Introduction: Histories of Protest in East London and the Eastern Cape, South Africa

The South African port city of East London and its surrounds do not feature prominently in histories of the liberation struggle, yet some of the fiercest protests and bloodiest racial conflicts of the apartheid years occurred within this region.¹ The year 2022 marked the 70th anniversary of the African National Congress (ANC) Defiance Campaign, in which East London played a major role, with 1,322 of its supporters receiving gaol sentences for protesting against apartheid laws. This was also the 70th anniversary of what has come to be known as Bloody Sunday or Black Sunday. On 9 November 1952, at the height of the Defiance Campaign, police opened fire on an ANC Youth League-organised meeting in Bantu Square in East Bank Location/Duncan Village. In the mayhem that followed, they shot and killed or wounded an untold number of black people over several hours, while two white people, including an Irish nun, were killed in crowd retaliation. It was also the 30th anniversary of the Bisho massacre on 7 September 1992, when the Ciskei defence force gunned down protesting ANC supporters, killing 28 and injuring about 200, with one soldier losing his life in the crossfire. Next year will see the 40th anniversary of the Duncan Village Massacre of August 1985, when 32 people were killed by police in the violent protests that followed the funeral of assassinated apartheid activist Victoria Mxenge.

While the massacres of 1985 and 1992 were brought before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1996, there has been no similar inquiry about events prior to 1960, and what happened in East London in 1952 remains unresolved. The nun who was killed, Sister Aidan Quinlan, was a qualified medical doctor belonging to a Dominican congregation with convents in Ireland and Germany. She lived and worked in Duncan Village running a popular clinic and is believed to have been killed when she went to help the wounded. Her death was reported widely at the time, with the mutilation of her body described by some media as ‘cannibalism’. The killing of Barend Vorster, a poor and relatively unknown insurance salesman, was also reported although in far less detail. The black people who were killed by police were barely mentioned in the media. Survivors have long claimed that hundreds of people died that day, but the police admitted to killing only eight – all men.

This Part-Special Issue on histories of protest in East London and the Eastern Cape addresses some of the questions that linger to this day. These revolve around three main themes: the political currents that gave rise to the day; the much-disputed black death toll; and the role and presence of women in this and other protests. This introduction outlines the origins of the Part-Special Issue and provides brief summaries of all the papers before concentrating on the events around which they all pivot – the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and the violence in East London that effectively brought it to a halt.

This issue has its origins in the conference of the Southern African Historical Society in East London, South Africa, in June 2022. Three researchers chose to focus on the host city and the silences that have haunted its histories for more than seven decades. Mignonne Breier spoke about the ‘forgetting and remembering of East London’s role in the ANC Defiance Campaign’ and the tragic killings on ‘Bloody Sunday’; she also launched her book of that name.² Hlengiwe Ndlovu and Katie Carline addressed the significant absence of literature about the role of women in East London in the 1950s. Both spoke about the women of the manyano (church prayer unions) movement at that time – Ndlovu about those who attended the meeting that led to the police killing and mob violence on 9 November 1952 and Carline about those who found solace and political expression both before and after the events in religion and building churches.³ The five articles that follow are the result of the conversations engendered by those conference papers, as well as Breier’s book launch. This introduction will provide background to the articles. All refer to some extent to the events of 9 November 1952 but the focus is not on the killing of the nun.

Leslie Bank’s article, ‘Populism and the Africanists in East London in the 1940s and Early 1950s’, describes the popular political mobilisation in East London prior to the Defiance Campaign which, he says, ‘ignited a racial war’. The article describes the shameful neglect of East London’s ‘locations’ by a municipality with a majority of white English-speaking councillors. He suggests that this reinforced the radicalism of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in East London and the ‘return to African values and perspectives’ that underpinned its battle against apartheid from 1950 to 1952. Educated elites and ordinary people, led by the charismatic triumvirate at the head of the local ANCYL, united in a series of protests against the conditions in which they were all forced to live. Bank analyses the events through a discussion of populism and concludes by noting the success of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in East London in the late 1950s.

Mignonne Breier’s article, ‘Proving a Secret Massacre: The Case of South Africa’s Bloody Sunday, East London, 9 November 1952’, focuses on the police killings that day and explains the use of the term Bloody Sunday. She draws on international literature on massacres and close analysis of archival and interview data to dismiss the official death toll of eight and present alternative estimates, which range from 80 killed on the day, reported by the Eastern Province Herald, to a total of 214 deaths, as repeatedly claimed by a former policeman. The article challenges the perception, perpetuated by the TRC’s mandate to investigate gross human rights violations from March 1960, that Sharpeville, with a death toll of 69 on the day, was the first and largest massacre in the apartheid era.⁴

In contrast to Breier’s forensic approach, in ‘Forgotten Bodies or Silenced Voices? Recasting Women’s Voices at the Bantu Square Massacre of East London, 1952’, Hlengiwe Ndlovu finds evidence of women’s involvement, and tragic deaths, on 9 November 1952, in the memories of Duncan Village residents whom she calls ‘local historians’. Following feminist methodologies, she is careful not to ‘dis-member’ their accounts and acknowledges ‘the possibility of distortion or misrepresentation of the historical facts given that the stories presented here are stories of violence and trauma that were passed from one generation to the other through oral histories’. Drawing on interviews, a published memoir and a film, she names the massacre after the site where the meeting was held and the police first opened fire and calls the day ‘Black Sunday’. This was the original title of the film, which also recorded the idea of a dark cloud that is said to have descended on the location on the fateful evening.⁵

Katie Carline’s article, ‘Sewing the Survival Tents: Black Women’s Christian Organisations and the Public Duties of Home-Making in Early-Apartheid East London, 1950–1963’, shows that black women’s Christian activism extended to formal political protest when manyano women supported the Defiance Campaign in East London. After the traumatic experience of 1952, many manyano women avoided obviously political activity, and instead focused their efforts on what Carline calls a religious revival that took place in the East Bank in the 1950s. Rhetorically, the focus was on motherhood, virtue and private domesticity. In reality, however, manyano women acted as public mothers whose (re)construction of impressive church buildings marked their right to the city at a time of increasing urban insecurity.

William Beinart and Colin Bundy provide the final overview, pointing out the three key historical processes that shaped popular protest in East London in the early 1950s. These encompass first, the Eastern Cape’s distinctive history of violent and protracted colonial conquest along with a widely dispersed missionary presence and relatively incorporative franchise; second, the strong commitment to segregation in East London and shocking conditions in its locations, which helped to radicalise African urban communities along Africanist rather than class or worker-based lines; and finally, the involvement of women. Here Beinart and Bundy compare the processes described in the special issue papers with those organised by the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU) in East London in 1929–1931.

East London and the Defiance Campaign

Founded in 1836 to serve British soldiers in the Sixth Frontier War, East London was originally called Port Rex and renamed in 1848 by the jingoistic British governor of the time, Sir Harry Smith. At the time of writing, it is one of the few Eastern Cape towns that has not yet acquired an indigenous name. Many local black people call it iMonti, an isiXhosa version of the Afrikaans word ‘mond’, denoting its position at the mouth of the Buffalo River, which runs through the city. The Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality of which East London forms part also takes its name from that river. The name most recently put forward for consideration in the renaming process is Gompo, after an area of Duncan Village long associated with the ANC.⁶

For the first 40 years of the 20th century, Beinart and Bundy note, East London was ‘deliberately and self-consciously a non-industrial town’. As the economic hub of what was then known as the Border region – a corridor of white-owned land stretching to Queenstown – it concentrated on being a port, an entrepôt and a holiday destination. It exported the produce of white farmers – mainly wool – and imported consumer goods to serve the Border population and the surrounding African reserves. Industry developed during the Second World War and by the early 1950s East London was promoting itself as an industrial centre with unique geographical advantages, being equidistant from, and well connected by rail or sea to, Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. For the industrialist, it offered a ready supply of workers from the surrounding African reserves who were prepared to work for wages that were about 20 per cent below the national average.⁷ For the white population it boasted good schools and an attractive coastal location. For black people who poured into the city in search of work, the reality was very different. The municipality confined them to three grossly overcrowded locations, of which the largest was East Bank Location, or Duncan Village as it was coming to be known following the building of about 600 houses in an area named after the governor-general of the time, Sir Patrick Duncan. A Commission of Inquiry in 1949 led by former Transkei official Hamilton Welsh described the conditions as ‘the worst in the Union’.⁸ As Bank’s article shows, ‘educated elites and ordinary people participated in a single set of protests against the municipal leadership around living conditions and their right to urbanise’. After a well-supported march through the city to protest against the lodger’s fee in 1951, ANCYL leaders embraced the Defiance Campaign with enthusiasm.

Conceived in a programme of action drafted by the ANCYL in 1949, the Defiance Campaign was launched on 26 June 1952. Its stated aim was to oppose some of the discriminatory laws produced by the National Party since it had come to power in 1948, as well as long-standing pass laws and recent livestock limitation regulations. ANC volunteers walked through entrances marked for ‘Europeans’, sat on whites-only benches, stayed in town beyond the curfew and performed other acts of defiance, mainly against pass laws or railway regulations. ‘Defiers’ were arrested, charged and chose to go to gaol rather than pay a fine. Leaders were banned, arrested and charged under the Suppression of Communism Act.

Much of the literature and imagery of the campaign gives the impression that defiance was predominantly in the Transvaal and men were in the forefront. In fact, the Eastern Cape was the major site of resistance, with 71 per cent of the 8,326 arrests nationwide. The first act of defiance took place in Port Elizabeth and the city saw the most arrests (2,007), followed by East London (1,322). The rural town of Peddie had more arrests than Johannesburg – 600 compared with 522.⁹ At one stage in the campaign 1,067 (42 per cent) of resisters in the Eastern Cape were women, and 173 (35 per cent) out of 488 in the Transvaal.¹⁰ The absence of literature about their involvement is discussed later in this introduction.

Violence Ends the Campaign

By the end of 1952 the campaign had ‘foundered’, as Nelson Mandela put it.¹¹ There had been violent clashes between police and location dwellers in four cities with the last, in East London, so severe that the campaign came to an immediate halt in the Eastern Cape and fizzled out soon after elsewhere in the country. The first clash was in Port Elizabeth on 18 October. Following a dispute about a stolen can of paint, the police shot and killed seven Africans, according to the official toll, while angry crowds retaliated by killing four white men and gang-raping the wife of one of the white victims.¹² The local ANC leadership, in a statement issued to the media, disassociated the organisation from the acts of the rioters and condemned the ‘unfortunate, reckless, ill-considered return to jungle law’.¹³

On 1 November the Minister of Justice, C.R. Swart, warned that the government, aware of the killing of whites during the Mau Mau uprising, would not allow a position in South Africa like that which had developed in Kenya. The police were mandated to act quickly and drastically.¹⁴ Two days later, the police shot and killed three Africans at Denver hostel in Johannesburg during a protest over a rent increase.¹⁵

On 7 November, after the ANC in Port Elizabeth announced plans for a strike on 10 November, Swart invoked the Riotous Assemblies Act and banned all non-religious public gatherings in Port Elizabeth, East London and King William’s Town. He also invoked the Suppression of Communism Act and banned 52 leaders from attending gatherings anywhere in the country for six months. The list included several East London ANCYL leaders, but they were only served their orders on the afternoon of Saturday 8 November, an important factor in the subsequent events in East London. Despite these measures there was a further clash in Kimberley that Saturday following an incident in a beer hall. In the riot that followed, police shot and killed 13 people.¹⁶

The last major incidence of violence was on Sunday 9 November in East Bank Location/Duncan Village. Certain points about this confrontation are undisputed:¹⁷

• Alcott Gwentshe of the ANCYL obtained police and magisterial permission for a meeting at Bantu Square in the Tsolo section of East Bank Location on the afternoon of Sunday 9 November despite the general ban on meetings. The police said they gave permission for a religious meeting only.

• Gwentshe and other leaders did not attend the meeting because by that time they had been served with banning orders. Instead, they attended a meeting in North End, East London, at which Walter Sisulu and regional leaders were trying to resolve a leadership dispute.

• The police came to the meeting heavily armed. Senior officers stated that there were 109 in total: half were ‘non-European’ and armed with batons only, the rest were armed with .303 rifles with fixed bayonets, Sten (sub-machine) guns and revolvers. The crowd was unarmed except for the stones that they picked up in the area.

• People gathered for the meeting in the afternoon. Crowd estimates have ranged from 1,500 (Major Prinsloo the day after the meeting) to ‘700 to 800, two thirds male, one third females’ (Captain Pohl in a court hearing).

• Shortly after the meeting began, the police instructed the people to disperse, the crowd resisted by throwing stones and the black policemen charged with bayonets. When the crowd still did not disperse, the white police opened fire. They later stated that eight people were killed and 27 injured. This has remained the official toll.

• After the police withdrew, groups of protesters roamed through the location burning and looting symbols of white control, including the Catholic mission.

• In the course of the evening, police found and removed the bodies of Barend Vorster, who had been beaten to death with sticks, and Sister Aidan, who had been reduced to a charred torso lying in the road next to her burned-out car.

• On finding the bodies, the police drove through the location in troop carriers, shooting between and into houses and shacks for hours. This part of the day was not reported in the media or covered in the inquest, which dealt only with the eight ‘official’ deaths.

Many questions remain. Why the police granted permission at a time when meetings were banned, and Gwentshe and other leaders were also banned, is unclear. They later said that they gave permission for a prayer meeting only and they did not know at the time that Gwentshe was to be served with a banning order. Perhaps they wanted to create the opportunity for a confrontation.

What happened to the flesh and limbs that were cut from Sister Aidan’s body after she had been hit, stabbed and set alight in her car, and what the police did after finding her body, are questions that still bedevil accounts of the day. Breier addressed the first question in detail in her book.¹⁸ In this Part-Special Issue, she focuses on the massacre by the police, the death toll and the questions that have arisen about the removal of bodies and burial sites. The challenges in arriving at conclusive figures about deaths are discussed with reference to international examples. The disappearance of many crucial records relating to the day, including the records of 63 court cases, is noted.¹⁹

Further questions must be raised about the presence of women at Bantu Square and the role they played in organising the meeting and in political protests of that time in general. A wide range of women could be encountered in East Bank Location/Duncan Village in the 1950s, from the girlfriends of tsotsis to the Dominican nuns (five African, two German and one Irish) at St Peter Claver mission at the top of the hill in the centre of the location. The seminal article on the meeting and confrontation, by Anne Mager and Gary Minkley, focused on the young people involved in the riots, the tsotsis and tsotsikazi, and the older, unmarried women who supported them at their trials.²⁰ Breier deals at some length with Mavis Mkobeni, the young woman of uncertain age who, along with seven men, was charged with the murder of Sister Aidan.²¹ A confession that she stabbed the nun was found admissible, but Mkobeni was acquitted on the grounds that the nun was already dead. Stabbing a dead body did not count as murder, and there was no alternative charge. From reported interviews and Breier’s own meeting with Mkobeni in 2017, it appears that she was not yet a member of the ANC at the time but attended their meetings and admired the leaders, including Gwentshe.²²

The men who were leaders – particularly Gwentshe from East London²³ and Dr James Njongwe from Port Elizabeth²⁴ – have received some attention from other authors, with the suggestion that they might have been better remembered in the annals of the ANC if it were not for the events of 9 November 1952. The violence both embarrassed the organisation and emasculated the campaign (leading to new laws with harsh penalties for protest and a fatal drop in volunteers).

Until recently very little has been written about the involvement of women who were not associated with the murder trials or arson. We can get a sense of what their role might have been by considering what has been written about the campaign in Port Elizabeth, bearing in mind that there were frequent interactions between East London and Port Elizabeth comrades, at the leadership level at least. Gary Baines has recalled that on 25 June 1952

women [in Port Elizabeth] spent the day and night in prayer in preparation for the launch of the campaign the following day. It became a feature of the campaign that women met for prayers prior to their men going into action, a practice in keeping with African custom. This is not to suggest that women played only a supportive role. On the contrary, a sample group of resisters in the Eastern Cape suggests that women made up as much as 42 per cent of participants and that the ANC Women’s League was actively involved in the campaign in numerous ways.

The first all-woman group of 32 defiers, led by ‘Nompie’, pregnant wife of Dr Njongwe, was the first to receive the heavier sentences. They were sentenced to 40 days’ imprisonment with the option of a £8 fine, half suspended for six months, for using the ‘Europeans Only’ entrance of New Brighton railway station.²⁵

Raymond Mhlaba’s memoirs give an insider’s view of the Defiance Campaign in Port Elizabeth and a list of the many women who were involved:

It would be false to suggest that only men were active in politics in PE [Port Elizabeth] … We worked with powerful and dedicated women such as Frances Baard, Florence Matomela, Hilda Tshaka, Talita Chaba, Nomalanga whose surname escapes me [sic], Nondwe Mankahla, Lilie Diedericks, Crissy Jason, Sophie William, Stella Damons, Notsomi Mazangwa, Nompi Njongwe, Nontuthuzelo Mabhala and Mrs Qhoyo.²⁶

There appears to be no similar list for East London. Even the few men whose experiences of the Defiance Campaign and subsequent political involvement have been recorded do not mention the role of women in the campaign. For example, in a book about the experiences on Robben Island of six political prisoners, all from the Eastern Cape, most give accounts of their involvement in the Defiance Campaign and there are several references to the killing of Sister Aidan. One prisoner, Galelekile W. Sitho, mentions that a pregnant woman was shot and killed by police during the East London ‘riot’.²⁷ For the rest, women are mentioned only in the context of their personal relationships with the prisoner, mainly as wives, loving or otherwise.

At least one had a wife who was politically active – Nomotshaka Mgabela, wife of Johnson Malcomess Mgabela. Mgabela describes his political involvement from 1947 until his arrest in 1963 but does not mention his wife.²⁸ Although Nomotshaka’s role in the Defiance Campaign is unclear, a video by the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), released in 2021, recorded that she was leader of the ANC Women’s League for the Border region and six months pregnant when she was incarcerated for nearly a year in Lock Street gaol in 1963. Her daughter was born in gaol on Christmas Day 1963.²⁹

Even women’s political involvements in later years have gone unrecorded. Irene Gwentshe, wife of Alcott Gwentshe, is one example. Their youngest son, Zweliyazuza, tried to tell the TRC about his mother, whom he described as a great patriot and one of the senior members of the ANC Women’s League in East London during the Defiance Campaign. He told a session of the TRC in Mdantsane in 1997 that she had been tortured by members of the Special Branch, as had other members of his family, and he wanted an investigation into a letter bomb sent to her in Mdantsane from an askari in Lesotho.³⁰ Evidence leader Advocate Ntsikelelo Sandi and chairperson Rev Bongani Finca did not permit him to say more because in his prior statement Zweliyazuza had said he would only be speaking about his father, Alcott, and his eldest brother, Mzwandile. At the time, his second-eldest brother Mzimkulu was going to speak about himself and their mother Irene. But both Mzimkulu and Irene died before the TRC hearing and Zweliyazuza had to represent the whole family. Advocate Sandi repeatedly told Zweliyazuza that he had 14 other witnesses to get through before the end of the day, advised him to write a book because ‘your story is very long’, and asked him to hand over the envelope of documents he had brought with him to the hearing ‘to save time’.³¹ I have not been able to establish whether they kept the documents.

This is why the stories of ‘local historians’ captured by Ndlovu and the interviews with manyano women conducted by Carline are so important. They point to the crucial presence of women in the events on Bantu Square.

From Passive Resistance to Armed Struggle

The Defiance Campaign failed to dent a single one of the apartheid laws which it specifically opposed. Rather it served to provoke a wide range of even more draconian measures, including the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1953, which made it a criminal offence to break a law in order to protest against that or any other law, and the Public Safety Act of 1953, which allowed the state to declare a state of emergency to maintain public order.

However, the ANC leadership did not have any illusions that those laws would be overturned. The campaign was also a strategy towards engaging more people in the liberation struggle and building the ANC. In this regard ANC leaders presented the Defiance Campaign as a great success, claiming that it led to a huge growth in membership, from 7,000 to 100,000 (even though the paid-up membership a year later was 28,000), and made going to prison a badge of honour.³² ANC leaders, looking back in later years, reflected that it was proof that non-violent measures would not dislodge apartheid and some form of militant resistance or armed struggle was necessary. Some regarded the crowd violence and subsequent repression as necessary stages in the liberation struggle.³³

Mandela and Sisulu washed their hands of the riots in October and November 1952 and in doing so ignored – or downplayed – the extent of the police massacre in East London. As Jonny Steinberg put it:

The ANC disassociated itself from the violence; it blamed the killing of Sister Quinlan on agents provocateurs. Shamefully, it had little to say about the scores of black people who had died that day. In later years, Nelson and Sisulu simply did not speak of the tragedy at Duncan Village; when asked about it they quickly dismissed it as having nothing to do with the Defiance Campaign.³⁴

Recorded conversations between Nelson and Winnie Mandela, found by Steinberg in the archive of former Minister of Defence Kobie Coetsee, suggest that Mandela drew lessons from these events. In 1985, when there were fears that the revolt against apartheid would lead to internecine war among black people, Nelson told Winnie that criminal elements were now involved and innocent people were getting killed. He compared it to the violence that erupted during the Defiance Campaign: ‘[w]e must be careful what we instruct our people because we are in a delicate situation’.³⁵

Steinberg says Mandela and Sisulu learned that

mobilising ordinary people to end white minority rule was formidably difficult … [t]he vast majority of black people were too afraid to participate … And those who did participate were not always amenable to control … Collective action, Nelson and his comrades learned, happens locally, in particular places and is liable to be seized by local currents whose meanings are impenetrable to national organisers … The campaign’s greatest lesson, Nelson came to believe in its wake, was that peaceful action would never dislodge apartheid.³⁶

In 1953, Sisulu visited China and, at Mandela’s request, asked for ‘Chinese backing for violent revolution’.³⁷

In East London, the ANCYL was crippled by the events of 9 November and their aftermath: including the disillusionment of ordinary residents of Duncan Village, dissent within the leadership ranks and the police crackdown. Gwentshe and Joel Lengisi were banished to remote rural areas in 1954, while Cornelius Judah Fazzie led an exodus to the PAC five years later. Fazzie said that Gwentshe joined the exodus to the PAC, but Gwentshe’s son told the TRC that in 1961 his father was smuggled back into East London from banishment in Tsolo to speak at the East London launch of Umkhonto we Sizwe.³⁸

Some Directions for Further Research

Given that the events of 1952 were beyond the purview of the TRC, and both police reports and the dominant liberation narratives about the Defiance Campaign are unreliable,³⁹ there is surely room for more research on the unfolding of the campaign both in East London and the three other centres where violence was experienced. How accurate were the official death and injury tolls in those centres? Leo Kuper and Baines suggest they could have been far higher in Port Elizabeth. One can also ask questions about the role of municipalities. To what extent did differences in municipal policy shape events and subsequent memorialisation? Port Elizabeth is said to have had a more ‘liberal’ approach to the management of its locations than East London, yet it also experienced riots and the killing of white people. No white people were killed in Kimberley and there was a municipal commission of inquiry following the events there, with public hearings that gave location residents the opportunity to express their grievances. Does this help to explain why that city commemorates the events not as a riot but as the ‘Mayibuye Uprising’ and built a memorial in Galeshewe?⁴⁰

There is also an urgent need for more research on the women who were involved in the Defiance Campaign and for the names of the people who were killed in the police massacre, beyond the eight men who were mentioned at the inquest.⁴¹ Ndlovu and Carline have gone some way toward recording the involvement of manyano women but there is still a dearth of written information and few names recorded. This can be attributed to some extent to the pall of shame, fear and public silence that descended over Duncan Village after the killing of Sister Aidan. There were harsh consequences for being associated with the meeting at Bantu Square, let alone an organiser of the meeting. Women who were holding together families bereft by the imprisonment of husbands and sons would have been particularly afraid of arrest. Now that more people are willing to speak about the day, we need researchers to record the memories of descendants, ‘local historians’ and any survivors still alive. In this way we might learn more about women’s involvement in political protests at that time, as well as the names of those who died – men and women.

Mignonne Breier
Honorary Research Associate, School of Education, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa. Email: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9397-2436

Notes

1 Thanks are due to Katie Carline and Hlengiwe Ndlovu for their various roles in the original proposal that set the direction of this special issue.

2 M. Breier, Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2021).

3 Bukiwe Tambulu also participated in this panel. Her paper, ‘Kuni Exodus: Experiences of Women in the 1986 Forced Removals’, about the experiences of women who were forcibly removed from Kuni Village by the Ciskei government in 1986, was not submitted to the special issue.

4 A new book, by N.L. Clark and W.H. Worger, Voices of Sharpeville (Abingdon, Routledge, 2024), challenges the long-standing figure of 69 and puts the immediate death toll at Sharpeville at 91.

5 M.K. Qebeyi, Black Sunday (later renamed Dark Cloud) (East London, M.K. Productions, 2011).

6 The Gompo proposal has been rejected because a ‘suburb’ still exists with that name, but there is a move to change the name of that area to ‘Clements Kadalie’ and then ‘Gompo’ will be back on the table for East London. The renaming process in Eastern Cape has included Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth), Kariega (Uitenhage), Qonce (King William’s Town), Ntabozuko (Berlin), Komani (Queenstown) and James Calata (Jamestown).

7 G. Minkley, ‘Class and Culture in the Workplace: East London, Industrialisation and the Conflict over Work, 1945–1957’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 4 (1992), pp. 739–60.

8 See L. Bank, ‘Populism and the Africanists in East London in the 1940s and Early 1950s’, in this Part-Special Issue for more details.

9 T. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1983).

10 D. Carter, ‘The Defiance Campaign: A Comparative Analysis of the Organization, Leadership and Participation in the Eastern Cape and the Transvaal’, in The Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Collected Seminar Papers: Vol. 2, No. 12 (London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, October 1970–June 1971), pp. 76–97, cited in T.G. Karis, S. Johns and G. Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge: Volume 2 (Cape Town, Jacana, 2015), p. 89.

11 N. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London, Little, Brown, 2010 [1995]), p. 130.

12 Union of South Africa, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Police for the Year 1952 (Pretoria, Government Printer, 1953).

13 G. Baines, ‘Community Resistance and Collective Violence: The Port Elizabeth Defiance Campaign and the 1952 New Brighton Riots’, South African Historical Journal, 34 (1996), p. 63.

14 ‘Polisie sal vining en sterk optree’, Die Burger, Cape Town, 3 November 1952, p. 1. Translation by author.

15 Union of South Africa, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Police.

16 Ibid.

17 Analysed in more detail in M. Breier, ‘Proving a Secret Massacre: The Case of South Africa’s “Bloody Sunday”, East London, 9 November 1952’, in this issue.

18 Breier, Bloody Sunday.

19 Breier, ‘Proving a Secret Massacre’.

20 A. Mager and G. Minkley, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind: The East London Riots of 1952’, in P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (eds), Apartheid’s Genesis: 1935–1962 (Braamfontein, Ravan Press, 1993), pp. 229–51.

21 The charge sheet said she was 20; her lawyer said she was 17; she later stated she was 15. See Breier, Bloody Sunday.

22 See Breier, Bloody Sunday; L. Bank and A. Bank, ‘Untangling the Lion’s Tale: Violent Masculinity and the Ethics of Biography in the “Curious” Case of the Apartheid-Era Policeman Donald Card’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39, 1 (2013), pp. 7–30.

23 C. Thomas, ‘A Spirit in the Village’, Daily Dispatch, East London, 6 September 2002; C. Themba, ‘Banned to the Bush’, Drum, Johannesburg, August 1956, pp. 22–5.

24 M. Benson, The African Patriots: Story of the African National Congress of South Africa (London, Faber & Faber, 1963).

25 Baines, ‘Community Resistance and Collective Violence’, pp. 52–3.

26 R. Mhlaba, Raymond Mhlaba’s Personal Memoirs: Reminiscing from Rwanda and Uganda, narrated to Thembeka Mufamadi (Cape Town, HSRC and Robben Island Museum, 2001), p. 71.

27 G.W. Sitho, ‘Prisoner 354/64: Galelekile W. Sitho’, in J.K. Coetzee, Plain Tales from Robben Island (Pretoria, Van Schaik, 2000), p. 92.

28 J.M. Mgabela, ‘Prisoner 353/64: Johnson Malcolmess Mgabela’, in Coetzee, Plain Tales, pp. 34–52. See also J.K. Coetzee, L. Gilfillan and O. Hulec, Fallen Walls: Voices from the Cells That Held Mandela and Havel (Prague, Lidové Noviny Publishing House, and Cape Town, Robben Island Museum, 2002).

29 SAHRA (South Africa Heritage Resources Agency), Duncan Village Massacre 1985: The Story Recovered, 22 March 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65gTjXpV474, retrieved 24 October 2023. This video also includes an interview with an older woman, Bella Joyi, who was a contemporary of Nomotshaka’s and also in Lock Street gaol in 1963. Joyi said she was among the people who flouted the night curfew and marched to town during the Defiance Campaign. For this she was arrested and locked up for a year. Her mother was also arrested when she went to court to support her daughter.

30 An askari is a former liberation fighter who is collaborating with the security police, usually after capture and torture.

31 ‘Case EC0354/96ELN: Zweliyazuza Gwentshe’, Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing, Mdantsane, 11 June 1997, available at https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/hrvel2/gwentshe.htm, retrieved 30 October 2023.

32 Mandela, Long Walk, p. 129; Karis, Johns and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge.

33 Ibid., p. 97.

34 J. Steinberg, Winnie & Nelson: The Portrait of a Marriage (Cape Town, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2023), pp. 92–3.

35 Ibid., p. 347.

36 Ibid., p. 93.

37 Ibid.

38 Lodge, Black Politics, p. 325. Umkhonto we Sizwe was the paramilitary wing of the ANC.

39 Such as Mandela, Long Walk; W. Sisulu, G.M. Houser and H. Shore, I Will Go Singing: Walter Sisulu Speaks of His Life and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Cape Town, Robben Island Museum, and New York, Africa Fund, 2001); and M.P. Naicker, ‘The Defiance Campaign’, 17 June 2019, available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/defiance-campaign-m-p-naicker, retrieved 22 November 2023.

40 S. Lunderstedt, ‘Today in Kimberley’s History – 8 November’, Kimberley City Info, 8 November 2023, available at https://www.kimberley.org.za/today-in-kimberleys-history-8-november, retrieved 22 November 2023.

41 In Breier, Bloody Sunday, p. 147, they are listed as Mvandaba Kafu (46 years old), Samuel Fotoye (45), Richard Qubudla (46), Sidney Tiffe (25), Talbot Kwoza (45), Matthews Sidanana (46), Greyton Lylendle (22) and Henry Lavans (27).