Chapter 3 Witnessing, detention and silence: speech as struggle

Introduction

Just three months after the trial of the Soweto Eleven ended, Masabata Loate appeared in the Rand Daily Mail, as a winning beauty queen, Miss Mainstay 1979 (Mainstay was a brand of South African sugar cane spirit). On 3 August she was pictured alongside the two runners-up in the contest, and on 28 August carrying out her duties at the first-round draw for the Mainstay Cup, a football competition sponsored by the brand.¹ The only hint that this young woman had a political past, and future, was her natural Afro hairstyle. Three years later she was back in court, on trial herself, charged under the Terrorism Act. What do these two fragments of a life – the beauty queen and the alleged terrorist – say when we hold them alongside one another? At her 1982–3 trial, Loate’s defence team suggested these two identities were incompatible. Masabata Loate spoke at her trial, and she spoke of beauty contests. In doing so she transgressed the boundaries as they were being drawn around these two apparently different lives. She spoke, too, of crossing another fiercely maintained distinction, that between a state witness and an anti-apartheid activist. This is even more extraordinary, given the context of intensifying struggles over speech that marked the 1980s.

The trial of Mary Masabata Loate and Sidney Khotso Seatlholo on two counts under the Terrorism Act that began in February of 1982 was all about speech and silence. It was shaped by an uneven compulsion to speak that played out along lines of gender and age.² The prosecution alleged that Seatlholo and Loate were members of both the SSRC, banned since 1977, and the South African Revolutionary Youth Council (SAYRCO). According to the prosecution, Seatlholo was the SAYRCO president and Loate the secretary, and SAYRCO recruited students in Soweto to undergo military training in Botswana as part of a conspiracy with other internal black organisations to violently overthrow the State. The trial was marked by three significant maintained silences: that of Khotso Seatlholo himself; the ‘silent five’ male witnesses who refused to testify for the State; and that of ‘Freedom’, a young woman friend of both the accused, who once in the witness box also dramatically refused to give evidence against them. Masabata Loate did testify in her own defence. A number of other young detainees appeared as state witnesses. For them, and for Loate, talking was a means of saving oneself and implicating others, if they could convince the magistrate that their talk was authentic. A large part of the defence case rested upon calling into question the motivations of these young witnesses and suggested that for them, testifying in camera as many did, the courtroom was an extension of the interrogation room. Unlike the trial of the Soweto Eleven considered in Chapter 2, there was, in 1982, less of an effort on the part of defence or prosecution to portray youth politics a particular way. Instead, the central debate of this trial was not the meaning of youth political action, but rather the meaning and motivation of speech. The defence suggested that the struggle at this time was an all-consuming environment. A ‘web’ was the metaphor used, which could entangle all young people; unwitting innocents, committed activists and criminal chancers alike. They argued that the prosecution acted cruelly, in failing to distinguish between them, and that how individuals spoke during the trial, was the key to telling them apart.

Jacob Dlamini has noted that state witnesses were at the very centre of South Africa’s political show trials and that the ‘choice’ that many detainees faced was, ‘talk and live or refuse and die’.³ This was a ‘choice’ faced at every interrogation but also again in court and in the early 1980s more and more chose silence at this moment. The refusal of potential state witnesses to give evidence was noted as an increasingly common feature of security trials in the 1982 Survey of Race Relations annual report. In 1982 at least fifteen people had been sentenced for refusing to testify on behalf of the prosecution. Two other features of Loate’s trial were also noted as wider trends by the same report: the holding of potential state witnesses for long periods in detention with release only following their court testimony, and the holding of portions of the trial in camera at the request of the prosecution or witnesses fearful that their ‘lives would be endangered if the black community was aware they were giving evidence for the State’.⁴ Despite being framed as a way of ‘protecting’ state witnesses, critics argued that in camera court proceedings were aimed at linking the moment of interrogation and the moment of testimony as closely as possible in the detainee’s mind, maintaining the closed world of detention and its psychological and physical compulsions to talk. These features taken together suggest increasing pressures on detainees in the 1980s, from multiple directions.

In this context silence was valorised by the liberation movement. An article in the August 1983 edition of Sechaba celebrated ‘voices of protest from the witness box’ that were challenging apartheid ‘on every front … even its own courtrooms’.⁵ The author praised those state witnesses who refused to testify, or did so only to ‘denounce in court those methods used to pressurise them’ into giving evidence as ‘the most effective challenge to the courts’ credibility’.⁶ At the same time that silence was valorised, talking was punished. As the 1980s went on, reprisals against state witnesses became increasingly violent and fatal. The ‘necklace’, a petrol-soaked tyre that was placed around a person’s neck and set alight, was a method used against informers during the period of intense political violence under the States of Emergency declared from 1985 onwards. Between 400 and 700 people were killed in this way during the mid to late 1980s.⁷ Whilst the UDF espoused non-violence and the ANC sanctioned the use of disciplined and strategic violence carried out by its armed wing UmKhonto We Sizwe (MK), the leadership of both organisations neither fully condoned, nor fully condemned, necklacing at this time. In what Reidwaan Moosage has named a ‘prose of ambivalence’, the practice was denounced (often as an ‘excess’ of violence) but those who carried out the necklacing were not.⁸ As Nyasha Karimakwenda has noted, ‘vulnerability to accusations of collaborating, and the form of punishment for men and women, were recurrently gender dependant’.⁹ The speech and actions of women were subjected to specific controls. Loate and Seatlholo’s trial took place at the very beginnings of this intensification of the violent struggle over speech. Loate was released and returned to Soweto when this violence was at its height, with tragic consequences.

Trial by talk

Seatlholo maintained a defiant silence throughout the trial, accompanied by black power salutes to the public gallery.¹⁰ It was an irony, given his reputation as a ‘forceful speaker’.¹¹ In contrast Loate did testify in her own defence and was cross-examined for a whole day. What Loate said whilst on trial makes her status difficult to ‘fix’ in terms of the clear-cut oppositional narratives of liberation. This was Loate’s second time in the witness box. Indeed, her situation as an accused in 1982 was inextricably linked to her first appearance as a state witness in 1979. Loate’s defence in 1982 relied upon a portrayal of her position within the struggle community as one that was deeply ambiguous following her appearance as a witness in the trial of the Soweto Eleven. She was, her defence team suggested, not trusted by the Soweto activist community and, in a misguided attempt to redeem herself, she became involved peripherally in SAYRCO through a romantic relationship with Seatlholo. Advocate George Bizos led Loate’s evidence regarding the effects of her testimony in 1979 in the following exchanges:

Now after you gave evidence, what was the attitude of the community that you were living in towards you? – The attitude was quite negative.

How was this negative attitude expressed? – Firstly I received a threatening letter and a two [sic] weeks after receiving this letter I was shot in the leg …

Were the people with whom you had been associated in the SSRC still keen to speak to you? – Well they used to talk to me, they used to walk with me, I was regarded as having been finished with the court and they held no grudges against me.

Did they continue discussing their political plans with you? – No politics were never discussed in my presence … No reason was given by them but the fact that nobody discussed these things in my presence, this was because I had given evidence against them.¹²

The defence argued that having become reacquainted with Seatlholo on a visit to Botswana in February of 1981, Loate and Seatlholo resumed their previous romantic relationship. This was the reason for their communications and for Loate’s meetings with other SAYRCO members; meetings that the prosecution alternatively alleged revealed her role as a military recruiter. Loate was with Seatlholo when he was arrested on his return to South Africa in June of 1981. She maintained in her testimony that she was Seatlholo’s girlfriend and not a member of SAYRCO. Loate claimed she had not even heard of the organisation before her arrest, and as a result she had mis-spelled the organisation’s acronym in a letter she wrote from detention. As she said, ‘The fact that I could not even spell its name is evident [sic] enough of my ignorance’.¹³

Bizos argued that Loate subsequently found herself on trial alongside Seatlholo, not because of her role in SAYRCO, but rather because, after her arrest, she had managed to smuggle letters out to her family, and to lawyers, including Bizos, that described how she had been tortured whilst in detention. Concurrent with the trial were Supreme Court proceedings launched by Loate’s mother against the police to try to prevent her from being assaulted further. Bizos argued that it was in response to this that the police further victimised her.¹⁴ The defence also pointed to her situation in 1981 to argue she had too much to lose by being an activist: she had finished school and passed her matric exams, despite her detention in the aftermath of 1976; she was a successful beauty queen who won competitions; and she had a place at the University of Botswana, funded by a United Nations scholarship. This, and not the organisation of military training, Bizos argued, was the reason for her multiple visits to the country.

Conveying a sense of Loate’s vulnerability was central to her defence strategy and it was a successful one to a certain extent. The magistrate expressed ‘sympathy’ for her position, but found her guilty, nonetheless. Perhaps in part because the idea of Loate as an exploitable girlfriend, who had been socially cast out and wanted a way back in, was not a role fully embraced by Loate in the courtroom. When under cross-examination it was put to her that ‘you thought you were unfairly regarded as a sell-out’, she replied:

Well I would not say it was unfairly said by the people because I did give evidence against my people and that is being a sell-out … I would not say I was forced, even if my mother had encouraged me to give evidence, that if I personally did not want to, that she could not force me to talk.¹⁵

She thus laid claim to her earlier decision ‘to talk’. Later when Loate was asked if her political views were the same before and after the Soweto Eleven trial, she replied:

I do have political views, one stays in such a society where one cannot ignore politics … I would say I am aware that a black man in this country is oppressed but because I have suffered this period of 18 to 19 months in detention, that does not mean I ignore the fact that the black man is oppressed in this country. I then decided that in order to help my society I will have to be involved with its cultural objection rather than getting myself involved in politics.¹⁶

Loate thus both lays claim to an awareness of black oppression, that she did not ‘ignore’, and puts some distance between herself and liberation politics by gendering that oppression. It is ‘a black man’ who is oppressed. She later made this admission: ‘I did not deny that I am a person who is politically minded, I am in possession of banned literature’.¹⁷ This last statement in particular points to a certain level of involvement in political circles. To read and possess banned literature was, as Matteau-Matsha has argued, to belong to an alternative public. As Chapter 2 outlined, to acquire, to possess, to hide banned literature, and perhaps most interestingly of all, to identify as a person who does so, places Loate, however marginally, within a circle of radical readers who through their reading practices ‘created a new social order’.¹⁸

During the trial Loate also admitted membership of AZANYU and the specific charges laid against her detailed that she had arranged for SAYRCO members from Botswana to contact the AZAPO national organiser (and one of the Soweto Eleven) Thabo Ndabeni and subsequently for two AZANYU executives, Alex Selani and Carter Seleke, to contact SAYRCO. AZANYU was described by Loate during the trial as ‘a non-political organisation, it is a youth cultural movement’.¹⁹ Loate claimed to have left membership of the organisation after her third visit to Botswana since she thought she would not have the time to dedicate herself to it once she began her studies. AZANYU was in fact established in Soweto in 1981 by the PAC as an internal youth wing that would build its underground presence and recruit military volunteers. However, it did present itself publicly as a cultural movement. It is an understudied organisation and Loate’s role within it is unclear – for example, the extent to which she knew of the organisation’s ‘real’ purpose.²⁰ At this moment it is worth dwelling on the intricacies of the political landscape in Soweto in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as those who had been involved in the 1976 Uprisings found various routes to maintain their political participation. Whilst many young activists who fled the country joined the ANC and the ranks of MK in exile, some joined the PAC, or continued to adhere to Black Consciousness through AZAPO. Others resisted being incorporated into any of the existing liberation organisations. Alongside Tsietsi Mashinini, Loate’s co-accused Khotso Seatlholo worked in this vein to establish SAYRCO as an alternative political home for students in exile and, they hoped, back in South Africa too.²¹ Loate appears on one reading of the evidence to have been involved from the very beginnings of AZANYU in creating dialogue between the organisation and SAYRCO, whilst eventually choosing to place her loyalties with Seatlholo and SAYRCO. This is perhaps evidence of what Jon Soske has called ‘the internal heterogeneity and the interlacing histories of the various currents in the liberation struggle’ that studies which use organisations as their primary subject and organising principle can fail to capture.²² Organisational histories of AZANYU and SAYRCO are very recent and based on ‘scant’ knowledge.²³ When he began working on AZANYU, Tshepo Moloi encountered a ‘reluctance, if not outright refusal, by the former members of AZANYU to be interviewed’,²⁴ a reluctance he was able to overcome through a slow process of winning trust. Within these existing histories of AZANYU and SAYRCO, Loate’s presence is barely registered. Toivo Asheeke’s history of SAYRCO describes Seatlholo as ‘working closely with a woman named Loate’.²⁵

Recollecting the trial in an interview with Thomas Karis and Gail Gerhart in October 1989, George Bizos remembered Loate as ‘a young, inexperienced, enthusiastic woman’ and later as ‘really a somewhat embittered and confused young woman’.²⁶ Gerhart questioned him about Loate’s ‘curious’ simultaneous involvement with AZANYU and SAYRCO. It was something Bizos dismissed, stating ‘I think that she was probably rejected, as sometimes happens. We have instances where people are not welcome in the Charterist movement, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad and irrational reasons, where you have to rely on who you think is an informer or who is reliable, this sort of thing can happen’.²⁷ For Bizos, Karis and Gerhart, who posed particular questions about the trial to him, the trial’s importance centred around the refusal of certain witnesses to give testimony, not the ambiguities of Loate’s story.

According to Bizos, Loate ‘for no apparent reason, took people who had come from outside and established contact with her, to Zwelakhe Sisulu’ (emphasis added). Zwelakhe Sisulu, son of Walter and Albertina and thus a member of an important ANC family, was a journalist and then president of the Media Workers Association of South Africa. This meeting was perhaps not quite so random as Bizos seemed to think. We can recall one of the profiles of the Soweto Eleven published in the Rand Daily Mail, written by Sisulu, that appeared in Chapter 2 of this book. Loate also established contact with Thami Mazwai, another prominent Black journalist. The students and the SSRC had, during the years of the uprisings, a close relationship with journalists, particularly at The World. SAYRCO, Seatlholo and Loate might have reasonably thought such contact could prove useful in establishing recruiting channels for their organisation. However, according to Bizos,

Zwelakhe for all practical purposes didn’t know Loate and didn’t know the people, and as would be expected, he was probably suspicious of the whole situation and turned the people away. Well, when she was detained she told them that she had taken people to Zwelakhe Sisulu and this led to Zwelakhe’s detention. He, of course, would have found it most embarrassing to give evidence in a trial. And John Coker, who was for the man, Seatlholo, and I persuaded the prosecutor, who was acting quite professionally, that we don’t really recquire the evidence against Sisulu to prove anything and it really isn’t your function to put Sisulu up for the purposes of getting him a term of imprisonment. The court is really used for the proving or disproving of offenses. He accepted the argument and he caused Zwelakhe to be released. But he was a decent prosecutor, and I think the moral pressure that we put on him was successful; but it doesn’t always happen that way. That provision is used to punish people.²⁸

Evidently in Bizos’s recollections those who did not speak during the trial of Loate and Seatlholo were deemed the more important story, than that of Loate the ‘confused’ young woman. This echoed the contemporary valorisation of silence in the courtroom that surrounded the trial. In his 2007 autobiography, Bizos again emphasised the story of Zwelakhe Sisulu’s involvement as the most significant aspect of the trial. In this later version of events, he described SAYRCO as ‘a little known’ and ‘off-beat organisation’.²⁹ He wrote of Loate that, she ‘had no defence on the merits. Not only did some of her friends give evidence against her, she was also found in possession of incriminating evidence. The case against her was watertight’.³⁰ Given this, it is even more extraordinary that Loate gave testimony and did not stay silent, as her co-accused did, and as the Soweto Eleven had done a few years earlier.

Silent witnesses

The silence of one of the potential state witnesses who refused to testify against Loate reveals further the ways in which age and gender mediated the contradictory pressures to talk and to remain silent. The defence team suggested that the witness known as ‘Freedom’ (Innocentia Nonkululeko Mazibuko) was the female activist who was recruiting young Sowetans to join the underground and that the prosecution was framing Loate instead, as punishment for her mother’s legal action against the police. Freedom was a friend of both Loate and Seatlholo and was, according to Loate, the one who told her that Seatlholo was returning to South Africa and asked her to help arrange accommodation for him. There was much discussion during the trial over the events of a particular afternoon in June 1981 following the 1976 commemoration service that year which the two young women attended together. The service was broken up by the police firing teargas into Regina Mundi Church and Loate and Freedom gathered, along with other young people, in a nearby house to escape the fumes. It was there that Loate took the names of some of those young people, she said at the instruction of Freedom for an unknown purpose. She claimed to have assumed it was for a drama project. The prosecution alleged Loate was knowingly recruiting volunteers for military training and a few of the young men on the list testified in support of this. After the testimony of several other witnesses who had described Freedom as a member of SAYRCO who was involved in recruiting members, she herself appeared in court on 8 February. The Rand Daily Mail reporter, John Majapelo described her appearance:

A state witness broke down and cried in the witness box after refusing to take the oath and give evidence against two Soweto student leaders … She told the magistrate that she was afraid to give evidence … she would rather go to jail than give evidence for the state.³¹

On February 13 she was jailed along with six others for their refusal to testify. In sentencing her to twelve months, the magistrate described her as ‘an actress of rare ability’, a comment that was also reported in the press.³² He suggested ‘I think she is able to turn on and off the tears and everything that accompanies that at will and that she can do so most convincingly’, although he also claimed that ‘I do not hold that against her’.³³ The magistrate’s comments, and the press reporting of them, point to perceptions of women as capable of emotional manipulation. In contrast, the reporting of male silence was accompanied by statements of principle. Five of those sentenced for refusal to testify that day were men and given eighteen months each. They included Thami Mazwai, at the time the former news editor of The Sowetan newspaper, Carter Seleke, the National President of AZANYU, Alex Selani AZANYU’s National Chairman and Thabo Ndabeni, AZAPO National Organiser.³⁴ Mazwai’s lawyer explained his position: ‘if Mazwai gave evidence he would lose his credibility as a journalist in the black community’.³⁵ Where Freedom was ‘afraid’ to give evidence, Mazwai’s silence was presented as based on principle and integrity. The five men, who were subsequently referred to by the press as ‘the silent five’ (Freedom disappeared from their story) lodged an appeal against their sentences at which their stance was reiterated: ‘they were prisoners of conscience who fully realised they would go to jail if their appeal failed. They chose to face prison rather than give evidence’.³⁶ Their appeal was unsuccessful.

In a further twist to Freedom’s story, before her twelve-month sentence for silence was completed, she was put on trial herself, answering terrorism charges alongside three young men. All four were eventually acquitted because of ‘unreliable and unsatisfactory evidence’ from state witnesses.³⁷ This was a case that was noted as a victory for the ‘voices of protest’ undermining the apartheid justice system in Sechaba.³⁸ In her own trial, Freedom denied all charges against her including membership of SAYRCO, and she told the court that what had been a ‘very good relationship’ with the security police during her initial detention, had ‘changed drastically’ when she refused to testify at Loate’s trial. Thereafter she was threatened with imprisonment and that she would be ‘turned into a jailbird’ with repeated arrests until she left South Africa.³⁹ For individuals to circle through the system as detainee, witness, trialist and back again was not unusual. As Micheal Lobban has argued, from the perspective of the security services ‘it did not strictly matter who was the defendant and who the state witness’ in any given trial since ‘both could be neutralised: the one gaoled, the other discredited’ through the process.⁴⁰ Freedom’s pathway through the system echoed that of Loate herself. I do not know what happened to Freedom once she was acquitted. The fragments we have of her story are even more sparse than those we have for Loate.

‘Well, I decided to talk’⁴¹

In defence of Loate, Bizos focused upon the demeanour and authenticity of those testifying against her to establish that they spoke to save themselves and to satisfy their interrogators. Some were quick to bring up their circumstances. One young woman pleaded with Bizos, ‘I am asking the council for defence to exercise some patience with me because my mind is full of the cell’.⁴² For most, this involved suggesting that they were motivated by fear of their interrogators and that they had a prepared statement from which they could not deviate. The cross-examination of Dipalesa Catherine Thamae was extensive and saw Bizos using this strategy, asking questions outside of the witness’s original testimony and using these answers to sow confusion until Thamae protested: ‘I thought I was to give the evidence according to what I was questioned about’.⁴³ Later when she forgot a previous answer to a repeated question and Bizos asked why, she admitted: ‘This is because I have been sitting for a very long time and I have forgotten my statement’. Bizos retorted, ‘You know that is perhaps the truest statement you have ever made, you are there really to repeat word for word what was in your statement irrespective of what the truth may be’.⁴⁴

Bizos’s tone was often slightly mocking. There was a distinct lack of sympathy for these young witnesses in contrast to the Soweto Eleven trial during which state witnesses, Loate included, had been cross-examined quite gently. At one point, Bizos pushed Thamae to clarify her memory of a meeting between herself and Loate, in which Loate allegedly revealed her role as a SAYRCO recruiter: ‘Can you explain to His Worship why she would have exposed herself in this way by making herself guilty, if what you have told is true, by using the very words of the Internal Security Act and the Terrorism Act in a hurried conversation?’⁴⁵ As the cross-examination went on Bizos commented: ‘You are now speaking so softly that even the interpreter standing next to you has difficulty in hearing you’.⁴⁶ Fear, tiredness, a slow dawning that she had not delivered her statement as expected, all we can presume weighed on this witness and caused her voice to falter. In their final set of exchanges Bizos returned again to Thamae’s account of meeting with Loate on the latter’s return from Botswana when she alleged that she tried to recruit her for SAYRCO. He commented on her ‘very feminine interest’ in Loate’s clothing over her reading material and pushed her on the credibility of herself and Loate as military recruits: ‘did you ever ask accused number one but what is this business of military training for women?’⁴⁷ This question ignored the reality, that as early as the late 1960s the ANC in exile was developing ‘a rich visual rhetoric’ of militarised motherhood and drawing women into the ranks of MK.⁴⁸ Military training was more unusual for young women but not unheard of. Thandi Modise, one of the most famous female MK guerrillas of the 1976 generation, recalled that after crossing the border to Botswana amongst a group of twenty young people, girls and boys, she was the only young woman who chose to undertake military training: ‘girls were encouraged to continue their schooling’ in exile.⁴⁹ However, by 1980 Radio Freedom had a half-hour programme called ‘Dawn Breaks: The Voice of the ANC Women’s Section’ which aimed specifically to recruit women for MK, as the ANC became more interested in mobilising women within South Africa.⁵⁰ In her interviews with Soweto COSAS activists of the 1980s, Emily Bridger has noted that young women were much less likely to be recruited into the underground or offered MK training but this was not necessarily due to a lack of interest amongst young women.⁵¹ During the trial, comments like those of Bizos on ‘this business of military training for women’, deliberately evoked normative gender boundaries around militarised political action in a way that placed Thamae and Loate firmly as outsiders to politics and rendered young women’s speech about politics as unreliable. Loate’s identity as a beauty queen was drawn into these arguments.

Beauty queens and the struggle

An important plank of the defence case for Masabata Loate was to present her identity and status as a beauty queen as incompatible with that of a political activist. However, the relationship between popular consumer cultures and the politics of the liberation struggle was one of proximity and tension. Focusing on this point of friction we can see that though Loate’s trial conveyed the beauty queen and the activist as inhabiting separate worlds, this was a porous and performative separation that had to be actively made and maintained. Loate’s straddling of both worlds was at the centre of her ambiguity and her vulnerability.

Beauty contests were to be found in the South African print media from as early as the 1920s and 1930s and were ubiquitous from the 1960s, especially within publications aimed at a ‘township’ audience.⁵² Nakedi Ribane, herself a former model during the late 1970s and early 1980s, has recalled that during the peak time of beauty pageants: ‘You had Miss Hospitals, Miss Football Associations, Miss Soccer Teams, Miss Brigades, Miss Lucky Legs, Miss Creams and Soaps, Miss Different Months, Miss Boxing Associations, Miss Teenagers, three different Miss South Africas, Miss Mini Universe … I am Telling you! Miss Anything-you-can-think-of!’⁵³ Pin-up cover girls and beauty queen models were central to the successful commercialised black urbanity that magazines like Drum emerged from and sold back to their readers.⁵⁴ According to Van Kessel, a ‘feasibility survey’ conducted in 1991 to explore the possibility of continuing production of the politically radical community newspaper Grassroots ‘found that people were interested in reading a local paper, but it should feature a picture of the Spring Queen rather than Nelson Mandela’.⁵⁵ As well as making for diverting pictures, these beauty contests were presented through newspapers and magazines as serious propositions for young black women looking for professional and financial success, albeit always only in the years before marriage when such a career would end. This was a model of femininity and success that was highly visible in townships. The very spaces which were the site of political mobilisation were very often also used for staging such contests. For example, in February 1977 successive articles in the Rand Daily Mail show that DH Williams Hall in Katlehang, Germiston was used to stage a beauty contest amongst residents of a local female hostel and just days later was the venue for the launch of the Katlehang Students Representative Council.⁵⁶

The politics of beauty contests were pliable. Beauty queens could be read as examples of Black urban modernity that contradicted apartheid ideology and could carry cultural pride. As Sisonke Msimang has noted when discussing the beauty and glamour of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, ‘the subject of beauty and desirability in African women has always been about more than lines and proportions and whatever is in the eye of the beholder – it has been about whether or not Africans are fully human’.⁵⁷ An aesthetic of Black pride was central to Black Consciousness philosophy. So, as Dan Magaziner discusses, the Black Renaissance Convention in late 1974 organised by Catholic priest and ‘Black Consciousness fellow traveller’ Smangaliso Mkhatshwa had a planned beauty contest to crown ‘Miss Black’.⁵⁸ The awkward collision of Black as a political philosophy with the objectifying gaze of a beauty contest was made clear in Mkhatshwa’s announcement that: ‘Those who may have lighter skins than the “darkies” ought not to be disheartened. The criterion will not be the colour of the skin, because our definition of Black does not refer primarily to the colour of the skin!’⁵⁹ Beauty contests could also be tied, perhaps more neatly, into conservative political agendas. In May of 1977 DH Williams Hall was host to another competition, this time the ‘first-ever Transkei National Independence Party (Transvaal region) beauty contest’.⁶⁰ TNIP was the ruling party of the Transkei, the first of the ‘homelands’ given independence in 1976, and closely aligned with the State’s Bantustan project. This beauty contest sat alongside various other trappings and performances of nationality that were supposed to bolster the legitimacy of these pseudo-nations: flags, parliaments and anthems.

The few studies which have begun to focus on those who participated in beauty contests demonstrate that their politics could be multivalent. Peter Alegi has argued with reference to the Spring Queen contest, held annually amongst garment workers in the Cape Flats from 1980, that whilst beginning as an initiative of factory managers to distract and control their workforce, over time the women participating transformed the contest into ‘a partially autonomous space for proletarian women’s sociability and power’.⁶¹ Ribane recalls that those contests that were established as Black-led ventures in a predominantly white world, such as the Miss Soweto contest, which first ran in 1979, ‘received a lot of support from the public and sponsors’.⁶² However, Ribane also notes that commercial beauty contests and modelling brought young black women into a predominantly white world of capitalist consumption which carried dangers. As she puts it, describing models in the 1980s ‘even though their communities were proud of them, they were under constant suspicion of going out with white men’.⁶³

This association with commercial culture made beauty queens an oppositional figure within youth politics as it developed over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. That such women might be a particular target for youth activism was signalled early on in the resurgence of protest following 16 June 1976. In the run-up to Christmas 1976, as the students sought to impose a ban on celebrations and focus on mourning within township communities, Pat Malagas, a well-known fashion model, was attacked by ‘youths’ and her home set on fire after accusations that she was an informer. She told the Cape Times she was accused of ‘mixing with white people’.⁶⁴ Similarly in July 1977 the Rand Daily Mail reported an incident involving ‘Bubbles’ Mpondo, a beauty queen and model who was in a controversial relationship with an Afrikaans bodybuilder, Jannie Beetge. It was a relationship that saw them arrested several times, as contravening the Immorality Act but also brought Bubbles into conflict with ‘the youth’:

Three beauty queens on their way to a contest at the Diepkloof Hotel had a narrow escape when youths began stoning their cars along a funeral route yesterday. Bubbles Mpondo who was involved in a much publicised romance with white muscleman Jannie Beetge, and two of her friends were involved … one of the people in the car behind Bubbles’ vehicle said ‘I heard a shout from the students who stopped Bubbles, “here’s the sell-out to the black community’ ”. When youths started hurling stones at the beauty queens car it took off at high speed … Meanwhile at the hall where Bubbles was competing, the crowd was hostile to her. There were jeers and boos. She was not placed in the competition.

Faith ‘Bubbles’ Mpondo’s story is a tragic one – she was eventually murdered in 1978 by Jannie Beetge, who shot her before he killed himself, reportedly due to her infidelity.⁶⁵ Such attacks, accusations and killings reiterated ideas of women as carriers of culture and as representative of the health and ‘purity’ of ‘the community’, be that national, or as in the report above, a racial one. These are ideas that have been foundational to nationalist projects in many contexts. They also point to the ways in which anti-apartheid politics was entangled with the control and disciplining of women’s bodies and relationships, particularly sexual relationships, in a context in which, as Beetge’s murder of Mpondo shows, this was violently controlled across South African society.

Xaba has argued that ‘struggle masculinity’ was characterised by promiscuity and violent aggression towards women.⁶⁶ These tendencies were particularly prevalent in youth political movements and the ‘comrade’ culture of the mid-1980s. According to Clive Glaser, a township gang culture in which young men viewed sexual control over young women’s bodies as an extension of territorial control over streets, found its way into the practice of youth anti-apartheid politics during the mid-1980s, at the height of the ‘politics of confrontation’.⁶⁷ He and Peter Delius have suggested that ‘schools could offer girls some protection from marauding youth gangs, and the form of masculinity that emerged among the leadership of these schools was less physically aggressive and more respectful of women’s sexual choices’.⁶⁸ However, even in the ‘more respectful’ student political organisations young women were often perceived as in need of control and/or protection. For example, Seekings, Van Kessel and Neihaus have all put forward the argument that COSAS campaigns against teachers’ sexual harassment of female students were primarily motivated by young men’s resentment and jealousy over such relationships.⁶⁹ Certainly the framing of young women by COSAS’s predominantly male leadership was that of a constituency that needed paternalistic guiding and protecting. A COSAS document titled ‘Women’s Participation for Victory’ set out the leadership’s stance upon mobilising female school students. It began, ‘in our last Congress a resolution was taken to ensure an all-sided attempt to draw our women fold into our organisation’.⁷⁰ It highlighted the position of young women within the family: ‘female students are drawn into domestic work at an early age’.⁷¹ Consequently their ‘performance in school work is pathetic’ and:

What they become interested in, in their school life is nothing else but events in our schools, your ‘Miss Orlando High’ and ‘Miss Freshette’ etc. It is this situation which forces students to strike a ‘deal’ with your wielding teachers. A love affair notes that you will sometimes be exempted from punishment. This is why in our schools we have sugar daddies and sweet sixties!!! … It is therefore our task to organise our women students into COSAS, to mobilise them against the problems they experience. We must educate them about the nature of our society.⁷²

For COSAS the beauty contest was a symbol for all that was wrong with young women’s social position and behaviours from which they consequently needed to be saved and educated. No wonder then that Bridger, and others, have noted that the figure of the female comrade of the 1980s that emerges through contemporary oral history is a ‘tomboy’; ‘to be accepted into [comrade] culture and to take up arms alongside young men, female comrades needed to erase outward signs of femininity and adopt many of the defining characteristics of struggle masculinity’.⁷³

However, commercial beauty culture was not separate from the worlds of anti-apartheid politics. Bridger heard one story of politicisation from a former COSAS comrade that demonstrates this. Florence recalled seeing a photograph of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in a newspaper in 1977: ‘she was so pretty … and I started reading because then, the only pictures that we’d seen in the newspapers, they were adverts … and the prettiest ladies would be advertising Lux, the soaps, the creams’.⁷⁴ Florence asked her family about Madikezela-Mandela but ‘nobody could explain because they are scared of explaining’. Florence recalled this silence as triggering a curiosity about politics that led to her involvement. That the world of politics offered the possibilities of its own sort of glamour comes across from Bridger’s interviewees, both male and female. Another female comrade remembered the excitement of attending their first political rally: ‘there were these people who were taking videos, taking photos and things. And being young I didn’t know what that was. For my side I was just happy that I will appear on newspaper … If you appear on the Soweto News, the local newspaper, you were like, a big thing’.⁷⁵ As Bridger notes, far from being superficial, such motivations show participation in politics as a social and cultural phenomenon and as containing ‘the pleasure of agency’.⁷⁶

Masabata Loate, as she emerges from her trial, appears to transgress the boundary between beauty queen and activist, standing in direct contradiction to the ‘tomboy’ comrade.⁷⁷ At her trial she confirmed that she had been able to earn money whilst still at school by entering and winning beauty contests.⁷⁸ Loate’s prize as Miss Mainstay in 1979 was reported as R200 – by 1981 the winner of the same title received R35,000.⁷⁹ The contest was run by a Mrs Christine Mguni and in the first few years was linked to the Soweto Cultural Club (for the Advancement of African People). In the year that Loate won, the proceeds raised by the contest were to be put towards the establishment of ‘a recreational and cultural club house’.⁸⁰ One of the opportunities on offer to the winner of this contest was to present the trophy at the final of the National Professional Soccer League’s (NPSL) Mainstay Cup. The Mainstay Cup was a project of the Football Council of South Africa, which had been formed in October of 1976. Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsman have described the formation of the Council as part of the National Party government’s plans to ‘ameliorate apartheid’, situating the Council alongside policies like the ‘independence’ being offered to the Bantustans, and the legalisation of black trade unions.⁸¹ The Football Council pursued the establishment of mixed elite sport, not the non-racial sport being advocated for by, for example, the anti-apartheid South African Council on Sport (SACOS). Its politics were conservative. The Mainstay League cup was launched in 1977, but the competition was not completed in this first year, hampered by ‘ineffective management, high travel costs, spectator violence, police intervention, and the constraints of residential segregation’ that restricted fans’ freedom of movement in attending games.⁸² Mainstay was a brand of South African sugar cane spirit, owned by the Stellenbosch Farmer’s Winery. The Winery put R70,000 into the Cup in its first year, a figure that went up to R100,000 in 1978.⁸³ That year the competition was completed, with Wits University winning the final against the Kaiser Chiefs. The motives for the Winery were articulated clearly by its public relations officer: ‘There’s a definite spin-off from black consumers. They identify your product with the game and support it. Football’s helped us retain our market share in a competitive industry’.⁸⁴ The politics of Miss Mainstay, whilst not overtly pro-apartheid were certainly not identifiably anti-apartheid either. Loate was also a runner-up in the Miss Sona (Soweto Netball Association) contest in 1979, entered the more famous Miss Soweto contest in June of 1980, and was a winner of a regional heat of Miss Benson and Hedges in October that same year.⁸⁵

Loate’s trial testimony suggests that she sought to keep her life as a beauty queen separate from whatever political involvement she had – even whilst she spoke about it. She told the court of her relief that the police were unable to find her diary when they searched her house. Asked by Bizos what was in the diary she replied: ‘I took part in beauty contests and I had the addresses of boyfriends, other contestants, my ambitions, all such things’. Bizos continued, ‘Did you use to write down your innermost feelings?’ ‘That is correct’, Loate responded.⁸⁶ Whether these ‘innermost feelings’ bore any resemblance to ‘My Thoughts, which were explored in Chapter 2, and this was the reason for Loate’s relief, we cannot know, but given her experience of exposure and scrutiny during the trial of the Soweto Eleven we can understand why she was glad the diary was not found. What little evidence we have from inside the world of beauty contests points to a desire to maintain an apolitical stance from contest organisers, sponsors and modelling agencies. Nikedi Ribane comments on one fellow beauty queen, Miss Africa South of 1974, Evelyn Williams: she ‘had a somewhat tougher time in the industry as she was outspoken and something of an activist. She was always speaking out about racism in beauty pageants and the modelling arena. It was particularly tough for her because she was a lone voice at the time!’⁸⁷ Ribane herself recalls getting a reputation as ‘always being angry’. Her own career in modelling began when she was expelled from Ngoye University where she had been studying law, and was detained for a year, for her part in student protests on campus in 1976.⁸⁸ In both the worlds that Loate inhabited – that of politics and beauty contests – young women’s silence was preferred.

Conclusions

In his very lengthy judgement on Loate and Seatlholo’s trial, the magistrate argued that Loate’s claim to be socially involved with Seatlholo but unaware and ignorant (or kept ignorant) of his political activities, was simply not credible, especially given that she admitted she still held the political beliefs that had first led her to be involved in the activities of the SSRC in 1976. He concluded:

dan is dit na my mening bo alle twyfel duidelik dat wat Beskuldigde Nr. 1 hier probeer vermag is om die beste van twee wêrelde te hê of soos die Engelse spreekwoord dit baie korrek en gepas uitdruk, sy wil haar koek beide hê en dit eet. Ek dink nie dat dit moontlik is dat sy hierdie dinge in dieselfde asem oortuigend kan beweer nie. [it is, in my opinion, beyond any doubt that what Accused No 1 is trying here, is to have the best of two worlds, or as the English proverb expresses it very appropriately, she wants to have her cake and eat it. I don’t think it’s possible that she can claim these things in the same breath].⁸⁹

Was Loate deeply involved politically, or was she simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time, because of her romantic entanglements and because she and her mother had the audacity to try to protect her from police brutality? The ambiguity of her status was either her strength as a political operator, or her vulnerability as a scapegoat, or both. She was certainly not a helpless victim. We can say with certainty that it was her refusal to submit to the discipline of the Apartheid State, either as an activist, or a defiant detainee, that resulted in the trial.

This young woman continually evades clear historical judgement and, to my mind, therein lies her importance to struggle history. She is a ‘mediated and unstable subject’ of the kind that social historians of the liberation struggle have not always acknowledged.⁹⁰ Shrouded by assumptions based on gender and youth, it is, even now, hard to hear her clearly. Her life, as we know it, was marked by moments of silence and speech in which she pushed against the expectations of talking and not talking and she suffered for speaking when she should not. The gendered entanglement of speech as struggle were such that, even when they were compelled to speak, young women were at particular risk of being punished by both state security forces and comrades as women who talked too much. On her release from prison in 1986, Loate was murdered, apparently for speaking up against the use of violence against suspected informers. Chapter 4 considers this final act of silencing in Loate’s life, and what it might mean, that it is through her death that she is remembered in the post-apartheid present.

Notes

1. 1.  Rand Daily Mail (Township Edition), 3 August 1979, 16, and 28 August 1979, 26.

2. 2.  State vs. Mary Masabate Loatse and others, case: 41/4115/81 Magistrates Court, District of Johannesburg; WHP: AD2021: SAIRR Security Trials 1958–82. Boxes 19–20. Digitised trial proceedings, accessed July 2019, http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AD2021/R/.

3. 3.  Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2014), 171, 70.

4. 4.  South African Institute of Race Relations, ‘Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1982’ (Pietermaritzburg, 1982), 235–6.

5. 5.  L. O., ‘Voices of Protest’, Sechaba: Official Organ of the African National Congress South Africa, 1983, 12.

6. 6.  O., ‘Voices of Protest’, 13.

7. 7.  Riedwaan Moosage, ‘A Prose of Ambivalence: Liberation Struggle Discourse on Necklacing’, Kronos 36, no.1 (2010): 137.

8. 8.  Moosage, ‘A Prose of Ambivalence’.

9. 9.  Nyasha Karimakwenda, ‘Safe to Violate: The Role of Gender in the Necklacing of Women During the South African People’s War (1985–1990)’, Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no. 3 (4 May 2019): 561, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2019.1642646.

10. 10.  Mike Louw, ‘Charges laid before a Johannesburg Regional Magistrate’, Rand Daily Mail, 2 December 1981.

11. 11.  Seatlholo was described as such by Gail Gerhart. As quoted in Tiovo Tukongeni Paul Wilson Asheeke, Arming Black Consciousness: The Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition and South Africa’s Armed Struggle, African Studies Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 149. For more on Khotso Seatlholo and his own absence from the historiography of the struggle see endnote 14 to the introduction of this book; Lynn Schuster who interviewed Seatlholo for her book on the Mashinini family, described him as ‘an intense, articulate youth’. Lynn Schuster, A Burning Hunger: One Family’s Struggle Against Apartheid (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 42.

12. 12.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 496–8.

13. 13.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 526.

14. 14.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 529.

15. 15.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 550.

16. 16.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 600–601.

17. 17.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 610.

18. 18.  Rachel Matteau-Matsha, ‘ “I Read What I Like”: Politics of Reading and Reading Politics in Apartheid South Africa’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 83, no. 1 (27 December 2013): 57.

19. 19.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 528.

20. 20.  For one exception see: Tshepo Moloi, ‘Youth Politics: The Political Role of AZANYU in the Struggle for Liberation: The Case of AZANYU Tembisa Branch, 1980s to 1996’, Research Report, University of the Witwatersrand, 2005. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/39664456.pdf.

21. 21.  The fullest account of SAYRCO in existing literature is within Asheeke, Arming Black Consciousness, 3–4 and 146–59.

22. 22.  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): 60, https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2012.380205.

23. 23.  As described in Asheeke, Arming Black Consciousness, 4.

24. 24.  Tshepo Moloi, ‘ “Oral Testimonies by Former Members of the Azanian National Youth Unity (AZANYU): The Sayable and Unsayable in an Oral History Interview”’, in Oral History: Representing the Hidden, the Untold and the Veiled’. Proceedings of the Fifth and Sixth Annual National Oral History Conference. (Pretoria: Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa, 2013), 1, https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files/ohasa_2008-2008-22-05-2013_oral_history_conference_papers.pdf.

25. 25.  Asheeke, Arming Black Consciousness, 158.

26. 26.  ‘Memoirs of George Bizos, as related to Thomas Karis and Gail Gerhart’ (New York, 1989), 97–8, accessed 14 March 2023, https://www.jstor.org/stable/al.sff.document.gerhart0018.

27. 27.  ‘Memoirs of George Bizos’, 97–8. ‘Charterist’ refers to those organisations that declared their allegiance to the Freedom Charter and were therefore aligned with the African National Congress.

28. 28.  ‘Memoirs of George Bizos’, 97.

29. 29.  George Bizos, Odyssey to Freedom (Johannesburg: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2011), 438.

30. 30.  Bizos, Odyssey to Freedom, 439.

31. 31.  ‘Terror trial witness won’t give evidence’, Rand Daily Mail, Township edition, 9 February 1982.

32. 32.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 265.

33. 33.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 266.

34. 34.  Moloi notes that after this moment AZANYU moved underground. See: Moloi, ‘Youth Politics’, 106.

35. 35.  Rand Daily Mail, ‘Six Jailed for Court Silence’, 13 February 1982.

36. 36.  ‘Six Jailed for Court Silence’.

37. 37.  O., ‘Voices of Protest’, 12–14.

38. 38.  O., ‘Voices of Protest’.

39. 39.  Evidence of Accused Number Four, State vs. Stanley Radebe, Ephraim Mthuthuzele Madalane, Ernest Lebana Mohakala and Innocentia Nonkululeka Mazibuko, Case: SH 635/82, Regional Court for the Regional Division of the Southern Transvaal (Kempton Park), WHP AD2021: SAIRR Security Trials 1958–82. Boxes 40–44, Proceedings, 2505–6, Digitised Trial Proceedings, accessed July 2019, http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AD2021/R/.

40. 40.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 13.

41. 41.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al., Proceedings, 425.

42. 42.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al., Proceedings, 470.

43. 43.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al., Proceedings, 155.

44. 44.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al.., Proceedings, 169.

45. 45.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al., Proceedings, 162.

46. 46.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al., Proceedings, 181.

47. 47.  State vs. Stanley Radebe et al., Proceedings, 206–8.

48. 48.  Kim Miller notes that a 1968 Sechaba front cover that featured a woman simultaneously carrying a spear and a baby appeared at a time when women members of MK were excluded from active combat and ‘forbidden’ from falling pregnant, in some cases through the forcible fitting of IUDs. Kim Miller, ‘Moms with Guns: Women’s Political Agency in Anti-Apartheid Visual Culture’, African Arts 42, no. 2 (2009): 68 and 74, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20626992; For more on the experience of motherhood and exile see: Rachel Sandwell, ‘ “Love I Cannot Begin to Explain”: The Politics of Reproduction in the ANC in Exile, 1976–1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 1 (2 January 2015): 63–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2015.991988.

49. 49.  Thami Mkhwanazi, ‘Thandi Modise: The Knitting-Needles Guerilla’, Weekly Mail, March 23–30, 1989.

50. 50.  Kameron Hurley, ‘The Voice of Women? The ANC and the Rhetoric of Women ’s Resistance, 1976–1989’ (MA thesis, Durban, University of Natal, 2003), 8.

51. 51.  Emily Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2021), 142–3.

52. 52.  Lynn M. Thomas, ‘The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa’, The Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 461–90, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853706002131. Lynn M. Thomas, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (New York: Duke University Press, 2020).

53. 53.  Nakedi Ribane, Beauty: A Black Perspective (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006), 45.

54. 54.  Rachel Johnson, ‘ “The Girl About Town”: Discussions of Modernity and Female Youth in Drum Magazine, 1951–1970’, Social Dynamics 35, no. 1 (1 March 2009): 36–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/02533950802666899.

55. 55.  Ineke Van Kessel, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 280; for a discussion of the long-running beauty contest amongst garment workers in the Western Cape, The Spring Queen see: Siona O’Connell, ‘The Spring Queen Pageant and the Postapartheid Archive’, Safundi 18, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 168–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2016.1272239; Peter Alegi, ‘Rewriting Patriarchal Scripts: Women, Labor, and Popular Culture in South African Clothing Industry Beauty Contests, 1970s–2005’, Journal of Social History 42, no. 1 (2008): 31–56, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0070.

56. 56.  Rand Daily Mail, 11 February 1977; Rand Daily Mail, 14 February 1977.

57. 57.  Sisonke Msimang, ‘Winnie Mandela (1936–2018)’, 4 June 2016, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/winnie-mandela-south-africa-obituary-anc.

58. 58.  Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 57.

59. 59.  Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, 58.

60. 60.  Rand Daily Mail, 30 May 1977.

61. 61.  Alegi, ‘Rewriting Patriarchal Scripts’.

62. 62.  Ribane, Beauty, 93.

63. 63.  Ribane, Beauty, 89.

64. 64.  Cape Times, 24 December 1976.

65. 65.  Nakedi Ribane discusses the case of Bubbles Mpondo in Ribane, Beauty, 56.

66. 66.  Thokozani Xaba, ‘Masculinity and Its Malcontents: The Confrontation Between “Struggle Masculinity” and “Post-Struggle Masculinity” (1990–1997)’, in Changing Men in Southern Africa, ed. Robert Morrell (London: Zed Books, 2001), 116.

67. 67.  Clive Glaser, Bo Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 189.

68. 68.  Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation in South Africa: A Historical Perspective’. African Studies 61, no. 1 (2002): 48, https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180220140064.

69. 69.  Jeremy Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980s’, Agenda 10 (1991): 77–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.1991.9675138; Kessel, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams; Isak Niehaus, ‘Towards a Dubious Liberation: Masculinity, Sexuality and Power in South African Lowveld Schools, 1953–1999’, Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 3 (September 2000): 387–407, https://doi.org/10.1080/713683581.

70. 70.  ‘Women’s Participation for Victory’, undated, SAHA: AC2457: N3.2 COSAS.

71. 71.  ‘Women’s Participation for Victory’.

72. 72.  ‘Women’s Participation for Victory’.

73. 73.  Emily Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades: Gender, Youth and Violence in South Africa’s Township Uprisings, 1984–1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no.4 (4 July 2018): 560, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1462591; See also: Janet Cherry, ‘ “We Were Not Afraid”: The Role of Women in the 1980s Township Uprising in the Eastern Cape’, in Women in South African History: They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 281–314.

74. 74.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 48.

75. 75.  Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 59.

76. 76.  The term ‘the pleasure of agency’ is taken from the work of Elizabeth Jean Wood on insurgents in El Salvador. See discussion in: Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 60–61.

77. 77.  She was not the only beauty queen turned activist noted by the press: Lydia Johnstone, former Miss Africa South was arrested at a protest march in Kraaifontein in September 1976 and subsequently charged with public violence, Cape Times, 16 October 1976.

78. 78.  Loate mentions winning prizes of R100, R250 and a refrigerator, see State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 617.

79. 79.  See reports in the Rand Daily Mail, 1 August 1979, 15, and 3 July 1981, 14.

80. 80.  Rand Daily Mail, 1 August 1979, 15.

81. 81.  Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann, ‘From Apartheid to Unity: White Capital and Black Power in the Racial Integration of South African Football, 1976–1992’, African Historical Review 42, no. 1 (1 June 2010): 7, https://doi.org/10.1080/17532523.2010.483783.

82. 82.  Alegi and Bolsmann, ‘From Apartheid to Unity’, 9.

83. 83.  Alegi and Bolsmann, ‘From Apartheid to Unity’, 9.

84. 84.  Alegi and Bolsmann, ‘From Apartheid to Unity’, 9.

85. 85.  See reports in the Rand Daily Mail, 4 July 1979, 16; 5 June 1980, 14; 10 October 1980, 10.

86. 86.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 520.

87. 87.  Ribane, Beauty, 77.

88. 88.  This is discussed in the Author’s Note that precedes the main text – another sign perhaps of the (self)disciplining of Ribane’s voice: Ribane, Beauty, xiii–xv.

89. 89.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Judgement, 97. My thanks to Ruhan Fourie for producing a translation of the entire 148-page judgement.

90. 90.  Jenny Robinson, ‘(Dis)Locating Historical Narrative: Writing, Space and Gender in South African Social History’, South African Historical Journal 30 (May 1994): 150, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582479408671788.