Lilian Ngoyi Passes On

Lilian Ngoyi Passes On

On 13 March 1980, a 68-year-old anti-apartheid revolutionary activist and founder member of the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL), Lilian Ngoyi, passed on. Ngoyi was living as a restricted person at the time, and had developed a heart condition, which led to hear death. She joined the ANC and eventually helped found the party’s women wing, ANCWL. In 1956, Ngoyi led a march against pass laws for women to the Union Buildings and personally knocked on Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom’s door to hand over the petitions.

“Mma Ngoyi”, as Lilian Masediba Matabane Ngoyi was affectionately referred to, was born on 25 September 1911, in Bloed Street, Pretoria, the only daughter of Annie and Isaac Matabane, and was a sister to three brothers. Ngoyi’s mother worked as a washerwoman and her father was a mineworker. She attended Kilnerton Primary School until Standard Two and in 1928, she moved to Johannesburg to train as a nurse at City Deep Mine Hospital. Here, she met and married a van driver, John Gerard Ngoyi, in 1934 and they had a daughter, Edith Ngoyi. Unfortunately, Lilian Ngoyi’s husband died in a motor car accident in 1937, leaving her alone with their three-year old daughter.

Ngoyi joined the Garment Workers Union (GWU) under Solly Sachs and soon became one of its leading figures. Impressed by the spirit of ANC volunteers, she joined the ANC during the 1952 Defiance Campaign and was arrested for disobediently using facilities in a post office that were only reserved for white people. She became the first woman elected to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC, and helped launch the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW).

Prior to becoming a machinist at a textile mill, where she was employed from 1945 to 1956, Ngoyi enrolled to become a nurse. Her energy and her gift as a public speaker won her rapid recognition, and within a year of joining the ANC she was elected as president of the ANC Women’s League. When the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) was formed in 1954, she became one of its national vice-presidents, and in 1956 she was elected as the Federation’s president. She was at that stage a widow with two children and an elderly mother to support, and worked as a seamstress.

On 9 August 1956, Ngoyi led a women’s march along with Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, Sophia De Bruyn, Motlalepula Chabaku, Bertha Gxowa and Albertina Sisulu of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in protest against the apartheid government requiring women to carry passbooks as part of the pass laws. Holding thousands of petitions in one hand, Ngoyi was the one who knocked on Prime Minister Strijdom’s door to hand over the petitions.

Lilian Ngoyi was also a transnational figure who recognised the potential influence that international support could have on the struggle against apartheid and the emancipation of black women. With this in mind she embarked on an audacious (and highly illegal) journey to Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1955, to participate in the World Congress of Women and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR – former East Germany). Accompanied by her fellow activist and as an official delegate of FEDSAW, Dora Tamana, they embarked on a journey that would see an attempt to stow away on a boat leaving Cape Town under “white names”.

With the assistance of a sympathetic pilot, they defied segregated seating on a plane bound for London and gained entry into Britain under the pretext of completing a course in Bible studies. She also visited Germany, Switzerland, Romania, China and the former Soviet Union, meeting women leaders and often engaging in revolutionary socio-economic and political issues, before arriving back in South Africa as a “wanted woman”. The national liberation movement owed its unshakeable positions with the ranks of the international democratic movement to leaders such as Mma Ngoyi, who were able to explain its progressive policies. Their loyalty to the ideals pursued by the progressive anti-imperialist movement of the peoples of the whole world had always guided the ANC’s perspective towards international relations.

In December 1956, Ngoyi was arrested for high treason along with 156 other leading figures and stood trial until 1961 as one of the accused in the four-year-long Treason Trial, who were arrested and charged with high treason for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the government and establish a “communist state”. According to the prosecution, the Freedom Charter they advocated visualised the abolition of all racial discrimination and the granting of equal rights to all. Combined with the slogan “Freedom in Our Lifetime”, the Charter was considered revolutionary, as it would involve the overthrow and destruction of the existing state. While the trial was still on, she was arrested and spent 71 days in solitary confinement, and was for a period of 15 years placed under severe bans and restrictions that confined her to her home in Mzimhlophe, Soweto.

Ngoyi was known as a strong orator and a fiery inspiration to many of her colleagues in the ANC and in the women’s organisations. She became a prominent leader of the militant women’s campaigns in all settings, both urban and rural, particularly in fighting against the extension of the hated pass laws to the Black womenfolk. Mma Ngoyi always remained “part of black women’s struggle for human rights, part of the women everywhere, and part of the total struggle for a better life for all humanity”. Indeed, “she was unique woman whose life had a great significance, and the recognition of this in the Isitwalandwe award gives us added pride in our movement – and in ourselves” (Bernstein). Lilian Ngoyi became the first woman, two years after her death, to receive the highest award of the liberation movement: Isitwalandwe.

Before she passed on, she summed up her unwavering confidence in the outcome of the struggle by declaring that “But my spirits have not been dampened. You can tell my friends all over the world that this girl is still her old self, if not more mature after all the experiences. I am looking forward to the day when my children will share in the wealth of our lovely South Africa. … if I die, I’ll die a happy person because I have already seen the rays of our new South Africa rising”. Mma Ngoyi epitomised the idiom “Mmangwana o tshwara thipa ka bogaleng!”

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
Obituary, African National Congress, “Ma-Ngoyi the Heroine”, Sechaba, June 1980.
Hilda Bernstein, “Lilian Ngoyi: Isitwalandwe”, Sechaba, August 1982.

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