For black people living in South Africa during apartheid, simply moving around the country was a fraught activity, let alone crossing its borders. This was especially the case for black women, who were “rock bottom of the racial pile”, as South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo expressed it.
Coming to power in 1948 and ruling for over 40 years before democracy in 1994, the white-minority apartheid government took various race-based policies to extremes. An emphasis was on trying to control movement, keeping the black majority “in their place”.
From the 1950s, the state extended pass laws, targeting black women. It also complicated overseas travel with extra bureaucratic and financial burdens.
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Mobility restrictions caused an outcry, especially among the growing body of black working women in industrialising cities and towns. These women connected their everyday challenges with broader sociopolitical issues. They injected new energy and forms of activism into organisations involved in the liberation struggle, including the African National Congress (ANC).
In a recent study, I explore the stories of black women who refused to stay put in the face of apartheid’s controls. For these women, mobility was a powerful form of anti-apartheid resistance – and of self-assertion.
I highlight how in 1954, a number of these women, working across race lines, founded the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw) and drafted the Women’s Charter. The pioneering document laid groundwork for the broader Freedom Charter, which enshrined ideas on freedoms of movement and thought:
All shall be free to travel without restriction from countryside to town, from province to province, and from South Africa abroad.
Even though these ideals would only be realised much later, these activist women broke apartheid’s rules by travelling, exchanging ideas and making connections across borders.
The activist-traveller
These women’s high-risk journeys struck me as being characteristic of what journalist and scholar Mahvish Ahmad describes as a musāfir: an activist-traveller in a politically hostile environment who breaks new ground for others so they may be free.
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The mobile black women workers I have been researching have not previously been brought into view as travellers with things to say about their journeys and movements. Their travel texts are diverse, many available only in archives. They include speeches, commentaries, handwritten accounts, interviews, letters and memoirs. Some memoirs were officially published, but outside the country.
Their outputs were not the products of high education or stylised writing, but produced in the intensity of the times by working women.
Elizabeth Mafekeng
When Elizabeth Mafekeng, president of the Food and Canning Workers’ Association, was denied a passport in 1955, she boarded a plane in disguise as a domestic helper. That’s how determined she was to get to the World Conference of Workers in Bulgaria. She also took in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and China, commenting in the press that she “saw the way people should live in the world” where race was not pronounced.
Returning to South Africa, she was punished for her transgressive travel. She became the first woman sentenced to political banishment by the apartheid state. Again she took mobility into her own hands, fleeing with her two-month-old baby to then Basotholand (today’s Lesotho).
Lilian Ngoyi and Dora Tamana
Lilian Ngoyi, leader of the Garment Workers Union and president of the ANC’s Women’s League, travelled to Switzerland, London, Berlin, the Soviet Union, China and Mongolia in 1955.
Ngoyi and Dora Tamana first tried to board a ship under “European names”, only to be arrested. On a second attempt, they succeeded by air using affidavits and a raft of explanations, eventually arriving in London after stopovers in Uganda, Italy and the Netherlands. Their destination was the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland on behalf of Fedsaw. There they forged powerful solidarity networks.
Tamana reflected in a letter:
When I saw all these things, different nations together, my eyes were opened and I said, I have tasted the new world and won the confidence of our future.
On return, Ngoyi and Tamana played leading roles in the 20,000-strong 1956 women’s anti-pass march to parliament.
Frances Baard
Frances Baard was a domestic worker turned union organiser who presented the Women’s March petition to the apartheid state.
She travelled around South Africa extensively despite police harassment. Her organising work connected domestic workers, factory workers and other exploited labourers, for which she was imprisoned and banished. In her memoir, she spoke of the mind’s ability to travel:
Even though they ban me … my spirit is still there … free.
Florence Mophosho
My research includes those who travelled into exile like Florence Mophosho.
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She was one of the few exiled women leaders of the ANC in the 1960s, based for years in Tanzania and travelling far and wide for the Women’s Secretariat. She stressed that travel was vital to advance the work of political freedom as well as global women’s emancipation. This wasn’t always appreciated by male colleagues.
Emma Mashinini
The apartheid government loosened some mobility restrictions in the 1980s. But this didn’t mean moving around was free or unencumbered. Emma Mashinini, who led the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union, undertook “a hundred and one travels” within and beyond South Africa to progress freedom for her people.
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In 1981, Mashinini was thrown into solitary confinement for six months. In the eyes of the state, she had “overreached” as a black woman traveller-organiser. She insisted in her memoir that it was her country and she intended to come and go.
Moving to be free
Understanding this travel and writing history helps shine new light on (often unsung) black women trade unionists and organisational leaders as anti-apartheid movers and shakers.
Insisting on mobility came at great personal cost, but in a sense these women never went alone. They travelled to gain ground for the greater cause of freedom, while discovering new versions of themselves along the way.
Janet Remmington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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