Dawn Breaks: the anti-colonial legacy of the ANC Women’s Section radio segment

ABSTRACT

This article is an auto-ethnographic study that explores how its author came to study South African exiles after stumbling upon archival material of a radio segment called “Dawn Breaks,” while at the Liberation Archives at The University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa. Dawn Breaks was the African National Congress (ANC) Women’s Section’s weekly 30-min radio segment of the exiled ANC’s radio programme, “Radio Freedom,” that broadcasted primarily from the radio programme’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, throughout the 1980s. This article argues that Dawn Breaks, as a cultural product of this movement, offers a significant model to studying how and why scholar-activists like the author, but more particularly Black women in times of struggle, are politicised into joining anti-apartheid movements and are able to find their anti-colonial voice. This kind of work is indebted to entities like the Women’s Section’s radio segment because it amplified the Women’s Section’s growing voice and activism across the clandestine ANC organisation in exile through the airwaves.

KEYWORDS:

• Dawn Breaks
• radio freedom
• ANC in exile
• ANC women’s section
• democratisation
• anti-apartheid
• South Africa

Introduction

Dear Sisters and Countrywomen, Fellow combatants,

We bring to you warm revolutionary greetings wherever you are. This is the voice of the oppressed women of South Africa. It is the Voice you will be listening to every Thursday evening from now onwards. This is the voice that calls on all women of South Africa, all mothers, all of you wives and sisters of our nation. It is the voice calling on you for action to save our beloved motherland from the claws of racist domination, apartheid and the rule of force perpetrated by Botha and his gang of murderers

A Statement Prepared for the Opening of a Women’s Programme on Radio Freedom – Lusaka Broadcast on the 13 March 1980.

It has been said time and again that the voice and the use of one’s voice in the face of domination is one of the most powerful weapons the oppressed can wield against the oppressor. The process of raising consciousness through developing a vocabulary in order to articulate one’s voice can be a fraught one but is nonetheless necessary to creating the conditions for liberation. I begin with this excerpt from a Radio Freedom Lusaka broadcast in March of 1980 because it introduces, both in its time and now in the pages that follow, the main subject of this article, the African National Congress Women’s Section radio segment “Dawn Breaks”, but also because it pivots on the centrality of the voice – of finding one’s voice and the necessity of articulating one’s voice in the pursuit of defeating the colonial state.

In his groundbreaking text, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, scholar Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.” (Kelley 2002, 10). This sums up my intentions for this article and in many ways, Kelley also describes Dawn Breaks in this passage. As a cultural product of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s exiled “time-tested revolutionary movement … for the seizure of power from the oppressors” (ANC Lusaka-Mayibuye PI Collection, ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection), Dawn Breaks brought together the poetics of struggle and lived experience of ordinary women and activists in order voice their collective vision for the future of their motherland beyond racist domination and apartheid. They were seeking to politicise women of every station across the country, from mothers, to wives, to sisters, by raising their consciousness over the airwaves in order for the masses to commit to the struggle for liberation.

For many women in South Africa in the 1980s, Dawn Breaks was the call they needed to realise the contributions they could make and join the anti-apartheid struggle. This was the intention for the creation of the radio segment in the first place and why it was able to last throughout the decade. However, my own politicisation and my commitment to the study of the anti-apartheid movement is also largely indebted to what happened upon Dawn Breaks in a South African archive almost 40 years after its founding. Prior to this, I was lost in the muck that is dissertation research in the midst of the global unrest brought to bear by the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its legacies, including the #FeesMustFall movement. I struggled to find my voice in a cacophony of voices. Whether they were demanding the end of police and vigilante violence against Black people in the United States or demanding death to the neoliberal state and equitable access to education for Native Black people in South Africa, or even my advisors demanding I decide on a project to satisfy my doctoral requirements, my voice was somehow trapped in the interstices.

I use autoethnography in this article to share my path to finding my anti-apartheid voice alongside a close examination of primary source documentation gathered primarily at the Liberation Archives at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa, as well as various other sources of secondary literature. I argue that Dawn Breaks most centrally articulated a more inclusive and expansive anti-colonial vision for South Africa’s liberation from the clutches of National Party apartheid rule by elevating the voices of women in struggle. This vision of a more inclusive and expansive anti-colonial movement was one I saw echoed decades later in the #BlackLivesMatter and #FeesMustFall protests, not only in how it considered the intersectionality of Blackness as a site of struggle but also in how it became transnational and dialogic in function. As such, the cacophony I described earlier was actually a dialogue, of which I had not yet, at least to that point, learned its language or vocabulary. I was lost in it because I hadn’t received the decryption key to decipher its meaning. Reflecting on the history of Dawn Breaks as a cultural product of struggle offers a significant model, a key if you will, to studying how and why people are politicised into joining anti-apartheid movements and are able to find their voice in anti-colonial struggle.

Lost in dusk

In the Fall of 2014, after an anxiety filled summer, I returned completely lost to my graduate programme in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego (UCSD). Months earlier, I had completed my course work, received a master’s in the programme and as a result, it was time to move towards developing a dissertation project. To that point, I had a vague idea of a project that would consider cultural activism in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, after the (in large part) Black Lives Matter Movement-led Ferguson uprising and unrest that began 10 August 2014, the day after police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, my proposed project just did not speak to me the way it had before. I had a different set of questions that I was mulling over, that I could not yet articulate, but I knew these questions could not be satisfied by my original project.

I began to get some clarity of my new direction during the Black Studies Project @ UCSD’s, “Trajectories in Black Studies: Interdisciplinary Foundations and New Formations Symposium,” in late January 2015.¹ As the symposium was considering trajectories of Black Studies, a major conversation piece over the two days was how Black Studies’ work in the academy fit with the work on the ground happening in Ferguson and around the country at the time. Many opinions were shared but one that particularly stood out to me came from sociocultural anthropologist, Jemima Pierre, who implored us not to forget the implications of Black Studies scholarship in continental Africa, but also reminded us that what we saw in Ferguson was a continuation of global colonial legacies of anti-Blackness and that this is what we must study and write about.²

The timing of Pierre’s comments was providence because while I was struggling to commit to a dissertation project another project had fallen into my lap. I had met a group of filmmakers that were working on a documentary project about South African street fashion called, “Born Free.” The title was a double entendre, both speaking to youth fashion in South Africa for those born after the apartheid regime had fallen but also to how the fashion itself gave witness to the freedom of a new age of a burgeoning global Black youth-led social and cultural movement. My job was to do research on the latter, identifying the ways South African youth were using fashion and technology to connect to Black youth globally. However, until Pierre’s comments, I hadn’t realised that South African youth weren’t only connecting globally with other Black youth by way of the virtual sharing of cultural aesthetics like fashion but also through a virtual dialogue analysing and participating in various forms of cultural resistance to the continuation of global colonial legacies of anti-Blackness. In other words, I became aware that these youth in South Africa were connected to a global Black struggle for racial justice by way of social media networks.

This latter point couldn’t have been made more clear when the viral #FeesMustFall movement arose in South Africa in mid-October of 2015. This movement began with a three-day student-led campus lockdown at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), which eventually spread to over 20 South African universities. Students declared that #FeesMustFall in response to a proposed 10.5% fee increase at the top South African schools and launched a #NationalShutdown blocking entrances and roads, causing the suspension of classes at some universities. Students rejected a proposed alternative by Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, of a 6% fee hike and led protests at the South African Parliament and the Luthuli House, the headquarters of the ANC (eNCA, 2015). This all culminated with South African President Jacob Zuma announcing that there would be no fee increase through 2016 (Eye Witness News, 2015).

#FeesMustFall was reacting to and struggling against the colonial vestige of the apartheid regime, which appeared in the form of a growing racial wealth gap, education inequities, segregated and inadequate housing, among a myriad of other structural forms of racial inequality and oppression.³ Consequently, this led South African youth to look to #BlackLivesMatter as a model and implement the same strategies to call for radical cultural change. #BlackLivesMatter, a movement created by three queer Black women, was founded on 13 February 2013, when these women began using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media outlets in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin. During the next few years, a consistent and troubling number of similar incidents of Black people being killed by vigilantes and in police custody across the country continued to emerge including the deaths of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Aiyana Stanley Jones, among many others. Soon this hashtag garnered wide-ranging support and its founders began to galvanise this support by formalising a Black Lives Matter organisation and movement.⁴

Alongside issues with the over-policing of low-income minority communities, police brutality and state-sanctioned murder of Black people, the #BlackLivesMatter movement also actively confronted issues of sexism, homophobia, and the devaluation of Black lives globally. Central to the #BlackLivesMatter concept is affirming a Black existence that had not mattered (in the hegemonic sense of mattering, neither socially, politically, or economically) in the United States or globally prior to its call. As an organisation, it pivots on the tenets of equal access to leadership, intersectional analyses of power, and inclusive conceptions of identity (especially with regard to race, gender, class, and sexuality) within various social, political, and geographic groups and communities. The viral nature of this movement’s hashtag as well as its organisational structure, which today includes dozens of chapters around the world, has allowed the movement to spread across the globe and to unite Black people against issues of global anti-Blackness.⁵

Like #BlackLivesMatter, #FeesMustFall decentralised a charismatic leader and instead relied on a viral hashtag and collective voice strategy to garner the masses to use their individual voices, stations and skill sets to create a multilayered assault on the myriad of oppressive state practices and systems that effected their communities. It was youth driven, technology driven, social justice oriented, and used various forms of popular culture mediums to relay these messages. As such, musicians, painters, writers, athletes, filmmakers, poets and entertainers of all types took up the call of both of these movements and helped spread the word to the masses.

#FeesMustFall in South Africa was a product of a transnational dialogue of resistance to lingering (or continued) forms of colonialism, of statelessness and of anti-Black policy with #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. At the heart of #BlackLivesMatter and #FeesMustFall is a deep dissatisfaction and rejection of policies that create the conditions for repression and suffering for Black populations. This dissatisfaction and rejection animated a transnational dialogue, one that connects local issues with resistance strategies and actions within transnational networks of Black radical thinkers and communities.⁶

At this point, I began to better understand the questions that I had been previously mulling over but could not yet articulate and found that there was one that stood out. I wanted to know if there were models of resistance from our past that could explain the activist and cultural connections I saw between contemporary social movements like #FeesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. Thus, I began to study Black American and South African artistic social movements.

Having some previous knowledge of Black American cultural movements, I focused over a year on reading and studying South African cultural history. In my investigations, I found such movements as the Sophiatown Renaissance and the Black Consciousness Movement, not to mention the timeless cultural works of doyen South African anti-apartheid artists–with two of my favourites being the 1959 all Black jazz opera, King Kong, and documentary-esque film, Come Back, Africa, which premiered the same year.⁷ But, much like the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States, it was the 1960s that changed everything in South Africa. Beginning with the Sharpeville Massacre in March of 1960 and the subsequent banning of South Africa’s most prominent and influential revolutionary organisations, the ANC and the Pan African Congress (PAC), the apartheid regime instituted numerous forms of repressive legislation and policies geared at limiting any opposition to the National Party government.⁸ As PAC and ANC leadership were arrested or forced to go underground, so too did the organisations. Both would re-emerge in neighbouring African countries years later, but the ANC would assume the mantle as the predominant exiled revolutionary force whose goal was to overthrow the white minority South African government.⁹ Therefore, as I studied the ways the apartheid regime fortified their control of the state, which eventually included limiting Black artistic dissent, I grew even more interested in how the cultural movements of the 1960s used popular culture mediums as tools to voice their discontentment and to fight to break free from this repression.¹⁰

This led to my investigation of the cultural mediums used by the ANC. As they were the vanguard movement to liberate South Africa, I assumed that their cultural work would be a predecessor to the work of contemporary movements. This is how I found Radio Freedom, the ANC’s most important propaganda outlet in exile. Radio Freedom communicated the ANC’s continued presence outside of South Africa’s borders. Radio Freedom was also key in recruiting new members to the ANC’s cause and to its clandestine guerrilla camps all over the African continent. Further, the ANC used radio to communicate resistance strategies and plans of sabotage to be carried out within South Africa’s borders.¹¹

Armed with this bevy of knowledge, I took a research trip in 2017 to the Liberation Archives, the official archives of the ANC housed at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa. I wanted to find all I could about Radio Freedom, but as I was sifting through the many boxes of ANC documents and communications, instead of looking through the information that covered the more general Radio Freedom programme, I found myself enamoured by the chunk that outlined one of its segments, Dawn Breaks. Reading these radio scripts, station reports, internal memos, and other primary documents exposed the freedom dreams of the ANC and particularly its Women’s Section in exile. In these documents, I read their intentions, plans, and outlooks and was able to glean from their work a complex blueprint for what freedom could look like for any social group but specifically for every South African once, as they constantly insisted, “the people’s war was won.”

When Dawn Breaks

Good evening fellow countrywomen, struggling mothers and daughters of South Africa, combatants of the People’s Army Umkhonto weSizwe, compatriots. Greeting you this evening the 17th of January 1985, the year declared by our vanguard movement the ANC as The Year of the Cadre is Tintswalo Mageza. I shall be with you in this 30 minutes programme of Dawn Breaks. Dawn Breaks is the revolutionary voice of the ANC Women’s section. We broadcast every Thursday evening at half past nine South African time, from the external service of radio Zambia, Lusaka …

“Dawn Breaks” Programme of 17/1/85 (ANC Radio Freedom 1982-1987 Collection)

So began the 17 January 1985 broadcast of the ANC Women’s Section radio segment, Dawn Breaks. In this broadcast, host Tintswalo Mageza paid quick homage to the ANC’s 1984 campaigns that supported its theme, The Year of the Women, while providing extended commentary on the main tasks presented in ANC President Oliver Tambo’s January 8th statement, which outlined expectations for 1985ʹs theme, The Year of the Cadre. Mageza’s brief comments on The Year of the Women were particularly poignant. She said of it, “We must all in one voice say, ‘Long live the Year of the Women.’ This was a year that added more pages to the glorious history of our struggle especially the contributions made by this powerful contingent of our struggle – the women” (ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection). This was a central task of Dawn Breaks, to elevate the voices, the contributions, the dreams, and the presence of women in the ANC and in the history of South African liberation struggle.

Dawn Breaks was the official voice of the ANC Women’s Section. It broadcasted throughout the 1980s from the headquarters of the exiled ANC–and its propaganda outlet,¹² Radio Freedom – in Lusaka, Zambia every Thursday evening at 9:30 South African time for 30 min. The main objective of Radio Freedom, and by extension, Dawn Breaks, was to be the revolutionary voice of not only the ANC as an organisation but more importantly, of its military wing, the People’s Army Umkhonto weSizwe’s (MK’s) various units within the clandestine exiled organisation.

By Dawn Breaks’ inaugural broadcast in 1980, Radio Freedom had been consistently on the air with dedicated radio stations in at least five countries for almost a decade (“Report on the Radio Freedom Workshop”, ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection).¹³ While the ANC began radio broadcasts as early as 1963 and the ANC Women’s League (which disbanded in 1960 with the banning of the ANC in South Africa but was recreated in exile as the ANC Women’s Section) operating since the 1940s, it wasn’t until 13 March 1980 that the Women’s Section gained a dedicated radio segment on the ANC’s most vital propaganda outlet. Thus, Dawn Breaks is an important case study for considering the shifting anti-colonial vision during the 1980s of the ANC and its membership in exile as it introduced the organisation to a more inclusive, expansive, and radical vision for the future liberation of South Africa during this period.

President Tambo’s January 8th Statement in 1984 introduced The Year of the Women and its stake in the liberation struggle. He said in this statement that,

Our struggle will be less than powerful and our national and social emancipation can never be complete if we continue to treat the women of our country as dependent minors and objects of one form of exploitation or another. Certainly, no longer should it be that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. In our beleaguered country, the woman’s place is in the battlefront of struggle” (Compilation, 2009, Track 2).

As Tambo insisted that the women’s role was on the front lines of this struggle as linchpins to “national and social emancipation,” so too did Dawn Breaks. The Women’s Section and its radio segment were key in raising the consciousness of the entire ANC, exposing the organisation to the plight of women and children in the struggle, and articulating the necessity to centralise these voices in order to realise true liberation.

Radio Freedom, let alone the contributions of its Women’s Section radio segment, have not been the subject of much scholarship.¹⁴ Though there are a minimal number of academic articles on Radio Freedom, I have yet to read a mention of Dawn Breaks in any of them. The same can be said within the histories of the ANC Women’s Section. Whenever propaganda or cultural workers are studied, as in the work of Kim Miller and Kameron Hurley, The Women’s Section’s best-known propaganda source, the Voices of Women (VOW) magazine gets much well-deserved attention (Miller 2009; Hurley 2003). My investigation of Dawn Breaks then, is an important addition to this body of scholarship on the ANC in exile and the contributions of women to the anti-apartheid struggle.¹⁵

As evidence, I outline two key focal points of Dawn Breaks programming and content, which emphasise the Women’s Section’s particular contributions to the ANC’s developing anti-colonial politics in the 1980s: 1) Dawn Breaks fiercely advocated that the ANC and MK were the vanguard movement to lead the people’s war to free South Africa and that women should join as soldiers in this army; and 2) The Women’s Section challenged the sexual violence and patriarchal practices within the ANC and MK ranks in an attempt to advocate for a more inclusive and expansive expression of freedom in South Africa’s future.¹⁶

Advocating for the vanguard movement

In the previous section, I began with the opening remarks to a Dawn Breaks broadcast in 1985. Though DJs and show producers changed sometimes as often as weekly, the opening moments of any Dawn Breaks broadcast remained constant, clearly outlining the segment’s allegiances and foci. First, the host would greet all women of South Africa and “combatants of the People’s Army Umkhonto weSizwe.” Then, the host acknowledged the “vanguard movement the ANC” before introducing themselves. Lastly, before they broke down the specifics of the broadcast, they would state that “Dawn Breaks is the revolutionary voice of the ANC Women’s section” (“Dawn Breaks Programme”, ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection, 1)

These acknowledgements, in particular, showcase the three primary commitments of Dawn Breaks’ programming. First, it was the dedicated Radio Freedom segment that spoke directly to the women of South Africa. It communicated the achievements of women in struggle both in exile and those still battling within the country, while for those who had yet to join, Dawn Breaks called on them to take up arms for the anti-apartheid struggle. Second, they were combatants of the MK centrally invested in communicating strategies and plans for winning the people’s war waged against the National Party apartheid regime. Lastly, Dawn Breaks was the official and revolutionary voice of the ANC Women’s Section and communicated this body’s aims, commitments, strategies and plans.

These foci all speak to Dawn Breaks being deeply committed to anti-colonial work. Particularly, after reviewing Dawn Breaks programme agendas and scripts throughout the 1980s, one is left with a clear sense that Dawn Breaks vehemently denounced the P.W. Botha administration in South Africa and their allies around the world.

For example, in the closing remarks of an 8 May 1986 Dawn Breaks broadcast, host Lucy Thandeni held:

Two days ago, the racist President Botha sent a secret letter to the United States President Ronald Reagan. In the letter Botha is persuading Reagan to campaign against sanctions on the Pretoria regime and in addition, he has promised to release Nelson Mandela, unban the African National Congress while emphasizing that the condition is on the organization abandoning armed struggle …

Fellow compatriots, Botha’s maneuvers in their entirety are only aimed at buying time and maintain the failing system of apartheid. What we the oppressed but fighting masses of the land want now is the complete transfer of power to the majority of the people. No longer are we prepared to be fooled by Botha’s cosmetic reforms …

It is also our greatest task to pressure the international community to effect mandatory sanctions on Pretoria and expose the Reagan administration’s support of terrorism in Southern Africa through its ally – the Botha regime …

“Women’s Section Radio Script.” 8 May 1986

In this excerpt, Thandeni calls out the United States as a conspiring co-collaborator with the Botha administration in the maintenance of apartheid in South Africa. She urges the international community of ANC allies to effect sanctions on the South African government while also demanding that the Reagan administration of the United States be exposed for their part in supporting the continuance of apartheid rule in South Africa. In many ways, this speech by Thandeni is showcasing the breadth of their struggle. She gives a glimpse into the grandness of the opponents they face, which include the Botha administration and the United States of America. More importantly, however, by calling on the international community for support, she also shows just how large their ally network is. Indeed, this is a rallying cry. As such, later in this same broadcast, Thandeni calls for all women to join the ranks of the MK and fight this terror together as one nation.

During Dawn Breaks’ first ever broadcast, its opening statement calls for women to take up arms and fight for the dismantling of the apartheid regime. President Tambo echoed these sentiments in his 8 January 1984^th Statement when he said, “In our beleaguered country, the woman’s place is in the battlefront of struggle” (Compilation, 2009, Track 2). We also see similar thoughts expressed in the excerpt above by Thandeni and within the numerous archival materials, including Dawn Breaks programme timelines, memos, audio recordings and scripts. Indeed, Dawn Breaks as a programme focused a considerable amount of time inspiring women to join the MK and training women in the art of guerrilla warfare in the pursuit of future liberation. I argue, this was done for a couple of reasons. First, the work and advocacy of the Women’s Section throughout the 1980s forced the ANC and MK to confront sexist and patriarchal policies at the heart of their organisations, which led to progress in the recruitment of women into the MK ranks – I speak more about this in the next section. Secondly, because there were women still within South Africa’s borders, and knowing that women, whether within MK camps or in their homes in South Africa, had to contend with lack of or substandard combat training, Dawn Breaks broadcasted combat instructions and training for women that could be carried out from their own homes.

For example, broadcasts from 4 February through 3 April 1986 – the ANC Year of the MK – all focused on women and the MK (“Women’s Section Radio Programme”, ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection). These broadcasts covered topics like why women should join the MK, rural women and the MK, and the “building of combat units – self defense units.” Other programmes focused on how to create and use weapons from household materials and included such themes as, “How to make a home made hand grenade,” “How to use hand grenades in our combat units,” and “how to make a cocktail molotov petrol bomb” (ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection). These programmes denote a commitment to incorporating women in the fight against apartheid not as support or behind the scenes but as frontline combatants.

Dawn Breaks also spent considerable time acknowledging the work of women fighting against the apartheid regime within South Africa’s borders. As Dawn Breaks primarily called for a decolonised South Africa and the acknowledgement of women’s contributions to this work, any action that met these criteria was reported on air. An example of such an occurrence happened on 5 September 1985, when Dawn Breaks host Tintswalo Mageza reported on the contributions of women and students in the Tricameral Parliament demonstrations that began on 3 September of the previous year. In this broadcast, Mageza said:

Since the 3^rd of September last year not a single day has passed without one form of confrontation or another by our people in different areas with the enemy. Communities have fought for rent they cannot afford. Workers are demanding a living wage as seen even in the recent mineworker’s strike. The students are saying ne! to slave and inferior education. Among the major struggles launched since that day has been the successful stay at home by the workers which was called on November 5 and 6 in the Transvaal …

Our women in the Vaal triangle through their organization the Vaal Women’s Organization played a major role in the struggles fought as from the 3^rd of September. They did not fold their arms and let their sons and husbands face the enemy alone. They were found in the forefront of the struggle. It is through them that women in areas like Uitenhage, Cradock, Pretoria, Soweto, and the West Rand joined the main stream of struggle.”

Dawn Breaks programme of 5th September 1985

The Vaal Women’s Organization was not affiliated with the ANC or its Women’s Section in any official capacity. As such, their work was not reported by Mageza because of organisational allegiances but because their work was deeply anti-colonial and a significant example of women’s contributions to the fight against the apartheid regime. So, though Dawn Breaks was the official voice of the Women’s Section and was committed to the ultimate objectives of the ANC and MK, their deepest commitments were to be a voice for women in struggle against apartheid and to advocate for and recognise their contributions within it.

Democratising the ANC by advocating for women and children

Though the Women’s Section was committed to the ANC’s leadership for national liberation, Hassim argues, that overtime, it became a vital part of the mission of the Women’s Section to stress to its umbrella organisation that this national liberation had to consider the “woman question.” The ANC historically had always been resistant to discussing these issues on a national level. The organisation also was infamous for restricting access to leadership positions for women comrades while simultaneously ignoring acts of physical and sexual violence against women, particularly in the MK guerilla camps. (Hassim 2004, 2014; Davis 2009; Bundy 2018). So, for the Women’s Section, a large part of their work throughout the 1980s was to address these issues in the interest of democratising the ANC, to allow for a better experience for women comrades within its ranks and to allow the entire organisation to adopt a more inclusive and expansive vision of liberation for their beloved country’s future.

However, the path forward was daunting. The conditions for women within the ANC, not only the marginalisation of the Women’s Section within the exiled ANC bureaucracy but also South African women comrades within MK guerrilla camps around the African continent, were exceedingly poor. The Women’s Section had no guaranteed position on the National Executive Committee (NEC), the top-ranking governing body for the parent organisation. Women comrades within the rank-and-file of the MK found that their membership within the guerrilla camps was anything but substantive.¹⁷ In fact, they found that their membership within the MK was marginalised, conditional and secondary to that of their male comrades.

Exposing and eradicating these issues, I argue, was one of the key roles of the ANC Women’s Section in exile. Hassim’s work “excavates the debates on feminism and autonomy within the ANC, and seeks to understand how feminist demands impacted on processes of organizational democratization” in three ways in her work. “The first relates to internal organizational experiences, and the second to the theoretical debates that flowed from attempts to find a role for women in national liberation. The third … (relates to) ANC women’s exposure to, and interaction with, international feminist debates and with women’s organizations in post-independence African countries” (Hassim 2004, 433). Therefore, Hassim’s work provides an in-depth analysis of the history of the Women’s Section, particularly with regard to how this body pushed for their inclusion into the higher echelons of the ANC organisation. Hassim also explores how rank-and-file women comrades within MK guerrilla camps found their membership to be marginal and often times outright oppressive. For context, I will provide a brief summary of Hassim’s findings regarding these points.

Throughout the 1980s, the Women’s Section fought for equal standing by petitioning and engaging all strata of ANC bureaucracy from the NEC to the Revolutionary Council and its successor the Political-Military Council beginning in 1983 (Hassim 2004, 439). The Women’s Section wanted a guaranteed spot on all of these councils while also demanding autonomy in order to control the affairs of women and children throughout these organisations. As they debated the merits of their position, they were met with many of the typical arguments men have made against similar demands by women in other nationalist movements throughout history. One being that the Women’s Section put the concerns of women before those of the ANC. However, the Women’s Section’s insistence on bringing their demands to the floor meant that the ANC and its disproportionately male leadership was forced to contend with and debate these issues on a regular basis throughout the 1980s. This led to improvements in many aspects of women’s representation within the organisation, such as creating a women’s segment on Radio Freedom and convincing the sympathetic ANC President Oliver Tambo to adopt for the ANC’s 1984 theme, The Year of the Women. However, as evidenced by only broadcasting the women’s radio segment once a week for 30-minutes and the lack of organisation-wide support in the creation, promotion and execution of events and policy around 1984ʹs theme, the ANC may have made strides on paper but never truly adopted an emphasis on gender equality in practice within the organisation (Hassim 2004, 446).¹⁸

One consistent project that was given to the Women’s Section to organise in exile was to set up crèches at the many guerrilla camps and staff these daycare centres (Hassim 2004, 436). This work was deemed a “natural role” for the Women’s Section to assume by leadership in the camps, which, for the most part, was not debated by the Women’s Section. They felt that they were best equipped to take care of the children at the MK camps and that this care was not only necessary practically but also for crafting the future generations of freedom fighters in South Africa. What these centres did expose though, and where the Women’s Section found themselves at odds with male organisational superiors, was that they were often used as dumping grounds for undervalued women combatants. Instead of women receiving more advanced combat training and being enlisted in more active militia units, they were disproportionately assigned to the camp crèches as if their only contributions to the peoples’ war could be as devalued domestic labourers.

One way leadership justified women being sent to work at camp crèches instead of more active militia units was the rule that women were forbidden from becoming pregnant while serving in the MK. This policy was not only written policy but was sometimes physically forced upon women like those who were “ … deployed to the Angolan camps (and) were inserted with IUDs as a matter of policy” (Hassim 2004, 436). However, when women did eventually become pregnant in camps, it was procedure for them to be sent away to camps where the Women’s Section had active daycare establishments. However, these deployments were not taken with excitement but rather, were understood as punishments or banishments for women comrades. As an example, Hassim quotes women from MK camps as saying, “ANC policy was to send new mothers to Morogoro with their children. For young women, ‘there was a slight horror about having children and being sent to Tanzania’, where they would spend long months without any activity (Hassim 2004, 436–437).”

The Women’s Section argued against these policies, with little to no change in them throughout the decade, as these policies were sexist and unevenly enforced. Male comrades who impregnated female comrades were not subject to the same relocation policies nor forced contraception. However, it was up to the Women’s Section and mothers within the MK only to take care of the children of all combatants. Meanwhile, this work was being performed while women had to contend with the unwritten policy that assumed that they were available sexually for male comrades. Hassim literally outlines male membership arguing whether or not women should be forced to have sex with male comrades to boost morale, while Stephen Davis along with Hassim provide several examples and sources that outline the plethora of instances of sexual violence in MK camps throughout the ANC and MK’s tenure in exile (Hassim 2004, 442–443; Davis 2009, 367).

In a Mail & Guardian article titled, “Women freedom fighters tell of sexual abuse in camps,” author Carl Collison uses the testimony of former women comrades of the PAC, and ANC and MK, as well as former male comrades of the ANC and MK guerilla camps, to account for the overwhelming history of rape, threat of rape and other forms of sexual violence against women in these camps. Several women chose to remain anonymous in the article, while others like Sibongile “Promise” Khumalo, Thenjiwe Mtintso, Fezekile “Khwezi” Kuzwayo, and Lita Mazibuko spoke in horrifying detail of their own or their comrades’ experiences with sexual violence or threat of violence. Khumalo spoke about being raped as early as 15 years old; Kuzwayo spoke about her rape at the hands of Jacob Zuma, former ANC President and alleged serial perpetrator of sexual violence against women since the 1980s; and Collison introduces Mazibuko’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) testimony where she recounts being raped three times while working to organise “safe routes for comrades over the South African border into Swaziland (Collison, 27 October 2017).” Unfortunately, this was not uncommon for women who decided to join the ranks of the armed anti-apartheid wings and because they were so low in number, women comrades were often coerced not to report these offences (Collison, 27 October 2017).¹⁹ Consequently, large percentages of women in the MK found themselves battling depression but again did not dare speak of their battles for fear of being labelled “emotionally unfit for duty” or “liabilities in struggle” rather than equally committed and capable comrades (Hassim, 2004, 436).

In sum, women in the ANC found that they had severely limited capacities to exercise their rights as members of the organisation. They found that they were not protected from sexual harassment or being undervalued as comrades in struggle by the national organisation or their local guerrilla MK units. The lack of women’s representation at the highest levels of ANC leadership, sexual violence in the camps, lack of guerrilla training, underutilisation in service jobs in the camps, among other issues, all point to the lack of substantive citizenship for women within the ANC in exile.

Moreover, Collison’s piece also showcases the inability of the male leadership of the ANC to come to grips with failures in their treatment and protection of women comrades. Collison uses TRC testimonies of then MK commander and defence minister, Joe Modise, and then deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, and quotes former MK commissar Andrew Masondo all as saying that when they were made aware of the “occasional instance” of sexual violence in the camps, these issues were taken seriously and dealt with swiftly (Collison, 27 October 2017). This revisionist history, as many would call it, including so many women who were sexually assaulted in the camps, is indicative of the constant struggle women comrades faced within the liberation movement. In fact, their actual stories and grievances were silenced, hidden, or labelled as insignificant or already handled.

However, the record shows that this did not stop the Women’s Section nor Dawn Breaks from advocating for the rights of women and children. In many ways, it can be argued that the damning paradox of being women militants subjected to the same misogyny that supported the apartheid society pushed these women to continue their fight. This is evidenced in Dawn Breaks’ programming, which included dozens of programmes dedicated to grappling with and challenging the role of women in the ANC, while also debating the best courses of action to build and sustain the anti-apartheid movement. These programmes showcase Dawn Breaks’ commitment to liberation strategizing, which ultimately elevated women’s voices in the movement.

One such segment, on 31 January 1985, featured the Head of the Women’s Section and Executive Committee Member of the ANC, Gertrude Shope, who spoke about her experience at the Afro Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) Meeting on Women in Cairo, Egypt, on the 23rd and 24th of January 1985 (“Interview with Comrade Gertrude Shope”, 31 January 1985, ANC Radio Freedom 1982–1987 Collection, 1–4). Shope’s comments highlight how the ANC Women’s Section’s connections to international women’s organisations helped their work in challenging the domestic and international gender politics of liberation struggle. This also helped the women of the ANC to articulate to their umbrella organisation what a truly inclusive liberatory struggle and politics entail. Shope describes that at AAPSO they “work together with other democratic organizations to ensure that discussions on contemporary women’s problems do not take place in a vacuum (‘Interview with Comrade Gertrude Shope’, 2)” She goes on to say that they discussed, “The problem of Women and the mass media as evidenced in ineffective communication due to inability to express and exchange views in both verbal and other forms of communication,” and that while following “a very clear policy” to “always [work] towards the emancipation of women,” they sought to implement “recommendations and forward looking strategies for the advancement of women in Africa and Asia to the Year 2000 (“Interview with Gertrude Shope”).

My argument is not that this process was ever complete. The ANC has never been without its issues with regard to patriarchy, misogyny or sexual violence perpetrated against women. For example, former South African President, Jacob Zuma, was charged with rape in 2005 and Oliver Tambo, presented here as sympathetic to the needs of women in the ANC, famously undercut Winnie Mandela’s leadership in the movement and condemned necklacing to international presses after her infamous 1986 comments regarding the tactic. Instead, what I am arguing is that this effort to articulate a new and inclusive vision of South Africa’s future helped the ANC work towards becoming a more democratic body but also aided women within South Africa and within the ANC to find their voice in struggle. This was deeply anti-colonial work, as they demanded that colonial gender roles and practices be eradicated from their national struggle for the betterment of South Africa’s future. It was in their persistence to not blindly support patriarchal and at times, misogynistic visions of the future that crafted the Women’s Section’s push to rearticulate the ANC’s liberation dreams. As such, this helped elevate women’s needs and those of their children as central to the dialogue for how freedom would be secured for all South Africans. Indeed, these women allowed the marginal to demand space in the centre, or better yet, to attempt to eliminate the margins all together.

Conclusion: takeaways in twilight

Dawn Breaks gave voice to a movement that demanded the end of settler colonialism in South Africa and a reimagined ANC that would usher in a new South Africa governed by a party that at its core was committed to equality for all people across race, gender and class lines. Though this dream was never fully realised, the Women’s Section and its powerful radio segment pushed the organisation and country forward in ways that would have never happened without this contingent of women’s activism, persistence and struggle.

This call has never disappeared and has guided, even if only through an informal historical material process, anti-apartheid movements in South Africa and globally since. The history of Dawn Breaks provides a compelling template for contemporary social movements. Dawn Breaks utilised the cultural medium of radio to recruit women to the vanguard movement while also giving them a voice therein. Analysis of this example allows one to scrutinise their negotiations, debates, and actions to effect change within the ANC and its membership for the betterment of all in a free South Africa.

Dawn Breaks also gives a real sense of what it takes to participate in truly anti-colonial work. Not only should this work confront the colonial state, but it must also confront the colonial policies adopted within anti-colonial movements, including their gendered dimensions. We must consider the needs of our most marginal and vulnerable and elevate these voices–through whatever means available to us – to the most central position of our fight so that we can ensure that no one is left behind on our march to the Promised Land.

I would argue that these are key components of #BlackLivesMatter and #FeesMustFall. Both movements work diligently to centralise the most marginal voices they represent while using a decentralised leadership to avoid the concentration of power in individuals or groups. They do this by using social media, popular culture mediums, organised protest, and whatever other means available to them. However, there is more to be learned from the Women’s Section and Dawn Breaks than just these ideas. History is full of other organisations, cultural productions, and social movements that can give us glimpses into how to achieve more expansive and inclusive anti-colonial politics. It is the work of scholars, cultural producers, artists and entertainers, and social movement activists to seek out these examples and critique them so that we can continue to create the future they struggled and laboured for.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin L. Boston

Martin L. Boston is an Assistant Professor of Pan African Studies and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento State). He holds a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), and has also taught at DePaul University, UC San Diego, and Washington State University before joining the Ethnic Studies Department at Sacramento State.

Notes

1. This was a two-day series of plenaries and workshops with over 120 attendees from UCSD and nearly every other UC campus, held January 29–30, 2015 at UCSD.

2. Pierre’s work, particularly (Pierre 2012), is an excellent example of considering the necessity to studying the construction and effects of “Blackness” and “Anti-Blackness” within and beyond the continent of Africa, especially as a tenet of colonialism.

3. Ochieng (2015) provides an excellent account of the racial politics that were at the epicentre of this struggle. Other texts that provide statistical evidence for these persistent forms of inequality include: (Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown 2011), (Klein 2007) and (Cliffe 2000, 274)

4. Texts that are helpful to consider the history, formation, and ideologies of Black Lives Matter: Ransby (2018) and Garza (2014).

5. Ibid.

6. Texts that are helpful to consider how these Black radical networks are formed are: Edwards (2003) and Head (1991). Edwards considers how radical politics are shared transnationally through translation of global texts. Head, a prolific South African writer, creates a global Black radical community through letters to colleagues around the world. Also, Gilroy (1993) theorises Black networks through the transnational cultural exchange routes found in the Atlantic world.

7. See: Bloom (1961) and Rogosin (1959).

8. For about Sharpeville and its aftermath, See: (Lodge 2011)

9. For more about the ANC in exile, see: (Ellis 2013).

10. Such repression included The National Party government destroying thriving arts communities like Sophiatown (beginning in the mid-1950s) and imposing the 1963 Publications and Entertainment Act, to censor, ban, imprison or exile outspoken anti-apartheid writers, artists and entertainers.

11. For more information about Radio Freedom, its formation, and ideologies, see: Lekgoathi (2010) and Davis (2009).

12. I use the term “propaganda” here because beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the ANC and its media outlets began to describe their conflict with the South African government as a “People’s War.” In the People’s War strategy, which was developed by the Chinese Communist Revolutionary Mao Zendong and later used by the Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, it is important to maintain the support of the masses through propaganda campaigns and to mobilise these masses to engage the enemy deep in the countryside employing guerilla warfare tactics. As such, the ANC began referring to all of their media outlets as propaganda, including Radio Freedom.

13. With a 1983 report of a Radio Freedom Workshop, it speaks of five active stations at the time located in Luanda, Angola; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Antananarivo, Madagascar; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Lusaka, Zambia; and in addition a sixth station in 1984 in Maputo, Mozambique. See: “Report of the Radio Freedom Workshop Held in Lusaka From the 28–30 April 1983 The Year of Unified Action.” (1983). Pps. 9–10.

14. Lekgoathi (2010) and Davis (2009) are two of the few but foundational articles on Radio Freedom that discuss the programme in distinct but interrelated ways. Davis’ essay traces the history of Radio Freedom as a way to discuss the dynamics of the relationship and the influence of the South African Communist Party (SACP) on the ANC in exile, while Lekgoathi’s essay adds to the history uncovered in Davis’ piece by focusing on the audiences of Radio Freedom, why and how these audiences listened to Radio Freedom and the impact Radio Freedom had on their lives.

15. Texts that outline the contributions of women to the anti-apartheid struggle include (Brooks 2008; Bridger 2021).

16. Note on sources: For the sections that follow, the majority of the history of ANC Women’s Section is indebted to the work of Shireen Hassim. The primary source materials particular to Dawn Breaks are documents I uncovered at the Liberation Archives at the University of Fort Hare.

17. I use substantive citizenship here as is defined in Glenn (2004), 53.

18. Hassim writes to this point that, “The Year exposed the ANC’s weaknesses in integrating issues of gender equality into the core work of the movement. Despite the creation of a committee to oversee the Year’s programme of action, it soon became the responsibility of the Women’s Section rather than the movement as a whole. (Mavis) Nhlapo argues that the Year of the Women failed in its most crucial task, that of ‘making the women’s issue a national issue and not just a women’s issue.’”

19. Collison quotes former MK commissar Andrew Masondo as saying, “In Angola there are at one time 22 women in a group of more than 1 000 people.” Collison also has entire section of his article speaking about the silence regarding women’s abuse in the camps subtitled, “The deafening silence on rape in MK camps lingers.”