Dedicated to MOKGOTHU ALETTA MTHENJANE : 10 April 1925 ~ 2 November 2001 and all the women held in the cells of the Fort Prison with their babies still against their skins. The most exposed frontline of the 1956 Women's March.
There is a photograph that circles endlessly in the archive of that decade, a woman's spine, straight as a rifle, a child's fist curled into the fabric knotted across her back, and behind her, thousands more spines just as straight.
That's the visuals I remember of 9 August 1956, when more than 20,000 women marched into Pretoria carrying thousands of signatures and the unbearable weight of what they were asking for. One of their grievances, highlighted, was to move through their own country without a idompaas tucked against their skin like a leash.
It is said that the then Prime Minister arranged to be elsewhere. He sent a secretary to receive what he could not face, the accumulated fury of women he probably cared less about
What followed that day, and in the anti-apartheid campaigns that boiled through the years after 1956 , was the violence of what followed protesters that is rarely written about.
The battered bodies of women choosing, again and again, to dodge attacks by the security police of an Apartheid state. Children confronted by a state that had already shown it was willing to set dogs indiscriminately to disperse crowds.
Fact! There were women who marched on that day in 1956 who were dragged into custody, attacked by police dogs, mothers with milk still in their breasts, held inside the cold stone geometry of Number Four at the Old Fort Prison, a building designed to break the spirit of the oppressed, detained women with their babies.
What has never been fully reckoned with, is what those weeks cost and what they built. Behind those walls, lullabies had to do the work that lawyers can't do. These women steadied their children, who were too young to understand why their worlds had been narrowed to a cell. It was in that narrowed world that Mandela & Tambo, the country's first Black-owned law firm, based in Chancellor House, Ferreiradorp in Johannesbug. These revolutionary men stepped at no charge into their story.
70 years later, I ask that we pause long enough for those mothers detained at the Fort Prison to be remembered and what it meant for those women interrogated with a baby crying against their ribs, or what it was like for those women to return home afterwards and still keep going, raising their children , hide the next comrade and protest again.
This is the history that has gone largely unwritten. Did HerStory, lack weight, or have we not thought to weigh it?
here's to THE MOTHERS
WHO DREAMED OF FREEDOM
women wrapped babies
against their backs
walked together
twenty thousand plus
teachers, washerwomen, nurses,
domestic workers
who left
their madam's dishes
unwashed,
mothers on swollen feet,
walking, carrying babies
as they carry everything else
on their backs,
close to their heartbeats,
so their children
would know the sound
of a woman refusing, revolting
right to the front door
of the oppressors
and they left
thousands signatures
on petitions
Strijdom would not receive ,
signed by hands
that scrubbed his floors.
and when the crowd
dispersed, they let loose dogs.
let's remember
their dogs
their teeth
ripping through flesh of women moving through crowds
like water finding every crack,
our mothers,
pulling their children tighter
into their spines,
running, with the weight
of their babies, still gentle
on their backs
even as the boots
the brutality came down.
bodies banged into police vans
and off to the Fort, Number four
for fourteen days,
in cells built for punishment,
they rocked their babies
on concrete floors
and taught their daughters
their sons, that a woman's back
is meant to carry, stand straight
even after being
beaten, broken
they are not alone.
i stand
in their shadows, their blaze,
breastfed by revolutionary warrior women
i stand
with these women
whose names history hides
and to children
on those women's hips
whose cries became
part of the record no one wrote down.
do not reduce our mothers
to widows of history.
do not forget those on their backs
do not forget
oMama bethu,
owancancisa uvukelo
History sometimes has this weird way of standing at the podium and forgetting who built the stage. We know the names of the four who led that march to the Union Buildings, Ngoyi, Joseph, Moosa, Williams-De Bruyn, because oftentimes leadership photographs well and a name at the front of a line is easy to record. But a woman interrogated in a cell with an infant's cry as her only witness leaves no minutes with her signature underlined.
She leaves nothing the archive knows how to hold, this poem is dedicated to those women. We should demand that historical records record these facts. So, without a name, a date, a verified fact, poetry is permitted to hold what cannot be disputed, the weight, the courage of a woman who was never asked to lead anything yet led anyway, by refusing to put her baby down.
This poem is not offered as a substitute for the record, it is offered for everything the record left out. If the organizers gave the 1956 march its face, then it was these women, the women detained in the Fort Prison who gave the August 9, 1956 March its cost.
This poem does not ask anyone to choose between remembering the leaders or remembering the mothers in those prison cells. It demands that we understand that we cannot honestly remember the first without the second. The frontline can never only be where the cameras pointed, but wherever a woman stood between her child and the state security police . History that only follows the camera is not history. I'm reminded of an African Proverb “maji yaliyomwagika hayazoleki “ spilled water cannot be scooped back up. We can undo decades of distorted history by refusing to spill it the same way again. We all know too well what happens once a truth is poured out crooked,