Reactions to Women Surviving Apartheids Prisons
(published in South Africa as Women in Solitary)
Women Surviving Apartheids Prisons is a compelling, heart-breaking, and inspiring work about a largely ignored side to the anti-apartheid/national democratic revolution in South Africa. So many of the stories that we hear or read about in connection with South Africa focus on great men. Taking nothing away from them, Women Surviving Apartheids Prisons examines the South African revolution from the point of view of women, and in this case, women with whom many of us outside of South Africas borders are unfamiliar. That makes this a must-read!
BILL FLETCHER, JR.
Executive editor, Global African Worker; past president, TransAfrica Forum
This book jerks the conscience. It reminds us of how easily we have forgotten the price of freedom and our inadequacies in valuing and celebrating the efforts that have gone into the struggle for a just, united, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa. All those who wish to have a richer understanding of history, including the wide scope of uses of sexual violence as a weapon of war in apartheid South Africa, and an understanding of the impact of generational trauma today, simply must get a copy.
RENEVA FOURIE
Board member, The Joe Slovo Foundation
As we grapple with deeply troubling divisiveness in America, it is clear to me that what is missing in the minds of so many is historyours, as well as that of people who fought the same fight all over the world to ensure that all people, regardless of how they were officially identified, enjoyed the same freedoms. It is therefore so appropriate and extremely timely that we have Shanthini Naidoos deeply moving and affecting narrative about the women who paid such a high price for freedom for all in South Africa. To be sure, the story of the sacrifice of Winnie Mandela has been well told; but having known her during my days in South Africa, it is my belief that Ancestor Winnie would be rejoicing over this latest, more inclusive Herstory.
Recounting Herstories would be on time, anytime, but it is especially so as we also mark the 100th Anniversary of the suffragette movement in the United States and update the efforts of Black women who, like the imprisoned women freedom fighters in apartheid South Africa, were initially not included.
It is my fervent hope that these stories of their sacrifice, while painful, willlike strong medicinehelp heal the wounds of division and bring us all closer to the promise these women believed in and, yes, are a prime example of that South African saying: Wathint Abafazi, Wathint Imbokodo, that is, When you strike the women, you strike the rock. These women lived it.
Teach, Shanthini Naidoo, Teach!
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT
Rights activist and broadcast journalism icon
A vital slice of South African history. Naidoo beckons these forgotten women back to center stage to remind us, achingly, of what true courage and sacrifice mean.
MICHELE MAGWOOD
Former books editor, The Sunday Times (South Africa)
This is one of those books that make you shed tears in the middle of reading it. We are reminded of the sacrifices made by many of our people in the execution of the struggle for liberation.
DR. KHULU MBATHA
Chairperson, Ekukhanyeni Relief Project; ANC veteran and author
The book is an enlightened yet critical view of how our women have coped with punishment, trauma and torture in solitary detention during shameful periods of our history. Those experiences, challenges and uncertainties have sadly been replaced by either idyllic or prejudicial fantasies. Shanthini has helped rekindle interest in the events of 1969. It needed heroines like Shanthie Naidoo to nurture a sense of nationhood.
The history of South Africans of Indian origin has moments of pride and shame. Unless we understand their struggles of the past, we will not understand the liberties of the present. Women in Solitary is an enlightened message that could just as well be relevant for all South Africans.
AMI NANAKCHAND
Veteran South African journalist
The struggle against the last vestiges of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa was the struggle against South African Apartheid, which ended in 1994. It was a struggle very close to my heart. Through my participation in the international solidarity movement I was deeply inspired by the courage and determination of the South African people to be free. Most of the best-known heroes of that struggle are men: Mandela, Biko, Tutu and others. But Shanthini Naidoos powerful new book, Women Surviving Apartheids Prisons, reveals that South African women not only were dedicated freedom fighters against apartheid, they also paid a high price for their commitments. She chronicles the sacrifices and triumphs of four South African women, including Winnie Mandela, co-defendants in a 1969 trial, all of whom served time in prison.
These women were banned, jailed, tortured, assaulted, separated from their families and yet they persevered, their spirits and principles intact. Their struggles are more relevant today than ever as young women in the United States and around the globe are fighting at the forefront of movements for climate justice, reproductive justice and against white supremacy and police violence. They should indeed know the names of Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin, Nondwe Mankahla, Shanthie Naidoo, Rita Ndzanga, and of course, Winnie Mandelatheir foremothers in the ongoing fight for a better world.
BARBARA RANSBY
Historian and activist, author of the award-winning study Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
Women Surviving Apartheids Prisons brings to life the hidden history of the critical and heroic role that South African women Freedom Fighters played in the liberation of their country from the draconian apartheid regime that had held the country in its bloody talons for far too long. These heroic women paid and paid dearly in their bodies, minds, and souls to free their country. As so often happens, until now we have learned only of the Mandelas and the other men who gave so much to free their country. (Just like here in the U.S. Freedom Struggle where we learn of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and the other men of our struggle)
I am so grateful to Shanthini Naidoo for bringing to the forefront some of the women who gave up so much for their and their peoples freedom. Say their names! Say their names! Tell their stories! Add their names to the Pantheon of those who gave so much for Freedom!
GWENDOLYN ZOHARAH SIMMONS, PH.D.
Former U.S. Civil Rights Activist and scholar of that Movement
Naidoo is an accomplished narrator who joins a powerhouse generation of South African writers who are trying to wake us up Using oral narrative, research, archives, interviews, analysis and her experience as a journalist, she draws a tight bowstring on the South Africa mirage. That a book about our abraded history is so readable is a remarkable achievement. And that it remains so compassionately focused on women of extraordinary character who were scarred, broken and murdered by a system which is not yet destroyed, is progressive
Naidoo has produced one of the most important and gripping examinations of the gendered fight of apartheid and its human beings.
