At the Croesus Cemetery in Newclare, Johannesburg, near the Walter and Albertina Sisulu Memorial Garden, lies Vesta Smith, née Mpama (1922–2013), affectionately known as Ma Vesta or Ma Vee. She was a prominent community activist who put social justice at the centre of her life, 71 years of which she spent in Noordgesig, Soweto, situated to the south-west of Johannesburg, where she became an institution. Next to Ma Vesta’s grave, which also contains the remains of her first child, activist Cecilie Lynette Palmer (1944–2019), is that of fellow stalwart Ismail Jacob Mohamed, better known as Professor Mohamed (1930–2013).
Although this section of the cemetery is dubbed the Heroes’ Acre, one is struck by the difference between the modest graves of Vesta Smith and Professor Mohamed and the grandiose Sisulu memorial. One of my interlocutors used this contrast as a metaphor for the different weight given to anti-apartheid activists. Since then, Ma Vee’s previously unmarked grave received a marble headstone at the initiative of the department of arts and culture in consultation with some family members — the unveiling ceremony took place on July 23 2022 after several postponements due to the various Covid lockdowns. Though important, this posthumous acknowledgement is not equivalent to that accorded to national icons such as the Sisulus.
Some recognition was given while Vesta Smith was still alive. In 2008, she received the Order of Luthuli in Silver for “her excellent contribution to the struggle against apartheid and her tireless involvement in the development of the communities around her”. The ceremony was held at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and the award presented to her by then president Thabo Mbeki. On August 30 2012, Ma Vee was honoured by the Legal Resources Centre at its annual awards dinner held during Women’s Month. After her passing in 2013, aged 91, the struggle veteran received a provincial funeral organised by the ANC and held at St Andrew’s Catholic Church in Noordgesig before an overflowing crowd, followed by a slightly more intimate memorial service.
Although these are fitting forms of recognition, there was much more to Ma Vee than being an ANC stalwart. She may be considered as part of a substantial group of black women who have been marginalised as a result of their lack of engagement in “the public sphere of politics and political parties”, as Cherryl Walker has famously written. Even if Ma Vee did engage in the public sphere, she was involved in community rather than party work.
The political contributions of black South African women who held official roles within the anti-apartheid movement (like Fatima Meer) or were married to leading ANC figures (like Albertina Sisulu and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela) are well documented. Yet, those who did not lead any organisation at national level, including those who participated in but did not lead the historic Women’s March of 1956, have received scant scholarly attention.
Exceptions are Ellen Kuzwayo’s 1985 and Emma Mashinini’s 1989 autobiographies, classics that were first published overseas during apartheid, as well as the biography of Jabu Ndlovu, published in South Africa in 1991. Notably, the lives of several black women political activists are beginning to be uncovered.
Joyce Piliso-Seroke published her autobiography in 2020, at the age of 86; and the biographies of Elizabeth Mafeking and Josie Mpama/Palmer were published in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Born in 1903, Josie was Vesta’s older sister from their father’s first marriage. She was the first black female member of the Communist Party of South Africa. Some activists such as Barbara Masekela, a significant figure in the ANC in exile, first heard of Vesta because of her well-known sister.
The life history of Vesta Smith is important for reasons ranging from the need to reconstruct the remarkable contributions of those anti-apartheid activists — especially black women — who are absent from both scholarly and popular accounts of the liberation struggle, to the need to expand our understanding of the struggle beyond the experiences of “great men” who played leading roles within official organisations, the most studied being the ANC. But there are other, more pressing reasons for telling this story.
Ma Vee should not be solely defined by, and remembered for, her connection to the cause of liberation, and even less so by her association with the ANC. In other words, she should not be simply characterised as a forgotten or under-recognised ANC stalwart. Without denying that she was influenced by the Congress Movement, and that she belongs to the considerable group of “unsung” activists whose lives warrant greater recognition, I am more interested in construing Ma Vesta as a “bridge-builder” who was more at home in local community-based bodies than in national leadership positions or high-profile mass meetings.
Vesta Smith was a grassroots community organiser, a “permanent mobiliser” whose involvement was not defined by partisan political affiliations and whose life centred on social justice and revolved around her visceral rejection of inequality. She epitomises an understudied and underestimated category of community activists who did not occupy — and did not aspire to occupy — key political positions, but whose constant presence (often in the background) and efforts as facilitators of connections laid the foundation for change and, in time, enabled the formation and growth of progressive organisations and various mass movements. Reconstructing the life of Vesta Smith helps illuminate the stories of those activists who emerged from the ranks of the oppressed and developed political consciousness (in this case, of race, class and gender oppression) and leadership skills. These are the hallmarks of “organic intellectuals” or community leaders — though the latter is a label Ma V rejected in favour of community worker.
Vesta Smith established herself as a voice to be reckoned with during the 1976 Soweto uprising. This is when, owing to her participation in two historic events (namely, the signing of the Freedom Charter in 1955 and the Women’s March in 1956), she came to be widely regarded as a veteran of the struggle and as someone who represented a vital link between the movements of the 1950s and the new rebellions. Young activists-in-the-making who met her for the first time realised that she was part of a wider network of senior comrades. Unlike some veterans who were wary of the emerging younger generation, Ma Vee keenly assisted those who stood against apartheid regardless of their age and affiliation, and became a shaping force in their lives. Therefore, I claim, she was a bridge-builder between generations, organisations and ideologies. These bridges, of course, could overlap, and she was not necessarily operating as a bridge-builder in a conscious way; but her practice certainly had that effect.
Even if some radical youths who met Ma Vesta in the 1960s and 1970s sensed that she may have been an ANC operative, it is important to stress that she was not a member of the banned ANC and did not recruit people to the underground. This is not only because her classification as a coloured person would have precluded her membership, but because she was a non-sectarian activist. Furthermore, being acutely aware of the dangers in belonging to proscribed organisations, she thought that “often it was more useful if activists were not paid-up members of any organisation ... as the government was banning them so regularly”.
Ma Vee did not build bridges between the movement inside the country and that in exile; she worked among individuals and ideological groups located mostly in Johannesburg. Examining the extent to which the activists who were coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s sought the guidance of struggle veterans like Vesta Smith also contributes to challenge the trope of a heightened generational conflict after June 16.
Church activism
In the early 1950s, she moved to the Catholic Church mainly because her partner was a devout Catholic. By the time Beyers Naudé broke away from the Dutch Reformed Church and from a type of Christianity that buttressed apartheid, Vesta was already putting her Christian beliefs to the service of the communities around her as she saw challenging all forms of injustices as her spiritual duty. Reflecting on her life during an interview in 1985, she said: “[M]y whole involvement in the political struggle is a Christian conviction.” The bridges Ma Vesta built also comprised those between church and community; after apartheid, between Christianity and other religions.
Classified non-racialist
As she stated in 1985, “non-racialism is good. That should be the solution to all our problems actually.” Vesta Smith was born to a coloured mother and an African father who died when she was five. Later classified as coloured, she shunned the label and the racial category behind it. Non-racialism was a praxis that can be traced back to her early life in the cosmopolitan inner-city of Johannesburg. If she drew her non-racialism from her lived experience, the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement provided her with the language to articulate her blackness in political terms. After a brief stint in the Labour Party and in the Noordgesig Tenants’ Association in the late 1960s, she detached herself from these organisations when it became clear to her that they upheld narrow coloured interests and, ultimately, backed apartheid. Although Ma V forged interracial networks throughout her life, in the 1970s her close association with the Black Consciousness Movement turned into a complex relationship with white people. In retrospect, in an interview she gave in 1985, she understood this stance as an integral part of her journey towards personal liberation and her bid to defeat her deference to white people, which her mother had inculcated in her during her childhood.
In the current context in which the re-emergence of narrow identity politics has led to a critique of non-racialism, the life history of a self-identified black woman who was classified as coloured and who remained true to non-racialism is significant as it speaks powerfully to contemporary South Africa.
Working in marginalised communities
Ma Vesta’s life helps us grasp the political role of marginalised townships and insert them (and their residents) into struggle narratives and into the broader historiography of Johannesburg. Established in the 1930s, Noordgesig was designated for poorer townspeople classified as coloureds, while Bosmont (1959) and Riverlea (1960) were intended for both middle- and working-class coloureds. Unlike the coloured areas established in the western parts of Johannesburg in the 1950s and 1960s, Noordgesig lacked a neighbouring coloured township. Adjacent to the politically prominent Orlando, and neglected in studies of the liberation struggle, Noordgesig has nonetheless produced significant political figures who, at different times, lived in, or were forcefully relocated to, this area. Among them are Godfrey Kenneth “Ottie” Beck (1925–1986, also a recipient of the Order of Luthuli), trade-unionist Rose Jardine (known as Aunty Vicky) and her son Bill, as well as younger activists such as the late Basil Douglas (1960–2019), Ignatius “Nash” Jacobs (1963–2020), and the brothers Clarence and Weizmann Hamilton. Most of them did not become well known outside local political circles, save for Jardine and Jacobs, who after democracy rose to national prominence within the ANC.
Cathedrals of humanity
Ma Vee’s life history is important for how she fiercely cherished her maternal qualities: she was a motherly figure to friends, workmates and comrades, did not neglect her large family because of her activism, and did not consider her nurturing roles and public roles as dichotomous. From the 1950s onwards, she was part of organisations that aimed to empower women and uplift their position within the family and their townships. Some of her later public statements suggest that in the 1980s she saw the struggle for gender equality as subsidiary to the struggle for racial equality — a way of thinking shared by many women of her era. This view, which should not be oversimplified, masks a much more layered and complex understanding of women’s and gender issues. Although Ma Vesta’s activities and language fall under the rubric of “maternalist politics”, shedding light onto her caring qualities does not lessen her impact as a catalyst of change in her own right. In fact, her practice consistently upheld women’s agency and empowerment.
As Nomboniso Gasa reminds us, binaries that posit blackness and the liberation struggle against feminism are not the most productive lens to understand black women’s political contributions. It is also important to keep in mind that, in the words of Meghan Healy-Clancy, “nationalism was a gendered project in which women were integral — not in spite of, but because of, their expanding claims to familial authority”.
• This is an edited extract from A Rare Gift to The Struggle: Ma Vesta and the Everyday Politics of Liberation by Maria Suriano which is published by Jacana Media
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