Lilian Ngoyi
Lilian Ngoyi stands as a giant in the country’s history, a passionate orator and tireless leader in the liberation struggle.
Lilian Masediba Ngoyi, known affectionately as Ma Ngoyi, was born into a religious Pedi family in Pretoria in 1911. One of six children, she knew poverty and hardship from an early age. A bright mind, she was troubled observing the way black South Africans were treated by whites.
Her family struggled with enough food to eat, and could not afford her school fees. After only one year of high school, she started working to help support her family.
Ngoyi married and had a daughter, but lost her husband when their daughter was only three years old. A widow, she kept working as the sole breadwinner to support her mother, her daughter and an adopted child. As a seamstress and textile machinist, she joined and became an active member of the non-racial Garment Workers Union led by Solly Sachs, where she would later be on the executive.
A trailblazer in the liberation struggle, the power of her personality and public speaking could not be ignored by the usually male-dominated leadership of the movement. Within one year of joining the ANC, she was the first woman to be elected to the national executive, as well as becoming president of the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL).
In this role, Ngoyi was instrumental in helping to launch the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw), particularly in her role of creating strong bonds between the ANCWL and Fedsaw. On the stage at Fedsaw’s inaugural conference, she spoke to rousing applause.
“Let us be brave: we have heard of men shaking in their trousers, but who ever heard of a woman shaking in her skirt?”
First elected as a national vice-president, she was later elected president in 1956, before the Women’s March.
In 1955, she secretly travelled to a World Congress of Women in Switzerland as an official Fedsaw delegate, an illegal and unheard of act for a black South African woman. An internationalist, she addressed several large apartheid protests, including one at London’s Trafalgar Square. She visited several socialist countries, as well as Nazi concentration camps. This only renewed her fervor to fight for freedom and a multi-racial South Africa.
Ngoyi, together with Fedsaw secretary Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, and Sophie Williams-De Bruyn, led the Women’s March protest of 20 000 fellow South African women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. This was among the largest and most influential mass actions in the country’s history. As Fedsaw’s president, it was Ngoyi that knocked on Prime Minister Strijdom’s office door, armed with thousands of petitions against the law requiring women to carry pass books.
Ngoyi was arrested for high treason in December 1956, the start of the four-year Treason Trial accusing 156 leaders of the liberation struggle. When out on bail, she was again arrested under the 1960 State of Emergency. As a black woman, the conditions of her imprisonment and solitary confinement by the apartheid state were particularly cruel.
Due to her relentless leadership, courage and success, she was banned by the apartheid state in 1962, limiting her movement, association and freedom of speech. Confined to her tiny house in Orlando Township for 18 years, she struggled to earn money by sewing, and her leading voice was silenced.
Under renewed banning orders, and suffering from a heart condition, she died in 1980, aged only 68. Two years later, she became the first woman to be awarded the highest honour of the ANC, the Isitwalandwe Medal. — Romi Reinecke