EXTRACT | In the image of God

Detention without trial in South Africa began in 1960 with the declaration of the first state of emergency, which permitted the arbitrary practice, and “the year 1963 saw its introduction into the permanent legislation of the land through the General Law Amendment Act No 37, one of the forerunners of the modern-day Internal Security Act No 74 of 1982 …“

In the 30 years from 1960–1990, an estimated 78,000 people were detained, with some, including children, dying from torture in police custody. A Rand Daily Mail editorial of November 8 1978 had posed some poignant questions about Sally’s detention on October 25: “If [the police] believed that she had transgressed any law — even one of the Nationalist-made ‘security’ laws — why couldn’t [a] normal police investigation have been undertaken and whatever evidence available placed before a state prosecutor for [a] decision? And if the prosecutor thought the case was well founded, why couldn’t charges then have been brought?"

For the first two weeks, Sally was held under the General Law Amendment Act and subsequently under the Terrorism Act, even as the police had no evidence of her participation in anything remotely resembling terrorist activity. She was kept in police custody at Jeppe Police Station, Johannesburg, and released on December 19 1978 without charge but with the warning that the attorney-general of the then Transvaal province retained the right to order her rearrest at any time he deemed necessary.

While in detention, Sally was intensively questioned by the police, “especially about how and why she had allowed five young women visiting from Port Elizabeth (now known as Gqeberha) to stay overnight in her home in January 1978″. Echoing Mathabathe’s view about detention without trial, the Rand Daily Mail editorial concluded: “Mrs Motlana’s detention illustrates what is now a frighteningly common practice: detain on some suspicion, fish around for evidence that could stand the light of the day, and then at a later stage, whether weeks or many months later, bring charges or release the victim without so much as an apology.”

Invariably, the conditions in detention were as inhumane as they were dehumanising. Sally recalled that in the middle of the normally unfriendly Johannesburg winter: “The very first week I got there (the Old Fort), I noticed that at the top of the cell, the glass pane on the window was broken. When the wind blew, it came in directly on to me, and it was very cold. I complained defiance and detention to the warden and she told me that they would repair it, but they never did. After a month, I decided not to complain anymore. Then the Red Cross came to visit. Suddenly they brought beds, mattresses, blankets, a mat, and a chair to sit on. There was movement in the prison. Suddenly there were pillows. We hadn’t had pillows. In every cell, they were bringing those things in.”

It was a providential occasion, as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had a scheduled visit the next day, but Sally decided that she would not participate in the prison authorities’ public relations exercise to sanitise their and the government’s image. At 3.30pm, when the prisoners were to return to their cells, Sally went into hers, grabbed her blanket, and again went out to sit on the stoep, refusing to stay in her cell.

Why do you give me those things now when I have been here for over a month and have been complaining about the broken window without you lifting a finger to fix it?

“I said, ‘I’m sure that that cell is not meant for me. Why do you give me those things now when I have been here for over a month and have been complaining about the broken window without you lifting a finger to fix it?’”

When the wardens told Sally that the ICRC was coming the next day, she snapped, “Oh, so you want to fake how you treat us? I’m not going in.”

For 2½ hours, the wardens begged Sally to return to her cell, with her insisting that the “inside and outside are the same because of the broken window”. When one of the wardens assured her that she had ordered a glass pane, Sally asked, “Where were those beds before?”

What had also incensed her was that: “The white prisoners used to sleep on beds and had shoes and socks. We didn’t even have underwear.”

Apartheid was everywhere: in and outside prison, all-encompassing. In her autobiography, Jwara! Induna’s Daughter, Joyce Piliso-Seroke recalls that her cell was close to Sally’s, so she was the first to notice that after “the other inmates had returned to their cells”, her neighbour had decided to remain sitting outside covered in a blanket: “I immediately alerted the other[s] … and we all gathered our blankets and went back out, refusing to enter our cells in solidarity with Sally. The warden begged us, but her plea fell on deaf ears. Eventually, she reported the matter to the lieutenant, who threatened to call the security police to disperse us, but we were not deterred. Wrapped in our blankets, we sat outside our cells singing protest songs. Finally, in the evening, the lieutenant came and promised that since there were no technicians at that hour of the night, the window would be fixed the following day."

Sally recalled her reply: “I said, ‘If it’s not fixed, this is going to be my home,’ and I went into the cell.” As Joyce Seroke confirmed: “After Sally submitted, we [also] returned to our cells.”

The prisoners’ victory strengthened their resolve to fight on, as it once more proved that, although powerful, their jailers could be challenged in their own terrain. Relatedly, it also lifted their spirits. Joyce wrote that: “Although that night had been cold, I will never forget how ecstatic I was to see the twinkling stars in the sky. Since the day I was detained, that was the first time I had seen them, as we were always made to move into our cells in the late afternoon. Our solidarity with Sally’s cause proved to be a plus for me.”

Sally recalled that the following morning, the inmates were woken early. “There were male prisoners with stepladders who had come to fix the window — and so many for a small window. They fixed it. They were not happy with what I did, but I didn’t care."

Like Sally, Winnie Mandela also stood up to the “abuse from wardresses”, which Sibusisiwe Nxongo (2019) put down to the two women’s “class and political influence”. Such an opinion ignores the “fervent spirit of struggle” and agency of scores of working-class and peasant women who participated in struggles against colonialism, apartheid, and other oppressive regimes worldwide. Instead, Sally and Winnie’s political impact was the result of their convictions and efforts to organise themselves and others into a collective process of struggle whose cumulative force became influential.

Sally and Winnie’s political impact was the result of their convictions and efforts to organise themselves and others into a collective process of struggle whose cumulative force became influential

After 1994, the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE), a post-apartheid constitutional creation, found a home at the east wing of the Old Women’s Jail, where Sally and her comrades had been incarcerated in the 1970s. Its boardroom “now occupies the space of the demolished cells that once accommodated our group of political prisoners”.

When Mme Joyce Piliso-Seroke served as CGE chairperson in the seven years between 1999 and 2007, she would, on occasion, “entertain … staff to tea in that boardroom to celebrate their birthdays, and they would ask me why the cracks and crevices on the walls had been left so naked and ugly".

As Joyce explained: “Those cracks had been left that way intentionally, to remind us of the painful past so that we would be grateful for the changes we enjoy. I also narrated stories of our horrible experiences to the younger staff members to ensure that they enjoyed their rights responsibly.”

An earshot from the CGE offices is the seat of the Constitutional Court — its very existence a loud statement of post-apartheid South Africa’s ill-disposition to the arbitrary rule of an era gone by — which completes the symbolism of the decision to domicile the commission in the precinct.

Sally’s detention in 1976 lasted three months, during which she had little contact with the outside world. When she returned, it would be to a changed Soweto, one that was as bewildering as it was concerning. By then an internationally recognised leader in the church movement locally and on the wider African continent, Sally’s incarceration caught the attention of the church beyond South Africa’s borders.

In December 1976, the American Episcopal Church passed a resolution protesting the “improper […] imprison[ment]“ of ”many Christian leaders … including Mrs Sally Motlana".

The church also resolved to extend its “love and concern to those Anglicans and other persons witnessing to freedom in Southern Africa and especially to Mrs Motlana”. A month earlier, on November 14, The New York Times had published a lengthy article that not only reported on Sally’s detention but severely chastised the Pretoria regime and called for the US government’s support of the oppressed.

“Law in South Africa,” it read, “has become a perverted mockery of itself”, and the government’s banning of publications with which it disagrees “made it clear that it does not want the truth to be published”. Whereas US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “has spoken against racism”, he had nevertheless “allowed South Africans to believe that the US is not really concerned about their problem”.

On November 18, PM Cohen, South Africa’s ambassador to the US, wrote to Pretoria to alert his capital of the newspaper article. “The writer of the article refers to the arrest of Mrs S. Motlana, and, in the light thereof, criticises the South African laws under which she has been detained. Mr [Anthony] Lewis — the writer — also emphasises that America will, whether or not she wishes to, have to remain concerned about developments in South Africa."

The secretary of foreign affairs forwarded the article to the commissioner of police and secretaries of justice and the interior.

Titled “In the Image of God”, Lewis’s sub-editor used a statement Sally had made to challenge and expose the assumptions upon which apartheid was based. “The Bible teaches me that I am made in the image of God. I believe that — I honestly believe that — and I don’t see how other Christians can discriminate against me. Then they must teach me again, and tell me I am not made by God, and teach me who did make me."

Representing a state founded on Christian Calvinistic principles, Cohen and his colleagues must have had their work cut out for them. How were they to convince Christians and members of other faiths that white and Black people were made by different gods? As monotheists, how would they sustain the idea that having created all his children in his image, God had an inferior side embodied in Black people and was consequently comfortable with racial discrimination?

Sally’s questioning of racial discrimination through the prism of the Christian religion was an affront to one of the fundamental pillars on which apartheid claimed its legitimacy — the idea that “God shows [or accords] special favour towards the Afrikaner” and whites in general, or, as Jimmy Kruger put it at the 1973 National Party congress: “All men are equal before God, but all men are not equal before man because the differences are obvious.” That was as true for South Africa as it was for the US and other jurisdictions, where the primary political contradiction took the form of race.

• Faith & Defiance – The life of Sally Motlana is published by Seriti Sa Sechaba Publishers