Mukoni Ratshitanga’s “Faith & Defiance — The Life of Sally Motlana”, which was published in December last year, has added to a growing list of SA’s biographical offerings.
The book brings to a new generation the exceptional life of Motlana as an avid developmental and Christian anti-apartheid activist from the mid-1940s until her retirement in the early 1990s. It begins in 1927, the year of her birth in Moremela, a village in the then-Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga.
Her arrival into the world was marked by bad blood that flowed due to her maternal family’s opposition to her parents’ marriage — her mother was of royal lineage and her father was a commoner.
The narrative glides seamlessly into Motlana’s early life and formative years in Sophiatown in the 1940s, her tertiary education at the Anglican Grace Dieu Diocesan Training College for teachers in Limpopo, and on to the University of Fort Hare.
The pace gathers momentum as Motlana enters adulthood, the beginning of her teaching career, and a reversal with her early exit from the profession after the introduction of Bantu education in 1953.
We follow her as she rediscovers herself with eventual leadership of the self-help organisation, Black Housewives League (BHL), in the late 1960s.
Brought up under the tutelage of the Anglican Church’s Father Trevor Huddleston in Sophiatown, Motlana joined the SA Council of Churches (SACC) in the early 1970s, where her leadership potential was recognised by her election as vice president of the interdenominational body, becoming one of its fiercest and most vocal leaders against apartheid.
Ratshitanga is a stickler for history, sometimes laboriously so, criss-crossing various epochs of SA’s past, presumably to “facilitate”, as seems to be his central concern, “a better understanding of [my] subject and the zeitgeist that shaped her”. While this might make for hard work, a biography of a person born in the late 1920s is invariably a historical text that opens a window to a fast-receding past.
As a black woman activist with odds heavily stacked against her, Motlana’s ability to multitask in the face of various hurdles is incredibly impressive. Part of the explanation for her industry lies in the decision she and Nthato Motlana, her husband, made to send their young children to boarding school at an early age.
“All my friends and relatives,” she told Ratshitanga, “thought I was the most cruel mother on Earth, but that didn’t bother me. The Catholics looked after the children very well.” Another estimation was provided by veteran cleric, activist, and former general secretary of the SACC, Frank Chikane. He held Motlana in high esteem because she was of the “pedigree,” “like … Charlotte Maxeke,” the first South African black woman to obtain a university degree.
Faith & Defiance is an important book for several reasons. It honours a remarkable woman and elevates SA women’s agency in challenging oppression. It therefore contributes to the struggle for gender equality, bringing added richness to the various narratives of women’s emancipation.
Its release is especially auspicious as we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings.
In 1963, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr wrote that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Referring to the SA situation, much later in 1987, Motlana wrote in Tiger Lily magazine — a Canadian publication for women of colour — that: “History has shown that no oppressors have willingly relinquished power to the vanquished.
“The disadvantaged have to build a comparable power base, either through military might or through grassroots organisations with popular support, to articulate the needs of the poor and to find solutions.”
Motlana took to heart the lesson that freedom is never free. She and her generation of freedom fighters nailed their colours to the mast for values that should be amplified today: a just, non-racial, non-sexist, and democratic SA. This country’s social and political stability depends on the fulfilment of these values.
Like all activists arrayed against oppressive regimes, Motlana was nothing if not defiant. The book recounts a 1976 incident in which some young people took refuge from truncheoned, heavily armed police at Motlana’s Sizwe Stores grocery store in Mofolo, Soweto.
A tense standoff ensued between Motlana and the officer commanding. He sought to gain entry into the room where the teenagers had hidden without her permission, but she would have none of that: “You are not going in; this is my shop, and permission to enter comes from me,” she chastised him, calling the officer a “brainwashed” quisling who did not “realise that these children are yours and mine”.
The hapless police officer’s response betrayed both his loyalty to his job and the sharp tension between communal African values and modernity, pitched in the intersection of apartheid and capitalist individualism. “My children are in the Transkei,” he retorted.
Acknowledging this tension is a vital first step towards an important national conversation about how the country fuses the best of our diverse cultural traditions into a uniquely post-apartheid SA cultural and social synthesis.
The dramatic high point of Faith & Defiance is Motlana’s 1978 conspiratorial manoeuvre, in which she plots the escape of two Azanian People’s Liberation Army operatives from Jeppe police station with the assistance of Samuel Ngobeni, a SA Police (SAP) officer, who ends up leaving for Tanzania with the two guerrillas donned in his SAP uniform. It reads like a film script.
Faith & Defiance reminds us of the importance of agency. Motlana and her colleagues in the BHL were not passive recipients of the generosity of others. They got up and rolled up their sleeves, built schools, vegetable gardens, and income-generation projects, which changed people’s lives. Their perseverance offers timeless lessons in active and responsible citizenship.
This book is a testament to the virtues of character and selflessness. Sally Motlana did not have to spread herself so thinly in the service of others, or to put herself in harm’s way. This teacher by training, married to medical practitioner, businessman and prominent activist, Nthato Harrison Motlana, chose the path of sacrifice. The couple could easily have lived cocooned middle-class lives — to the extent that apartheid allowed Africans — but instead they chose the path of service to the greater cause.
Faith & Defiance is a great read; it draws the reader’s gaze into the rearview mirror of history, the better to reflect on the present and the future. The youth of today should accept this challenge, to look into their future through the eyes of remarkable figures from our history.
Former president Thabo Mbeki, who authored the book’s foreword, concluded that the “book is itself a school, which, especially the younger generations, should not miss”.
Faith & Defiance is available at Exclusive Books.
- Makhafola is a former spokesperson for the minister of communications
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