The older generation of present-day South Africans may remember in the 1970s and 1980s the insistence, even by enlightened people involved in the Struggle, that equality between the gender groups must wait until political equality between race groups had been achieved. It was argued in the same period that feminism was a first-world luxury, in which only spoilt white women could be interested.
The women whose accounts of their exile appear in Prodigal Daughters Stories of South African Women in Exile(University of KwaZulu-Natal Press) learnt the hard way that justice and equality are not divisible into areas that matter and areas that don’t, and that “sexism and other forms of exploitation would not simply fall away just because apartheid had been defeated”.
Edited by Lauretta Ngcobo, wife of Abednego Bhekabantu “AB” Ngcobo, the late PAC treasurer-general, Prodigal Daughters consists of accounts of their exile by 17 ANC and PAC women and is a piece of history of the kind that has been traditionally suppressed.
The women, most of whom fled to avoid imprisonment and some of whom left families and small children in South Africa, despite their heroism don’t figure in conventional accounts of the Struggle, which tend to focus on males. That some male exiles were cruelly exploitative of their wives and children has also been ignored in more conventional accounts.
Most of the women began their lives as exiles in what were known as the Frontline states – Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Botswana. “Botswana was not what we had expected. Instead of being welcomed, we were interrogated and photographed like criminals,” writes Carmel Chetty.
“The police were extremely officious and quite inefficient – making us write and rewrite our statements until they were satisfied. We were asked why we had come to Botswana rather than go to the newly independent Transkei.” These states, adjacent to South Africa, to different degrees economically dependent on this country and vulnerable to murderous cross-border raids, however sympathetic to the plight of refugees, felt they must put the welfare of their own citizens first. Ngcobo tells of rebuffs, rejections, false starts, as she tries to live in Swaziland and then to leave for Zambia
Brigalia Bam, former Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, is disconcerted by the tendency of countries who apply sanctions against South Africa to refuse her entry – Trinidad, for example, takes the view that there are no distinctions to be made between South Africans: “The commissioner of police arrived at the airport to see for himself who this cantankerous South African woman was who was refusing to leave. He had, of course, assumed I was white. At the same time the African and Indian Trinidadians were debating among themselves… Finally I was put on a plane by police, who had to lift me from my seat in the airport… The captain of the plane met me at the door and later offered me a rum and coke.”
Bam is careful, however, to thank the many people who understood her position: the Liberian president who saw to it that she received a Liberian passport, her friend Annie Jiagge, “a Ghanaian judge who taught me how to dress like an African” (an act with far-reaching effects on South African political chic) and other families who made important gestures of friendship and support in a period when she – and all the other exiled women – most needed them.
Gonda Perez, now the deputy dean of the University of Cape Town's health sciences faculty, writes of culture shock: in Algeria, for example, she “could not walk alone in the streets without being followed by men… On one occasion Comrade Ngesi chased an Algerian man down the stairs with a broom after he had followed me right up to the door of the ANC offices.”
In Zambia Ngcobo, a long-term party worker, is surprised to find that she is not regarded as a PAC member – only men are acceptable. But she and the other women exiles form a women’s group, raising funds to help support their families. “One Saturday morning… our team got summoned to the PAC office in Lusaka. There was (Potlkako) Leballo and his new executive members. They told us that they wanted us to submit all the documents of the PAC women’s organisation to him right there and then. He wanted the bank accounts in particular. Those men took all the books, went and withdrew all the money from the bank… Yes, that ended the dream of supporting women on the home front.”
Children were problematic for political exiles: some, like Ngcobo’s son and Bam’s, were left with relatives; some were able to join their mothers and move with them between countries until they found relative stability, often in London. Some were born in exile, though raised to believe that South Africa was the only real home: “We were in a place called exile, and I grew up with the assumption that I was on my way to Azania via settler South Africa” writes Liepollo Pheko, daughter of PAC leader Motsoko Pheko, explaining her foreignness in a South London school.
When at last she comes “home” she is “unsure about her ability to translate cultural codes, to speak seSotho…”
Her sister Mohau writes about being tormented in Zambia because she was (compared to Zambians) light-skinned. The five countries in which she lived during her exile “bestowed upon me multiple identities… In reality I did not belong at all.”
Children born in exile were at times seen by the ANC authorities as nuisances, and their mothers (not their fathers) were sternly rebuked: “When there is so much work to be done, how can you be complicating things by making babies?” Similarly unmarried women who became pregnant were penalised, but the fathers of their children were untouched – left, says the former deputy president, Baleka Mbete, to find other girls to impregnate.
The emphasis of Prodigal Daughters is not on triumphant return, though the book exists because that return was eventually possible, but on the hard work, political, domestic and professional, by women which allowed them and their families to survive exile. It’s a wonderful read.
l The late Margaret Lenta was an emeritus professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.She passed away last month.