Mrs Winnie Mandela knows well what it is to be both a political widow and a political prisoner. Her husband, ANC leader Nelson Mandela, has been in gaol since 1962. She herself was arrested in 1958 for demonstrating against the pass laws, banned in 1963, forced to leave her job as a social worker, detained under the Terrorism Act in 1969, tried twice and acquitted twice after over 15 months in solitary confinement; placed under partial house arrest; and in 1974/5 served six months imprisonment for breaking her banning order.
When at last her bans expired in September 1975 and were not renewed, Mrs Mandela, undeterred by her protracted ordeal, immediately seized the opportunity to draw attention to the plight of detainees and other political prisoners. In a recent article she has focussed on the forgotten women whose men are serving sentences for political offences — South Africa's many political widows. An extract from her article follows:
Imprisonment of breadwinners inevitably destroys families, but such destruction is all the more wanton, all the more unjustifiable when it is the lot of the brave and courageous, of those who sacrificed for their people.
White South Africans enjoy today one of the highest standards of living in the world; militarily, the country's defence is at its best, but what is the plight of the political widows, the women left destitute by a system which does not care where or how they will find the next food crumbs for their children.
CAROLINE MASHABA's husband was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment and he is serving his sentence on Robben Island. Caroline was a domestic servant at the time and is still one today. She has four children. She lives in at her place of employment where she takes care of her employer's children while her own have always been left to fend for themselves. Her eldest child is a cripple. She once tried to institutionalise him but discovered that she could not afford to pay the fees requested by the Cripple Care Association. The other children have become habitual truants from school, but since she 'lives in' as a servant she only gets these truancy reports on Thursdays her single day-off each week, when she reaches home towards the end of the day by public transport. It is then too late to see the teacher and discuss these problems, and already time to return home. She cannot afford to send the children to a boarding school. She sees her husband once a year in December even though he is now upgraded and can be seen twice a month.
CHRISTINA BOIKGUTSO lost her husband in the sixties when he was forced to leave the country, to escape imprisonment. She alleges that she was seriously assaulted when the system tried to find out the whereabouts of her husband. She has three children and she was forced to place them in a boarding school from the ages of five since she had to work and could not remain at home to look after them. The Roman Catholic Church assisted her in placing the children in a boarding school. Mrs Boikgutso's problems were seriously aggravated when she was advised that her husband had died in combat on the borders. She was hounded by the location superintendent who demanded her husband's death certificate though he knew very well that Mrs Boikgutso could hardly identify her husband's grave. After years of persecution from local authorities Mrs Boikgutso, who is a domestic servant, was thrown out of the house and is today roaming the townships. Her children was subsequently removed by the Roman Catholics and placed in an institution.
Whenever it is school vacation Mrs Boikgutso gets completely hysterical. She has nowhere to take the children to since she lives on her employer's premises. At one time I placed the eldest child with my parents in the Transkei but we had forgotten that we were not supposed to be ordinary human beings, that we had been forced into separate kraals. She is supposed to be 'Tswana' and I 'Xhosa'. The local authority once more clamped down on her and she was forced to return her child to a Tswana school.
And what is the position when the men return? Adolescent children meet a complete stranger. Daddy has been a name, a photograph in a frame. They have never seen him and do not know how to relate to him. He in turn is shy and afraid of these strangers, his own children. He walks into a life which his wife has made in his absence. He does not know that life, he cannot identify with it, or play out his traditional masculine role. Too many times, the expectations preciously nurtured on both sides, explode into bitterness, the exploded dream becomes a nightmare, the happy reunion never happens...
There are many others: in Natal the Mesdames Ndlovu, Naicker, Nair, Bhengu, Moonsamy. Their anguish would fill columns, women left by their husbands in the prime of their lives, during what should have been the best years of their lives.
Added to their loneliness, and their physical deprivation are the taunts and insults, the vicious tongue-wagging of neighbours, who have remained insensitive to the search for human dignity, and have thus never appreciated the sacrifice of a husband or son, or who, weak in soul, have readily yielded to the power of the enemy. Wives and mothers stand defenceless... objects of pity, or spiteful censure. In many instances the tragedies of these women are further compounded when they themselves are banned, restricted, house arrested, endorsed out of the urban area, or pursued by the police from work place to work place, so that every potential employer discards them as they do liabilities.
What is the future of the children of parents thus condemned? How does one avoid bringing up a generation of bitter youth who see a counter nationalism as their only survival hope? How does one save such youth from a confrontation with power, from the terrible reprisals that this will bring from a government so equipped with draconian laws?
......What future can be offered to one who is part of four hundred years of suffering, four hundred years of striving to invest some grains of dignity, four hundred years in which, survival... has depended on the primitive ideology of saying "yes" and meaning "no", of resisting and serving by not resisting. But all this can only result in accumulating a great anger and bottling up intolerable emotions whose outburst will have frightful consequences.
The future is black unless reparations are made now.
