“The Black Sash has dared to stand for justice, year after year, in the face of the hostility of those who have power. We salute them as the conscience of white South Africa,” Nelson Mandela said in February 1990, praising the human rights organisation which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year and remains a champion of social justice.
From the 1950s to the 90s, white women wearing sashes stood on streets or in front of state institutions protesting apartheid laws with placards such as “Stop the Hangings” and “Just Land Allocation”. In Joburg, Sash mothers sat in a plastic-sheeted shack on Jan Smuts Avenue holding a toddler and the sign “Being Homeless is Not a Crime”. A message that is as relevant today.
The Black Sash helped to set up advice offices to fight apartheid laws and develop the rural women’s movement and the Transvaal Rural Action Committe. With TRAC’s support the people of Driefontein (present-day Mpumalanga) successfully resisted their forced resettlement into the ‘homeland’ of KaNgwane.
Acclaimed photographer Gille de Vlieg held vigil for five days in 1983 in the chapel of Khotso House in the Joburg CBD in support of the Driefontein community.
“One night while I was sleeping in the chapel, I heard voices in the foyer at the tin toilet we had put up. I found three young men looking at the images,” she said of the UDF activists who later took her into Thembisa, northeast of Johannesburg. “The young guys wanted me to talk to their parents about why they were not going to school.”
De Vlieg’s work is at the heart of the Black Sash’s 70th anniversary exhibition, which features original posters and artefacts. The interactive exhibition opens on Thursday at the District 6 Museum in Cape Town, before travelling to the National Arts Festival in Makhanda.
De Vlieg joined the Black Sash after finding its contact details in the phone book. After her first protest was in wintry Joburg, she soon became vice-chair of the Joburg Committee. “The apartheid government was doing things in my name I did not support... I felt this is where I needed to be,” she said in a telephonic interview from her home in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal.
In 1986 she was detained for 37 days at Hillbrow police station and says her privilege protected her. “I was white, middle class and middle aged and that made a difference.”
Black Sash historic snapshot
The Sash’s members used their privilege as white women to drive in and out of the townships to expose and fight human rights violations. They monitored pass law courts and supported paralegal advice offices throughout the country. “The advice offices were the foundation stone of the Black Sash and gave us insight into the conditions people lived under,” said De Vlieg.
When detentions, deaths behind bars and bannings escalated in the 1970s as resistance to apartheid increased, Black Sash leaders like Sheena Duncan drew attention to the escalating brutality and the deaths in detention.
The Sash supported political prisoners and their families, and its leaders were trusted. “Human rights lawyers would phone Sheena in the morning to ask what she had found in the latest Hansard,” De Vlieg said. She led the Black Sash in supporting the launch of the End Conscription Campaign in 1983, which gained popular support.
We still exist because the government is failing to look after the most vulnerable…The majority are being left behind
— Black Sash executive director Rachel Bukasa
Activists put themselves on the line. “My favourite was Albertina Sisulu. The first time we met at her home, she was in her nurse’s uniform and she made us tea. She never wavered (in her commitment) despite her husband being on Robben Island and her children in exile... there was a wonderful unity despite the terrors of the time,” said De Vlieg. “We were all linked together by the word ‘com’.”
Audrey Coleman, who cofounded the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, would enter townships hit by vigilantes to expose the violence. Molly Blackburn collected affidavits on police brutality in townships like Langa and Cradock and died in a car crash after one such trip in 1985. At her funeral 20,000 mourners paid tribute to her.
The Black Sash was instrumental in the Free the Children Campaign (from detention) and opposed the death penalty — about 130 political prisoners were executed from 1963 to 1989. Before 1994, it expanded its focus to voter education for elections.
Black Sash today
Many South Africans remember the Black Sash’s role under apartheid but are unaware of what it does today — but the 18-million South Africans who rely on South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) grants are aware the Black Sash monitors delivery.
In 1995 Black Sash transitioned from a member-based outfit to an NGO. “We still exist because the government is failing to look after the most vulnerable... The majority are being left behind,” executive director Rachel Bukasa said in an interview at their Cape Town headquarters.
In the absence of jobs, people are even more desperate, disillusioned and angry than before 1994 when they harboured hopes of a better future, she said.
“If you are destitute, what is there to catch you? People are running from pillar to post. In the absence of jobs we need a safety net that is consolidated, not haphazard. As a country we cannot accept that a mother kills herself and her three children because they are hungry (as happened in 2023 in the Eastern Cape).”
In a joint interview with Bukasa soon after her appointment, former president Mary Burton said: “I cannot understand why Black Sash member Zille Harries Baird lights the Amnesty candle in Durban in 1989. People who are privileged and have access to enough for their own lives are not eager also to provide the kind of security that would come from knowing their fellow citizens have at least a basic means of existence...
“For your own conscience, your own future and the future of your children, you should be trying to build a society that would be of benefit to all its citizens.”
Black Sash is at the forefront of more than 120 civil society organisations advocating for a “social protection floor” based on five pillars: a basic income grant (BIG), access to nutrition, health, basic services, and education.
In February, government departments joined NGOs in a workshop to develop this framework and advocacy will be a key focus in the year ahead, said Bukasa.
Social support for the most vulnerable
“The Black Sash is everywhere,” says Brian Alcock, director of the country’s oldest advice office in Athlone. Black Sash pamphlets are piled next to others on debt, shelters, rehab services at the entrance. Donated loaves of bread lie next to them.
“For 35 years we’ve had a good partnership with the Black Sash,” said Alcock, who keeps files with completed case sheets. Officially the advice office is closed on Fridays but Alcock unhesitatingly helps a woman who walks through the door asking about the deeds office.
Athlone Advice Office usually sees 10 to 15 people a day and problems with the Sassa cards, grants, housing issues and wills dominate their work. “I have gone at 2.30am to get in line for my grant and then I’ve waited for about 12 hours and then the official says they will not see any more people, and we must come back again,” said one such applicant, 61-year-old William Veale.
Posters on the walls reflect the findings of the Black Sash’s critical community-based monitoring of grant payouts including the percentage completed, queue waiting times and the quality of service.
About 3,5m black South Africans were forcibly relocated into ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’
— Under apartheid
“Advice offices are at the front line in people’s fight to get access to justice,” said Amanda Rinquest, the Black Sash’s national education and training manager, who had just returned from a week’s training with Thuso Advice Office in remote Pampierstad, in the Northern Cape.
With partners, Sash runs an annual Dullah Omar School to train paralegals and Stellenbosch University law clinic supports advice office work.
Black Sash is rigorous about tracking Sassa grant payments, consistently raising the alarm around systemic failures and corruption, and it made submissions to the Zondo Commission on the social grants crisis in 2017. As a founding member of the Hands Off Our Grants campaign, the Sash mobilised public support and helped secure a Constitutional Court victory protecting grant beneficiaries from unlawful deductions.
The Black Sash was pivotal to the case that held former social development minister Bathabile Dlamini personally liable for legal costs — the first time in democratic South Africa that a cabinet minister was ordered to pay such costs from their own pocket.
Western Cape Black Sash regional manager Thandi Henkeman said patterns and themes emerge from their monitoring and they go back to the community and stakeholders for robust dialogues on these issues. “We do advocacy at all levels,” she said of work intended to inform policy.
A toll-free helpline assists about 3,000 people annually, said Bukasa, referring callers to paralegals and relevant services. In one case, a woman recovered R50,000 in unpaid grants with their support.
Finding hope in Trump times
2025 has been a volatile year for the NGO sector and the Black Sash which, though it is not funded by USAID, has not been exempt from cuts in funding, said Bukasa. “One of the challenges has been Mr Trump’s presidency. What we’ve seen is an anxiety in the sector and a scramble for the existing resources.”
On a more personal level, she said: “It is hard to see your work go into a never-ending hole of poverty and feel like (you barely) make a dent. It’s disheartening when you see the numbers — but you have to remind yourself, daily, you are trying to help one person at a time.
“What has been rewarding is seeing how civil society has rallied together in these Trump times and we have seen some funders and philanthropists come to the party and say, ‘how can we salvage this?’.
“I have a very strong team at Sash,” said Bukasa, who has run a number of other organisations. “They are passionate. This is passion before work for them and you see this every day.”
In the Black Sash boardroom, oversized photos celebrate its founding values, such as courage, justice and human dignity. Seventy years on, they still shine strong.
* For free paralegal advice call 0800 601 011 or visit blacksash.org.za
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