislation tried to outlaw the influx of Africans, the possibility of work and the dream of a better life continued to lure them to Johannesburg. Here, in turn, poor living conditions and exploitative labour practices fomented political unrest.
Some time later, Ngoyi would describe the Shelters, painting a bleak picture. Families lived, ate and slept in fly-contaminated one-room shacks, ‘twelve by twelve’.10 Ngoyi’s windowless home – its tin roof held down by stones – had no bathroom or electricity. There was little privacy, and her father dressed in the morning by holding a blanket around his body to maintain his dignity. Thirty families shared a tap, and the nearest latrine was three streets away in a district where going out at night was a risk to one’s life.
Ngoyi’s mother-in-law encouraged her to complete her nursing training to improve her situation, but this option was impractical. The probationary wages were really only a stipend, and the working hours would have made it difficult for her to raise her growing number of dependants. In 1943, Ngoyi’s aunt passed away, leaving a newborn baby, Memory Mphahlele, without a mother. Ngoyi adopted her cousin immediately, despite her meagre circumstances.
There are discrepancies over the number of children Ngoyi had. Most accounts refer only to her biological child, Edith, and her adopted daughter, Memory. Ngoyi’s own version claims that she had three children with John: two girls and (as at least one source mentions) a boy.11 It’s possible that this boy was from a previous relationship of John’s and stayed temporarily with Lilian, or that he was another family member’s child. It’s possible, too, that Ngoyi meant her grandson, born later, since she frequently referred to him as ‘my boy’ in her letters. Whatever the case, it’s clear that by the mid-1940s she had her hands full and wasn’t too concerned about how children came to be in her care. They were ‘her children’, and she mothered them.
At her own mother’s suggestion, Ngoyi continued working as a seamstress, which allowed her to mind her children after school until they were old enough to be left at home alone. This she did until 1945, when she began to work as a machinist at a garment factory. It was at this point, after many years of hardship, that she ‘started her struggle’, as she put it, adding, ‘this time Politically’.
In addition to better wages, entering the formal labour pool gave her access to organised mass action and, because of her outspoken personality, she was elected as a shop steward, joining the Garment Workers Union (GWU), where she came into contact with the influential trade unionist Solly Sachs. A Lithuanian immigrant with a background in law, Sachs had joined the predominantly white union in 1927, ostensibly to improve the plight of rural Afrikaner women who’d come to work on the Witwatersrand during the Depression. The fact that the racial composition of the workforce changed rapidly over the next few years didn’t alter his passion for workers’ rights. ‘Sacks [sic]’, Ngoyi later wrote, ‘said a worker is a worker, despite his or her colour.’ Although this view wasn’t initially shared by some of the other union leaders, under Sachs’s leadership, the GWU grew to become a powerful example of interracial action in the country (even if, as Ngoyi notes, it was necessarily composed of racially stratified sections).
Ngoyi was appointed to the executive for a brief spell, and it was there, she says, that ‘she learned to protest’. When, in 1952, the minister of justice slapped Sachs with two banning orders, 15 000 supporters staged a protest outside Johannesburg City Hall on 24 May. It was a Saturday morning and Ngoyi attended with her daughter Edith, who was now a young woman. Sachs defied the order and tried to address the gathering. When he was arrested, the crowd grew angry and clashed with police. The next day, the Rand Daily Mail carried images of policemen brutalising unarmed protesters, reporting that women had been ‘singled out’.12 Edith was one of the victims; a policeman struck her with a baton as she and Ngoyi retreated from the mayhem. The event was something of a turning point in the country, signalling to women that they should not expect to be treated differently than their male counterparts. Instead of backing down, however, the women’s movement gathered momentum.
Ngoyi’s union career ended when she found a political home in the African National Congress. She notes in her autobiography that she was dropped from the GWU executive for putting forward ‘Congress ideas’, considered a conflict of interest. Her first encounter with what she called the ‘organisati
on behind all these good ideas’ also came in 1952, a few months after the protest over Sachs’s banning. News of the ANC’s forthcoming Defiance Campaign reached Orlando, and there were calls for people to voluntarily contravene various apartheid prohibitions. It was hoped that the police would be too swamped to continue enforcing the law. This logic impressed Ngoyi ‘a great deal’, and so she joined the party and registered to defy by signing a special pledge ‘to serve my country and my people in accordance with the directives of the National Volunteer Corps’.
The decision was risky. Early in 1953, the government presented the Criminal Law Amendment Bill in an attempt to crush the campaign; if arrested, volunteers faced up to three years in prison. At the time, Edith was sick in hospital and Ngoyi could ill afford a lengthy prison term. Nevertheless, shortly before Albert Luthuli called off the campaign, she asked ANC officials to allow her to defy and was instructed to recruit an additional five volunteers, which she did.
Ngoyi gives a vivid description of her role, clearly a pivotal moment for her. The group entered the whites-only section of the Rissik Street Post Office – an imposing colonial building in Johannesburg – and she began to pen a telegram to Prime Minister D.F. Malan. The message, as she later remembered it, read: ‘Please stop your ruthless laws, other wise the black man is rising.’
The sight of the group in the whites-only section provoked a white customer to approach Ngoyi: ‘Excuse me, Annie,’ the man said, ‘you are in the wrong department.’ (He was likely referring to Annie Oakley, the gutsy American cowgirl who’d been popularised a few years earlier by the musical Annie Get Your Gun.)
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Ngoyi shot back, ‘my name is Lilian. And I am not in the wrong department. I’m sending a telegram to the Minister of Justice and because of apartheid I feel I should write this just here.’
She meant the prime minister, of course, to whom one could only send telegrams from the white sections of post offices. But she never got the chance to send her missive, because the group was arrested shortly after the exchange.
A terrified Ngoyi spent her first night in prison, experiencing both the harshness of the prison system (stale porridge, nothing but a mat to sleep on and no washing facilities) and the solidarity of the movement. A supportive Indian woman cooked the women a ‘lovely supper’, and she and her fellow defiers were greeted in court the next morning by supporters, all shouting ‘Africa!’ thunderously. To her relief, her lawyer, none other than Oliver Tambo, managed to secure bail and, after a few court appearances, the case was dropped.
Inspired by these events, Ngoyi went on to join the ANC Women’s League, where she served as such an active recruiter that within a few months she was elected as president of the Transvaal branch. At the time, the Women’s League was a small but growing organisation, whose political activities increased under the leadership of Ida Mntwana and also after Ngoyi joined its ranks. This was not likely because of Ngoyi’s strategic or organisational skills; she wasn’t, those who knew her have said, ‘much of a political thinker’13 or an intellectual; and she had little knowledge of global history or political science – a lack she felt keenly and later attempted to address, asking her Amnesty benefactors to send books by a wide range of authors, including Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In her letters, she often mentioned her feelings of inadequacy about her prose, and it’s clear that she felt uncomfortable in print, leaving a comparatively thin paper trail in the archives of the organisations she served.
Nevertheless, by her early forties, Ngoyi’s life story mirrored the experiences of many African women, and she had a legendary gift for public speaking, drawing listeners to events and holding them captive. A young Winnie Madikizela, barely twenty at the time, was among them. She later wrote of Ngoyi’s effect on her:
She was one of the greatest orators I have ever heard, one of the greatest women I have lived to know. And you could feel she was self-taught. I felt some kind of physical identity with her because she belonged to the working class. She spoke the language of the worker, she was herself an ordinary factory worker. When she said what she stood for, she evoked emotions no other person could evoke.14
It was this talent that accounted for Ngoyi’s popular appeal, securing her votes in various organisational elections; women wanted her to speak both to and for them, making her an extremely valuable asset to the Women’s League.
Not much is known about her personal life during her active political years. At some point, her father had passed away, but she still lived with her mother and two daughters. To her great relief, the family had been allocated a house in Orlando West and had moved on from the Shelters. The new neighbourhood was dusty and monotonous: the municipal houses, built on small square plots, were virtually identical, and although the dirt roads were illuminated by streetlamps, the houses themselves were not yet electrified.15
Romantically, there are no reports of any relationships beyond her first husband, apart from the rumour that she and Nelson Mandela had had an affair while Mandela was still married to Evelyn Mase. If true, the relationship would have occurred around this time. They both lived in Orlando and it’s possible that they met via Tambo, when he served as Ngoyi’s lawyer. Mase, whose religious temperament was unsuited to political life, told Mandela’s first biographer, Fatima Meer, that she’d heard that her husband was ‘having an affair with a woman member of the ANC’,16 a woman she knew, respected and liked. She didn’t believe the rumours at first and Mandela never confirmed the claims. Apart from this, there is little concrete evidence to support these whisperings. Ngoyi was of course nearly a decade older than Mandela, although she looked like his contemporary. She is remembered as being handsome and magnetic, with ‘laughing eyes’ and an ‘enchanting little gap in her front teeth’.17 Photographs of her suggest that she was usually smartly attired in dress suits and that she had a fondness for pillbox hats and earrings.
Whether or not the two were romantically involved remains a mystery. Suffice to say they spoke warmly of one another in their various recollections. Ngoyi attended his wedding to Winnie Madikizela, and he would later apply from prison, unsuccessfully, to attend her mother’s funeral. Ngoyi visited Mandela on Robben Island, and his prison diary includes a note to telegram Edith with condolences the day after Ngoyi’s death.18
Ngoyi’s next important leadership position was with the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), an umbrella organisation of women’s groups across the country. FEDSAW was the brainchild of Ray Alexander, a politically connected white trade unionist and former Communist Party member who believed that the fight for women’s rights should transcend class and race. When invitations were issued for a national conference to ‘discuss the position of women in South Africa’, the ANCWL was impressed and agreed to attend. The ANC leaders, however, all of whom were men, had concerns that FEDSAW’s work would duplicate political efforts and were generally reluctant for women to become involved in activism.
The conference was held on 17 April 1954 at the Trades Hall in Johannesburg, a cavernous venue that was adorned with bannered slogans: ‘Women! Speak out your demands.’ And: ‘Homes – food – jobs; real education for all.’ Although Ngoyi wasn’t among the appointed speakers, she gave a fiery speech when the discussion was thrown open to the floor. She immediately attacked the hypocrisy of men, stating that the event would have been even better attended had it not been for the husbands who kept back many of the women. It was a bold opening, widely applauded.
This was the first time that Helen Joseph – an active trade unionist who would go on to play an important role in her life – saw Ngoyi. She was impressed, noting wryly that she doubted ‘any husband would have been able to hold her back’.19 Ngoyi went on to speak about a number of pertinent issues, weaving together her various life experiences. ‘If we are not employees, then what are we?’ she asked in reference to the Industrial Conciliation Amendment Bill, which sought to extend passes to African women. ‘When the garments are
sold in shops, could you tell which were made by black hands and which by white hands?’20
The FEDSAW conference was a triumph, bringing together 150 delegates representing nearly 250 000 women. The women adopted a charter and drew up a draft constitution, announcing their aim ‘to bring the women of South Africa together’ and ‘to secure full equality of opportunity for all women’.
Later that year, Ida Mntwana was elected as president, and Ngoyi took up the vice presidency in the Transvaal, with Joseph as secretary. Her involvement with the organisation would soon lead to the opportunity of a lifetime. When the Communist-leaning Women’s International Democratic Federation announced that a World Congress of Mothers was to be held in Switzerland the following year, FEDSAW was invited to send two delegates to represent South Africa. Alexander was clearly taken with Ngoyi; after their first meeting, she told Joseph that Ngoyi ‘must be helped so that she can become an important leader of her people’.21 When considering delegates for the congress, Alexander confessed to being ‘more impressed with Lilian than Ida’,22 who, as president of both FEDSAW and the Women’s League, would have been the natural choice. In fact, it wouldn’t be long before Ngoyi took over both positions.
Ngoyi’s voice featured prominently at the next conference, which addressed increased rentals in sub-economic housing schemes. While the other speakers – Mntwana, Joseph and Amina Asvat – analysed the situation from an academic perspective, Ngoyi’s speech cut to the heart of the matter, painting a devastating picture of what it was like to be poor: ‘We are like the birds of the air when we have no homes,’ she opened dramatically, ‘but the birds are better off than we are, for they have trees, and they have fresh air …’23
Recalling her time living at the Orlando Shelters, she spared the audience no detail of a space so crowded and dangerous that women were forced to relieve themselves in the passage at the back of their one-room homes. She relayed how she’d prayed ‘for the first time’ when she received a letter to say that she’d been allocated a three-room semi-detached house – still inadequate by modern standards but an improvement. She drew attention to the deep injustice of a society in which black people were given an inferior education and paid inferior wages but still had to pay the same taxes and prices for food and transport.
Illuminating Lives Page 14