Although her letters grew darker and angrier, Ngoyi seldom despaired. When she was offered a car, she proceeded to learn to drive at the age of sixty-six, passing her driving test after four attempts. The pleasure, she wrote to Allan, came from being useful. ‘At least with the Datsun I enjoy having driven a sick woman to Hospital, or any Human being, then [their] saying, “Thanks, Lily”. I feel great.’55
In her final letters, Ngoyi complained of various health problems: high blood pressure, asthma and cardiac issues. ‘I envy Donald’s [Allan’s husband] travelling,’ she wrote in her final missive on 13 March 1980, ‘but me with cardiac on the other side must be nursed like a baby.’56 Five weeks later, she died of heart failure, just two months before her current banning order was due to expire. Her funeral was a rallying affair, with over 2 000 mourners following a horse-drawn-cart procession to Avalon Cemetery in Soweto, where she was laid to rest. Desmond Tutu, then general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, delivered a speech, anticipating that Ngoyi’s name would be ‘written in gold’ when the true history of the country was written.57
To date, however, Ngoyi’s full story – beyond her involvement in the 1956 Women’s March – is little known, and it is only now that her legacy is being revisited. A few clinics and streets bear her name, and in 2016 statues of her and the other Women’s March leaders were erected in commemoration of the event. As part of the Sunday Times Heritage Project, in 2006 a modest memorial sculpture – a sewing machine constructed from painted car parts, with an ANC-coloured blouse in its presser – was fixed to the front fence of 9870B Nkungu Street, the municipal house allocated to Ngoyi back in the 1950s. The plaque below it includes a quote of activist Hilda Bernstein’s: ‘For 18 years this beautiful and brilliant woman spent her time in a tiny house, silenced, trying to earn money by doing sewing.’
The face-brick house has been modernised and is now inhabited by Memory, Ngoyi’s adopted daughter. (Edith died in the 1990s.) Although not a large-scale tourist attraction, it does receive the occasional interested visitor. A Google Earth image taken in 2009 shows the flat Orlando West streets, still monotonous beneath an expanse of blue sky. If you zoom in on the property, by some chance occurrence, you can see Memory, standing in the now-paved front yard where Ngoyi’s garden once grew, tenderly polishing her mother’s memorial.
Further reading
Lilian Ngoyi’s letters to Belinda Allan have been published in M.J. Daymond’s collection Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head & Lilian Ngoyi (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015). The most comprehensive biography of Ngoyi is Dianne Stewart’s 1996 imaginative reconstruction, written for the They Fought for Freedom history series published by Maskew Miller Longman. Lauren Beukes’s chapter on Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph in Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past (Cape Town: Oshun Books, 2004) provides an entertaining account of their relationship, and Joseph’s autobiography, Side by Side: The Autobiography of Helen Joseph (Johannesburg: Ad Donker Publishers, 1996), includes many of the events of Ngoyi’s life. There are also several excellent books on the women’s movement, including Julia C. Wells’s We Now Demand! The History of Women’s Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993) and Cherryl Walker’s Women and Resistance in South Africa (Cape Town, Johannesburg and New York: David Philip and Monthly Review Press, 1991).
Jane Turner: A tale of love and loss
Jackie May
* * *
When Jane Turner went to bed on 7 January 1978, it must have seemed like any other Saturday night. But shortly after midnight, her life changed.
For years Jane had been living alone in a cottage on her farm, Welcarmas, at the top of Helshoogte Pass in Stellenbosch. It would have been quiet that night. Although it was summer, a busy time on a deciduous fruit farm in the Cape, Jane had sold most of her land with its income-earning orchards. The harvest season no longer affected her. Most, if not all, of the students who rented cottages from her were away on their summer break.
As on every other Saturday, she had been to town to pick up her mail from the post office. Before going to bed, she read the newspaper and did the crossword. Perhaps she listened to the radio while sitting in the same chair she always used in the dark, cluttered living room with its stable door leading outside. She smoked Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes and drank whisky: an evening ritual. It was a new year, a time for new beginnings. Within a few days, she would turn seventy. Richard, her son, was serving out a banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act, which kept him imprisoned in his home in Durban. The banning was due to expire at the end of March, when he would be free to take up a fellowship in Germany or return to academic and political work in South Africa.
Instead, before the next day broke, Jane’s only child was dead. There would be no fellowship, no more academia, no more activism. His second wife, Foszia, was a widow and Jane’s granddaughters no longer had a father.
In Durban, a coastal city more than 1 600 kilometres from Stellenbosch, Richard had read a bedtime story to his two young daughters that evening. The girls, who lived with their mother in Cape Town, were there to spend some time with their father. After midnight, Richard heard a knock on the front door. He returned to the girls’ bedroom, where from a front bay window he could see who was outside.
Thirteen-year-old Jann woke up as her father pulled back the curtain. ‘He looked slightly surprised and opened his mouth,’ she wrote in her police statement. ‘I heard a loud bang and saw a flash.’ Richard was shot at point-blank range with a 9mm bullet. Twenty minutes later, the thirty-six-year-old political activist died in Jann’s arms, while nine-year-old Kim watched her sister trying to revive him.
Back in Stellenbosch, neighbours rushed in the country darkness to wake Jane with the news. Screaming and weeping inconsolably, she scrambled to find the gun that she once had but which her family had removed from her bedside table. Jane had lost her only child, the son whom she adored, and from whose death she never fully recovered. Later that day, she said, ‘I am so bitter my very blood has turned to acid.’1 She spent the next ten years of her life trying to track down Richard’s assassin.
I arrived in the Boland town of Stellenbosch as a first-year student in 1986, eight years after Richard Turner was killed in Durban. I wanted to study at the Afrikaans university for the mountains and valleys of farmland, the town’s wide avenues lined with old oak trees, and the old whitewashed Cape Dutch buildings. I felt lucky to be offered a place at the university and a bedroom to share in Huis de Villiers, a women’s hostel. My roommate was a fellow English-speaking student and the niece of Conservative Party politician Clive Derby-Lewis, the man who was later found guilty of conspiring to kill the South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani in 1993.
Stellenbosch is the symbolic heart of the Afrikaner nation. Thirty years after the Dutch commander and colonial governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, officially founded the settlement, the word ‘Afrikaner’ was used for the first time. Or, at least, it was the first record of a white South African using the term to refer to himself.2 Seventeen-year-old Hendrik Biebow and another three young men had caused drunken havoc in the town in March 1707. In response to a reprimand by the rural magistrate or landdrost, he said, ‘I shall not leave, I am an Afrikaander, even if the landdrost beats me to death or puts me in jail, I shall not, nor will be silent.’3
The town’s university, which grew from its 1850s origin as a seminary for the Dutch Reformed Church, was the academic home of many leading National Party politicians. In fact, every prime minister who ruled South Africa between 1919 and 1978 – Jan Smuts, J.B.M. Hertzog, D.F. Malan, J.G. Strijdom, H.F. Verwoerd and B.J. Vorster – was involved with Stellenbosch University, whether as a student, a professor or a chancellor.
While still at boarding school in Rondebosch, Cape Town, in the 1980s, I watched the students of the University of Cape Town protest on the slopes of Table Mountain. We coul
d see and hear the noise from our common room, where we often quarrelled over our political differences. During the 1980s, only a small percentage of the Stellenbosch students were progressive or verlig, and tensions on campus between liberal and Marxist students and those who remained committed to the apartheid status quo were high. While organisations mobilised and educated a group of politically interested and active students, there was a subculture of students making resistance music, writing countercultural literature and living a bohemian and permissive lifestyle.
My roommate’s life didn’t cross paths with mine very much. Most nights, I came through the residence’s front doors moments before they were locked for the night. By then she would be asleep. Before dawn she dried her hair, waking me up with the sound of the drier. We may have chatted about a National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) or End Conscription Campaign meeting that I had attended. Or about how many Black Labels I had drunk at the bar. Or not. She may have told me about her uncle’s politics. Or, maybe not.
My first trip to Welcarmas farm was to visit a postgraduate art student who lived in the main house. The farm lies at the top of Helshoogte Pass between the university town and Pniel, over the crest of the pass. You took the road from Idas Valley, in Stellenbosch, up the old and treacherous mountain pass through patches of thick forest and along sheer drops to get to the farm on the saddle between Simonsberg, on the Stellenbosch side, and Jonkershoekberge. When clear of trees, there were steep views into the valleys below, some littered with crashed and abandoned cars, and other views across to the West Coast and to Table Mountain. If you looked up, you could see mountains rise ruggedly into the blue skies and pierce through dense clouds.
Welcarmas is where Jane raised her son. In the middle of the unkempt front garden of the main farmhouse was a big, old chestnut tree, the one Richard had played in as a young boy. The next time I visited, I stayed the night with a boyfriend. The artist had left and a group of friends moved into the dark, old house with its small windows and wooden floors. One of them was a law student, another studied genetics, they all played music and some of them were members of a rock band. I hitched lifts up and down the pass a few times to visit. A year later, the house was let to another set of my friends. At the same time, I would visit a nearby student commune on a farm a kilometre or two over the hill from Welcarmas towards the small mission settlement of Pniel, in a house with a wrap-around stoep, where five student activists lived.
One of them was the chair of NUSAS, another was the chair of the End Conscription Campaign, and others were members of NUSAS’s executive committee. A former student remembers how he helped to carry a photocopier from Morgenzon in the middle of the night, taking it across the road and through many fields and orchards to where it was hidden in a cellar on Welcarmas. The photocopier, which was funded by the African National Congress, was used to make political posters and pamphlets for distribution in the area.
Those students were my mentors. I read what I was told to read. On my first holiday, on a family trip to Namibia, I carried a copy of Richard Turner’s banned The Eye of the Needle with me. I read it at a waterhole in Etosha National Park. I read it on a remote cattle farm. I read it in the car while travelling through the desert. The book gave me a frame of reference for the politics of the time and answers to the way forward. His thinking made it clear that apartheid made no ethical or rational sense.
I never met Jane, but I’d heard about the old British-born woman living alone on the farm in the mountains, alongside bohemian, liberal and some radical-thinking students. She was the mother of a deceased political activist whose thinking continued to influence a generation of students, and she gave refuge to many non-conforming students, whether she intended to do so or not. To me, she was a mythical figure.
Looking at a photograph taken in September 1941 of Jane holding her baby, it’s hard to imagine the woman that many people say she was. ‘A cantankerous old cow,’ one person remembers. She was ‘a bitter woman’, said another. She had ‘reserves of criticism and even contempt which she drew on’. She was ‘cross with the world’.
In the photograph, the thirty-three-year-old mother is holding her son’s blanket away from his face. Richard, born on 25 September, was a few days old, still startled by the world he had recently entered. Jane is wearing a crocheted cardigan, her hair softly tousled, looking down at her baby while he looks directly at the camera.
Difficult and bitter she may have been, but Jane was also a practical, capable and effective woman. She was outspoken and feisty, and when she chose to be, she was delightful, mischievous and funny. Physically she was of average height, but she stood tall. Her movements were defined and confident. Her facial features were birdlike; her animated eyes were a chestnut brown; and as she aged, her curly brown hair turned grey, then white, while her eyes always glinted with life. She wasn’t interested in her appearance and very seldom applied make-up. One of her friends remembers her style as pragmatic: in summer she wore dresses and in winter, pants and jumpers. She spent a lot of time with what she called ‘a fag’ on her lips. She was capable of having a conversation and keeping her hands busy as all the while a cigarette burned in her mouth. In later life, her face grew lined, as is typical of a heavy smoker.
Jane was born on 17 January 1908. She and her six siblings grew up in the London East End borough of Hackney, near the Hoxton train station, far away from farm life in South Africa. There were no housing benefits, no social security, no health service, and everything the family wanted or needed, they earned through grit and hard work. Jane’s grandfather was a smuggler, and her father arrived in London from Wales ‘loaded with cash – all of which went down the drain with drink’, she told her niece, Jean Fawbert. Her parents managed two coffee shops and kept cows in their London backyard, which provided the milk that Jane’s father delivered to families in the area. While all the siblings did well at school, Jane was especially bright, funny and endlessly curious, always looking for a new experience.
Jane Turner and the tingle of tobacco in her farm garden
‘We all looked up to her,’ says Jean. ‘She was a rebel at school and we loved hearing about her exploits.’ At fourteen, as soon as it was legally permissible to do so, Jane left school to work in an office. For years, she worked and travelled, going on trips to France with her best friend, Muriel Meek.
On a blind date she met her husband, an engineer called Owen ‘Paddy’ Turner. Some say she was on the rebound; another person said that although he wasn’t the man she wanted to marry, he charmed her. He took Jane to Paris for a holiday, and after a six-week courtship they married. The newly-wed couple left London to live in the British colony of the Gold Coast (which later became Ghana), where Paddy was a partner in a successful building business.
After she became pregnant, Jane and Paddy travelled by ship to Cape Town for the birth of their son, believing they would receive better medical care there. By then, Europe had been at war for more than two years, and London, her home, was under threat. The Cape attracted many Britons and ex-colonists from other parts of Africa, as ‘land and labour were cheap and plentiful’.4 When Jane travelled south, the seas were busy with wartime traffic. They were also dangerous: en route, one of the ships in the convoy was torpedoed.
At first Jane and Paddy lived in a cottage in Bakoven, a small residential area in Cape Town along the Atlantic coast, where the sun sets late and the seawater is icy cold. While there, Richard was born, but three months later the family moved to Welcarmas, a farm of forty or so hectares.
The couple had driven to Stellenbosch one day and stopped for tea at Welcarmas, named after the three women who opened the tea room: Miss Welsh, Miss Carmichael and Miss Masters. The tea room had become an institution, and people travelled up the pass from Stellenbosch and further afield for tea and scones. Paddy never discussed with Jane his interest in buying the farm. Shortly after their visit, using money he had made in the Gold Coast, Paddy went back to buy the farm without con
sulting Jane. It was a quick, impulsive decision. Neither Jane nor Paddy had farmed before.
The year before they moved to Welcarmas, a student protest dominated news about Stellenbosch. After Prime Minister Jan Smuts involved South Africa in the British and Allied war against Germany, a group of Nationalist students travelled daily to Cape Town to interrupt patriotic midday prayers for the war. On 27 July 1940, events became particularly nasty when students clashed with soldiers in the city. When they returned to Stellenbosch that day, some of the students went on a rampage, destroying property and assaulting pro-war coloured residents in Die Vlakte, an area within the town and from where people would be forcibly removed under Group Areas legislation twenty years later. It was the most dramatic racial clash the town had experienced.
Jane and Paddy arrived in Stellenbosch in 1941. Within seven years, the National Party won the general election and began to formulate and institute its policy of apartheid, extending and furthering the racial segregation and oppression that was already established in South Africa.
Paddy was a solidly built, flamboyant and good-looking man. He was decisive and effective, characteristics that impressed Jane, even though they meant that he was an impulsive and dominant partner at times. He was a heavy drinker and smoker, and a member of the Freemasons, a secretive Protestant brotherhood of men who commit to living a moral and ethical life. Paddy wouldn’t have known what to expect of farm life and probably had no idea that it required as much work as it did. Perhaps because of his erratic personality or heavy drinking, Paddy’s new lifestyle didn’t keep his interest for long.
David Louw, who lived close by and who later moved with his family to Welcarmas, describes Paddy as a man with red hair and a big head. He says that he used to sit there and drink: ‘Hy het daar gesit en suip.’ By the time that alcohol killed Paddy, thirteen years after they had arrived at Welcarmas, Jane was most likely out of love and already in control of running the farm. Richard’s school friend John Clare says that Richard didn’t talk much about his father. John sensed that after Paddy’s death, Richard was ‘happy to have seen the back of him’.
Illuminating Lives Page 16