Chapter 2 The Soweto Eleven and the sayable: speaking about the struggle

Introduction

On 17 June 1977 Masabata Loate was arrested outside John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg.¹ She was taken to the ninth floor and searched. She had in her pocket a press statement that she was supposed to give to The World newspaper. Earlier that day she had been discussing its contents with student detainees already being held at the station. After her arrest, she was taken by Detective Warrant Officer Trollip to two addresses in Orlando West, Soweto – 7798 and 7804. A stash of papers and books were taken from 7798.² These remain in the archives of the South African State. As a part of the State’s response to the Soweto Uprisings, eleven young South Africans were tried for sedition, between 25 September 1978 and 30 April 1979. Ten of the eleven were young men. One was a young woman. Shadowing those on trial, another eleven young people testified as state witnesses for the prosecution’s case. Of these witnesses, six were young women, and five were young men. Masabata Loate was one of them. She would live with the fall-out from her appearance at the trial for the rest of her short life.

In 1978 she told the court about the two houses she had been taken to after her arrest: ‘I live in both houses, and sleep at different days in both houses’.³ In amongst the papers the police seized from 7798 was a handwritten document titled ‘My Thoughts’. This is what it said:

We have been living through an unforgettable period. Here is history in the making, with all its terrific drama and all its tragic interest. For our age is transitional. Its very uniqueness prepares the way for a unique renaissance. We must learn to meet bad times with better thoughts. We must struggle for a new era characterised by heartfelt universality. It is for us to spell the riddle of the future with letters drawn from the alphabet of the present. It is for us to evaluate the movements disclosed by history and follow its own logic. It is for us to draw wise lessons out of the vanished centuries for our own ethical guidance and material profit.

When intelligence is only partial, immature and incomplete, it leaves man cunning, selfishness and materialism [sic]. When full, mature and perfect, it teaches him wisdom, selflessness and truth.

Struggle there must be, for all life is a struggle of some kind.

For what man will not learn by reason he must learn by pain. He who will not think, must suffer.

Hatred is a sharp boomerang which not only hurts the hated but also the hater, they will hesitate twice and thrice before yielding to this worst of all sins.⁴

No author is attributed. Most of the other papers do have authors given to them in the labels of the police, or historians have matched the handwriting of other unattributed documents with those that do have names.⁵ This document was not referred to during the trial of the Soweto Eleven. ‘My Thoughts’ were archived as part of another court case that took place in the aftermath of 1976. In the civil courts the West Rand Administration Board (WRAB) that administered Soweto brought a case against Santam, the insurance company that covered WRAB against riot damage. In amongst the evidence submitted during this process were many papers produced by students, particularly South African Students’ Movement (SASM) documents seized during a raid on their headquarters in October 1977 and those confiscated from Masabata Loate at 7798 Orlando West. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, who first uncovered this archive, suggests we read ‘My Thoughts’ as a ‘prose poem’, reflective of the ‘eloquence of an empowered thinking student consciousness’.⁶ Here, it seems, is a thoughtful and poetic mind, a young person aware of themselves within history and thinking deeply about their experiences.

However, this sense of authorship and voice is disrupted by a simple online search for the text. The lines labelled ‘My Thoughts’ by a writer in 1970s Soweto are taken, mostly without editing, from a book first published in 1941, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, by Paul Brunton.⁷ Paul Brunton was itself a pen name for Raphael Hurst, a British man who travelled to India in 1930 and thereafter embarked on a life as a travelling spiritual ‘researcher’ and teacher.⁸ He wrote a number of books of spiritualism, drawing upon Hinduism and Buddhism. The question of who these thoughts belong to, is a complex one. Brunton was himself performing an act of translation, in bringing ‘Eastern’ philosophies and religious thought to a Western audience. ‘Struggle there must be, for all life is a struggle of some kind’, is a quote Brunton attributes to Buddha.⁹ In his intellectual history of Black Consciousness, Dan Magaziner has noted that the activists of SASO, SASM’s forerunner, ‘did not exactly respect copyright’. Their writings often included ‘an endless succession of purloined phrases’.¹⁰ Yet, as Magaziner argues, ‘activists copied, but they also translated; they read words from one context and wrote them into their own’.¹¹ There is no doubt these words, written by Brunton during the Second World War in India, with some minor edits and a process of careful selection, seem to speak as if directly out of Soweto in 1976. Two edits were made to the first long paragraph. Firstly the line, ‘the ravages of the war will need to be repaired’ was omitted, which clearly altered the context of the ideas.¹² Secondly, ‘it is for us to evaluate the movements disclosed by history and follow its own logic’ originally referred to history’s ‘iron logic’.¹³ Too deterministic a sentiment perhaps? By writing down these lines, taken from different passages in the book, and compiling them into ‘My Thoughts’, a new voice is made. We can still hear this as ‘an empowered student consciousness’, albeit with a more nuanced grasp of the processes of making such a voice. Who exactly was involved in articulating this ‘student consciousness’ is unclear. Is it just as plausible that these thoughts were written down by a young woman, as it is that they were written by a young man? Did these ideas belong to Masabata Loate?

In 1978 Loate told the court that the papers had been given to her ‘for safe keeping’.¹⁴ So, even if she did not write these thoughts down, she possessed them in another sense. At the very least we can say that Loate (literally) held these thoughts on behalf of others. She shared the responsibility of holding them. The sense of being part of a collective ‘we’ is strong within ‘My Thoughts’. The writer takes on responsibilities with the repeated phrases, ‘we must’ and ‘it is for us’. In her evidence in 1978 Loate talked about a ‘we’ who was planning an event that the press release in her pocket pertained to. Asked who she meant by ‘we’ she clarified: the Soweto Students’ Representative Council.¹⁵ The SSRC was formed in August of 1976 and was made up of two representatives from each high school and secondary school in Soweto and comprised about a hundred individuals.¹⁶ Its formation came two months after the initial march and the ensuing violence, and followed the reopening of Soweto’s schools in July. It was an organisation forged out of the events of 16 June. It included activists who had been involved in earlier student political formations and the planning of the original march, but also drew in a wider group. Micheal Lobban has described the SSRC as ‘an ambiguous organisation’.¹⁷ It was perceived during the Uprisings as articulating genuine grievances, possessing moral authority and even seen as a ‘moderating voice’ that repeatedly espoused non-violence.¹⁸ Yet, the State sought to brand it as led by dangerous agitators – a characterisation which was based on the intimidation used to enforce the stayaways the SSRC called for, as well as violence directed at members of the Urban Bantu Council, acts of sabotage and the destruction of government property carried out by members and some leaders.¹⁹

There were different levels of involvement and politicisation within the SSRC. For example, one former President of the organisation and one of the Soweto Eleven, Dan Montisisi, spoke years later of a ‘Shadow Committee’ within the SSRC that sought military training and had links with the ANC underground that were not known about by other students.²⁰ Whilst we do not know the depth of her involvement, Loate, it seems, saw herself as part of the SSRC, and students saw her as one of them. It was reported in the Rand Daily Mail that a few days after her arrest, over a thousand pupils at Orlando High School stayed away from classes ‘in sympathy’ with Loate and the two others arrested at the same time as her.²¹ Yet the trial of the Soweto Eleven positioned, and heard her, as a liminal figure, on the edges of the events of 1976 and 1977 at best. Her testimony as a state witness meant that once the trial was over, that marginality was confirmed. Back on the streets of Soweto, she was no longer trusted.²² This chapter looks closely at the framing of young women during the trial of the Soweto Eleven and the wider public discourses surrounding it, which fed into the making of the ‘1976 generation’ as a collective voice within South African history. This was a trial that was focused on what had happened on 16 June and in the year and half afterwards; its battleground was the recent history of the Uprisings and how they should be explained and understood. The narratives that it produced were gendered in ways that shaped the speech and silence of young women.

On reading the transcript of the Soweto Eleven trial, it was not what Loate said, but what was said to her, that first caught my attention. The judge’s parting comment on the weight she had lost during detention – ‘She must watch her weight. I think she should not add another 20-lbs again’ – is a moment that exemplifies how young women have so often been seen, but not heard within the unfolding of youth political activism in South Africa.²³ It was only later that I would return to Loate’s testimony and pore over every word, looking for clues as to what lay beyond the simple and mostly unrevealing statements she made in court. There is nothing there to suggest that Loate could have been the compiler of ‘My Thoughts’. That document feels a little like the first draft of a speech – certainly there is strong rhetorical energy in the first paragraph with the repeated phrases and the sense of audience. There were several papers identified as ‘notes for a speech’ in the same file, listed as confiscated from Loate, as well as drafts for press releases, pamphlets and books, some of which were banned. The trial heard evidence that both young men and young women of the SSRC made speeches, at schools and during organised protests. Yet the unresolved question of who wrote ‘My Thoughts’ points us to the ongoing silences of many who participated in the 1976–7 Uprisings and the boundaries of what was sayable, and for whom, as events were unfolding and later as they were retold in court.²⁴ It is a reminder of the ways individual thoughts, drawn from many sources, became collective statements during this ‘unforgettable period’ of ‘history in the making’. The tantalising possibility remains that if Loate did write ‘My Thoughts’, there is very little chance the historical record would credit her with them.

There are two inventories of the papers and books taken from Masabata Loate.²⁵ In one the following books are listed:

Religious Beliefs and White Prejudice, by Robert Buts

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Black Viewpoint by The Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS)

Black Theology and Black Power by James H. Cone

Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin

Naught for Your Comfort by Father Trevor Huddleston (Two Copies)

Détente in Southern Africa by South African Institute of Race Relations

Some Implications of Inequality by SPRO-CAS

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Eastern Philosophers by E W F Tomlin

Assault on Private Enterprise: The Freeway to Communism by A. D. Wassenaar

Not Yet Uhuru: Autobiography by Odinga Oginga

Inside the KGB by Aleksei Myagkov²⁶

The inventory points to the range of thought the young participants in the Soweto Uprisings drew upon. Kasonde T. Mukonde has recently made the case for the existence of a ‘vibrant reading community amongst high school students in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s’.²⁷ This is evident in the list above which includes African nationalist texts (Odinga Oginga) alongside African American thought (the two James Baldwin books); a good dose of liberation theology (James H. Cone) and theologically influenced critiques of apartheid (the volumes produced by SPRO-CAS); as well as texts introducing Marxist theory (Wassenaar) and Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam (Tomlin). The two copies of Huddleston’s account of the destruction of Sophiatown (Naught for Your Comfort) point to the knowledge of historical episodes in the liberation struggle.²⁸ Texts like Détente in Southern Africa, which analysed the policies of then South African Prime Minster John Vorster towards Rhodesia and the surrounding region, alongside the insider account of working in the KGB by Aleksei Myagkov, reveal a potentially wide-ranging political sphere of interest.

The list contains many that Dan Magaziner has highlighted as influential in shaping Black Consciousness thought in its early years. For example, of the Sophiatown forced removals which Naught for your Comfort chronicles, Magaziner argues ‘the failure to save Sophiatown … and the helplessness that defeat engendered’ was the ‘critical intellectual context’ for what Black Consciousness sought to address.²⁹ Oginga Odinga was Steve Biko’s African nationalist of choice, who by the time of the publication of Not Yet Uhuru had emerged as a critical voice within the project of the independent African postcolonial nation (specifically Kenya).³⁰ Magaziner considers the intellectual contribution of James H. Cone at length – highlighting in particular his ideas of Christ as a political actor.³¹ However, as well as the content of these books, the sociality of reading underlines what having this list of books may have meant about Loate.

Mukonde argues that within the reading culture of Soweto High school students banned books circulated much less widely. Even so, many books which were not, in fact, banned, were perceived as such, and treated as illicit by students. Indeed, even books with no political content at all, like the thriller novels of James Hadley Chase, circulated and were read in subversive ways. Reading Chase became a marker of generational identity that challenged the conservatism of South African society and created a network of readers which might then later be used in the exchange of radical literature.³² With these books in her possession, we can assume that Masabata Loate was one of these readers. In her 1982 testimony as a defendant on trial on charges of terrorism, she stated quite plainly: ‘I did not deny that I am a person who is politically minded, I am in possession of banned literature’.³³ If Loate was a radical reader, who through their practices ‘created a new social order’, then surely there is every possibility she was a radical thinker too?³⁴

The existence of the papers, titled intimately (albeit deceptively) ‘My Thoughts’ stand in stark contrast to the speech of Loate and her contemporaries during the trial. Loate spoke, but she and the other young witnesses did so under the severe and pressing constraints of ongoing detention. This was the kind of speech we can think of as ‘talk’ – deeply shaped by the coercive circumstances that produced it. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has urged us to consider those students who spoke during the trials that followed the Uprisings and in front of the government-instituted Cillié Commission of Inquiry as voices struggling to be heard.³⁵ Acts such as the refusal to confirm or to deviate from statements extracted through torture were ways of reclaiming voice, through silence.³⁶ Speaking about the struggle in this context was a deeply gendered act. Loate and the other young women witnesses who testified during the trial, as well as the only young woman defendant, Sibongile Mkhabela née Mthembu, were framed by the prosecution and defence alike in such a way that their speech was marginalised before it was uttered. Yet these processes of silencing required the presence and speech of those same young women and girls, pointing to a more complex picture of political participation than their words alone suggest.

Speaking about the struggle

As we noted in the introduction to this book, there are powerful and abiding narratives of youth political action in the liberation struggle. In academic, popular and official histories alike, it has been held that over time youth organisations became more aggressively masculine and that an increase in violence and confrontation marginalised young women from the activities of the ‘comrades’ or the ‘youth’, by the 1980s.³⁷ The explanations as to why this process took place are at times circular: violence causes masculinisation causes violence; and sometimes they rely problematically on normative constructions of masculinity in suggesting that apartheid emasculated black men and thus provoked hyper-masculine responses.³⁸ Such narratives suggest, as Leslie Hadfield has noted, that men alone possessed the agency or ability to alter gender relations: young women were simply, ‘victims or unwitting contributors to the construction of masculinities’.³⁹ Hadfield argues that we need to rethink how we define political participation, in order to properly locate and understand young women’s place within the Black Consciousness movement. Her argument applies across the various organisational currents of the liberation struggle. If political activity became more violent this is not quite the same thing as violence constituting politics.⁴⁰ We need to re-examine the ways in which connections between violence, political participation and masculinity were made and reinforced over time. This means looking closely at the production of gendered narratives of struggle. When and where did ideas about youth politics, violence and masculinity appear? This takes us towards an approach which focuses upon an analysis of ‘struggle speech’.

‘Struggle speech’ is a way of trying to capture the inseparability of speaking about political activity from that activity itself, and the simultaneous distinctiveness of speech as a social act. To speak about taking part in a march or a demonstration is different from going along or organising one. Such speech is a part of participating but, depending on context, it is also a reflection on political practice and a way of (re)making its meaning. In the trial of the Soweto Eleven the meaning and nature of youth political actions on 16 June and its aftermath were discussed at great length. This trial came at a time when masculinisation was supposedly not so aggressive or dominant within school-based political groups. Clive Glaser and Peter Delius have described the student leadership of the 1970s as ‘less physically aggressive and more respectful of women’s sexual choices’ than was the case subsequently in the ‘fusion’ of student and gang culture that pervaded the youth groups of the 1980s.⁴¹ The work of constructing stories of youth that are traceable in the Soweto Eleven trial reveals the interest both the state prosecutors, and those defending young activists, had in producing narratives of masculine youth political action – gendered narratives which had very real repercussions for Masabata Loate. The presence and speech of young women in constructing these narratives of youth politics show us that they were not straightforward reflections of exclusively male activity. Speaking about the struggle had gendered dynamics of its own. In interpreting the speech and silence that are the focus of this chapter I borrow the idea of the ‘sayable’ from Judith Butler to try to draw into focus a broader sense of the context for speech about youth politics. As I outlined in the introduction, Butler asks us to consider ‘what constitutes the domain of the sayable within which I speak at all?’⁴² As well as thinking about young witnesses’ fear and the consequences of their speech during the trial itself, this means asking what could be said by whom, how, and what was heard when it was uttered.

Youth on trial

According to the prosecution, the eleven accused were members of SASM and the ‘Action Committee’ which had organised the march of school children on 16 June 1976. This march, an expression of SASM’s policy of rejecting the system of education in South Africa and, specifically, the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, was deemed a ‘seditious gathering’,⁴³ an argument that was ultimately accepted by the judge. The State also alleged that the Action Committee had changed its name to the SSRC sometime in July or August, and the SSRC was responsible for a series of further gatherings which stretched from June 1976 to October of 1977 that were also seditious.⁴⁴ These included four stayaways in 1976; marches such as those that aimed to call for the release of detainees in August 1976 and June 1977, and the anti-Kissinger demonstrations of September 1976; the ‘Black Christmas’ campaign in December of 1976 that called for the closure of shebeens, the suspension of football games and other leisure activities, the boycott of white-owned shops, and the observance of a period of mourning; protests targeting the Urban Bantu Council (which eventually resulted in the mass resignation of the Councillors); and a series of events commemorating the first anniversary of 16 June. The charges brought by the State alleged that the eleven accused had committed sedition as well as conspiracy to sedition, incitement to sedition, and a secondary charge of ‘participation in terroristic activities’.⁴⁵

In his study of the political trials of the 1970s, Michael Lobban argues that the trial of the Soweto Eleven marked a change in the South African State’s legal assault on Black Consciousness organisations. According to Lobban, the decision to regard the eleven as seditionists and not revolutionaries was an ‘attempt to dilute the political mixture’ that the trial represented both domestically and abroad.⁴⁶ Observers in the 1980s noted this move to the use of common law crimes such as sedition and treason as a response to criticisms of state security laws.⁴⁷ The Soweto Eleven trial was, as the Rand Daily Mail reported at the time, South Africa’s first sedition trial in thirty years.⁴⁸ In a number of earlier political trials the State had failed to link the SSRC as an organisation to specific acts of violence or to a conspiracy with the ANC, as it had hoped to and, perhaps, believed was the case.⁴⁹ By 1978 the Cillié Commission of Inquiry into the ‘riots’ had been running for two years and the events of 16 June and its aftermath had been publicly discussed at length inside and outside South Africa. The trial of the Soweto Eleven began whilst the Cillié Commission was ongoing. It was enmeshed in both the State’s attempts to rationalise and justify its response to 16 June and the ongoing efforts of parents, the liberation movements in exile, and other observers, to make sense of the events. Alongside the shock of the young age of participants and the perception that there were legitimate grievances behind student protests, the State was up against widespread scepticism, even within white South African society, that agitators might explain the size and scale of the unrest.⁵⁰ According to Lobban, ‘the trial was an exercise in retrospective self-justification by the State’; one that sought to ‘establish plainly the boundaries of illegitimate protest’.⁵¹ The prosecution thus moved away from attempting to prove grand conspiracy theories of a unified liberation struggle directed from exile by the ANC and instead argued that by challenging Bantu Education the SSRC was actually assailing the authority of the State.

Since Bantu Education was administered by the Department of Bantu Education, a branch of the State, to attack the former was construed as an attack on the latter. As Lobban points out, the logic of this was to make almost any black protest against the government seditious but the prosecution selectively emphasised the ‘ensuing violence’ as the mark of seditious intent.⁵² Playing upon public perceptions about legitimate grievances the prosecution argued that the Action Committee was ‘irresponsible in calling the march’ on 16 June, considering the background of anger and tension that existed in Soweto.⁵³ It was alleged that since the Action Committee knew the march would bring about conflict with the police they were aiming to assail the authority of the State. The result of this choice of arguments and battleground was that both prosecution and defence spent a lot of time debating the nature of youth political action and the position of the 16 June march and uprisings in wider understandings of liberation politics to that date. It was the prosecution which put forward what might be recognised now as the more orthodox nationalist version: that the students acted with political intent but were limited by their youth. The defence found itself in an awkward position, trying to play down the students’ political ambitions and emphasising the social aspects of youth political action, evoking a more innocent and naive youthfulness. Both prosecution and defence had constructions of youth, often overlapping, which they wished to emphasise to condemn or absolve the eleven accused. These constructions were sometimes explicit and were drawn out of evidence given by witnesses but were also implicit in certain arguments and courtroom practices.

The accused were named in court as: Wilson Welile ‘Chief’ Twala aged 18 in 1978; Daniel Sechaba Sediane Montsisi aged 23; Seth Sandile Mazibuko aged 19; Murphy Mafison Morobe aged 22; Jeferson Khotso Wansi Lenganu aged 21; Susan Sibongile Mthembu aged 22; Ernest Edwin Thabo Ndabena aged 21; Kennedy Kgotsietsile Mogama aged 19; Reginald Tejobo Mngomezulu aged 21; Michael Sello Khiba aged 20; and George Nkosinati Yami Twala aged 23. Throughout the proceedings defence advocate Ernest Wentzel tried to emphasise the young age of his clients, drawing upon a discourse of youth as innocent and vulnerable in the face of determined efforts by the prosecution to suggest the opposite. In South Africa at this time the age of criminal responsibility was seven.⁵⁴ In the case of defendants aged between seven and fourteen, the onus was on the prosecution to prove that the accused were aware that whatever act they committed, contravened the law. Defendants older than fourteen were treated as adults. At the outset of the trial in 1978 the prosecution asked that the witnesses they regarded as accomplices, the second Soweto eleven, be allowed to give evidence in camera. Defence advocate Wentzel reacted with indignation at the suggestion that those witnesses were potentially in danger from his clients: ‘M’Lord, I am representing school boys and school girls. This is not the African National Congress, or some body which is in hostile antagonism with the Republic of South Africa. These are school children’.⁵⁵ However, the court accepted the prosecution’s arguments. In other instances too, Wentzel’s emphasis on the innocent youth of his clients did not prove all that successful within the courtroom. Once, the judge himself intervened to disagree with Wentzel’s use of ‘child’ when describing a defendant. Wentzel was cross-examining Walter McPherson of the South African Police, who was in charge of detainees at John Vorster Square, and was asking him how long Sibongile Mthembu had been in solitary confinement for:

Adv. W: What about this child here, accused No.6, how long was she there in those conditions?

BY THE COURT: I don’t know whether accused No.6 can still be described as a child, she is well over twenty.⁵⁶

Justice Cillié sounded a similar complaint in his report, published in 1980: ‘witnesses referred in a misleading manner to young people as children … with the object of arousing sympathy for them, because they were supposed to be children and not blameworthy’.⁵⁷ The meaning of the age of the accused was thus highly contested. Indeed, this was in part because, during the 1970s in South Africa, ‘childhood, youth and adulthood’ became blurred in the context of social changes that were particularly acute in urban areas.⁵⁸ Schooling was not compulsory for Africans and many school-going children had to work alongside their studies. In addition, as Ndlovu has argued, through their actions and their shouldering of political responsibility, of which the writer of ‘My Thoughts’ was so aware, the young participants of 16 June and the SSRC ‘brought forth’ a ‘new age category of their own making, between adolescence and maturity’.⁵⁹

The sayable

The trial was lengthy. The Soweto Eleven first appeared in court for a remand hearing in July 1978 after having already been held in custody for up to a year. The trial then began in September of 1978 with the prosecution’s case heard for three months. The defence case began again in February of 1979 and the Eleven were sentenced in May. The three-month gap between prosecution and defence cases in particular prompted media reflections on the nature of the trial experience and its effects on the young accused. This manifested itself in the sympathetic English-language press as a focus upon their appearance. In February 1979 when the accused reappeared to the public, Zwelakhe Sisulu reported for the Rand Daily Mail that: ‘nine of the 10 young men either had or seemed to be in the process of cultivating Afro hairstyles. The sole exception was accused number four Mr Mafison Morobe. He had the Yul Brynner look’.⁶⁰ The young accused’s Afro hairstyles were thus read as a way of signalling a radical Black Consciousness politics.

Also in February 1979, another portrait of the accused was published in Sash magazine circulated to the members and supporters of the Black Sash – a women’s anti-apartheid campaign group. The author Janet Sahil sought to reassure the Black Sash membership of predominantly white middle-class women about the potential association between youth and violence, or at the very least unruly behaviour, in the case of the Soweto Eleven. This resulted in an emphasis on the absence of ‘Afro clothes’ as opposed to the Rand Daily Mail’s focus on the presence of ‘Afro hairstyles’:

Just before 10.00 the 11, whose ages range from 19 to 23, came into the dock. They looked fit, slim, shiningly clean, almost unreally like the sort of advertisement in ‘Post’ which projects a sophisticated, affluent image of black youth. Some wore tracksuits with stripes of white, enhancing the basic maroon or navy. Bongie [Sibongile], the only girl, wore a mohair jersey over a pleated skirt, made even more elegant by an ivory pendant. Some of them had wanted to wear Afro clothes, but their parents had forbidden it. Such is the cohesion of their family life that they had simply obeyed.

They exuded, collectively and individually, a feeling of youth, but a curiously mature, highly disciplined youth … The combination of high intelligence, drive, sensitivity and toughness impressed itself on me again and again as I watched their successive changes of expression during the proceedings: scepticism, potential dislike, humour and impassivity.⁶¹

Janet Sahil presented the Soweto Eleven as full of youthful promise. Their very appearance was a contradiction to their position as defendants in a criminal trial. The reference to the accused as appearing like an ‘advertisement in the Post’ together with the movie star reference to Yul Brynner in the Rand Daily Mail suggests a certain glamour was attached to the Soweto Eleven. The presence of a young woman amongst the accused was often mentioned by the press. For Sahil, Sibongile Makhabela’s presence was a marker of the respectability of the group, as was their obedience to their parents’ wishes. Sahil had been invited to attend the trial by Jill Wentzel, the wife of Ernest Wentzel, the Eleven’s defence advocate. Sahil’s account was part of a broader defence of the young accused and the battle over the meaning of youth political action. All of this tied in with the defence portrayal of the Soweto Eleven as teenagers.

The accused did not testify during the trial. Lobban suggests this was the result of an awareness of the strength of the case against them.⁶² Their comparative silence is something that Sahil also mentions: ‘they are understandably cagey about their personal philosophies, which probably vary enormously. For instance, the Special Branch have confiscated from Bongie Bibles, prayer books and religious tracts’ – a suggestion for the Sash readers that this young woman was perhaps not even that ‘political’ after all.⁶³ Instead the testimony and cross-examination of another Soweto eleven – the young state witnesses brought from detention to testify on the activities of their peers – were those who spoke as participants during the trial.⁶⁴ In contrast to the Cillié Commission of Inquiry into the same events which heard the evidence of only two young women from a list of 563 witnesses, the testimony of young women was central to the depiction of youth politics in the courtroom. The Cillié Commission had in fact displayed a profound scepticism about the value of young witnesses for understanding 16 June and its aftermath. Cillié himself commented on what he saw as the dubious authenticity of young witnesses as part of his understanding of the importance of ‘agitators’ in provoking and spreading the uprising. For example:

In one outstanding case, a coloured girl gave very able testimony on grievances before the commission in Cape Town. It subsequently transpired that she had not been expressing her own or local views, but was reciting the contents of a pamphlet that had been drawn up in Soweto and distributed from there. She had learned this pamphlet off by heart. It was later handed in to the commission.⁶⁵

In contrast, at the trial of the Soweto Eleven, young people were treated as windows onto a world.

The young witnesses who appeared had arrived to testify directly from detention, where they had also been held for up to a year. Large numbers of young people were arrested in the aftermath of the first anniversary of 16 June and the commemorative events that were organised.⁶⁶ Testifying as accomplices they were at risk of being re-detained after their testimony if they did not satisfy the court that they had given ‘full and frank answers’. The trial proceedings record that of those who appeared in the courtroom, even the often-unsympathetic judge, noticed their fear. The following exchanges come from the testimony of Anastasia Zulu, led by Prosecution Advocate Von Lieres:

Adv. V. Lieres: Just a bit slower please, just a bit slower.

By the Court: I know she is a bit nervous, but she must speak slowly and distinctly. She needn’t be afraid.

Adv. V. Lieres: (cont.) Even Seth is laughing at you.⁶⁷

This exchange also reveals a little of the social pressures for young people who were testifying in front of their friends. Seth, whom Advocate Von Lieres refers to, was Seth Mazibuko, one of the defendants.

In the trial, the ‘domain of the sayable’ was shaped by the wider frameworks of interpreting 16 June put forward by prosecution and defence, as well as the very material circumstances of detention that surrounded the young people testifying. During proceedings young women’s presence and speech was used as a way of reiterating youth political and/or social space as normatively male. How far this reflected the realities of political or social organising is not straight forward. First, the historian must understand what was ‘sayable’ for these young women.

A popular house

The evidence of a number of the young witnesses revolved around a particular house, which belonged to the Ngubeni family and its four daughters, two of whom testified in the trial. The nature of student meetings within this house became a point of debate. The representation of this particular domestic space within courtroom testimony also structured the narratives of the young women witnesses and their male counterparts. The Ngubeni house appeared within the courtroom testimony as having been presided over by the mother of the family Maria Ngubeni, with four sisters, two brothers and a cousin living there.⁶⁸ One of the sisters, Elizabeth Ngubeni, described how her cousin, Herbert Mabuza, had asked first if two girls named as Baby and Joyce could stay at the house, and had then invited a number of the accused to also stay there.⁶⁹ Jon Soske has drawn attention to the place of households within township anti-apartheid political activity. He argues that ‘because of the segregated character of black areas and the clandestine nature of organising, anti-apartheid activism often relied on linkages among a series of overlapping, closely knit personal and political networks around prominent township households’.⁷⁰ He goes on: ‘family networks and households provided meeting spaces, places of refuge, and nodes of transit – for information, material, ideas and individuals’.⁷¹ All of this is borne out in the descriptions of the Ngubeni household that emerged out of the trial testimony.

Elizabeth Ngubeni was asked by the prosecution to describe the meetings that happened in the house: ‘What did they used to do when they came to your house? – If I was at home I would give them supper. Yes? – They would close the door and hold a meeting then’.⁷² Later the prosecution asked again, ‘Could your sisters, or your brothers, or your mother attend these meetings? – No, except Herbert’.⁷³ Through the Prosecution’s questioning, the young female witnesses were thus placed outside the main SSRC grouping. From the outside, looking in, the meetings seemed exclusive and serious. There was, it should be noted, an advantage for these young women witnesses in denying their involvement. Not just as individuals seeking to escape jail but as Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has argued, young women and girls could use their ‘invisibility to the eyes of the exclusively male police force to perform some of the movement’s most important tasks, such as facilitating communication networks between male activists in hiding’.⁷⁴ The ‘natural’ or normative expectations of gender was something the defence drew upon. Defence advocate Wentzel asked the second of the Ngubeni sisters, Cecelia, about the frequent visits of some of the accused to her house:

I have also heard the evidence in this court of your sister who has testified already and one [sic] listens to the two of you it would seem that there was a lot of coming and going into your house, is that right? – Yes.

We can judge from all the evidence there was your family with the various daughters and you must have had lots of friends? – Yes.

And we have your cousin Herbert Mabuza? – Yes.

I believe that your sister is a very good cook? – Yes.

That in itself makes the house a popular one, doesn’t it? –Yes.⁷⁵

In this way Wentzel suggested that these meetings were social gatherings. His implication was that the young women’s confinement to the kitchen of their home was unremarkable – a normal arrangement and the result of Elizabeth Ngubeni’s special talent. However, it was later during the cross-examination of another accomplice, Nelson Thamondqa Ndwendwa, that Wentzel really emphasised the masculinity of the SSRC as the result of its character as a social grouping. During his evidence, led by the prosecution, Ndwendwa had described activities at the Ngubeni house thus:

We’d come in, sit down and listen to music, I’d complain of hunger, bread would accompany my tea and so on, I would then hold a conversation with the people I found there, I would talk generally, also amongst other things about girls. I would then, in passing in our conversation, speak to an individual there about matters which we had discussed during our meetings at the SSRC and try to find out from this person how he viewed things.⁷⁶

In cross-examining the witness Wentzel picked up on this description for his own purposes:

For example at this house in Diepkloof, you would discuss politics, girls, soccer, and literature? – That is so.

In other words, to put it very shortly, you were like any group of young folk gathered together? – That is so.

And you disputed amongst yourselves, some of you had this opinion about soccer, some had that opinion, some had this opinion about politics, others had that opinion? – That is so.

I suppose you even differed about the girls? – That is so.

I want to just get away from the idea that we’re dealing with a kind of command post at the house in Diepkloof, that wasn’t a house full of a lot of long faced, serious young men talking SSRC, from morning till night was it? – That is so [emphasis added].⁷⁷

The implications of Ndwendwa’s evidence were drawn out by Advocate Wentzel to try to undermine the prosecution’s concentration upon the defendants’ subversive political identity to the exclusion of all else. The portrayal of the SSRC as a masculine grouping was central to both cases; only its meaning was disputed. What is also worth remarking upon here was the repeated response that Ndwendwa gave each time to Wentzel. ‘That is so’ was affirmative but did not elaborate in any way – suggestive of Ndwendwa’s attempts to draw the process of questioning to a close as quickly as possible.

This line of argument caused problems for the defence when they came up against their own witnesses’ extolling of the importance of the youths’ political actions. Bishop Manas Buthelezi of the Black Parent’s Association, which had been formed in Soweto during the Uprisings, was one of only two witnesses for the defence. Under cross-examination the prosecution chose to confront him with his own words in various newspaper articles, in which he had praised the actions of the students and heralded 16 June as a momentous political event. Advocate for the prosecution Van Lieres put forward the notion of a new generation taking leadership of the liberation struggle. He thus implied, even without any grand conspiracy theories of links with the ANC, that the SSRC should be thought of in the same way.

Adv. V. Lieres: Now one gets the impression Bishop, if one looks historically at the position that in the 1970s apparently the youth has sort of taken over the role of the older people in connection with the liberation of the Black people in putting forward grievances and so forth, would you agree with that? –

Bishop Buthelezi: Not ‘taken over’, I took them as having; they tried to do their own thing in the student’s pattern.⁷⁸

Buthelezi’s argument was to try to contain the importance of this new politics by the description ‘student’s pattern’. Advocate Van Lieres later read out a section of an article that had appeared in the Sunday Express on 15 August 1976. Buthelezi was quoted as saying:

Black politics was experiencing a birth in the flow of fresh political ideas. In the 50s and 60s, the dominant figures on the political scene were such figures as Chief Luthuli and Dr Moroka. Accused in political trials of those days were usually, ‘the old people’, but the big new factor in the ’70s is that you have the politics of the youth, Dr. Buthelezi explained, it started with SASM, the BPC and now it is the whole student body. It appears as if the grievances which were expressed in the past by the grown-ups, were just not being listened to. You must therefore, see the role of the students in relation to unsuccessful attempts in the past to bring about change.⁷⁹

It was very difficult for Buthelezi to maintain plausibly that he referred only to youth political leadership on the issue of Bantu Education and Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. The prosecution played upon ideas of trials and detention as a marker of political opposition to apartheid. Buthelezi had commented that ‘accused in political trials’ of the past had been ‘the old people’. The implication that was hard to avoid was that the students, by virtue of being on trial fitted into the roll call of ANC leaders, Chief Luthuli and Dr Moroka and should be treated accordingly by the State. The social practices of youth politics were explicitly gendered as male by both prosecution and defence. In the prosecution’s case the wider idea of youth politics as a historical phenomena, the Soweto generation, was more implicitly – but also nevertheless quite definitely –male.

Being heard from the margins

The trial evidenced a widespread presence of young women within the world of Soweto student political organising but also partially erased this presence. The testimony of Masabata Loate provides a stark illustration of the domain of the sayable within which young women spoke and were heard. This book began with the judge’s comment on her body, coming at the end of her testimony in which she had revealed the weight loss she had suffered in detention.⁸⁰ This instance reveals the ways in which young black women had to negotiate multiple discourses, not just those of their peers, which framed their actions and bodies as up for scrutiny, control and judgement. If they were ‘invisible’ to police as potential political actors, they were hyper-visible in other ways. The judge’s comment on Loate’s weight followed on from a quite lengthy cross-examination in which Wentzel suggested that Loate was the object of a falling-out between one of the defendants and Herbert Mabuza, another SSRC member (and cousin of the Ngubeni sisters).

Adv. Wentzel: Now I’d like you to look at the eighth accused. Accused no 8 Kgotsietsile Mogami? I don’t want to say more than I have to about very personal matters. I see from the smile on your face you know what I am about to say? He was your particular boyfriend was he not? – He is my ex-boyfriend.

And at one time he was very much your boyfriend is that right? I won’t put anything personal? – Yes.

Do you know a young man called Herbert Mabuza? – Yes.

Am I right in saying that his nickname was ‘Chance Taker’? – I can’t say.

You can’t say? What chances was Herbert always taking? – Divorcing girlfriends of his friends, making love to …

By the court: Making love to his friend’s girlfriends? Was he a ladies man? – Yes.

Adv. W: And in fact Herbert Mabuza was rather interested in you, he found you a very attractive young lady? – He was having a soft spot for me.

The eighth accused wasn’t very pleased about this was he? – Yes, he didn’t like it.

It led to trouble between him and Herbert did it not? – Yes.⁸¹

Wentzel did not pursue this line of questioning any further, but the implications of this exchange placed Masabata Loate in a very particular role with regards to the SSRC social grouping. She was one of the ‘girls’ discussed and disagreed over. This was all part of Wentzel’s portrayal of the SSRC as group of young friends rather than serious or dangerous political actors.⁸²

It doesn’t seem too much of a leap to suggest that the depiction of young women’s position employed here in defence of young political activists can, and should, be connected by the historian to the tales told by young men and others about youth politics subsequently. The idea that young women who became involved in political activities might get a reputation that they were sexually available is an issue that young men mentioned in Catherine Campbell’s widely cited study of youth politics in 1990s Umlazi township, outside Durban. Campbell was told that a woman who attended political meetings ‘gets the reputation of being a woman who goes after men’.⁸³ One reading of Wentzel’s exchanges with Loate might be to see this as further evidence of the sexual control of young women as part of youth sociality and political organising.⁸⁴ This interpretation, however, should be resisted. Instead, it should be seen more precisely as evidence of the courtroom as a site for the reiteration of such a narrative. The production of such a narrative in this space undoubtedly had effects. In the Soweto Eleven trial Loate appears very much as a peripheral young woman – this peripheral status was confirmed on her release. In 1982 she told another courtroom, this time as a defendant on trial herself, that following her appearance as a state witness, ‘politics were never discussed in my presence’ and she received a threatening letter and was shot in the leg.⁸⁵ The trial thus heard Loate and the other young women witnesses from the margins and placed them there in very real terms on their release.

Sibongile Mkhabela née Mthembu recalled the attitude of Prosecutor Von Lieres during the trial in her 2001 autobiography: ‘He had especially focused on the only young woman, the black rose, who stood among men. He, an Afrikaner male of the time could not understand how a black female could be determined to defy the white man’s law: after all, black women belonged in the kitchen’.⁸⁶ The perception of the judge, prosecution and defence lawyers, as well as the security services, in selecting witnesses all shaped the way in which young women’s speech in the courtroom was heard.

The way youth politics was discussed in the trial did not quite capture the nature of young women’s involvement, even whilst it registered their presence. The issue was raised in the court that various young women, including the accused Sibongile Mthembu, found it difficult to attend SSRC meetings regularly. In his testimony, Issie Gxluwe, who also attended Naledi high school, explained why his school had four representatives in the SSRC instead of two.

Adv. Vo. Lieres: But all four of them served on the SSRC, that is if I understand you correctly? – Susan Mthembu sometimes didn’t attend. Sometimes she didn’t attend, most of the time she did not.⁸⁷

Mkhabela mentions in her autobiography that she would sometimes miss political meetings. She saw this as insignificant in contrast to her male comrades who she says felt they had to attend to prove themselves political.⁸⁸ Other young women’s testimony at the trial similarly echoed a constrained commitment – or a different kind of identification with politics. For example, Ayanda Cokile:

Von Lieres: What was your attitude to being elected as a member of the – to represent your school on the SSRC? – I asked the chairman himself when he came to our school …

Is that Mr. Sono you asked? – Yes.

What did you ask him? – I asked him that as being in the SSRC some people like myself were having domestic problems, so that I won’t be able to attend these meetings regularly. So he said that as long as I am representing the school and I am well informed about what [sic] the meetings which were held when I wasn’t there and gave the reports back to the students as to what was said at the meetings, that was ok.

Your, perhaps just briefly, your domestic problems, did you have to do the household at home? – Yes.⁸⁹

Another witness, Sarah Makepe, suggested that membership of the SSRC was for her a social choice as much as anything else. After being elected by her school to the SSRC she resigned the following day. The judge intervened to ask her, ‘Why did you resign the very next day?’ She replied: ‘I had to decide whether I was representing my students on the SSRC or whether I should go back to my old procedure, that is being an actress’.⁹⁰ These are glimpses of political participation that the trial and its narratives cannot quite erase. It shows us student politics was something that existed alongside housework and drama groups, even during the turmoil of 1977. The gendered dynamics of state repression and prosecution (and the defences this elicited) interrupt young women’s voices and interpolate young women’s speech to their own ends but they were there, and they did speak.

Silence in court

The trial includes one final form of speech that is neither the coerced talk of state witnesses nor the intimate and internal dialogue of ‘My Thoughts’, though it exists somewhere in between. Whilst being held in detention, Sibongile Mkhabela née Mthembu wrote letters on tissue paper which were then rolled and sewn into the hem of a skirt and smuggled out of prison.⁹¹ The extraordinary fragility of the letters, written with great difficulty on such thin paper means that had they reached their intended recipients they would not have been easy to preserve and keep, even if this was desired. But the fragility of three of these letters was transformed, when they were intercepted by police. They were transcribed and admitted as evidence. They became the foundation of an additional charge of ‘terroristic activities’ that was laid against Mkhabela. In defending his young client, the letters were read out in full to the courtroom by Ernest Wentzel, in the hope that it would be clear their content was personal and not, as the prosecution alleged, evidence of terrorism. After reading one, he exclaimed to the court, ‘is this letter not just patently the letter of a lonely, unhappy girl, communicating with her family?’⁹²

Even at the time Wentzel clearly thought it was extraordinary that the letters could be read as sufficient evidence of incitement to terrorism. In a letter to her younger sister that is full of encouragement to ‘try to keep strong’ in the face of her ongoing detention, there is also the reflection: ‘it has become obvious that a violent struggle is the only hope we cherish’.⁹³ This was highlighted by the prosecution, as was the observation to her brother, ‘should we be scared of the last kicks of a dying horse, that we give it a second chance. I don’t give these bastards more than 5 years’.⁹⁴ However, in 1970s South Africa many young people were tried and convicted for trying to leave the country to undergo military training or recruiting others to do so, on the basis of casual conversations, even where no action was taken.⁹⁵ The line between ‘casual talk’ and incitement was extremely thin.⁹⁶ The danger of speaking about the struggle was very real. In these convictions the State also blurred what was in the realm of private thought and public action, conditions which shaped everyday speech. Reflecting on the way her activism in 1976–7 affected her close relationships, especially with her father, Mkhabela recalled ‘growing quieter’ over time. Writing in 2001 she remembered:

As I grew less and less communicative with Baba, I became even less communicative with my own comrades. All conversations I engaged in were of an intense nature; I was finding it difficult to talk about ordinary, day-to-day things. The desire for liberation had gripped me more than I was prepared to admit.⁹⁷

In her own account the pressures and intensity of activism shaped what Mkhabela said in intimate as well as political spaces, breaking down distinctions between them.⁹⁸ The incorporation of her letters into the trial did so again. Of the three letters, only two were relied upon by the prosecution as evidence of terrorism. The third was still nevertheless read out to the court by Wentzel. Indeed, he began his arguments with a prison guard W. McPherson with what was, in Wentzel’s words, a ‘love letter’.⁹⁹ He read it to underline its personal nature. Alongside the experience of Masabata Loate during the trial, discussed as a girlfriend and her body scrutinised, here the only young woman amongst the accused was also subjected to an extra level of exposure in the courtroom, her personal letters read in public. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick has argued, drawing on another young woman’s anguished letters that were subsequently confiscated by police, that the choice to become involved politically and to stay involved was ‘harder and more poignant’ for young women and girls because of their caring responsibilities, either for younger siblings or children of their own.¹⁰⁰ In her autobiography, Mkhabela reprints two of the three letters at the back of her book, omitting the love letter. She thus reclaims them.¹⁰¹ She does not tell us what it was like to hear them read aloud. As with Loate, exposure sits alongside silence.

Exploring Sibongile Mkhabela’s autobiographical account of the trial more fully, silence is a recurring theme. Dealt with in one chapter, titled simply ‘The Trial’, her account focuses on the moment of sentencing in May 1979. It begins in the third person:

One by one the 11 accused emerged from the holding cells, Emgodini, to take their place in the dock. Fists were raised high in power salutes and shouts of amandla continued to defy the ‘system’ that had convicted them and was now going to pass sentence on them. The audience responded with amandla and the court orderly shouted ‘Silence in Court’.¹⁰²

The silence of the courtroom is something Mkhabela mentions repeatedly and always in contrast to what is going on inside her own head: ‘above the noise in my head and the silence of the courtroom the Judge pronounced his sentence’; and then, ‘Silence in court, why, I thought, I need silence in my head. What is he going to say?’¹⁰³ Mkhabela takes us inside the ‘noise’ within her head by telling the life story of her mother’s sister, whom she called ‘Gogo’, who was watching that day in the public gallery. She also re-enacts what she calls ‘a silent dialogue’ she held with the judge as he read his 114-page judgement:

Crime 1: The accused were leaders of the South African Student Movement (SASM) a student movement which strived to create political, social and cultural awareness and solidarity among Black schoolgoing students.

(Surely, Judge, that cannot be a crime. If this was a crime I wondered why the leaders of my church, The African Methodist Church, were not on trial. I further wondered why the Broederbond was not on trial).¹⁰⁴

Mkhabela thus overwrites her silence in the courtroom with the story of her Gogo’s struggles to live under the strictures and repression of the apartheid system and her own view of her actions for which she was being tried: ‘you are not dealing with terroristic activities, you are dealing with students who were anxious to preserve their right to an education’.¹⁰⁵ In her autobiography the trial is transformed into a space through which to tell these stories. In doing so her account also points us to what remained unsayable at the time.

On hearing her sentence for six years (four years suspended) Mkhabela recalled being unable to say anything; there was ‘a muffled cry from the audience’ and she remembered ‘I smiled and steered my thoughts beyond the two years’ effective prison sentence’.¹⁰⁶ Then, ‘Gogo’s voice erupted in a scream. She shouted my name’. She described leaving the courtroom: ‘I felt the loneliness of being the only woman amongst men and getting convicted. I thought of Ma and Gogo; her scream in the courtroom would not leave me, I heard it loud and clear. I wanted her to know I would be ok.’¹⁰⁷ This moving description of the pain of separation from her family makes clear the limits of what was sayable in the courtroom. Her Gogo’s story was not heard there – but her scream was.

Conclusions

There are two Soweto elevens in this chapter – the eleven accused and the eleven who testified during the trial. Asking who spoke, as well as what they said, and how they were heard, uncovers some of the dynamics of speaking about the struggle. In thinking about what was sayable for these young people in the context of this trial and the legal battles (with very real material consequences) over the meaning and nature of youth political action in June 1976 and its aftermath, I argue that we can begin to see some of the ways in which gendered narratives of struggle were made. The portrait of youth politics that was drawn inside the courtroom during the trial of the Soweto Eleven served several different purposes and it also had effects beyond the courtroom. It was an important site for reiterating and amplifying youth politics and youth sociability as male. For Masabata Loate the trial, and her testimony as a state witness, marginalised her (through speech rather than silence) in two ways. In the historical record she is framed and heard as on the edges of the SSRC – one of the girls disagreed and fought over. On the streets of Soweto, after the trial, her talk marginalised her within the ongoing practice of anti-apartheid politics.

Over twenty years later, on the anniversary of the 1976 Uprisings, a special hearing of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was held, to reconstruct again the events of 16 June. Two of the Soweto Eleven – Dan Montsisi and Murphy Morobe – spoke authoritatively about the march and its aftermath.¹⁰⁸ Other witnesses such as Amelia Molapo gave more jumbled accounts of participation and injury that day: for Molapo the march was ‘noise … confusion … running around … running away’.¹⁰⁹ When the TRC again returned to the events of 16 June during a special Johannesburg children’s hearing, another witness, Nomande Ntabeni, who had been sixteen in 1976 and shot during the march, was asked repeatedly by one commissioner, Joyce Seroke, about the extent of young women’s involvement, specifically in violence: ‘I want to establish if the girls were also in a position of fighting back, perhaps fight back with stones or bombs like the previous witness who has told us they would be in possession of explosives. What were the girls up to?’¹¹⁰ When I first began asking questions myself about young women’s political participation, this moment of repeated questioning and the refrain ‘what were the girls up to?’ resonated loudly with my own frustrations. They were there after all. My own view now is that an equally important question is: Why do we not know what they were up to? Why is the historical record so contradictory? Examining the bounds of the sayable within the trial of the Soweto Eleven, it seems clear that young women involved in politics experienced a struggle to speak because speech was so central a site of the struggle. Speaking about the struggle produced gendered narratives, narratives forged out of necessity in courtrooms as well as on the street, in moments of protest and reflection. These gendered narratives enable us to see and hear Masabata Loate but they do not help us to unpick who wrote down ‘My Thoughts’.

Notes

1. 1.  This account is the one Masabata Loate gives within her testimony to the trial of the Soweto Eleven. Supreme Court of South Africa (Transvaal Provincial Division), State vs. W.W.C. Twala and Ten Others, case K/P 282/78; WHP: AD1450: Box 5: Record of Proceedings, 1084–7.

2. 2.  At her trial in 1982 Masabata Loate told the court that 7798 was her brother Barney’s house and that she stayed there with her grandmother, her mother, her sister-in-law Sophia (married to Barney), and three children of her sister. See: 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. Record of Proceedings, 533. Digitised trial proceedings, accessed July 2019, http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AD2021/R/.

3. 3.  State vs. W.W.C Twala, Proceedings, 1087.

4. 4.  WRAB vs. Santam, SAB WLD 6857/77, vol. 436, accessed June 2024, www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN2877.jpg.html.

5. 5.  The papers confiscated from Loate are discussed and available in the digital archive that accompanies Helena Pohlandt-McCormick’s e-book. Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’ … : Doing Violence to Memory, accessed June 2024, http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/.

6. 6.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’, chapter 5, 90.

7. 7.  Paul Brunton, The Hidden Teaching beyond Yoga, Tenth Impression (London: Rider & Company, 1941).

8. 8.  An account of his life is available here: Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation (blog), ‘Illustrated Biography’, 19 November 2023, https://www.paulbrunton.org/about-paul-brunton/illustrated-biography/.

9. 9.  Brunton, The Hidden Teaching beyond Yoga, 348.

10. 10.  Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 48.

11. 11.  Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, 48.

12. 12.  Brunton, The Hidden Teaching beyond Yoga, 345.

13. 13.  Brunton, The Hidden Teaching beyond Yoga, 345.

14. 14.  State vs. W.W.C Twala, Proceedings, 1087.

15. 15.  State vs. W.W.C Twala, Proceedings, 1086.

16. 16.  These are details given by Murphy Morobe in his testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. See: Murphy Morobe, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed February 2024, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/morobe.htm.

17. 17.  Michael Lobban, White Man’s Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 220.

18. 18.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 220.

19. 19.  In 1961 the Urban Bantu Council Act established Urban Bantu Councils as the means by which urban African populations were ‘represented’ within the system of administration boards that ran African townships. UBCs never enjoyed much legitimacy amongst urban Africans and were nicknamed ‘useless boys’ clubs’. After the failure of UBCs to intervene in the Soweto Uprisings, this system was replaced by Community Councils. For the role of the UBCs and the subsequent Community Councils within the township uprisings of the mid-1980s see: Franziska Rueedi, The Vaal Uprising of 1984 and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2021), 60.

20. 20.  He did so at in his testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. See: Dan Montsisi, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed February 2024, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/montsisi.htm.

21. 21.  ‘Orlando Stayaway goes on’, Rand Daily Mail (Township Edition), 22 June 1977, 1.

22. 22.  According to her testimony at her own trial in 1982, State vs. M.M. Loatse et al. as discussed in Chapter 3.

23. 23.  This moment is discussed at the very beginning of the Introduction to this book, State vs. W.W.C. Twala, 1096.

24. 24.  Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu amongst others notes the discrepancy between photographic images of 16 June 1976 that show the widespread participation of young women and their lack of voice within the historical record and histories of the Soweto Uprisings. See: Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, ‘The Anatomy of the Crowd’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 7: Soweto Uprisings: New Perspectives, Commemorations and Memorialisation (Cape Town: Unisa Press, 2017), 49.

25. 25.  ‘Inventory of items confiscated by the police (17 June 1976) from Masabatha Loate’. Civil Case WLD 6857 (1977), vol. 413, accessed June 2024, www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN2753.jpg.html and ‘Brown envelope with inventory of documents seized during Masabatha Loate’s arrest’. Civil Case WLD 6857 (1977), vol. 436, accessed June 2024, www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN2881.jpg.html.

26. 26.  ‘Inventory of items confiscated by the police (17 June 1976) from Masabatha Loate’, accessed June 2024, www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN2753.jpg.html.

27. 27.  Kasonde T. Mukonde, ‘ “If You Belong to My Generation and You Never Read James Hadley Chase, Then You Are Not Educated”: Everyday Reading of High School Students in Soweto, 1968–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies 49, no. 2 (4 March 2023): 223, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2023.2204782.

28. 28.  Between 1955 and 1960 the National Party government removed residents from Sophiatown, a black freehold suburb of Johannesburg. Resistance to these removals, whilst ultimately unsuccessful, were a radicalising moment within the liberation struggle. See: Tom Lodge, ‘The Destruction of Sophiatown’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 19, no. 1 (1981): 107–32; The significance of the destruction of Sophiatown derives in part from the cultural life of the suburb that was home to many writers and artists. See: Paul Gready, ‘The Sophiatown Writers of the Fifties: The Unreal Reality of Their World’, Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 139–64, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2636643.

29. 29.  Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, 18.

30. 30.  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): 38, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2011.552542.

31. 31.  Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, 93–9.

32. 32.  Mukonde, ‘ “If You Belong to My Generation and You Never Read James Hadley Chase, Then You Are Not Educated”’, 215.

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

34. 34.  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.

35. 35.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’, chapter 1, 115, 135.

36. 36.  Murphy Morobe recalled being taken out of detention and being forced to read statements extracted through torture before the Cillié Commission, but also that he and others later refused to confirm those statements despite the consequences: ‘we knew what refusal meant because we were still in detention’. See: Murphy Morobe, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed February 2024, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/morobe.htm.

37. 37.  Jeremy Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980s’, Agenda 10 (1991); Seekings, Heroes or Villains? Youth Politics in the 1980s (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1993).

38. 38.  For a critique of the ways in which narratives of Apartheid’s ‘emasculation’ of Black men assumes certain constructions of masculinity see: Helen Moffett, ‘Sexual Violence, Civil Society and the New Constitution’, in Women’s Activism in South Africa: Working Across Divides, ed. Hannah Britton, Jennifer Fish and Sheila Meintjes (Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2009), 161, 164.

39. 39.  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): 248, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0021853713000261.

40. 40.  For many insightful thoughts on the relationship between violence and politics see: Franziska Rueedi, ‘ “Siyayinyova!”: Patterns of Violence in the African Townships of the Vaal Triangle, South Africa.1980–86’, Africa 85, no. 3 (August 2015): 395–416, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0001972015000261; N. Chabani Manganyi and Andre Du Toit, eds., Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-21074-9.

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

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

43. 43.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala and Ten Others, Box 4: The Indictment, 3.

44. 44.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, ‘Schedule F’, 25–32.

45. 45.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, ‘Schedule B’, 7.

46. 46.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 221.

47. 47.  J. R. L. Milton, ‘Criminal Law in South Africa – 1976–1986’, Acta Juridica 1987 (1987): 44.

48. 48.  Pam Kleinot, ‘SA’s first sedition trial in 30 years’, Rand Daily Mail, 1 May 1979.

49. 49.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 225.

50. 50.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 225.

51. 51.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 226.

52. 52.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 232.

53. 53.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 230.

54. 54.  Enid Fourie, ‘The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Crisis for Children in South Africa: Apartheid and Detention Symposium: UN Convention on Children’s Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1990): 111.

55. 55.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 603.

56. 56.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1522.

57. 57.  South Africa, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Riots at Soweto and Elsewhere from the 16th of June 1976 to the 28th of February 1977 (Pretoria: Govt. Printer, 1980), 357.

58. 58.  Ndlovu, ‘The Anatomy of the Crowd’, 44.

59. 59.  Ndlovu, ‘The Anatomy of the Crowd’, 45.

60. 60.  Zwelakhe Sisulu, ‘Students face a marathon trial’, Rand Daily Mail (Township Edition), 31 July 1978.

61. 61.  Janet Sahil, ‘The Soweto Eleven’, Sash: The Black Sash Magazine, 1979, 6.

62. 62.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 247.

63. 63.  Sahil, ‘The Soweto Eleven’, 6.

64. 64.  The prosecution also called as witnesses policemen, several white people who had been in Soweto on June 16, eleven bus drivers and employees of the bus company PUTCO, the Director of Finances at the West Rand Administrative Board, and Dr A. B. Fourie of the Department of Bantu Education. The Defence called only two witnesses – the educationalist Dr Franz Auerbach and Bishop Manas Buthelezi, one of the founders of the Black Parents Association that sought to mediate between the students of Soweto and the authorities. Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 243–7.

65. 65.  South Africa, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Riots at Soweto and Elsewhere from the 16th of June 1976 to the 28th of February 1977, 279.

66. 66.  See for example the report of the arrest of Masabata Loate on 20 June 1977: ‘Police detain three more, but release six’, Rand Daily Mail, 20 June 1977.

67. 67.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1699.

68. 68.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 692.

69. 69.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 693.

70. 70.  Jon Soske, ‘The Family Romance of the South African Revolution’, in Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa, ed. G. Arunima, Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021): 179, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79580-1_7.

71. 71.  Soske, ‘The Family Romance of the South African Revolution’, 179.

72. 72.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 694.

73. 73.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 695.

74. 74.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’, chapter 4, 59.

75. 75.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 705.

76. 76.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 993.

77. 77.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 994.

78. 78.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 2461.

79. 79.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 2461–2.

80. 80.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1096.

81. 81.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1093.

82. 82.  It is worth mentioning Shahid Amin’s work on judicial discourses in colonial India here. In discussing the testimony of an ‘approver’ or accomplice turned witness, Amin comments, ‘the prosecution treats the Approver’s testimony as a sealed text which derives its meaning from its constitution and not from any context … the defence attempts to “socialize” the event, implicate it – and hence the Approver’s testimony – into the reality of its milieu’. Shahid Amin, ‘Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura’, in Subaltern Studies V, ed. Ranajit Guha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 187.

83. 83.  Catherine Campbell, ‘Learning to Kill? Masculinity, the Family and Violence in Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies 18, no. 3 (September 1992): 625, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637301.

84. 84.  Delius and Glaser, ‘Sexual Socialisation’.

85. 85.  State vs. M.M. Loatse et al., Proceedings, 498 and 496.

86. 86.  Sibongile Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses: Remembering 16 June 1976 (Braamfontein, South Africa: Skotaville Press, 2001), 83.

87. 87.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 676.

88. 88.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 40.

89. 89.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1241–2.

90. 90.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 735.

91. 91.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 63.

92. 92.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1529–30.

93. 93.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 122.

94. 94.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 123.

95. 95.  A number of such cases in which convictions were justified on the basis of ‘mere talk’ are discussed in Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 115–95.

96. 96.  Lobban, White Man’s Justice, 117.

97. 97.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 59.

98. 98.  Another of the Soweto Eleven, Murphy Morobe, recalled during his testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission what he thought of as a sense of exhaustion, he dated to September of 1976: ‘my own emotions had totally run out by then’. See: Murphy Morobe, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed February 2024, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/morobe.htm.

99. 99.  State vs. W.W.C. Twala, Proceedings, 1527.

100. 100.  Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare’, chapter 4, 63.

101. 101.  I have not discussed the third letter, that Mkhabela chooses not to reprint, believing that to do so would be to repeat that act of exposure.

102. 102.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 83; The Afrikaner Broederbond was a secret, all-male society that sought to promote the interests of the Afrikaner nation. It was an organisation with close links to the National Party and exerted a ‘profound influence at all levels of South African politics’. See: Dan O’Meara, ‘The Afrikaner Broederbond 1927–1948: Class Vanguard of Afrikaner Nationalism’, Journal of Southern African Studies 3, no. 2 (1 April 1977): 156, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057077708707970.

103. 103.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 88, 89.

104. 104.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 84.

105. 105.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 84.

106. 106.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 89.

107. 107.  Mkhabela, Open Earth and Black Roses, 89.

108. 108.  Dan Montsisi, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, Available at: https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/montsisi.htm and Murphy Morobe, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed May 2023, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/morobe.htm.

109. 109.  Amelia Molapo, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Soweto – June 16 Hearings, Day 1, 22 July 1996, accessed May 2023, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/soweto/molapo.htm.

110. 110.  Nomonde Ntabeni, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Violations Committee Public Hearings, Johannesburg Children’s Hearing, Day 1, 12 June 1997, accessed May 2023, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/children/ntabeni.htm.