Women in solitary in apartheid prisons

This is the story of what happened after the 1969 dawn raids in South Africa that led to the arrest and imprisonment of 22 people including Winnie Mandela.  It has been put together for the first time following the death of Winnie Mandela in 2018.  It is horrifying to read wat happened and the women concerned – Shanthie Naidoo, Rita Ndzanga, Nondwe Mankahla and Joyce Sikhakhane – are still traumatized by what happened to them over fifty years ago.  The other three women – Martha Dhlamini, Thokozile Mngoma and Winnie Mandela – are no longer alive to tell this story.

The 22 were held in solitary confinement.  They were incommunicado.  Their families did not know where they were.  The only people they saw were their interrogators and their warders.  They did not have access to lawyers.  Anything could happen to them, and they understood people had died in detention, murdered by the security police.

All the prisoners, both male and female, were tortured mentally and physically to force them to confess.  The torture involved sleep deprivation, lack of food, physical assault and, of course, lack of company.  But for the women it was far worse.  There was the ever-present threat of rape.  None of these women were raped, but the threat was always there, and women prisoners had been raped.  What probably saved these women was that they were being eld in detention, pending trial, and had not yet been found guilty of anything.  

What they did have to endure was not being provided wit sanitary products when they needed them.  It is hard to describe how awful this was. It was not something that was forgotten.  Their warders were women.

I am in complete awe of these women.  Somehow, they survived everything that they went through, and emerged defiant.  When they stood in the witness box, they repudiated the statements that had been extracted from them.  They refused to give evidence against Winnie Mandela even though they were threatened with a return to solitary confinement.  They defied the apartheid state to do its worst.  The case against Winnie collapsed because there was no evidence.  

The women were eventually released.  Rita and Nondwe returned to their communities, but Shanthie and Joyce were forced into exile which is where I met them. They did not speak about their experiences.  The subject was forbidden.  We should have recognized that they needed treatment, but this was the 1970s, and we did not know about Post Traumatic Stress. let alone how to treat it.  Shanthie and Joyce still have flashbacks and/or nightmares.  Joyce is supported by her family and Shanthie by her husband, Dominic Tweedie.

Reading this book as made me ashamed that we did not offer Shanthie and Joyce more help, but they threw themselves back into the struggle (Shanthie in London and Joyce in Edunburgh0 and we assumed that they had recovered.  We should have known better.

Shanthini Naidoo (no relation to Shanthie) has done a remarkable job in putting this book together.  It is a book that everyone should read.