The paper explores the ways in which three South African women activists and colleagues have represented the effects of a drastic curtailment of their personal and political freedom in the 1960s.
Rusty Bernstein, the husband of Hilda Bernstein and soon to be one of the accused in the Rivonia Trial, was placed under house arrest late in 1962. Her account of their lives under constant surveillance is given in The World that Was Ours: The Story of the Rivonia Trial (1989, 1967). Helen Joseph was the first person to be placed under house arrest in South Africa, on 13 October 1962; she has told the story of being “my own gaoler” in Side by Side: The Autobiography of Helen Joseph (1986). Lilian Ngoyi did not publish during her lifetime and no original copies of her speeches seem to have survived. What does, however, remain is a collection of unpublished letters, also written some years after the immediate shock of being subjected to the State’s wrath.
The larger context for my inquiry is the ambiguities that surround ‘home’ in a country like South Africa. The extremes of these ambiguities are suggested on the one hand by Njabulo S Ndebele who, like many others displaced by apartheid, longed to show his children the house where he was born, but had to endure the pain of his home having been destroyed. Germaine Greer, on the other hand, has renounced the idea of home, arguing that in a post-colonial and globalizing world where migration is the gathering reality, “exile [is] the human condition.” In their accounts of ‘self’ and a ‘home’, both attitudes seem to have been necessary—sometimes in intertwined form, and probably as a result of a coerced sense of loss—to the women whose writings I wish to explore.