Chapter 1 A methodology for fragments: voice, speech and silence

Introduction

If Masabata Loate and young women have been made liminal within narratives of the liberation struggle, in another sense, Loate’s story is central. The spaces and records through which we can know Masabata Loate (and the impossibility of knowing her) are those through which we know the liberation struggle: photographs; trials – their processes, proceedings and the evidence they created; political speeches; newspapers; human rights reportage; creative fiction, drama, poetry and song; autobiography and memoir; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and oral histories. In approaching these various archives of struggle this book traces cycles of voicing and silencing within them. This is an approach that treats all archives as ‘storied’ spaces, where lives are made and remade in the unfolding tangle of political mobilisation, state oppression and individual self-fashioning.¹ Looking for ‘cycles of voicing and silencing’ is a conscious attempt to move away from a linear understanding of subjecthood, in which once silent/silenced subjects have their voices found or given, and thereby enter into ‘History’.² The politics and practices of voice, speech and silence are much richer and more complex than this. It is the argument of this book that, if we acknowledge that voice and silence are not opposites of one another, but rather always entangled in any act of speech, we can position ourselves to learn much from the shadows. Below, I introduce my approach to voice, speech and silence, situating each within the historiography of South Africa’s liberation struggle and a wider methodological discussion. These are the tools I have used when drawing Masabata Loate’s shadow; they might be used for navigating the interplay of light and dark in the archives of many other times and places.

Voice

To possess and to be able to use your voice is something we can distinguish from the straightforward ability to speak. As Sean Field puts it, having voice is perhaps more accurately about having ‘sufficiently enabled’ access to public spaces to speak and be heard.³ To have a voice is to achieve recognition. It is both a political demand and a deeply personal experience. It is also about the connection between speech and a sense of self. Having voice is to be able to achieve a recognition and expression of selfhood through speech. In the chapters which follow I listen for the expressions of individuals and collectives. There are many voices, nested inside one another: South Africans, Africans, Black, white, women, men, the youth, nationalists, feminists, to name but a few. Exactly who has a voice and when, or what claims are made for and by individuals, is a history of the many threads contained within South Africa’s anti-apartheid liberation struggle. Sometimes individuals are contained and constrained by the collective claims made through and by them; sometimes competing voices drown each other out or silence those within; and sometimes they can amplify one another.

The emergence and evolution of African nationalism in Southern Africa can be understood in a very simple way as a fight to claim a political voice for all within the nation of South Africa, the borders of which were drawn in 1910. South Africa was a nation created out of the violent encounter between the British Empire, white settlers of Dutch origin and the indigenous communities of Southern Africa. As soon as that nation was constituted, those who had already been working for political recognition within the early colonies and settler states in the region, developed claims for their right to a voice within the Union of South Africa.⁴ An organisational history of African nationalism begins with the founding of the South African National Native Congress, later renamed the African National Congress (ANC), in 1912. The ANC was not always the driver of political action or demands over the course of the twentieth century – the liberation struggle was wider and deeper than any single organisation – but it maintained a constant presence and ultimately led the process that negotiated a non-racial democracy in the 1990s. Demands for a political voice always existed alongside those for access to land, especially following the 1913 Land Act that dispossessed ‘Natives’ of the right to buy or hire all but 7 per cent (later 13 per cent) of South Africa’s territory and controlled access to that remnant through a reconstituted tradition of Chieftaincy.⁵ For others, the driver was economic opportunities, and, for some, the struggle was guided by a vision of economic and political revolution.⁶

The fight for political voice in South Africa acquired a new dimension when the white segregationist State was reconfigured as the Apartheid State after 1948. Apartheid legislation conceived of South Africa as a white nation and sought to control all aspects of life based on a person’s racial classification as either White, African, Asian or Coloured.⁷ After 1948 African nationalist demands were bound up with a fight for racial justice against institutionalised white supremacy. This had a global dimension in the anti-apartheid solidarity movement, interconnected with the rise of human rights discourses. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the ideas that came to be collectively named ‘Black Consciousness’ sought nothing less than to ‘transform identity’ and ‘instil dignity and confidence’ in those who were oppressed – ideas which, Dan Magaziner has argued, by the 1980s gave way to ‘the far more limited, if laudable goal of ending apartheid’.⁸ Achieving a political voice for all South Africans through electoral democracy was thus not necessarily always the principal demand of those who participated in the liberation struggle. Yet, to have a voice was a continuous demand and a desire running through these various currents, even if the articulation and meaning of this demand changed over time and location, and in response to the State’s attempts to suppress opposition.

Natasha Erlank has suggested that there are two different ways of thinking about nationalism. The first is to conceptualise African nationalism as a response to the white State. ‘It speaks to a desire for equal rights for black and white South Africans’ and is a project aimed at producing a political community that takes place in the public sphere.⁹ The second is to consider what is contained within this process of producing a political community and look for the ways nationalism is shaped – the imaginative repertoires it calls upon and creates.¹⁰ Using voice as a lens brings both into focus: asking who speaks, when and where; what claims they make; how; and with what consequences? If we approach nationalism in this way, it becomes a space rich with struggles over speech, drawing upon and in dialogue with other ideologies and currents of thought – Christianity, socialism, communism, Black Consciousness, feminism, queer activism – through which individual and collective voices were forged.

We should note that there were specific conditions under which voices, public voices striving for recognition, were articulated in South Africa after 1976, shaped by the struggles which had preceded 16 June, and the shocks that the Uprisings themselves unleashed. Those who opposed apartheid were targeted by an array of security legislation which evolved over the forty years of National Party rule, through measures such as censorship, banning orders, banishments, detention and torture – many of which targeted the right (and in the case of torture the ability) to speak or write. Whilst legislation like the Suppression of Communism Act was laid down in the 1950s, the systematic and concerted suppression of political opposition to the Apartheid State deepened after 1960. The State of Emergency declared to quash the response to the Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March, when sixty-nine unarmed anti-pass protesters were shot (in the back) by police, saw the mass detention of political activists. In April 1960 the ANC and the PAC, the latter the organisation which had organised the Sharpeville protest, were banned. By the mid-1960s most of the leadership of these organisations, and their armed wings (both launched in 1961), as well as that of the South African Communist Party (SACP), and other organisations of the Congress Alliance, were detained, imprisoned or in exile. This has resulted in a common characterisation of the 1960s as the ‘silent decade’ within the history of the liberation struggle.¹¹ The idea that political organising ceased in the face of state repression has been shown by Julian Brown and others to be inaccurate.¹² However, we might instead see the 1960s as the point at which silence became an ever more necessary tactic within the struggle. From the 1960s onwards secrecy and silence were central to political lives.¹³ Voices had to be ever more carefully composed, shaping the forms of speech available and limiting what was sayable. We can include within this the stifling silences operating within white society – what Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has recalled as ‘the potent mixture – for whites – of silence, secrets, complicity, indifference, guilt, habit and decree’ that upheld apartheid laws and the means used to do so.¹⁴

The legal space to voice opposition to the State shrank again in the wake of 16 June 1976. The Internal Security Amendment Act that was passed during the Uprisings allowed for the indefinite preventative detention of those suspected of endangering the security of the State, or law and order.¹⁵ It also enabled the detention of, and prohibition of bail for, potential witnesses to violations of internal security. This was the form of detention without trial that many young people involved in the Soweto Uprisings, including Masabata Loate, were subjected to.¹⁶ Into the 1980s detention became the principal weapon utilised by security forces to curtail the activities of youth groups, trade unions and women’s, church and civic organisations that were mobilising in opposition to the State’s attempts to retain apartheid through reform.¹⁷ Another Internal Security Act (ISA) was passed in 1982 and amended in 1986. The powers of the ISA were, in the words of the Human Rights Committee of South Africa (HRC), ‘truly awesome’.¹⁸ Writing in 1990, the HRC noted that, ‘there is hardly a form of political expression, which is not blocked, controlled or threatened by one or other provision of the ISA’.¹⁹ The Act allowed for three forms of detention: detention for interrogation (Section 29), preventative detention (Section 28, 50 and 50A) and witness detention (Section 31). The power to detain was widened still further by the States of Emergency declared in 1985 (partial) and 1986 (national) that lasted until 1990. Under the Emergency any member of the security forces was empowered to detain and interrogate. Those detainees had no automatic right of access to lawyers, family or friends and could be held for the duration of the Emergency. Even the naming of those held in detention under the Emergency was prohibited. In the context of 1970s and 1980s South Africa then, speech and silence had meaning and importance beyond the content of such acts – simply to speak and to be silent could have extraordinary resonance and meaning in and of itself.

As many have noted, including the TRC, the violence of the Apartheid State in these years and the effects of this violence on memory and speech have been profound. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick identifies a ‘collusion between violence and silence’ that can, and has, ‘obstructed the ability of individuals to place themselves in history’.²⁰ Veena Das who thinks deeply about the experience of world-annihilating violence suggests that such violence can have the effect of rendering someone ‘voiceless’ but ‘not in the sense that one does not have words but that these words become frozen, numb, without life’.²¹ Similarly, Elaine Scarry argues that: ‘world, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture’.²² If violence has profound effects on voice, then the gendered patterns of state violence, and that which took place within the liberation struggle, shape both speech and the record it leaves us.

Voices were the stuff of the liberation struggle; they are also very often how we know about that liberation struggle. Given the restrictions on the public articulation of political voices under apartheid, oral history has been for historians one of the most important ways of accessing the liberation struggle both at the time and in the post-apartheid present. As Jeremy Seekings has noted, South Africa’s liberation struggle is perhaps unusual in the extent to which it was documented by academics as it was unfolding.²³ Voices were central methodologically to the social historians of the second half of the twentieth century. The aim of ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ can be found within social history, oral history and feminist research at this time.²⁴ It was certainly not always put as bluntly and simplistically as this. However, a sense of the authenticity of voices, that are ‘out there’ to be found and restored to history by the historian and can thereby redress the gaps in the written archives, still lingers within South African historiography.²⁵ Yet there are also important critiques of such an approach that have emerged from all three intellectual traditions, social, oral and feminist histories, which equip us with the tools to explore voices as I have suggested above,²⁶ to hear them as constructed claims, speech striving for recognition, crafted by speakers in dialogue with others, and under conditions that shape what was sayable and by whom in specific circumstances.

The centrality of voices within South African historiography means that struggles over voice criss-cross apartheid and post-apartheid spaces. Those who were conducting research during the 1990s noticed the profound affect that the ending of the Apartheid State had upon talk about the liberation struggle. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has recounted how researching the Soweto Uprisings before the 1994 election she found people ‘cautious, reluctant and unwilling to talk’ but that after the election ‘much of the tension had been replaced by relief and a new willingness to think about the past’, and ‘interviews were now tinged with humour and the heady feeling of victory’.²⁷ The 1990s may have seen the creation of new openings for speech and changing attitudes from former participants in the liberation struggle ‘as a range of inhibitions and security concerns dissipated’, but these openings were not universally accessible and many individuals have maintained significant silences.²⁸ Thus, the cycles of voicing and silencing that this book traces continue beyond the end(ings) of apartheid.

The ongoing creation of oral histories of political participation is a part of a longer history of speaking about the struggle.²⁹ This means recognising sites of speech that were heavily coerced, such as the statements of young people in court and their possible relationship with subsequent acts of speech and silence.³⁰ Those who speak now about their pasts of political participation do so after having traversed the terrain of speech and silence within the liberation struggle for many years. The interconnectedness of different sites of speech can sometimes be uncomfortable. For example, during an interview I conducted back in 2008 with a woman named Rebecca Musi, who became politically active as a university student at the University of the North, this interconnectedness became audible in a moment that initially passed me by in the flow of conversation.³¹ It was only later when I was transcribing the interview that her words pulled me up short. We were talking about her time in detention in 1977:

In all my interrogations etc, you’d have, you always had the good guy, the bad guy, the mediocre guy (laughs). And the good guy would always come to you and thinking well, speak like we are speaking, and you give them all the information, and the other guy, if the other two guys realised he’s not winning then they come and the aggressive guy comes and those are the guys who actually beat you up and you know all sorts of things. [emphasis added]³²

Speak like we are speaking. This was, of course, perhaps just a simple way of explaining the differences in tactics between security police. It was a reminder too of the ways my whiteness shaped our interactions. However, it also brought home to me the way in which moments of speech about the struggle are layered upon one another. Talking to me then, Rebecca Musi was recalling the way she spoke to police during her interrogations, and how she tried to maintain her silence, in the face of ‘all sorts of things’. This euphemistic reference to torture points to the ongoing effect of the experience. That earlier moment of speech and silence was part of our conversation. There was, I hope, a huge difference between those moments but Rebecca Musi’s words suggest that even if just for a second, the two collapsed into one another. This layering of speech is something the chronological structure of the book emphasises – the palimpsest effect of speech in the struggle, across multiple sites, and over time, is important. However, the ways in which speech and silence recollect and revisit earlier moments should also disturb any straightforward notion of chronology. The potency of speaking about the struggle as an act breaks down divisions between the past, present and future.

Speech

There are many forms of speech – and it should be noted, languages – through which voices emerge from within the liberation struggle and in its aftermath.³³ There are spectacular and highly choreographed moments, for example, Nelson Mandela’s speech from the dock at the Rivonia Trial. When the publication of his words and image were banned, Mandela took the opportunity to make a statement to the court instead of testifying, and spoke, uninterrupted for over four hours. The speech detailed a personal history of his involvement in the struggle, that of the ANC and the decision to launch the armed struggle.³⁴ Alongside this, are more everyday kinds of political discussion or debate, such as the umrabulo of the COSAS activists on Soweto streets, which Emily Bridger’s interviewees discussed with her. Bridger’s research suggests that at the centre of young men and young women’s differential participation in youth politics in the late 1980s was speech. Florence told Bridger that from young men’s easy access to the street flowed the ease of their participation:

It’s easy for them to communicate. We used to say umrabulo [a political discussion or debate] … it was easy for them to umrabulo-ise, to make understand or make one politically aware. So, it was easy because one guy would go chat, they’d start smoking, passing it, and chatting about whatever.³⁵

As both of the above examples attest, all forms of speech had gendered dynamics. Certain modes of speech, and spaces, were more and less accessible to men and women. Speech – who talks, when and where – takes us to the heart of the ways in which participation in the liberation struggle was navigated through inter-personal relations. The vast majority of speech does not leave behind any archival traces. The spectacular is more likely to leave a trace than the everyday. In a striking example of the ways in which the repressive machinery of the State shaped speech in the struggle, Murphy Morobe, a member of the SSRC and one of the Soweto Eleven, has recalled clandestine meetings with underground ANC activists during the 1970s. Testifying at the TRC, Morobe recalled meeting with ANC operative Joe Gqabi, who was a banned individual at the time: ‘Each time we came to his house, we did not speak, you know, everything will be written on paper and we will just exchange paper because the houses will be bugged and after all, those papers, he would take those papers and burn them’.³⁶ Yet, as I argued above, speech and silence do leave traces in subsequent acts of talking and not talking. These unspoken meetings resurfaced in Morobe’s TRC testimony.³⁷

Most of the material that I work with in the book is speech rendered as text. Captured in this way we lose much about the act of speaking – body language, tone, demeanour, fluency. Yet recorded speech is still different from written prose. Walter J. Ong has argued that: ‘by keeping knowledge embedded in the human life world, orality situates knowledge, within a context of struggle’.³⁸ This quality of speech, as a form of struggle, can certainly still be found within speech rendered as text, such as the trial transcripts that underpin Chapters 2 and 3 in this book. The oral historian Luisa Passerini has described how working with written archives can be a work of oral history too ‘in so far as it seeks to uncover a culture of the spoken word’.³⁹ I argue that in the archives of South Africa’s liberation struggle we can uncover cultures of the spoken word that shaped what was sayable and by whom. These cultures I call ‘struggle speech’.

Struggle speech has three dimensions: speech about the struggle, speech as the struggle and the struggle to speak. In an individual’s efforts to speak about their own actions within the anti-apartheid struggle, as a way of critiquing and publicising the injustices of apartheid, one can see all three dimensions of struggle speech: a struggle to talk about liberation and to use speech as a means of winning it. In each of the chapters which follow I question one aspect of the life of Masabata Loate by focusing on one dimension of struggle speech. I argue that each of the three dimensions of struggle speech had gendered dynamics and was, and is, part of the ongoing reiteration and negotiation of gender as a lived experience. Whilst in individual chapters I think repeatedly about moments of speech and silence, the whole book is also an attempt to think instead about what is sayable. The term is borrowed from Judith Butler and is an attempt to capture something more than the straightforward question of what people can say in a given context because of social or political norms or personal interests. As Butler puts it, ‘the question is not what it is that I will be able to say but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all?’⁴⁰

What is sayable is what underlies having a voice – staying within the bounds of the sayable helps speech to be recognised as a voice. Struggle speech is a particular ‘domain of the sayable’, the boundaries of which shifted over time through cumulative acts of speech and silence. The violence used to constitute that domain, state violence and liberation violence, was productive of gendered narratives and experiences of struggle. Who can talk, where and when, and what they might say, are not, as Butler argues, the kinds of ‘rules’ that are written down or even necessarily conscious.⁴¹ It is very often through moments of rupture or transgression that we can glimpse the domain of the sayable: acts of silence or silencing, of speech which is spoken but unheard, or that which is deemed unspeakable, can show us just what was and is sayable. It is through struggle speech and the ways in which she both conformed and did not conform to its conventions, that we come to know, and cannot know, Masabata Loate.

In this endeavour, maintaining the distinction between speech and voice, or having a voice, helps us to think more precisely about when, and how, speech becomes a moment of voicing. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, written prose plays an important role in the making of voices – both collective and individual. Veena Das puts it this way: ‘voice is not identical to speech, nor does it stand in opposition to writing’.⁴² Written prose, particularly in the form of memoir and autobiography, also contains traces of earlier moments of speech and silence. For example, in composing her autobiography, trade unionist and anti-apartheid activist Emma Mashinini began with the transcripts of recorded conversations she had with the film-maker Betty Wolpert.⁴³ She explains the process in a preface to her book:

During the shooting of the film, [Mama I’m Crying] Betty interviewed me and recorded my story on every possible occasion, even on aeroplane journeys. She would then post the tapes to Ruth Vaughan, her collaborator in London, who would rapidly transcribe them so that I could immediately work on the rough draft. With time I gained confidence and got into the groove of writing chapters myself. It was Betty who took my manuscript to The Women’s Press, and it was at her house in London that I completed the final draft and worked with my editor, Alison Mansbridge.⁴⁴

However, what Walter Ong’s recognition of the special character of orality, that we noted earlier, does usefully draw attention to, is that speech and writing often occur in (and require) different kinds of spaces and moments. This is evident in Mashinini’s account above.

In the chapters which follow I explore the gendered dynamics of ‘talking’, ‘speaking up’ and ‘speaking out’ as certain kinds of speech within the struggle which were archived. Each of these forms of speech played a role in capturing Masabata Loate’s story, drawing fragments of her life into the archive. These forms of speech were recorded particularly through the legal system and the human rights activism which emerged to monitor, publicise and campaign against the Apartheid State’s use of legal and extra-legal methods of supressing political dissent. I consider ‘talking’ as a form of speech that resulted from the unbearable weight of state oppression on individuals. Talking is speech that was the result of detention and often torture. It is the kind of speech recorded as the testimony of state witnesses. Talking can involve claims to voice (seeking a recognition of a self) but often involve a high degree of dissembling. We might think of dissembling as speech that seeks to protect a self through misinformation, half-truth and silence. Trial transcripts are full of talk, to such an extent that many researchers have cautioned against their use for writing struggle histories. For example, as Belinda Bozzoli and Franziska Rueedi have shown, the trial scenario silences particular actors and amplifies others.⁴⁵ It thus cannot be read as representing an accurate picture of struggle politics – particularly its gender and generational dynamics. The life stories that might emerge from these encounters between the State and its subjects or opponents are, as Gready has noted, a ‘violently collaborative’ effort.⁴⁶ The pressures of speech in such a context may well produce utterances which are ‘precisely not testimony’ and those who talk may ‘no longer coincide’ with themselves.⁴⁷ Whilst fully acknowledging this, I argue that trial versions of events mattered, and perhaps even more so, who spoke and from what position during trials had consequences beyond the courtroom. The life and death of Masabata Loate demonstrates this rather starkly. In addition, whilst ‘talk’ may not always give us access to an accurate picture of ‘who did what’ it does often and in surprising ways reveal the emotions of activists amidst oppression and points to what was sayable in this context.

At times, talk morphs into an act of ‘speaking out’ against the injustices of the Apartheid State. This was much more commonly the case in the high-profile political show trials of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Treason Trial (1956–61), the Incitement Trial (1962) and the Rivonia Trial (1963–64) all included moments where defendants were able to articulate openly and, at times at great length, their political ideology, the actions they had taken in opposition to apartheid, and justify their beliefs.⁴⁸ The State removed these possibilities for subsequent political defendants, and it should be remembered that the majority of political trials took place far from the glare of the international or even national media, with large portions closed to the public.⁴⁹ For those young people detained in the 1980s, in particular under the Emergencies, there was often no trial at which to speak or stay silent. In this context acts of ‘speaking out’ were recorded by human rights groups like the Detainee Parent’s Support Committee (DPSC) through their advice offices, daybooks and public campaigns.

In September 1981, just a few months before Seatlholo and Loate’s trial began, a large number of activists were detained in a countrywide swoop. By January 1982, over a hundred people were detained.⁵⁰ The State at this time targeted some of the newly resurgent ANC-aligned activists as well as trade unionists, such as Emma Mashinini, and a number of white students, including Keith Coleman. Keith Coleman’s parents, Dr Max and Audrey Coleman, and Emma Mashinini’s husband, Tom, were among the founding members of the first DPSC.⁵¹ In 1983 the DPSC affiliated to the newly formed United Democratic Front. Two weeks before a partial State of Emergency was declared in 1985 the DPSC opened an advice office in Johannesburg at Khotso House, where the South African Council of Churches was also based. By 1987 the DPSC operated advice offices in ‘all major centres and several small towns’.⁵² It was named a banned organisation by the State in February 1988 but continued to operate until 1990 when the office in Khotso House was finally closed.⁵³ The DPSC actually had two organisational components: the Detainee Parent’s Support Committees which were made up of parents, friends and relatives of detainees and thus had an ever changing membership; and the Descoms which had a much wider membership and carried out the organisation’s education campaigns, provided support to DPSC branches and undertook ‘information gathering’ and ‘crisis and emergency work’.⁵⁴ Underpinning this information gathering were the advice offices and their ‘daybooks’.

The daybooks recorded testimony from newly released detainees, family members of the recently detained, those affected by the violence of the State and, as the 1980s unfolded, inter-organisational conflict. The DPSC was deeply enmeshed in the politics of struggle speech since it had to work closely with other organisations whose membership was being targeted for detentions if they wanted to provide support to detainees and ‘gather information’ from them about the repressive tactics of security forces. As Audrey Coleman explained in 2007, ‘the different organisations within the townships seconded people to our office because of the sensitivity of the information we were receiving. So, they wanted to know that reliable people were getting the information as we debriefed detainees’.⁵⁵ The DPSC’s position, and, with that, its ability to assist detainees and access information, depended upon it being trusted. In the increasingly fraught political landscape of the late 1980s trust gained through, for example the organisation’s affiliation with the UDF, would have had far from a universal purchase. Even amongst UDF affiliates there could be considerable tensions.⁵⁶ Coupled with this, under the Emergencies of the late 1980s, as the DPSC itself became a target for state repression, members of other organisations were often needed to step in and help run the advice offices. Audrey Coleman remembers relying upon friends from the Black Sash to help her keep Khotso House running in 1985 when the first State of Emergency sent other activists underground.⁵⁷

The DPSC daybooks contain glimpses of people’s lives at moments of crisis. In each case the testimony recorded was prompted by an intrusion into a friend’s, a relative’s or the testifier’s own life. The archived daybooks are not systematic or comprehensive. They cannot provide an overview of human rights abuses during the Emergency. That they exist, that they were created, is what interests me. This was the emergent context for Loate’s second trial and the circumstances in which she found herself on her release in 1986. There is a terrible immediacy to the testimonies even read at a physical and temporal distance. However, each testimony was mediated by a statement-taker working in the DPSC advice offices. Judging from the surviving daybooks, different statement-takers, and witnesses, had differing approaches. The DPSC’s guidelines make clear the organisation’s interest in dates, times, places and names which would make up a factual statement of what had happened to each person. Nevertheless, this did not constrain some individuals from making fuller and more personal statements. Occasionally it appears that individuals wrote their own testimony directly into the daybooks. One such example can be found in a testimony written by a young man from Klipspruit West, Gerald Lewis Williamson. The entry is written in a mixture of upper and lower-case letters; he describes his detention and treatment angrily as dehumanising and barbaric. His testimony ends: ‘an injury to one is an injury to all! KILL THE BOER, THE FARMER! I hate WHITES!’⁵⁸ The writing of these slogans and the final statement, ‘I hate WHITES!’ take up most of a single page; the form of the writing itself seems to convey the emotions of this act of speaking out and to suggest that this has been written directly by Williamson. In most cases the role of the statement-taker is obscured by the use of the first person.⁵⁹ In this way, the daybooks are more than composite and mediated accounts of the Emergency – they are sites of struggle themselves, of speech as struggle. They are evidence of an important set of processes by which experiences of detention and abuse were (re)framed for individuals so that speaking out about such experiences became itself an act of confrontation with the State, a responsibility of resistance. They are records of decisions to speak out made by many activists and non-activists alike: the counter to the testimonies delivered and silences maintained within the courtroom.

Finally, ‘speaking up’ is a form of speech that has not so often been archived. We can think of this as the internal discussions that took place within liberation organisations – debates over strategy or practice. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, more of this kind of speech within the struggle began to emerge publicly in the late 1980s and during the relative freedom of the 1990s. It often accompanied the (re)making of collective voices for women and queer activists within the liberation struggle. All of these forms of speech within the struggle had gendered dynamics which is important, because of the centrality of voices to our understanding of political participation, especially since these archived forms of speech do not stand in opposition to oral histories of the struggle. There are important ways in which genres and forms overlap and shape one another across time and space: trial testimonies, human rights reportage, activist interviews and oral histories echo, and recall, one another in ways of speaking in the struggle.

Speech might also be seen to have a particular relationship with emotion and thereby help us to understand the ‘projects of desire’ within anti-apartheid political activism.⁶⁰ The idea of a special connection between speech and emotion has been put forward in an influential set of arguments by William Reddy. According to Reddy there are particular speech acts which can be defined as ‘emotives’, whereby sensory, biological and bodily experiences are translated into expressions of emotion.⁶¹ He argues that ‘when we speak of our emotions, they come into a peculiar, dynamic relationship with what we say about them’.⁶² Emotives ‘are influenced directly by, and alter, what they refer to’.⁶³ Speech thus offers historians glimpses of the normative regimes of emotional management which individuals navigate in specific contexts. An individual’s ability to navigate their feelings is at the core of emotional liberty which, for Reddy, must underpin any definition of political freedom.⁶⁴ Reddy’s insistence that ‘emotions are of the highest political significance’ converges with the second-wave feminist mantra, ‘the personal is political’.⁶⁵ Put another way: claims to self and voice are inherently political, and politics is enacted through embodied subjectivities.

Many have recognised that histories of the liberation struggle are necessarily intimate and emotional.⁶⁶ Jon Soske has drawn attention to the ways in which, in researching and writing histories of the liberation struggle, historians are often working with ‘intimate knowledge’. In his definition, ‘intimate knowledge’ is derived from ‘lived experience’, from ‘direct personal involvement; it is embodied in individual relationships (and therefore possesses an affective dimension) and it incorporates the knower within that which is known’.⁶⁷ However, Soske argues that the ‘intimacies of black anti-apartheid politics’ have often been obscured in academic accounts. In his own work Soske restores the emotional depth of the past by noticing not just what former participants have told him, but how those stories are told. He reflects on the way one interviewee chooses to tell a story ‘off the record’, in the form of a secret, despite the information actually imparted being well-known.⁶⁸ When confronted with the emotional intensity of speech about the struggle it is not long before the question of silences appears.

Silence

In thinking about silence, I want to return to a moment of failure, as I experienced it. In 2008 I was in Johannesburg, conducting oral history interviews with women who had been activists when they were young. I encountered both refusals and acceptances, but one set of refusals left me with a profound sense of unease, which has informed my approach to the past ever since. This set of refusals from a group of women was courteous but firm. They did not want to speak with me about their activist pasts. It might help me, but it certainly would not help them. They did not need recognition from me as historical subjects and they did not need my intervention. Initially, the meaning I took from these refusals was that I was not the historian who should be writing their histories – after all, my foreignness, race and age (for I was a very young researcher then) undoubtedly informed our interaction.⁶⁹ Over time, I have come to see another meaning there, too, that those refusals to speak were important archival acts. In a place like South Africa, where oral history is so obviously necessary for vast swathes of the past to be remembered and understood, how can we honour some people’s decisions not to speak? Should it be that a decision to stay silent results in being written out?

Jacob Dlamini has considered the issue of silence and refusal within the public discourse on the liberation struggle in his work on police collaborators, the so-called askaris, former liberation soldiers and activists who were ‘turned’ to work for the South African security forces. In beginning to write the histories of informing and collaboration Dlamini touches on one of the loudest silences within public narratives of the liberation struggle. He makes this plea:

There are stories that continue to refuse to be told. How might we go beyond that refusal? One way, it seems to me, is to engage honestly with the fatal intimacy at the heart of human relations in South Africa. It is in our persons that the secrets of the past have found a home. We must open up these archives and tell these stories.⁷⁰

Yet Dlamini reveals just how difficult this ‘opening up’ can be by telling his readers a story he asks us to ‘treat as fictional’, in which a young man ‘keen on history’ decides against following his suspicions and finding out whether one of his uncles had been an informer for the apartheid police.⁷¹ Dlamini describes this young man as coming ‘face to face with the notion of a legitimate secret’.⁷² What Dlamini makes clear is the way in which certain silences can be woven into the warp of social worlds and that the costs of unravelling them may be too high a price to pay. In this context there is a moral and ethical urgency to Nthabiseng Motsemme’s call for historians to ‘learn to read silences just as we would speech and action’,⁷³ since to ‘break’ some silences might have very real social consequences for those involved in carrying controversial pasts.

When thinking about the silences of individuals, Obioma Nnaemeka makes an important distinction between ‘to be silenced’ and ‘to be silent’.⁷⁴ Whilst the first fits quite obviously with an understanding of oppression, the second is more complicated. As Nnaemeka puts it, ‘one exercises agency when one chooses not to speak; the refusal to speak is also an act of resistance that signals the unwillingness to participate’. By choosing to remain silent an individual may in fact ‘gain attention that initiates talk’.⁷⁵ Or, as Motsemme has noted, silence may offer a form of emotional protection amidst conditions of oppression.⁷⁶ I argue that to read a silence held by an individual as what Reddy would term an ‘emotive’ is possible and indeed, necessary, to understand the gendered navigation of feeling in the liberation struggle.⁷⁷ On an individual level speech and silence are not opposites of one another. As social acts, and archival traces, silence and speech contain the possibility of each other within one another. This has long been recognised by oral historians who argue that the silences, errors or ‘even the lies’ within oral accounts of the past are what make them truthful; they reveal the creative processes by which lives lived become memories and stories to be told and retold in the present.⁷⁸ This is the ‘unique and precious element’ of oral sources: they tell us ‘not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’.⁷⁹ They do so through acts of silence, just as they do through speech.

‘Talk’ as a form of speech heavily shaped by coercive power is particularly full of silences. Dissembling – saying one thing but meaning another, or speech that misleads and misdirects – was central to daily life under apartheid. The need for black South Africans to speak in particular ways to (often white) authority in order to survive is captured particularly within poetry of the Black Consciousness era. For example, in ‘Gumba Gumba Gumba’,⁸⁰ a poem that catalogues the sights, sounds and feelings of life in a South African township, Mafika Gwala describes:

Struggle is when

You have to lower your eyes

And steer time

With your voice bent

[…]

Jerk your talk

Frown in your laughs

Smile when you ain’t happy

That’s struggle.⁸¹

Jeremy Cronin has called this a ‘paradoxical voicing of voicelessness’, which explores the rich (and painful) emotional depths of the silences imposed and maintained under apartheid.⁸² The terrain of speech in the liberation struggle was significantly reshaped in the late 1960s and through the 1970s by the emergence of Black Consciousness, which placed a renewed emphasis on voice. Dan Magaziner has argued that the ability ‘to speak with the self-conscious assurance of an adult’ was of central importance to Black Consciousness thought.⁸³ In another set of reflections on silence from the early 1970s, in his poem, ‘And Yet …’, Don Mattera points to a complex relationship between silence and emotional expression which underlay his own ideas about his place in the world. Mattera, who had been working as journalist for the newspaper The Star and an activist within the Black People’s Convention (BPC), was banned by the State in 1973.

I have known deep silences

when thoughts like angry waves

beat against the shores of my mind⁸⁴

Within this silence Mattera remembers painful experiences and in particular recalls the wounding of his sense of masculinity.⁸⁵ The recent flowering of scholarship on Black Consciousness has shown that the movement’s ideas and practices were marked by gendered formulations such as this.⁸⁶ Magaziner emphasises the ‘conscious silences and stressed syllables’ of the famous mantra ‘Black man you are on your own’.⁸⁷ According to Magaziner, Black Consciousness ‘was both a marker and a process; to call oneself ‘Black’ was to ‘assert one’s consciousness of oneself as such’. He suggests that despite an initial interest in exploring women’s consciousness of themselves as women, over time the movement became more ascriptive of distinct gendered roles and soon the ‘options open’ to women within Black Consciousness organisations were to be ‘one of the boys’ or a mother.⁸⁸ As ‘one of the boys’ it was possible for women to speak with ‘defiant adult voices’ but they were not always heard in this way. By way of example, Magaziner cites press coverage of the Black Renaissance Conference in 1974 that denigrated the young women delegates from the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) as ‘hysterical girls’.⁸⁹ All of this points us to the importance of the contexts in which speech and silence are heard, which can shape the meaning of both. These ‘deep silences’ show us that a historical silence is not simply an absence or lack of speech or noise. It is something more akin to a limitation on knowledge about the past. Silence is a limit in the sense that it marks the boundary between one kind of knowledge and another. Silence can be one of the ways in which we come to know about the past.

In his influential work on the Haitian Revolution, Michel-Rolph Trouillot talks of four crucial moments at which ‘silence enters the process of historical production’: ‘the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)’.⁹⁰ Paying attention to when and where silences are made, Trouillot suggests, is vital for understanding that ‘not all silences are equal’ and therefore ‘they cannot be addressed – or redressed – in the same manner’.⁹¹ Archives, written and oral, can be silent about things which we know happened. That they are partial is axiomatic. Asking how and why we do not know, about marginalised people in any given context, can be extremely revealing. As Ann Laura Stoler has argued, we can read ‘along the archival grain’; to see the workings of governmental mind-sets within the making of state archives with logics, desires and anxieties shaping what was recorded and how.⁹²

Colonialism, genocide and slavery are all processes of annihilation, of people and of worlds, and enact foundational silences at the moment of source creation. Historians who have sought to write about societies and peoples subjected to such annihilation have faced many questions about what it is possible to know in these contexts. These historians often conceive of themselves as telling stories of the unspoken, the unspeakable or the impossible. In her iconic essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak argued that ‘if in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’.⁹³ For Spivak, subaltern women are ‘doubly in shadow’ or ‘in the shadow of shadows’,⁹⁴ and the possibility of learning to ‘speak to the subaltern woman’ lies in ‘unlearning’ the postcolonial intellectual’s privilege by ‘measuring silences, if necessary into the object of investigation’.⁹⁵ I take this to mean we must unlearn the privilege to know.

Conclusions

Writing about the silence of enslaved women in the Americas, Saidiya Hartman observes that: ‘the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So, it is tempting to fill in the gaps and provide closure where there is none’.⁹⁶ Hartman resists this temptation in her work and argues for a refusal to fill in gaps and an imperative to ‘respect black noise’ as that which was not sayable.⁹⁷ Following Hartman and other feminist historians and theorists who have drawn attention to how stories are told I have aimed to keep Loate’s story contained within the fragments that hold her.⁹⁸ Working with fragments and keeping them as such – noticing their sharp jagged edges and holding the incomplete pieces alongside one another – helps us to see moments of voicing and silencing and what makes them possible, necessary or likely.

The silences and silencing of Masabata Loate occur at every stage that Trouillot identifies. Her voice emerges only through the apartheid legal system and its regimes of torture; her face is captured by the beauty-seeking camera; her death is subsumed under wider patterns of violence within mid-1980s Soweto. Within the archives, in her trial alongside Khotso Seatlholo, the records misspell name her as ‘Masabate Loatse’. In the transcripts of the TRC’s public hearings she is ‘Masabata Luate’. The Financial Mail when reporting her death described her as ‘one of the best known activists during the Soweto 1976 upheavals’ – yet her name is rarely to be found within wave upon wave of scholarship on 16 June and its aftermaths.⁹⁹ She is mentioned in Helena Pohlandt-McCormick’s, I Saw A Nightmare, only because of the large number of documents archived as having been found in her possession when she was arrested in 1977.¹⁰⁰ In this last instance it is the record itself that almost obscures her. Chapter 2 begins with this – the archive which bears Loate’s name – and asks what it can tell us, if anything, about her. After this, Chapter 3 explores Loate’s seemingly different appearances as beauty queen and terrorism suspect. Chapter 4 examines the multiple stories of her death. These fragments are kept as such, glimpses of a life and a person, a shadow moving through the archive. Throughout the book I do not attempt to recover whole voices but rather work with fragmented speech and silence to reveal both what we know and how we know it.

Notes

1. 1.  Ciraj Rassool has pioneered this approach in a South African context with his focus on processes of biographical production, or the creation of ‘storied lives’. See: Ciraj Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/Biography and History in South Africa’ (University of the Western Cape, 2004), 9.

2. 2.  Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley, eds., Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), xxiv.

3. 3.  Sean Field, ‘Turning up the Volume: Dialogues about Memory Create Oral Histories’, South African Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (1 June 2008): 187, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582470802416393.

4. 4.  Bernard Magubane, The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996); André Odendaal, The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2012); Peter Limb, The ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa before 1940 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2010), https://doi.org/10.25159/882-5; Thula Simpson, History of South Africa: 1902 to the Present (London: C. Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2022).

5. 5.  For one argument about the importance of land for early ANC leaders see: Philip Bonner, ‘Fragmentation and Cohesion in the ANC: The First 70 Years’, in One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today, ed. Arianna Lissoni et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 1–12.

6. 6.  For histories of the place of communism and socialism within the liberation struggle see: Tom Lodge, Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party 1921–2021 (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2022); Allison Drew, Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (London: Routledge, 2019).

7. 7.  For a concise overview of the apartheid state see: Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

8. 8.  Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 12.

9. 9.  Natasha Erlank, ‘Christianity and African Nationalism in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today, ed. Arianna Lissoni et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 83.

10. 10.  Erlank, ‘Christianity and African Nationalism in South Africa’, 84–5.

11. 11.  This shorthand is widespread – for a recent example see the chapter title ‘The Silent Sixties’ in Simpson, History of South Africa.

12. 12.  Julian Brown, The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2016); Steven Friedman, ‘The Sounds of Silence: Structural Change and Collective Action in the Fight against Apartheid’, South African Historical Journal 69, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 236–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2017.1293719.

13. 13.  As Gillian Slovo, daughter of Ruth First and Joe Slovo recalls. In the aftermath of Sharpeville, her father was detained under the Emergency and her mother went into hiding. Slovo remembered, ‘Secrecy which had been part of our lives for as long as we could remember, now ran riot’. Gillian Slovo, Every Secret Thing / Gillian Slovo (London: Little, Brown, 1997), 53.

14. 14.  Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’ … : Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chapter 1, 30, http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/.

15. 15.  The Internal Security Amendment Act 79 of 1976, accessed May 2024, https://www.gov.za/documents/internal-security-amendment-act-16-jun-1976-0000.

16. 16.  For more on the changes to the legal landscape after 1976 see: Michael Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 144–51.

17. 17.  See ‘The Detention Weapon’ in Max Coleman, A Crime Against Humanity (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998).

18. 18.  See ‘Internal Security Act’ (July 1990), reprinted in Coleman, A Crime Against Humanity.

19. 19.  Coleman, A Crime Against Humanity.

20. 20.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’: Doing Violence to Memory, chapter 6, 5.

21. 21.  Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 8.

22. 22.  Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 35.

23. 23.  Jeremy Seekings, ‘Whose Voices? Politics and Methodology in the Study of Political Organisation and Protest in the Final Phase of the “Struggle” in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 7–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582471003778300.

24. 24.  Luise White, Stephan Miescher and David William Cohen, African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

25. 25.  This is a critique put forward in Field, ‘Turning up the Volume’.

26. 26.  For some examples, drawn from each of these overlapping and loosely defined fields see: Jenny Robinson, ‘(Dis)Locating Historical Narrative: Writing, Space and Gender in South African Social History’, South African Historical Journal 30 (May 1994): 144–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582479408671788; Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Woodward, Hayes and Minkley, Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa.

27. 27.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’: Doing Violence to Memory, chapter 1, 40.

28. 28.  Arianna Lissoni et al., eds., One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 35.

29. 29.  Field, ‘Turning up the Volume’, 176.

30. 30.  Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has argued for something similar when it comes to the statements of student activists before the government inquiry into the Soweto Uprisings, the Cillie Commission. She suggests, ‘they cannot be discounted, because to discount them would be to discount the struggle of participants to assert, in the face of severe and threatening repercussions, and even in the smallest of ways, their own voices’. Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’: Doing Violence to Memory.

31. 31.  The world of student politics which Rebecca Musi was part of at the University of the North and its importance for the development of national student movements is explored in Anne Heffernan, Limpopo’s Legacy: Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2019), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc16j21.

32. 32.  Rebecca Musi, interview with author, Johannesburg, September 2008.

33. 33.  Liz Gunner makes this point – even if the ‘official’ language of the ANC was English, that organisation’s history was ‘acted out, experienced and recorded through a variety of languages’: Liz Gunner, ‘The Politics of Language and Chief Albert Luthuli’s Funeral, 30 July 1967’, in One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today, ed. Arianna Lissoni et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 192, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/one-hundred-years-of-the-anc/politics-of-language-and-chief-albert-luthulis-funeral-30-july-1967/E613C1E81B5CD1EFE8F8052C8EA2AC04.

34. 34.  Awol Allo, The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial (London: Routledge, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315615073.

35. 35.  Emily Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2021), 45.

36. 36.  Murphy Morobe, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed February 2024, http://www.doj.gov.trc.hrvtrans/soweto/morobe.htm.

37. 37.  For a discussion of the significance of these links see: Simpson, History of South Africa, 239.

38. 38.  As quoted in Alessandro Portelli, ‘Oral Testimony, the Law and the Making of History: The “April 7” Murder Trial’, History Workshop, no. 20 (1985): 5–35, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288647.

39. 39.  Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, 9.

40. 40.  Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 133.

41. 41.  As Butler puts it: ‘one speaks according to a tacit set of norms that are not always explicitly coded as rules’. Butler, Excitable Speech, 134.

42. 42.  Das, Life and Words, 8.

43. 43.  Mashinini discusses this process in the preface to her autobiography. I discuss this book and its origin story more fully in Chapter 4. Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography (London: Women’s Press, 1989).

44. 44.  Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life, xvi.

45. 45.  Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Franziska Rueedi, ‘Narratives on Trial: Ideology, Violence and the Struggle over Political Legitimacy in the Case of the Delmas Treason Trial, 1985–1989’, South African Historical Journal 67, no. 3 (3 July 2015): 335–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2015.1092573.

46. 46.  Paul Gready, Writing as Resistance: Life Stories of Imprisonment, Exile, and Homecoming from Apartheid South Africa (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 10.

47. 47.  These are Louise Bethlehem’s evocative descriptions of the speech of a ‘boy prisoner’ character, Jerry, in Mary Benson’s novel, that used verbatim excerpts from political trials. Louise Bethlehem, ‘Stenographic Fictions: Mary Benson’s At the Still Point and the South African Political Trial’, Safundi 20, no. 2 (3 April 2019): 198–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2019.1576963.

48. 48.  Referring to the trial of Nelson Mandela for incitement in 1962, for which he was sentenced to five years, as the Incitement Trial, is a shorthand suggested by Catherine Cole, ‘Justice in Transition: South African Political Trials, 1956–1964’, in The Courtroom As a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial, ed. Awol Allo, Emilios Christodoulidis and Sharon Cowan (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 81–122.

49. 49.  See for example the Post-Rivonia trials of activists in the Eastern Cape attended by Mary Benson as a journalist for the British newspaper the Observer. Benson describes the ‘terrible pall of anonymity’ which fell over these trials, held in camera and often without counsel or press in attendance. As discussed in: Bethlehem, ‘Stenographic Fictions’.

50. 50.  Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 38.

51. 51.  ‘History of the DPSC’, (1987), WHP, AG2523, Box A1.

52. 52.  ‘History of the DPSC’, (1987), WHP, AG2523, Box A1.

53. 53.  Max and Audrey Coleman, interview by Craig Matthews, John Vorster Square Police Station, Johannesburg, April 10, 2007. Between Life and Death: Stories from John Vorster Square (Doxa Productions, 2007), DVD

54. 54.  ‘Detainee Support Committees’, WHP, AG2523, Box A1.

55. 55.  Interview with Max and Audrey Coleman in Between Life and Death.

56. 56.  For example, Seekings suggests a very strained relationship between COSAS and the UDF. Seekings, The UDF, 134.

57. 57.  Interview with Max and Audrey Coleman in Between Life and Death.

58. 58.  Gerald Lewis Williamson, Kliptown/Klipspruit Daybook, 1985–86, WHP, AG2523, Box G21.4.1.1.

59. 59.  The DPSC did not have a policy on this except that statement-takers should be consistent. In a March 1987 document it was suggested that ‘when taking down the statement we should try to be consistent. Either we should use “I” all the time, or “He/She”. That way it will not be confusing to read’. ‘Detainee Interview Checklist of Statement Taking’, (March 1987), WHP, AG2523, Box M1.12.1.6.

60. 60.  This evocative phrase is Rachel Sandwell’s, see: Rachel Sandwell, ‘Fantasy States: Nationalism, Intimacy, and Transgression in South African Women’s Political Memoirs’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no. 3 (March 2022): 765–87, https://doi.org/10.1086/717734.

61. 61.  William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: University Press, 2001), 96–104, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511512001.

62. 62.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 64.

63. 63.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 104.

64. 64.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 113.

65. 65.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124; The phrase ‘the personal is political’ was coined by Carol Hanisch in a 1970 essay, reprinted in Carol Hanisch, ‘The Personal Is Political’, in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 113–16.

66. 66.  Shireen Hassim has also explored what she terms ‘the sphere of the intimate-political’ in her work on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her marriage to Nelson Mandela. In this work she also cautions us not to ‘reduce the personal to the political’. See: Shireen Hassim, ‘Not Just Nelson’s Wife: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Violence and Radicalism in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 5 (3 September 2018): 901, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1514566; Shireen Hassim, ‘The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela’, Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no. 6 (2 November 2019): 1152, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2019.1697137.

67. 67.  Jon Soske, ‘Open Secrets, Off the Record: Audience, Intimate Knowledge, and the Crisis of the Post-Apartheid State’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 38, no. 2 (2012): 58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23267796.

68. 68.  Soske, ‘Open Secrets, Off the Record’.

69. 69.  As Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith have put it, in urging historians to consider the positionality of their potential subjects, ‘the silenced, may be particularly silent precisely to us’: Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, ed. Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 14.

70. 70.  Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014), 255.

71. 71.  Dlamini, Askari, 256.

72. 72.  Dlamini, Askari, 257.

73. 73.  Nthabiseng Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Current Sociology 52, no. 5 (2004): 910, https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392104045377.

74. 74.  Obioma Nnaemeka, ‘Imag(in)Ing Knowledge, Power and Subversion in the Margins’, in The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (London: Routledge, 2005), 4.

75. 75.  Nnaemeka, ‘Imag(in)Ing Knowledge, Power and Subversion in the Margins’, 4.

76. 76.  Motsemme, ‘The Mute Always Speak’.

77. 77.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.

78. 78.  Alessandro Portelli, The Voice and the Text – Writing, Speaking and Democracy in American Literature: Writing, Speaking, Democracy, and American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 53.

79. 79.  Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 50.

80. 80.  Gumba Gumba was a slang term used in township English that referred to hi-fis used to play music loudly, particularly at drinking sessions.

81. 81.  Robert Royston, ed., Black Poets in South Africa, African Writers Series (London: Heinemann, 1974), 24.

82. 82.  Jeremy Cronin, ‘ “The Law That Says/Constricts the Breath-Line (…)” South African English Language Poetry Written by Africans in the 1970s’, English Academy Review 3, no. 1 (January 1985): 27, https://doi.org/10.1080/10131758585310031.

83. 83.  Daniel R. Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man: Feminism, Gender and Adulthood in Black Consciousness, 1968–1977’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 1 (1 March 2011): 53.

84. 84.  Don Mattera, ‘Six Poems’, Index on Censorship 3, no. 4 (1974): 24, https://doi.org/10.1080/03064227408532368.

85. 85.  Mattera, ‘Six Poems’, 24.

86. 86.  Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man’; Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets; Leslie Anne Hadfield, ‘Challenging the Status Quo: Young Women and Men in Black Consciousness Community Work, 1970s South Africa’, Journal of African History 54 (2013): 247–67, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0021853713000261; Leslie Anne Hadfield, Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2016); Ian M. Macqueen, Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2018), 138–64.

87. 87.  Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man’, 48.

88. 88.  Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man’, 49.

89. 89.  The coverage was in Drum and The World, as cited in Magaziner, ‘Pieces of a (Wo)Man’, 56.

90. 90.  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Revised edition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015), 26.

91. 91.  Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 27.

92. 92.  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

93. 93.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Carry Nelson (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 288.

94. 94.  Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 289; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 265, https://doi.org/10.2307/2505169.

95. 95.  Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

96. 96.  Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 8, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

97. 97.  Refusal and respect are both central to what Hartman calls a method of ‘critical fabulation’ for ‘telling impossible stories’ about enslaved women ‘to amplify the impossibility of [their] telling’. Critical fabulation disrupts chronological ‘tellings’ of events and introduces multiple perspectives as a way of making visible the production of historical silences. Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, 12.

98. 98.  See for example: Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

99. 99.  Financial Mail, 24 October 1986, 57.

100. 100.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’: Doing Violence to Memory.