Mmagauta Molefe still remembers how police used to raid her home in Tladi, Soweto, in the middle of the night just to see that everyone in the home had a permit to live in Johannesburg.
These random visits in the late 1950s by the Black Jacks began to open her eyes as a child that something was not right in SA.
In one of the raids, she recalls, police came to her home at night demanding to see if everyone had a permit.
Someone had given the police information that her grandmother had visited; obviously, she did not have a permit.
But her father, Daniel Molefe stood his ground that no one was going to take his mother away.
“Where do you want her to be? She is my mother. If you want to take someone, take me,” Molefe recalls her father saying.
Her father was arrested that night and spent time in jail before being placed under house arrest for a year.
She said her father would never allow anyone to be bullied by police. Molefe learned to stand for the truth from him.
Molefe said she later learned as an adult that her father was actively involved in the work of the Pan Africanist Congress.
Molefe, 69, who now lives in Krugersdorp, on the West Rand, was born in Alexandra and moved to Tladi in the early 1950s, where her family settled for most of her childhood.
She is one of the many women who are being profiled by radio personality Thabiso Sikwane in her initiative SHE IS 1976.
The initiative is aimed at telling stories of women who played a critical role in the struggle for liberation.
Ultimately, Sikwane plans to even produce books which she will take to the department of basic education so that children can learn about the role of women in the struggle for freedom.
Around 1968, Molefe started getting involved in the struggle through student organisations such as South African Student Movement as a pupil at the Morris Isaacson High in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto.
Long before the 1976 Soweto uprising came, her political involvement intensified as she was a social work student at the University of the North.
But she was expelled from the university for her involvement in politics.
She decided to enroll at the University of SA and got a job as an admin assistant at the Black People’s Convention’s (BPC) office, an organisation that coordinated work for liberation movements.
It was while she was at the BPC that the apartheid government announced that Afrikaans would be the medium of instruction starting in 1976.
The announcement received a lot of resistance from all sectors of society.
At the BPC office in Johannesburg, Molefe worked with other comrades to coordinate the resistance against the policy.
But on June 16 1976, Molefe was down with flu and was only alerted of the killing of pupils by another comrade.
Later that month, Molefe was arrested and spent six months at the John Vorster police station (Johannesburg Central) and also Number Four (Hillbrow).
Police forced her to stand for 18 hours in six successive days just for not cooperating with the police.
After that, she stood for 24 hours in 18 days. It is where Molefe learned to sleep with her eyes open.
But having paid such a high price, the mother of three is not happy with what the ANC has become in a democratic SA.
“The government does not love our people. They do not care about the people. If they loved our people, they would make sure that we do not suffer like this. How do you go and cut a ribbon for a shack…and go back home and say you have served our people. How do you steal money that is meant to change the lives of people,” Molefe said.
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