essay about the pass laws in south africa

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Women's Anti-Pass Law Campaigns in South Africa

What happened when the SA government tried to force women to carry passes.

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The first attempt to make Black women in South Africa carry passes was in 1913 when the Orange Free State introduced a new requirement that women, in addition to existing regulations for Black men, must carry reference documents. The resulting protest, by a multi-racial group of women, many of whom were professionals (a large number of teachers, for example) took the form of passive resistance - a refusal to carry the new passes. Many of these women were supporters of the recently formed South African Native National Congress (which became the African National Congress in 1923, although women were not allowed to become full members until 1943). The protest against passes spread through the Orange Free State, to the extent that when World War I broke out, the authorities agreed to relax the rule.

At the end of World War I, the authorities in the Orange Free State tried to re-instate the requirement, and again opposition built up. The Bantu Women's League (which became the ANC Woman's League in 1948 — a few years after membership of the ANC was opened to women), organized by its first president Charlotte Maxeke, coordinated further passive resistance during late 1918 and early 1919. By 1922 they had achieved success — the South African government agreed that women should not be obliged to carry passes. However, the government still managed to introduce legislation which curtailed the rights of women and the Native (Black) Urban Areas Act No 21 of 1923 extended the existing pass system such that the only Black women allowed to live in urban areas were domestic workers.

In 1930 local municipal attempts in Potchefstroom to regulate women's movement led to further resistance — this was the same year that white women obtained voting rights in South Africa. White women now had a public face and a political voice, of which activists such as Helen Joseph and Helen Suzman took full advantage.

Introduction of Passes for All Blacks

With the Blacks (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act No 67 of 1952 the South African government amended the pass laws, requiring all Black persons over the age of 16 in all provinces to carry a 'reference book' at all times — thereby inforcing influx control of Blacks from the homelands. The new 'reference book', which would now have to be carried by women, required an employer's signature to be renewed each month, authorization to be within particular areas, and certification of tax payments.

During the 1950s women within the Congress Alliance came together to combat the inherent sexism that existed within various anti-Aparthied groups, such as the ANC. Lilian Ngoyi (a trade unionist and political activist), Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu , Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, and others formed the Federation of South African Women. The prime focus of the FSAW soon changed, and in 1956, with the cooperation of the ANC's Women's League, they organized a mass demonstration against the new pass laws.

Women's Anti-Pass March on the Union Buildings, Pretoria

On 9 August 1956 over 20,000 women, of all races, marched through the streets of Pretoria to the Union Buildings to hand over a petition to JG Strijdom, South Africa's prime minister, over the introduction of the new pass laws and the Group Areas Act No 41 of 1950 . This act enforced different residential areas for different races and led to forced removals of people living in 'wrong' areas. Strijdom had arranged to be elsewhere, and the petition was eventually accepted by his Secretary.

During the march the women sang a freedom song: Wathint' abafazi , Strijdom!

wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo, uza kufa!

[When] you strike the women, you strike a rock, you will be crushed [you will die]!

Although the 1950s proved to be the height of passive resistance against Apartheid in South Africa , it was largely ignored by the Apartheid government . Further protests against passes (for both men and women) culminated in the Sharpeville Massacre . Pass laws were finally repealed in 1986.

The phrase wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo has come to represent women's courage and strength in South Africa.

Pass Laws During Apartheid
Grand Apartheid in South Africa
What Was Apartheid in South Africa?
South Africa's National Holidays
Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950
Biography of Nontsikelelo Albertina Sisulu, South African Activist
Understanding South Africa's Apartheid Era
The End of South African Apartheid
Geography and History of South Africa
Chief Albert Luthuli
A Brief History of South African Apartheid
The Origins of Apartheid in South Africa
Why Does South Africa Have Three Capital Cities?
How South African Names of Places Have Changed
The Freedom Charter in South Africa
Biography of Martin Thembisile (Chris) Hani, South African Activist

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Women and apartheid.

Meghan Healy-Clancy Meghan Healy-Clancy Department of History, Bridgewater State University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.184
Published online: 28 June 2017

Apartheid, the system of racial and ethnic separation introduced in South Africa in 1948, was a gendered project. The immediate goal of the white Afrikaner men who led the apartheid state was to control black men: to turn black men from perceived political and criminal threats into compliant workers. Under apartheid, African men would travel to work for whites in towns and on mines, but their homes would be in rural ethnic “reserves,” known as “homelands” or “Bantustans.” This vision depended on the labors of African women: while their men migrated to work, women were to maintain their families in the increasingly overcrowded and desolate countryside, reproducing the workforce cheaply while instilling a sense of ethnic difference in their children. “Coloured” (mixed-race) and Indian women were similarly charged with social reproduction on a shoestring, in segregated rural and urban areas. White women uniquely had the franchise and freedom of movement, but they were also constrained by sexually repressive laws.

Apartheid’s gendered vision of production and social reproduction faced continual resistance, and it ultimately failed. First, it failed because African women increasingly moved from rural areas to urban centers, despite laws limiting their mobility. Second, it failed because some women organized across ethnic and racial lines. They often organized as mothers, demanding a better world for a new generation. Both their nationally and internationally resonant campaigns—against pass laws, educational and health care inequities, police brutality, and military conscription—and the fact of their collective organization gradually undermined apartheid. Officials generally underestimated the power of women, and their contributions have continued to be under-appreciated since apartheid ended in 1994, because women’s political style emphasized personal and familial concerns. But because apartheid was premised on transforming how families lived, actions of women in fact undermined the system from its core.

South Africa

State interventions into the formation and lives of families were central to apartheid: the legal regime of racial and ethnic division that ruled South Africa between the election of Daniel Malan in 1948 and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 , with legacies enduring through the present. From the regime’s inception under the leadership of Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister Malan, ideas of racial purity, sexual restraint, and patriarchy were intertwined. Apartheid’s immediate goal was to control black men—turning them from political threats into compliant workers, to ensure South Africa’s development into an industrialized state in which whites would enjoy growing wealth and political hegemony. But apartheid could only work by also controlling women. Apartheid leaders were concerned with black women (a category that includes women classified as African, Indian, or “Coloured”), as well as with white women (both Afrikaners like apartheid leaders, and women from British and other European backgrounds). Officials saw women as central to creating properly ethnicized and racialized subjects, who would fill their prescribed niches in an economy and polity controlled by white men.

Black women undermined the visions of apartheid from its onset. First, many black women refused to be held in place. African women were supposed to remain confined to rural ethnic “reserves” (known as “homelands” or “Bantustans”), cheaply raising compliant workers and ethnic subjects there while their husbands labored for low wages for whites in towns and on the mines. But from apartheid’s start, women increasingly went to town. African women who stayed on the reserves did not all submit quietly to apartheid’s demands, either. Rural women’s organized resistance—in both political organizations and religious groups—was formidable, attracting both state oppression and gradual reforms. As key urban women activists were forced to the countryside in line with apartheid’s strategies of banning activists, the liveliness of rural resistance only grew.

Across South Africa, across lines of race and class, activist women came together to resist apartheid. While they also worked with men, women particularly organized as mothers—a fitting riposte to a regime rooted in restructuring families. Even as their campaigns attracted national and international support, apartheid officials underestimated their impact, generally seeing women as less threatening political actors than men. Since apartheid ended in 1994 , women’s contributions to the regime’s collapse have continued to attract less popular and scholarly attention than men’s contributions. Yet controlling personal lives and transforming families were core objectives of apartheid policies. Through both individual and collective action, the gendered life choices of many diverse women therefore undermined apartheid from within.

Male-Led Nationalist Movements and the Roots of Apartheid

In May 1948 , the National Party (NP) won the South African general election, inaugurating the era of apartheid: “apartness” in Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived language of the NP’s Afrikaner leaders. The National Party heightened the segregationist policies that had ruled the Union of South Africa since its 1910 formation as a British dominion, ruled by an alliance of British and Afrikaner men. Apartheid added an ideological emphasis on the development of Afrikaners and South Africa’s other ethnic groups, each as a separate volk (people) with distinct racial destinies. 1 Very few black men, and no black women, had the franchise in 1948 . Whites, who then made up about a quarter of South Africa’s population, therefore determined this election: they included both men and women, as white women had the franchise since 1930 , as part of a state strategy to diminish the influence of the small number of black men with the vote. 2

Women as well as men generated the ideas that animated Afrikaner nationalism. They highlighted the historical role of Afrikaners—mostly descendants of 17th-century Dutch settlers in the Cape—in bringing Christianity and European civilization to southern Africa. They mourned Afrikaners’ history of oppression on the frontiers of a growing British Empire, particularly Britain’s brutal treatment of women and children in the South African War a half century before. They called for the urgent uplift of poor Afrikaners, to advance their “race”—against the threat posed by the British-descended South Africans who had for the past century and a half exercised influence in politics and the economy on one hand, and against the increasing threats from politically assertive black South Africans on the other. 3

The black South Africans who so alarmed Afrikaner nationalists included men and women in the African National Congress (ANC) and similar organizations advocating rights for indigenous Africans, as well as other black people known as “Coloureds” (mixed-race) and Indians (descended from the indentured workers and immigrants who came to Natal from the 19th century ). Women played key ideological roles in these groups, stressing their history of protecting their families against the depravities of colonialism and calling for black people to end white domination. But women also struggled against dismissal of their voices by the activist men who led these groups. Women, both black and white, similarly asserted themselves in the male-led Communist Party (CP), which increasingly supported movements for racial equality in South Africa from the mid-1920s through its banning in 1950 . 4

It was important to the formation of apartheid policies that, despite the role of women at the grassroots of both Afrikaner and black movements, the leaders of the NP and its rivals in 1948 were all men. 5 The specter of black men unwilling to submit to white authority, and the inability of the ruling United Party (UP) to make them submit, loomed large in the NP’s 1948 campaign. While the NP achieved its narrow victory with strong support from rural whites, it appealed to white fears of black men in cities. In South Africa, as across the continent in the wake of the Second World War, urban black men were at the helm of organizations that launched boycotts and strikes demanding their rights against white male leaders. The NP particularly feared the potential of activists to spread communism, destroying what they saw as Afrikaner Christian civilization. 6 The NP’s solution was to develop a “white man’s country,” headed by Afrikaner patriarchs. 7

Legislating Sex and Family: The Foundations of Apartheid

Foundational pieces of apartheid legislation tellingly targeted love and sex—demonstrating how control over sex was critical to the production and maintenance of racial difference. 8 In 1949 , the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act barred marriage between “Europeans” (white South Africans, including Afrikaners, British, and other immigrants from Europe) and “non-Europeans” (African, Coloured, and Indian South Africans). 9 It was followed by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 , which prohibited sex between whites and all blacks. This extended the 1927 Immorality Act, which had already restricted sex outside of marriage between whites and Africans: the word “native” in the original act was replaced by the more encompassing “non-European” here. 10 These broadening and hardening restrictions on intimacy revealed officials’ sense that “European civilization” in southern Africa was under siege, and the first place to shore it up was the family home. Interracial sex and marriage would remain illegal until 1985 . 11

Controlling intimacy entailed categorizing people. In the Immorality Amendment Act, the terms “European” and “non-European” were defined culturally: “‘European’ means a person who in appearance obviously is, or who by general acceptance and repute is a European,” and vice versa. 12 Soon after, the Population Registration Act of 1950 established a national register, to categorize each South African more bindingly by race and ethnicity. 13 The accompanying Group Areas Act established the country’s firm segregation along racial and ethnic lines, with specific “groups” restricted to specific regions and neighborhoods; black married women’s ethnicity followed that of their husbands. 14 This legislation displaced black families from their homes and communities, as mixed neighborhoods such as Johannesburg’s Sophiatown and Cape Town’s District Six were declared “white areas.” Ultimately, some 3.5 million black South Africans would be forced to move under apartheid. 15 Families could also be separated when the race of their children fell into doubt. 16

The apartheid state’s struggle for control over racial reproduction manifested in family-planning policies that urged white women to have children while encouraging black women to limit family size. Puritanical, DRC-influenced ideas of women’s chastity discouraged the pursuit of sexual pleasure and agency for all women. While abortion was illegal for all South African women, spectacular court cases concerned white rather than black women. Intrusive policies, supported by many employers and the state, required black women to have contraceptive injections to keep their jobs; doctors employed sterilization far more readily for black women than for whites throughout the apartheid years. Black women’s primary modes of employment—domestic service, farm labor, factory work, teaching, nursing, and clerical work—were not conductive to pregnancy, forcing many mothers to send their children to live with distant relatives. Due to black men’s low wages, black women were much more likely to need to work than white women, connecting reproductive rights to labor issues. 17

Gendered labor policies were at the heart of apartheid, in intersection with marriage and housing policies. To secure the labor of black men while limiting their presence in towns and cities declared to be predominantly white areas, an existing system of male migrant labor was further entrenched. This system had emerged with the development of diamond and gold mining over the latter half of the 19th century : labor recruiters, chiefs, and rural African families sent young men to work in distant towns, while African women were to support rural families, leading to growing domestic tensions. 18 From 1952 , African men aged sixteen or older legally had to carry identity documents called passes with them, to justify their presence outside of the rural ethnic “reserves” to which officials consigned Africans. 19 As the land in these reserves was insufficient in size and quality, men needed to work in urban areas to support themselves and their families, and to pay taxes. They could generally only reside in urban areas as long as their passes attested to employment by whites, staying in hostels intended for temporary sojourns in segregated areas called “townships.” Exceptions were those who had been born in the urban area where they lived, who had lived in that area legally for fifteen years, or who had worked for the same employer in that area for a decade: such men and their dependents had “Section Ten” rights to live in urban townships as a family, as long as they were not deemed “idle” or “undesirable.” 20 Most urban housing was deliberately unwelcoming to families, who were supposed to remain in the countryside, eking out a living by women’s farming, to supplement the low wages received by migrant men. 21

In rural areas filled increasingly with African women and children, the authority of male chiefs—both hereditary and appointed—reigned supreme. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 entrenched chiefly authority to administer “customary law,” a patriarchal system under which African women remained legal minors throughout their lives. Legal minor status meant that African women could not enter into contracts or own homes or other property in their own right; children legally belonged to their fathers or male kin. Customary law collapsed and distorted diverse precolonial African legal systems in which women had generally held more authority, especially as they aged. 22 The distorted power of “traditional” chiefs deepened in the 1960s. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 provided the legal basis for the “gradual development of self-governing Bantu national units” out of the ethnic reserves to which Africans were consigned. 23 Ten rural ethnic reserves formed: officials called them “homelands” or “Bantustans,” and in 1970 , the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act declared Africans “citizens” of their homelands, not of South Africa. 24 Reforms in the 1980s allowed for African women’s growing emancipation from customary law: for instance, in 1981 the KwaZulu Bantustan introduced reforms so that adult women, married or unmarried, could legally own property and make other legal decisions, following popular pressure. 25 But African women continued to struggle against chiefly authority that privileged men.

As wives, women were generally subject to their husband’s authority. This was true not only for African women, but also for other black and white women; unless they secured a prenuptial contract, the default through most of apartheid was that even privileged white women lost power to make legal decisions upon marriage. 26 As mothers, however, women were charged with the critical responsibility of raising a new generation of workers and ethnic patriots. For Africans, this new generation was supposed to see their political futures not in “white South Africa” but in their rural ethnic reserves. African mothers were to send their children to new state schools, in an ethnically differentiated system called Bantu Education, while Indian, Coloured, and white women were to send their children to distinct schools. 27

At the crux of apartheid production and social reproduction therefore stood women, whom officials intended to be compliant wives and mothers in a segregated society. But increasing numbers of women refused to stand in their imposed places.

Black Women’s Urban Mobility Challenges Apartheid

Black women had lived in towns and cities long before apartheid, attracted to urban life both by a desire to escape rural familial tensions and by economic necessity. African access to land had been severely restricted since the Natives Land Act of 1913 , with clearly declining land productivity by the 1920s, and the rural reserves grew more stressed with apartheid’s forced relocations. Women’s options for formal urban employment were limited, with most consigned to domestic service. But women had long been developing a vibrant informal urban sector: they brewed and sold beer and other foods to male migrant workers and operated bars called “shebeens,” among other jobs. By the early 1950s, more than a fifth of African women were urban, and many of these women lived in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. 28

While black women’s urbanity concerned officials before apartheid—especially when they worked as prostitutes—officials had never been sure what to do about it. African men in major cities had been required to carry individual passes before apartheid, although laws varied by municipality. 29 But officials had rarely imposed individual passes on women. This was, first, because attempts to do so had engendered resistance, as seen in Bloemfontein in 1913 , when hundreds marched against pass laws for black women. 30 At a deeper level, officials expected African women to be governed through their men. When laws referred to “natives,” they usually meant African men; African women were seldom singled out as political subjects, as they were legal minors under customary law and thus not proper “persons” in their own rights. 31 The language of 1952 pass-law legislation was characteristically vague—first stating that pass laws would apply to “every native” aged sixteen or older, but then shifting to masculine pronouns. 32

Officials prevaricated about when and how pass laws would be extended to African women under the terms of the 1952 legislation, facing public outrage about this intrusion into family life. 33 Then, in 1955 , officials announced that individual passes would soon be issued to African women; women’s organized resistance, discussed in the next section, delayed full implementation of this requirement until 1963 .

Yet women kept moving to cities, whether or not they could claim Section Ten rights or passes testifying to their legal right to be there temporarily. Many lived covertly in “informal settlements” of shacks, or with men in migrant labor hostels. They faced frequent prosecution for breaking the law and forced deportations to Bantustans: this risk was especially pronounced for Africans in Cape Town, where most working-class jobs were reserved for “Coloured” men, and where African women had access to few formal jobs outside of low-paid domestic service. 34 But women often turned right around after their deportations to catch the next bus into town, despite feeling “like a hare being chased around, hunted.” 35 The everyday presence of black families—in urban spaces legally defined as white, where black people were only supposed to appear as necessary to meet white labor needs—powerfully challenged core tenets of apartheid. 36 Ultimately, the expense of combatting this unstoppable movement of black families to cities forced apartheid officials to end pass laws in 1986 . 37 African women’s migration then accelerated, with continually rising numbers of female-headed households. 38 Black women’s defiant mobility thus worked to renegotiate relationships between genders and generations.

Amidst this insistent mobility, growing numbers of women in rural reserves were also not fulfilling the roles that officials envisioned. Resistance to the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 surged quickly, and women played key roles in rejecting the cooption of chiefly authority and implementation of new agricultural policies, with organized protests in places including the Western Transvaal area of Zeerust ( 1957 ) and the Natal countryside ( 1959 ). The latter protests significantly linked urban and rural issues, as women protested both apartheid removals from the interracial urban community of Cato Manor in Durban and intrusive “betterment schemes” and taxes in the rural reserves surrounding the city. 39 While the ANC did not initiate these protests, its members were involved in them, and ANC membership increased in their aftermath. Rural women’s engagement in religious groups such as mothers’ prayer unions ( manyano ), which also boasted linked urban branches, provided another font for growing anti-apartheid organization. Cyclical migration—driven by forced removals and by women’s decisions to return to rural areas after periods of work in cities—kept urban and rural communities linked. 40

Anti-apartheid linkages between towns and countryside would only accelerate as apartheid officials increasingly “banned” political leaders to remote districts, to try to eliminate them as national leaders amidst surging protests from the 1950s. This strategy could backfire, as banned leaders connected with people in these rural districts whom they would not otherwise have met. Women often made these connections by engaging in social-welfare work, which seemed less objectionable to officials than overt political organizing. Most famously, during their bannings in the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Consciousness movement activist Mamphela Ramphele and the ANC activist Winnie Mandela organized health clinics, which became centers for spreading anti-apartheid ideas. 41 The politicizing role of health care speaks to women’s broader sociocultural style of anti-apartheid organization.

Women’s Collective Organization Challenges Apartheid

The pattern of male leadership of political movements, and women’s influence at movements’ grassroots, persisted through the apartheid years, with women tending to play influential roles in sociocultural wings of the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1950s, women first organized against apartheid as mothers, uniting across lines of race and class. Both the achievements and limits of their foundational strategies set a pattern, which would emerge vividly in the 1960s and 1970s. The pattern was that women would organize most effectively by using discourses of family. But when women raised sensitive issues pertaining to their own family lives that did not fit within activist campaigns, men often dismissed these issues as ancillary to immediate political struggles. Many women would come to share male leaders’ emphasis on family as a strategic political discourse more than an immediate site of political struggle. This was so especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when major liberation movements were forced into exile and key male and female leaders banned, heightening the stakes of eliminating anything deemed a “distraction.” Finally, in the 1980s and during the transition to democracy in the 1990s, women increasingly challenged activists’ sublimation of personal issues in political arenas, using indigenous and international forms of feminist critique.

The Congress Alliance and Federation of South African Women in the 1950s: The Foundational Period

In the 1950s, opposition to apartheid centered in the Congress Alliance: a front of anti-apartheid movements in which the ANC played a predominant role, in partnership with the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the white leftist Congress of Democrats. The Congress Alliance was a “multiracial” organization because it comprised those racially distinct affiliate organizations. In the mid-1950s, two major nonracial member organizations—comprising both black and white members—joined the Congress Alliance: the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). Women played important roles in the SACTU, as unions provided a distinctive forum in which women could unite as workers across racial lines. 42 And female trade unionists played central roles in the 1954 launching of FEDSAW—as did women from the ANC.

FEDSAW’s first president was Ida Mtwana, former president of the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL); her better-known successor as FEDSAW’s leader, Lilian Ngoyi, also served as president of the ANCWL. Both women worked in the garment industry, and their activism characteristically emphasized issues of work and family. On one hand, the women often spoke of women’s commitment to anti-apartheid struggle as necessitating that they move away from domestic responsibilities. For instance, Mtwana declared at FEDSAW’s founding meeting, “Gone are the days when the place of women was in the kitchen and looking after the children. Today, they are marching side by side with men in the road to freedom,” in political meetings and in trade unions. But Mtwana went on to stress that women’s public activism was rooted in their responsibilities as mothers: “We cannot sit down and fold our arms when attempts are being made to hold our progress and that of our children . . . If we do not fight now, it will be too late, and our children will curse us for our callousness.” 43

Such invocations of familial responsibilities should not be taken narrowly as statements about individual women’s lives, but broadly as skillful public discourse. Several key FEDSAW leaders—including Miss Ida Mtwana—were unmarried or childless themselves. Black women drew upon the public leadership they exercised as mothers in their communities to forge ties across racial lines, appealing to white women through appeals to a shared moral economy of motherhood. Discourses of motherhood therefore demonstrated black women’s rejection of apartheid ideas of white women as “empire builders” and black mothers as social problems, and reflected black women’s bold political imagination of a shared community of mothers with a responsibility for creating an anti-racist world. 44

Unifying maternal discourses were an achievement, because divisions between black and white women ran deep. After all, the major space of interracial encounter was domestic service, where black women tended intimately to the needs of white “madams” and their children for low pay, often living away from their own children to stay in the backyards of their employers. 45 Moreover, white women had won suffrage in 1930 at the expense of black men’s loss of their limited franchise, something that black activists did not forget. 46 Making connections across racial lines—including among African, Coloured, and Indian women, who increasingly lived in separate communities—was a great challenge.

Despite tensions, FEDSAW succeeded in uniting women as mothers against apartheid policies that divided black families and communities: centrally, against pass laws and Bantu Education. In June 1955 , FEDSAW participated in the Congress Alliance’s Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg, where FEDSAW issued a list of “What Women Demand,” beginning with claims to rights such as paid maternity leave, child care, and contraception “FOR ALL MOTHERS OF ALL RACES.” 47 Famously, FEDSAW then organized multiracial delegations of women to march on the seat of the apartheid government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria. FEDSAW and COD member Helen Joseph was inspired by a liberal white women’s organization, Black Sash, which had been “haunting” apartheid officials by surrounding them with groups of women wearing the eponymous black sashes, signs of mourning against apartheid policies. 48 With her comrades in FEDSAW, Joseph incited more powerful, multiracial activism.

On October 27, 1955 , two thousand women followed the symbolic quartet of Joseph, ANCWL president Lilian Ngoyi, Coloured People’s Congress activist Sophie Williams, and the heavily pregnant South African Indian Congress activist Rahima Moosa, bearing petitions to leave for cabinet ministers. On August 9, 1956 , a day now celebrated as Women’s Day, twenty thousand women marched with FEDSAW on the Union Buildings, coming from as far away as Cape Town, and leaving thick stacks of individual petitions protesting the extension of passes to women on the doorstep of the prime minister’s office. 49 The women, many with children, sang the ANC’s anthem and taunting anti-apartheid songs, then gathered for a half hour of stunning silence, richly documented by journalists and photographers. Such iconic activism delayed implementation of pass laws for women until 1963 , but it also led to deepening state repression against FEDSAW activists that made the organization effectively moribund by the early 1960s.

FEDSAW members struggled not only with divisions among anti-apartheid women but also with struggles between these women and officials. They also confronted tensions with anti-apartheid men—tensions amplified by the ANC’s dominance in the Congress Alliance. Men had consistently served as ANC presidents from its 1912 founding, even though women had been full members of the ANC and leaders of the ANCWL since 1943 . Significantly, as scholar Shireen Hassim has described, the early ANC “was a political family and it replicated the hierarchical form of a patriarchal institution.” 50 The ANCWL’s founding president, Madie Hall Xuma, was the wife of the ANC’s president, Dr. A. B. Xuma. The National Executive Committee (NEC) was all male prior to Lilian Ngoyi’s election to it in late 1956 , recognizing her impressive work in FEDSAW. The NEC mediated between the party’s membership and the state, while the ANCWL focused on the everyday social and economic needs of its membership; both oversaw the ANC Youth League, which pushed party elders leftward. Women in both the Youth League and Women’s League often chafed against the restrictions of male party leaders, who encouraged women to engage in educational campaigns rather than confronting authorities with further protests after 1956 . 51 Men’s attitudes reflected both a protective impulse, and patriarchal assumptions that women should remain marginal to politics. 52 Above all, Congress Alliance men often failed to see women’s discussions of family issues that did not fit into the central activist platform as matters of politics. For instance, they responded to FEDSAW women’s discussions of family planning with what scholar Cherryl Walker has characterized as “jocular dismissal.” 53

Anti-apartheid men’s dismissal of women’s discussions of family planning was profoundly ironic, for two reasons. First, intimate issues of family were actually central to issues of apartheid governance, which hinged on control of racialized bodies and homes. Second, activist men relied upon women’s deft public rhetoric of motherhood to bring more activists into the anti-apartheid movement; they acknowledged anti-pass issues as central to the movement. 54 Yet most activists were no more ready for open discussions about real tensions of sexuality and family than were puritanical apartheid officials. Other matters of oppression loomed too large. Reticence about public discussion of sexuality applied to both male and female activists. Most had been raised in religiously conservative homes and schools where intimate matters were treated delicately, were Communists who saw gender issues as subordinate to class issues, or were both Communists and Christians. Anti-apartheid activists’ reliance on rallying familial discourses, but discomfort talking about family tensions that did not fit within the central anti-apartheid platform, would deepen with state repression in the 1960s and 1970s, as the need for activist discipline (already significant in the 1950s) grew.

Navigating the Personal and the Political, at the Height of the Anti-apartheid Movement

In April 1960 , officials banned the ANC and a rival organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), after women and men’s rising anti-pass activism and escalating police violence against protestors. From this point until February 1990 , the major liberation movements went underground, with key leaders in exile, imprisoned, repeatedly detained, or personally banned. All of these assaults on leaders were profoundly disruptive to family life. 55 Women lost organizational autonomy in the interest of streamlining underground operations: in 1969 , the ANCWL was replaced by the ANC Women’s Section, which Hassim describes as turning into “the movement’s social worker.” 56

Iconography of women and families played an integral role in an increasingly global anti-apartheid movement. This movement was shaped both by new armed wings of the ANC and PAC launched in 1961 , and by a transnational civil-societal campaign encouraging boycotts and diplomatic pressure on the apartheid regime that grew stronger after South Africa left the British Commonwealth in 1961 . Within South Africa, women’s social and cultural work fueled a new movement called Black Consciousness, rooted among students and workers across the country from the late 1960s. Black Consciousness activism would explode in a wave of student protests against Bantu Education in 1976 , which began in the Johannesburg township of Soweto but turned into a national schools boycott after police massacred student protestors. After 1976 , new waves of activists—especially youth—fled South Africa, and the country’s international pariah status worsened.

Women were a minority of armed combatants plotting sabotage from across South Africa’s borders, but both the iconography and presence of women has attracted attention—particularly from scholars of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, or Spear of the Nation). Conspicuous in MK’s propaganda were images of what scholar Kim Miller has called “moms with guns”: women with babies on their backs, weapons in hand, and fury in their eyes. 57 Female MK members could experience a thrilling sense of equality with men, particularly in cases where women held rank, and women performed critical roles smuggling weapons into South Africa. But women were also confronted with sexism and harassment from their comrades, the product of the very male-dominated atmosphere of MK camps.

Most troubling for many MK women were the ANC’s policies on pregnancy and childrearing, which reflect the essential contradictions between discourses and realities of family in the anti-apartheid struggle. Pregnancy was supposed to be forbidden for MK women, with some forcibly fitted with IUDs. MK women did inevitably become pregnant, however, especially after new waves of young activists flocked into MK camps from 1976 , and as the camps faced prolonged periods of minimal activity, plotting and training for many military expeditions that never occurred. Pregnant women would be sent to the ANC’s Charlotte Maxeke Mother and Child Centre in Morogoro, Tanzania—which they understood as a punishment, as this remote exile-within-exile took them away from camps in the frontline states. By the late 1980s, the Women’s Section complained to the party officials of years of demanding day-care facilities near MK camps so that women could be mothers while preparing as soldiers, without result: “We seem to travel in a dead end street with marriage and babies being at the end of the street. There is not and can never be a contradiction between marriage and having babies on one hand and fighting on the other.” 58 Yet MK women could only be “moms with guns” in propaganda.

Women had more space in the cultural wings of the global anti-apartheid movement, as ANC president O. R. Tambo particularly supported the deployment of eloquent and engaging women in exile: women were central to the Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble in London, and Barbara Masekela led the ANC’s Arts and Culture wing in the 1980s, for instance. South Africa’s most prolific, globally influential anti-apartheid novelist was a middle-class white woman in suburban Johannesburg, Nadine Gordimer. Black woman artists in exile, like Miriam Makeba and Lauretta Ngcobo, generated support for the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and Europe.

Within South Africa, educational institutions became important sites for young women’s anti-apartheid thought and organizing. Inanda Seminary, a high school drawing some of the brightest African girls from around the country to its campus near Durban, was an especially lively site during the 1970s. There young women met visiting activists like Steve Biko, a radical medical student at the nearby University of Natal, and Fatima Meer, an Indian academic-activist based at that university. While black women remained severely underrepresented in higher education compared to black men or whites, black girls’ high school attendance was rising dramatically during the apartheid years, such that by the early 1980s more black girls than black boys would be in high school. This was an outcome of apartheid policies promoting the education of black female teachers and nurses to work in new Bantustan schools and clinics, as officials saw women as both cheaper to employ and more politically tractable. 59 As the cases of banned activists setting up politically vibrant rural clinics make clear, women’s work in social professions could give them an entrée to anti-apartheid organizing. Such work could be particularly politicizing as women were confronted directly with apartheid’s violence, especially in clinics and social work. 60

The Black Consciousness (BC) movement, while helmed by men like Steve Biko, was undergirded by the work of young women in clinics, schools, and journalism, working to unite black women and men—African, Indian, and Coloured—to end apartheid. 61 Yet women in BC, like women in the liberation movements in exile, ran up against frustrating gendered limitations. As Mamphela Ramphele notes of her time as a leader in the South African Students’ Organisation, the key BC group until its 1977 banning: “I became quite an aggressive debater and was known for not suffering fools gladly. Moreover, I intimidated men who did not expect aggression from women. Soon a group of similarly inclined women, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Nomsisi Kraai, Deborah Matshoba and Thenjiwe Mthintso, became a force to be reckoned with at annual SASO meetings. Ours was not a feminist cause at that time—feminism was a later development in my political consciousness—but an insistence on being taken seriously as activists in our own right amongst our peers.” 62 Attempts at organizing BC women, such as Fatima Meer and Winnie Mandela’s Black Women’s Federation in 1975 , similarly attempted to develop women’s self-assertion while shying away from the label “feminism.” 63

Hassim’s Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa has most vividly shown how often anti-apartheid activists—particularly women of color—resisted calling themselves feminists, or discussing issues of gender inequity within their movements in public from the 1970s. It was not only that feminism was often rejected as an imported, “white” ideology without indigenous roots. That critique reflected the overrepresentation of white academics in South Africa’s second-wave feminist groups, the dramatic differences between the conditions of white and black women’s lives, and global moves of African American and “Third World” women toward less individualistic ideologies like “womanism.” As state oppression grew more pervasive in the 1980s—with prolonged “states of emergency” of military rule by mid-decade—feminism could seem a divisive distraction that activists should not indulge.

Yet Hassim has also shown how individual women’s connections of their experiences with those of other women could lead them, like Mamphele, to feminist consciousness. This happened as women grew involved in a resurgent wave of grassroots organizations—called township “civics”—as part of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a new, aboveground coalition of anti-apartheid groups stressing non-racialism and democracy from 1983 . Three major regional women’s groups formed: the United Women’s Organisation in the Western Cape (UWO), the Federation of Transvaal Women (FEDTRAW), and the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW). These groups were inspired by FEDSAW, which ANC activists were then trying to reestablish within South Africa. An emerging challenge facing women in these movements was how to connect personal issues with the political system that shaped them and that they shaped—against many activist men and women’s tendencies to sublimate intimate issues. Activist Phumelele Ntombela-Nzimande recalled, “NOW comrades were asking, ‘Why write about rape all the time?’ These were seen as weird issues to focus on. They said people should speak about the state of emergency, not about wife battering . . . Even I don’t remember once challenging a NOW meeting to speak about these issues. I just felt overwhelmed by the fact that it wasn’t appropriate.” 64 In Natal in particular, the brewing civil war between UDF activists and the Zulu nationalist group Inkatha (sponsored by the apartheid government) put discussion of such issues on the backburner for many activists in the 1980s. But growing sexual violence was a significant part of Natal’s political violence, laying the groundwork for the province’s high rates of HIV/AIDS after the democratic transition.

Throughout the anti-apartheid struggle, women were routinely underestimated and ignored as political actors. Officials’ underestimation of women could open up valuable political space. Women running politically lively clinics and schools, for instance, were not seen as threatening, while male-led political groups attracted more censure. 65 Yet the neglect of core issues of gendered inequality as apolitical—by many male and female activists—left lingering contradictions after apartheid’s end. The democratic transition in 1994 was in some respects remarkably progressive on gender and sexuality, with a constitution enshrining equality and unprecedented rights for LGBTQ citizens; but ANC leaders’ compromises with chiefs meant that women living under customary law could not realize this equality. Moreover, everyday gendered inequities—in issues from employment, to pervasive sexual violence—plague post-apartheid society. While South African women undermined apartheid from its gendered core, they have yet to realize core rights of gendered citizenship.

Discussion of the Literature

Work in this field began to emerge in the 1980s. Scholars, many of whom were also activists, began to develop an anti-apartheid feminism that acknowledged the harm done by a national liberation movement that could not fully grapple with gendered oppression during its long struggle. Marxism was influential in this early work. Scholars working during the late apartheid years were therefore concerned with (1) how gendered oppression had been integral to the racial capitalism that anti-apartheid activists were fighting, and (2) how feminism and nationalism were linked. The second theme will be explored in detail here, as it has recently been attracting more attention from a new wave of scholars.

On the first point, Belinda Bozzoli’s 1983 essay, “Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies,” examined the “patchwork quilt of patriarchies” through which the migrant labor system foundational to apartheid had developed. 66 Probing gendered histories of domestic service, factory work, nursing, and mining followed. 67

Walker’s Women and Resistance in South Africa , first published in 1982 with a second edition in 1991 , was the germinal study connecting the gendered foundations of apartheid rule with women’s development of strategies of collective resistance. The book emerged from Walker’s University of Cape Town thesis, drawing upon archives, activist memoirs, and interviews about the Federation of South African Women. But it also offers a deeper history of women’s urban migration, rural struggles, and links with male-led organizations, extending far beyond FEDSAW. Walker raised two central questions that shaped subsequent scholarship. First was the question of how apartheid-era South African women’s organizing was both emboldened and constrained by the movement for national liberation out of which it emerged. Second was the question of how, why, and to what consequences motherhood has united South African women.

In the first edition, Walker contended that both FEDSAW women’s lack of organizational autonomy and tendency to unite as mothers limited their feminism, seeing women as bound to both patriarchal politics and patriarchal homes. In the preface to the second edition, she backed away from seeing maternal appeals as primarily conservative, following pointed critiques of this approach as reductive and predicated on Western understandings of family life as a refuge from the public sphere. Hassim’s 2006 Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority pursued the question of women’s organizational autonomy more fully, extending her examination to the ANC in exile, women’s grassroots organizations in the 1980s, and the democratic transition. Like Walker, Hassim adjudged that the subordination of South African women’s organizations to the increasingly pressing needs of its national liberation movement ultimately constrained the gender-transformational potential of the democratic transition.

Nomboniso Gasa’s essay on 1950s women’s organizing in her 2007 edited volume, Women in South African History , challenged the theoretical premises of both of Walker’s central questions, as well as Julia Wells’s maintenance of the position that the “motherist” politics driving anti-pass protests were fundamentally conservative. 68 “At the heart of the earlier struggles is the fact that African women were homeless by state design,” Gasa argued. “Their struggle against the pass laws, which were a tangible way of infringing their rights, was, in fact a struggle to be in the public domain at the same time as a struggle for free movement.” 69 Building on Gasa’s intervention—and on the questions about motherhood Walker posited in her own auto-critique—scholars have begun to address the histories of motherhood in southern Africa that gave maternal politics very different meanings for black and white women, and to examine how family tensions played out politically during the liberation struggle. 70

The most important counterpoint to Walker’s and Hassim’s argument that female activists’ lack of autonomy from that national liberation movement limited their feminism remains Zine Magubane’s extensive 2010 essay, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990 : A Theoretical Re-interpretation,” in the Road to Democracy series. Revisiting Walker’s and Hassim’s sources and examining additional interviews, activist memoirs, and archives of FEDSAW and the ANC, Magubane argues that autonomy was not a viable option: groups like FEDSAW derived strength from their roots in political groups and trade unions. 71 Further, she contends that black women’s emphasis on motherhood did not entrench patriarchy, but rather asserted black women’s moral leadership over white women in a growing popular struggle. Drawing on women’s own conceptions of their activism, she shows how political motherhood in FEDSAW, and in subsequent movements influenced by FEDSAW, was an ideology rooted in black women’s experiences of not only caring for their own children, but also taking community leadership roles on the basis of their maternal authority. 72 New scholarship is only beginning to grapple with the challenges and opportunities that transformations in the political meanings and everyday experiences of family brought to women, and to men, during apartheid and in the transition to democracy. 73

Primary Sources

National and provincial archives, with a searchable online database , contain information on both foundational gendered legislation and protests against key policies such as pass laws. The most revealing archives document anti-apartheid resistance, however. Compared to anti-apartheid men, relatively few women have extensive personal archives. The University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers do contain some (such as those of Helen Joseph, Lilian Ngoyi, and Hilda Bernstein of FEDSAW) and FEDSAW’s organizational archives; key sources, including the FEDSAW papers, have been digitized . Other major collections include the ANCWL papers housed at the Mayibuye Archive , at the University of the Western Cape, and the central ANC Archives at the University of Fort Hare; both of these collections regrettably lack complete, searchable online databases at the time of writing. Campbell Collections at the University of KwaZulu-Natal contains archives for women’s organizations such as the Natal Organization of Women. Many women have published memoirs of their anti-apartheid activism and imprisonment, 74 and extensive oral histories have been collected on women’s experiences of exile. 75 Prominent women have also authored collections of essays and creative writing reflecting critically on the apartheid years. 76 Other published primary sources include Shula Marks’ collection of letters between a troubled schoolgirl and her benefactors in apartheid’s early years, and an anthology of regional writing. 77 Key feminist anti-apartheid periodicals may be found in JSTOR’s Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa collection.

Essay About The Pass Laws 300 Words

let’s explore a piece of history that’s like a puzzle from the past – the Pass Laws. It’s a chapter of our world’s history filled with struggle, injustice, and the courage of those who fought against it. So, grab your time-traveling hats, and let’s dive into this important journey!

Table of Contents

What Were the Pass Laws? – A Glimpse into a Challenging Past

The Pass Laws were like a set of rules and regulations in South Africa during a time when things were not equal for everyone. They started way back in the 18th century but became more serious in the 20th century. These laws required people of color, mainly Black South Africans, to carry a special passbook with them at all times. It’s like carrying around a ticket just to prove who you are.

Apartheid – The Dark Background

To understand the Pass Laws, we need to talk about apartheid. Apartheid was like a big dark cloud that hung over South Africa for many years. It was a system of racial segregation that separated people based on the color of their skin. The Pass Laws were one of the tools used to enforce apartheid and control the movement of Black South Africans.

The Different Types of Passes

There were different types of passes for different purposes. It’s like having a bunch of keys, each unlocking a different door. There were work passes, travel passes, and even passbooks for children. These passes controlled where people could live, work, and travel.

The Struggles and Hardships

Living under the Pass Laws was like walking through a maze filled with obstacles. Black South Africans had to deal with constant police checks, arrests, and harassment. It was difficult to find work or move to different areas without the right passes. Families were often separated because of these laws.

Heroes Who Fought Back

Even in the darkest times, there were heroes who stood up against the Pass Laws. People like Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and many others were like beacons of hope. They organized protests, spoke out against injustice, and worked tirelessly to bring about change.

International Pressure

The Pass Laws didn’t just affect South Africa; they caught the attention of the world. Other countries imposed sanctions and boycotts to pressure South Africa to end apartheid and the Pass Laws. It’s like a global chorus of voices demanding justice.

The End of Apartheid

Finally, in the early 1990s, the world witnessed a remarkable change. It was like a bright dawn breaking after a long night. South Africa started to dismantle apartheid and the Pass Laws. Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and negotiations for a more equal society began.

Lessons Learned

The Pass Laws and apartheid are like reminders of the importance of equality, justice, and the power of people coming together to make a change. We must remember this part of history so that we can prevent such injustices from happening again.

Our Role in History

As young people, we also play a role in history. It’s like adding our own brushstrokes to a painting. We must learn about the past, stand up against injustice, and work towards a more equal world. Our actions today shape the future.

A Brighter Future

Today, South Africa has made progress towards equality, but the wounds of the past still linger. It’s like a healing process that takes time. By learning about the Pass Laws and understanding their impact, we can be part of a brighter future where all people are treated with fairness and respect.

Conclusion: Remembering and Learning

The Pass Laws were a dark chapter in South Africa’s history, but they also serve as a reminder of the strength of the human spirit and the power of change. By understanding this history and working towards a more just world, we can honor the heroes who fought against injustice and ensure that such laws are never repeated.

Author’s Note:

I hope you found this journey through history insightful. It’s like a window into a challenging time, but it also shows us the resilience of the human spirit. If you want to talk more about this or any other topic, just let me know!

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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The imposition of pass laws on the african population in south africa 1916–1984

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Pass law
On this day in 1956, thousands of South African women protested against
Pass laws in South Africa 1800-1994
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The extension of the pass laws

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Pass laws in South Africa 1800-1994
Slaves at the Cape were forced to carry passes. This made it easier for their owners and the local authorities to control their movements. The first time Pass documents were used to restrict the movement of non-European South Africans was in the early 1800's. However, slaves at the Cape had been forced to carry Passes since 1709.
Pass law
pass law, law that required nonwhites in South Africa to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas. Pass laws were among the main instruments of apartheid until the government ended the requirement to carry documentation in 1986. The pass law system arose out of a series of regulations, beginning with those enacted by the ...
Apartheid Era Pass Laws of South Africa
South African pass laws were a major component of apartheid that focused on separating South African citizens according to their race. This was done to promote the supposed superiority of White people and to establish the minority White regime. Legislative laws were passed to accomplish this, including the Land Act of 1913, the Mixed Marriages ...
Pass law
By this time, versions of pass laws existed elsewhere. A major boost for their utilization was the rise of the mining sector from the 1880s: pass laws provided a convenient means of controlling workers' mobility and enforcing contracts. In 1896 the South African Republic brought in two pass laws which required Africans to carry a metal badge ...
Women's Resistance Against the Pass Laws
The anti-pass campaign by the women had reached new dimensions. In rallying the women to resist the Pass Laws, Lilian Ngoyi used to remind the women of an old African proverb: Mangoana o tsoara thipa ka bohaleng (The mother grabs the sharp edge of the knife to protect her child). This proverb is familiar to all Africans in South Africa.
PDF Pass laws in the Western Cape: Implementation and resistance
Pass laws in South Africa 2. Pass laws in South Africa 10. 11 'Hottentot' found without a pass (by any landowner) was reported to the local Landdrost. In 1828, further laws were passed requiring all Africans living beyond the frontier to have a pass to enter the Cape Colony. Penalties for failure to produce a pass included arrest
The Politics of Passes: Control and Change in South Africa
page 206 note 4 The callousness with which the police enforce the pass laws is noted in Welsh, David, 'The Growth of Towns', in Wilson, Monica and Thompson, Leonard (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, Vol. II, 1870 - 1966 (Oxford, 1971), p. 200.Google Scholar
At War With the Pass Laws? Reform and The Policing of White Supremacy
This article analyses a key reformist gesture by General Smuts's Second World War South African government - the May 1942 order suspending enforcement of the pass laws in major cities. Hated by Africans for curbing their mobility, employment opportunities, and urban residence rights, the pass laws were a fundamental instrument of white supremacy.
Pass Laws
Summary. Pass laws were designed to control the movement of Africans under apartheid. These laws evolved from regulations imposed by the Dutch and British in the 18th and 19th-century slave economy of the Cape Colony. In the 19th century, new pass laws were enacted for the purpose of ensuring a reliable supply of cheap, docile African labor for ...
Women's Anti-Pass Law Campaigns in South Africa
Women's Anti-Pass March on the Union Buildings, Pretoria . On 9 August 1956 over 20,000 women, of all races, marched through the streets of Pretoria to the Union Buildings to hand over a petition to JG Strijdom, South Africa's prime minister, over the introduction of the new pass laws and the Group Areas Act No 41 of 1950. This act enforced ...
Essay On Pass Laws
Essay On Pass Laws. 800 Words4 Pages. Pass Laws in South Africa During the apartheid era in South Africa, Pass laws could be classified as an internal passport system that was made to separate the population, limit black African movement, control urbanisation and distribute migrant labour. Blacks were obliged to carry pass books with them when ...
PASS LAWS
The Pass Laws Act of 1952 required black South Africans over the age of 16 to carry a pass book, known as a dompas, everywhere and at all times. The dompas ... In South Africa, pass laws were a form of internal passport system designed to segregate the ... Under the act, every Asian man, woman or child of eight years or upwards, entitled to ...
Women and Apartheid
The History of Women's Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, ... National Congress of Women, Held in the Trades Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa, April 17th 1954," Federation of South African Women Papers, Historical Papers, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, File AD1137-Ac1.6.2 ...
The History of Black Women's Struggle against Pass Laws in South Africa
Wits University Research Archives. Fonds A1985 - Papers of Helen Joseph; Series P - Women; Subseries P4 - Papers and Theses; 7 more... File P4.8 - Why women rebel: a comparative study of South African Women's Resistance in Bloemfontein 1913 and Johannesburg 1958; File P4.9 - A Case study of the Anti-Pass Laws Campaign in South Africa; File P4.10 - Women: speeches at a Women Under Apartheid ...
Essay About The Pass Laws 300 Words
The Pass Laws were like a set of rules and regulations in South Africa during a time when things were not equal for everyone. They started way back in the 18th century but became more serious in the 20th century. These laws required people of color, mainly Black South Africans, to carry a special passbook with them at all times.
Now You Have Touched the Women
Less than a year later, the Women`s League and the Federation of South African Women organised a second major demonstration - this time focussing exclusively on the pass laws. On August 9, 1956, 20,000 women from all parts of South Africa staged a second march on the Union Buildings.
Pass laws News, Research and Analysis
Browse Pass laws news, ... Ernest Cole/© Ernest Cole Family Trust/Courtesy Wits Historical Papers/Photography Legacy ... South Africa's most famous photobook has been republished after 55 years ...
The imposition of pass laws on the african population in south africa
Abstract: This thesis compares how Lilian Ngoyi of South Africa and Fannie Lou Hamer of the United States crafted political identities and assumed powerful leadership, respectively, in struggles against racial oppression via the African National Congress and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The study asserts that Ngoyi and Hamer used alternative sources of personal power which ...
Pass Laws in South Africa Collection
African Women`s Resistance to the Pass Laws in South Africa 1950-1960, by Elizabeth S. Schmidt. Speeches and Public Statements. Migrant Labour Pass Laws 1975-78. Newspaper clippings. Migrant Labour Pass Laws 1979 - 1980. Newspaper clippings. Migrant Labour Pass Laws 1980 - 1981.
Dom Pass
The Pass Laws Act of 1952 required black South Africans over the age of 16 to carry a pass book, known as a dompas, everywhere and at all times. The dompas ... This image may not be reproduced and published without permission from the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre. The Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Centre has exclusive rights to this letter.
African Women`s Resistance to the Pass Laws in South Africa 1950-1960
was the campaign against the pass laws, and in particular, the extension. of reference books to African women. No other campaign was carried out. on such a massive scale or was sustained over as many years. No other campaign. struck at the very root of the apartheid system. Protest against the pass laws was not an innovation of the 1950s. The