Her next year, 1955, must have seemed like a dream, and Ngoyi spends more than half of her twenty-five-page autobiographical letter describing the months that she spent abroad. At first, she was reluctant to attend the congress, because of her ‘poor English and poor education’, but her colleagues insisted, and she was nominated along with Capetonian Dora Tamana, who was also a committee member of FEDSAW.
It’s difficult to comprehend just how illuminating the adventure must have been for Ngoyi, who by all accounts hadn’t travelled far beyond the Witwatersrand area at this stage in her life. ‘Because of my poor geography,’ she later wrote, ‘I thought that abroad meant no soil and that people there were supernatural.’
The ANC’s Ahmed Kathrada had arranged for their passage by ship, booking tickets under European names. But the plan was thwarted when the women were discovered hiding in the toilet just after the ship’s launch. They were returned to shore, arrested and their baggage confiscated. Ngoyi said the sight of the ship leaving the harbour was a ‘moment of disappointment’ she would never forget.
After they were released, the women tried their luck at Jan Smuts Airport, where, upon boarding a plane, an official-looking white man approached and asked, ‘Are you Lilian Ngoyi?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she answered, an icy feeling in her stomach.
‘Happy landing,’ the man replied, adding that there would be no apartheid on his plane and that she and Tamana were to use the same facilities as the other passengers. This exchange set the tenor for the rest of the trip.
Ngoyi gushes through her account, her descriptions full of wonderment at the hospitality the women received. With no passports, she had to talk her way through various border controls (claiming at one point to be on a Bible study tour). They travelled first to England, via Italy and Amsterdam, before spending time in East Germany. In London, she attended the theatre for the first time and passers-by gave them broad smiles. Even the use of public facilities was a joy: ‘No discrimination,’ she noted, ‘we were human beings.’
Berlin surpassed London, the warmth of Berliners evident in the way they gripped her hand. To her astonishment, she and Tamana were driven to and from events and provided with a personal maid and translator. They attended various cultural functions; Ngoyi remembered music so beautiful, ‘the conductors were sufficient to make you cry’. They visited Buchenwald concentration camp, which moved her deeply and led to her firm adoption of an anti-war stance. They were also taken to places of particular interest to women: hospitals to observe Caesarean procedures and learn about fertility treatment, and factories, where Ngoyi was impressed by the provision of crèches and the women’s freedom to breastfeed.
All the time, however, she was ‘looking ahead’, anxious about the forthcoming congress and her lack of education, feeling that she had to ‘bluff’ her hosts into thinking she was an ‘educated some body’. Eventually, she asked a superintendent at a Berlin hospital if the respectful staff had perhaps mistaken her to be ‘some one with a high qualification of education’.
‘You see,’ the superintendent said, ‘educational degrees do not worry us. But anyone who respects his people and knows their suffering is most respected.’
For Ngoyi, this was ‘like a shower of relief’ and she went on to lose her ‘complex’. ‘I was a woman and a mother,’ she said of her feelings en route to Switzerland, ‘armed tooth and nail with the suffering of my people.’
The congress was held in Lausanne, and it brought together over 1 000 delegates from sixty-six countries, many of whom, like Ngoyi and Tamana, had made arduous journeys. An admittedly nervous Ngoyi presided over its second session, and various meetings were held on questions of health, education, the protection of children, and the press; the women shared their experiences of their homelands and struck up lasting friendships.
Tamana and Ngoyi were invited to visit various countries and travelled to China and the USSR after the conference concluded in July. Here, more wonders awaited, as Ngoyi visited Peking, Shanghai and Moscow. Upon entering the USSR, she later laughed at her own expectation that there would be a real ‘iron curtain’ marking the entrance. The pro-Soviet displays of industriousness impressed her, and she marvelled at the Orthodox churches and the Moscow Metropolitan.
‘Oh, I can go on and on!’ an excited Ngoyi wrote of her adventure some twenty years later, lost in memory. The trip was important not only because it exposed her to different political systems and cultures, but also because it was the first time she felt accepted as a human being.
She finally returned to her homeland in August, even more inspired to take up the struggle for African women’s rights. ‘There was much she had seen and heard,’ an ANC newsletter said of her, ‘and she wanted to shout it from the rooftops.’24
Soon after she arrived, she discovered that African women faced a new challenge. In September 1955, minister of native affairs Hendrik Verwoerd announced that the government would begin issuing passbooks to women the following year, which it began to do in March in the rural areas. Ngoyi and others travelled around the country to drum up support for the growing anti-pass movement, and a wave of protests swept through the land. These culminated in the famous Women’s March on 9 August, the event for which Ngoyi is best known.
An estimated 20 000 women – many at great personal cost – marched to the Union Buildings. Wearing uniforms to highlight their identity as workers, the women held up placards with slogans equating the pass system with slavery. The procession’s leaders – Ngoyi, Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams – delivered piles of written demands to the office of the prime minister, J.G. Strijdom. Before entering the Union Buildings, Ngoyi, both inspired and afraid, remembers looking down from the steps at Edith’s crying face in the crowd and wondering if she would ever see her again.25 When she returned, she announced that a cowardly Strijdom had run away, and she called for a silent protest. The women obeyed, and the chime of the clock, striking three and then quarter past, was the only sound.26 They maintained silence for half an hour, their arms raised in the Congress salute, before singing ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. Maggie Resha remembers Ngoyi concluding the event, her voice echoing ‘from the walls of the Union Buildings as she cried out: “A … frika!” The atmosphere seemed electrified by the power of her voice, and the crowd responded: “Mayibuye” (May it [r]eturn!).’27 The march was praised for its dignity, discipline and unity; nobody was arrested; and the Cape Times guessed that it was the ‘largest gathering of women in the country’s history’.28
The following day, Ngoyi was elected as FEDSAW president at a national conference. As leader of the ANCWL, and the only female member of the ANC national executive committee, she was now the most powerful woman in the liberation movement. It was at this point that her life began to unravel.
Five months later, in a predawn raid, Ngoyi was arrested, along with Helen Joseph, Ida Mntwana, and 153 other dissidents. She spent three weeks in prison before being charged with high treason, a capital offence. The defendants were so numerous that Johannesburg’s Drill Hall had to be converted into a courtroom for their first appearance, where stringent bail conditions were set: Ngoyi was forbidden to attend any public gatherings or address meetings, and she had to report to her local police station once a week. These restrictions would come to define the rest of her life.
The number of defendants was later whittled down to thirty, and in 1959 the proceedings moved to Pretoria. Ngoyi was among the last remaining trialists who had to take the government-provided ‘Treason Bus’ from Soweto to Pretoria every day. Because of the long travel hours and the constant need to be in court, she lost her job and had to work from home as a seamstress, taking in whatever work she could. Some of her income came from sewing black-and-green Women’s League blouses for supporters in court and, for part of the trial, she also rented out a room to another trialist, Arthur Letele, a doctor from Kimberley, so that he could continue his medical practice. Frequent fundraising events and stokvels29 were
held, and the trialists received assistance from the International Defence and Aid Fund, established in England in 1956 specifically to provide funding to political prisoners and their families.
In court, the prosecution presented snippets of incendiary speeches copied down by Special Branch policemen over the years. In Ngoyi’s case, it appears that a Detective Sergeant Van Papendorf had been transcribing her words from as early as 1954, at FEDSAW’s launch, and a document titled ‘10 reasons why I refuse to carry a pass’ was also submitted as general evidence. Her travels naturally got her into hot water, and the court spent much time analysing a speech in which she allegedly said, ‘In Europe there are countries which are free because of their liberation fighters. This freedom is a very heavy trip. There are some people who are opposing us, but the time will come when they will be taken alive and thrown into the fire.’30
The meaning of the final sentiment was defended by Joseph, who claimed that Ngoyi had been misquoted and had been speaking about the gas chambers in Europe. The prosecution, however, believed more in guilt by association and responded by saying that ‘even if there is doubt as to whether Mrs. Ngoyi did utter these remarks, she still did not disassociate herself from the remarks of [Nimrod] Sejake and [Robert] Resha … it would have been in accordance with the spirit of the meeting.’31
Proceedings dragged on in this ‘he said, she said’ manner for the better part of five years, making it the lengthiest trial in the country’s history. A year before its conclusion, the situation worsened when the Pan Africanist Congress staged an anti-pass campaign outside Sharpeville police station on 21 March 1960. The police shot dead sixty-nine protesters, and a wave of panic swept through the country. In May, Ngoyi was arrested under a newly declared state of emergency and detained without charge for five hard months, nineteen days of which were in solitary confinement.
The Treason Trial finally ended on 29 March 1961, and according to Joseph, Ngoyi emerged ‘lily white’32 despite the prosecution’s attempt to paint her red. The state thought otherwise and the environment in which Ngoyi now found herself was much altered. After Sharpeville, the government had banned the PAC and the ANC, which provided the state with useful new ammunition against activists. For Ngoyi, now jobless, the end of the trial meant the end of monetary support as well as the loss of the encouraging camaraderie among the trialists (many of whom were now banned and cut off from her). It wasn’t long before her life turned into a litany of random arrests, raids and banning orders.
On 4 May, the police searched her home in another predawn raid,33 and on 26 September she received her first banning order, forbidding her to attend public gatherings and meetings. Barely a month later, she was arrested for contravening it after she had a small party at her home. (When none of the attendants would testify that the occasion had been a meeting, the case was dropped.) Then, in March 1962, she was further confined to a one-mile radius of her home.34 Just before Christmas that year, she received yet another restriction prohibiting her from attending social events as well, which Bertha Mashaba said condemned her to a ‘living death’.35 Ngoyi’s public demeanour was optimistic: ‘I am cut off from the world,’ she told journalist Benjamin Pogrund in 1962, adding, ‘The government cannot confine my spirit to Orlando.’36
Then, for no apparent reason, she was arrested again on 26 June 1963 in a midnight raid on the homes of friends of Walter Sisulu, who had recently gone underground.37 Detained under the new General Law Amendment Act, she was held this time in solitary confinement for seventy-one days, an experience she describes as ‘Devilish’. ‘You count your fingers until you can count no more,’ she later explained. ‘One day I actually fainted, and when I complained to the authorities, I was told that I asked for it.’ The ordeal affected her ability to concentrate.
A period of relative quiet followed, of which there is little information about her life. It’s clear that money was tight. In 1965, Ngoyi wrote to St Mary’s Association in Liverpool, expressing her ‘distress at the daily visits from police … and her inability to earn any money from dressmaking’.38 Not only did the bans limit her political, social and intellectual life, they curtailed her ability to make a decent living. Unable to source wholesale materials from the city for her work, she was also forced to pay township food prices, which were generally higher.39 At one point, she sold liquor in order to make ends meet, a last resort that she clearly found distasteful. What’s more, security policemen harassed her customers. ‘They get in my house,’ she wrote, ‘they find customers, they want their names, passes, where do they stay, what is their political affiliation.’
The confinement was particularly stifling for a woman with Ngoyi’s temperament, which her daughter Edith later described as ‘restless, always on the go … For a person like her, the ban must have been a blow. Like clipping the wings of a bird and putting her in a cage.’40 Her banning order was renewed in 1967, sentencing her to this existence for another five years.
Four years later, a New York branch of Amnesty International decided to send her monthly assistance, and Belinda Allan, a publishing assistant, was tasked with writing to her and sending a small amount of money. By way of acknowledgement, Ngoyi sent written replies to Allan.41 These letters give an intensely personal glimpse into the last decade of her life, when she had largely vanished from the public eye.
In addition to fear of interception, it must have been difficult for Ngoyi to know what to say to a foreign white woman she’d never met. At first her comments are guarded, containing much ‘small talk’. She acknowledges receipt of the monthly ‘parcels’, requests a few book titles and expresses self-consciousness about her writing ability. When Allan marries, Ngoyi takes on an almost maternal role, dispensing advice on marriage and, later, motherhood. The tone contrasts with the image of the ‘mother of the resistance’, who’d once said, ‘We don’t want men who wear skirts under their trousers.’42 ‘In marriage, one has to give and take,’43 Ngoyi counsels Allan, and, somewhat primly, ‘I hope you will not be a nagging wife’!44
She refers throughout to her small but beloved ‘match box garden’, sending Allan a photograph of herself tending her flowers. Inspired by her earlier travels, she frequently asked for seeds from abroad, wanting to see what flowers from the USA look like and marvelling at the result. Gardening appeared to provide a real and rare source of pleasure; it was, she said, ‘a consolation to watch the blooms every morning’.45
But always, always – against the developing bond between the two women – there is the humiliating question of money, and it is sometimes excruciating to read Ngoyi’s ‘endless, necessary statements of financial need and tactful requests for more’.46 At one point, she confesses to feeling as helpless as a baby bird: ‘You know if you have noticed birds, the young ones open their mouth open whilst their mothers are gone out seeking food. Same applies to me.’47 The earlier letters are underscored by a constant sense of anxiety that Allan’s beneficence might cease. ‘We are not a lazy lot,’ she explains at one point. ‘We feel small to say thanks all the time.’48
Lilian Ngoyi in her garden, during her banning in the early 1970s
To Ngoyi’s delight, in December 1972 her banning order expired and wasn’t renewed. Her immediate desire was to travel, and with contributions from various women, she managed to journey to both Durban and Cape Town, writing to Allan from both destinations. Her exhilaration is evident in the almost breathless descriptions of this trip, which echo her writing on Europe. ‘I’m looking at the sea waves,’ she wrote from Durban, ‘the ships, the multitude of people and I say yes 11 years [banning order], thanks, you were not renewed’.49 Ngoyi swam in the ocean, went to a snake park and visited the grave of Albert Luthuli. In Cape Town, she received permission to visit Nelson Mandela, where, according to police surveillance files, the two spoke about the past and the whereabouts of ANC exiles.
‘You know, Lily,’ Mandela reportedly said to her, ‘people here do rely too much on you … You know if we hear that you unit
e people like this. That is very important to us here.’50
For whatever reason, Ngoyi does not mention the various political engagements of this period to Allan. In December 1974, after a separation of eleven years, she was reunited with her old friend Helen Joseph. The two spoke at a United Nations Human Rights Day event in Johannesburg before spending Christmas together.51 Then, in May 1975 she spoke at a memorial meeting held in honour of Bram Fischer,52 who had served on her defence team during the Treason Trial, and who had died of cancer after almost ten years in prison. This was sufficient for the state to determine that she was furthering ‘the achievement of the objects of communism’, and she was banned two months later for an additional five-year period. She was now sixty-three years old.
As time went on, and Ngoyi felt more assured of Allan’s continuing support, she became less hesitant with her confidante, sharing thoughts on current events: her fears for the younger generation in the wake of the Soweto uprising, her concerns about the inferiority of Bantu Education, and her exasperated anger over the death of Steve Biko. A deep, personal tragedy that she shared with Allan was Edith’s alcoholism, which developed in the mid-1970s, leaving a grandson, Neo, in Ngoyi’s care: ‘There is nothing as bitter to watch helplessly as ones child sinking,’53 she wrote to her friend. By 1977, she was so comfortable with her correspondent that she confided, ‘I sometimes stretch out my hands to try to feel God, but never do I feel him.’54
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