Durban - Anti-apartheid activist Phyllis Naidoo has been hailed for her role in the Struggle, her support for her imprisoned comrades and those pursuing South Africa’s liberation from the grip of the oppressive and brutal regime.
Naidoo’s role in the fight against apartheid was detailed during a seminar on Thursday, spelling out how she had made a significant contribution to the anti-apartheid movement through both her private and public writings.
The seminar was titled The Making of Human Rights from Below: A reflection on the contribution of anti-apartheid activist Phyllis Naidoo.
In her presentation on Naidoo, Dr Annie Devenish, a lecturer in the History Department at Wits University, said that while sitting in the Gandhi Luthuli Documentation Centre there were rows of dusty boxes and files. From the outside, they give little indication of the rich treasure trove they contain.
Devenish said that these boxes are filled with the personal papers of Phyllis Naidoo which give an insight to her personal letters to family, diaries, Mothers Day cards from her children, poems, short stories, newspaper clippings, telegrams and lists of friends’ addresses and birthdays.
“This rich correspondence of letters, in particular, gives and seeks love, consolation and advice, trading in the valuable commodity of news and information. It reaches out across space and time to comfort the families of comrades and offer strength and courage.
“It channels money and instructions to colleagues for the support of families of imprisoned activists, organises transport and permits to Robben Island, paying for school fees, food, clothing and even birthday presents,” she said.
Devenish said that the correspondence was also a depiction of how Naidoo supported imprisoned and detained activists, sending them letters and cards, arranging permission for them to study in prison, raising the funds for these studies and ensuring that activists had clothes and somewhere to go and work once they were released.
She said that it also sought to strengthen contact with anti-apartheid activist groups such as Amnesty International, trading on Naidoo’s interpersonal network to enhance awareness of the brutality and injustice of apartheid and to raise funds for the liberation movement in South Africa.
“As I came to read and interpret these letters, I came to understand that cultivated through this letter writing, Phyllis sought to reconstitute and emotional, social and ideological home for herself, her family, friends and comrades while in exile. A home grounded on the networks of friendships and mutuality.”
Devenish said that this was an effective politics, a heartland, built around emotion, friendship, support comfort and love and showed the way in which these emotions, in a private sphere, underpinned political histories of struggle activism in the public sphere.
“We tend to think of human rights from the top down, as being defined and made within the big legal realm and within the realm of diplomacy where nation states, international organisations such as the United Nations and the African Union and powerful political players operate.
“If we look at this correspondence as an entry point into the life and activism of Phyllis Naidoo however, it gives us a window into understanding how human rights are made from below and in many senses it’s in these spaces of intimacy, this heartland, that this occurs.”
She said that the crucial role that many of Naidoo’s letters played logistically in securing the basics such as food, clothing and access to education for detainees, prisoners and their families ensured securing human dignity.
“Secondly, through their bearing of testimony, drawing on the experience of her own life Phyllis bears witness to the brutality of apartheid and its human rights abuses in her private letters as well as her public writings, in so doing exposing the injustice and abuse of a cruel system, but equally reinforcing humanity and giving agency to apartheid’s victims.”
She said that the letters expressed global solidarity which transcended race and the barriers of nation states and found connections between oppressed people across the globe.
“It’s in this sense that we can think of Phyllis as one of the many hands that contribute to South Africa’s post apartheid culture of human rights,” Devenish said.
Political Bureau