‘Adelaine was a modest woman of great integrity and courage’
Anti-apartheid activist Adelaine Hain, mother of former Neath MP Peter Hain and a sole white supporter during the trial of political icon Nelson Mandela, has died aged 92. Nino Williams looks back at a remarkable life
KNOWN as Ad, Adelaine Hain was married to fellow antiapartheid activist Walter Hain, who died in 2016.
The couple were parents to four children, including former Neath Labour MP and Labour cabinet member Peter Hain, who followed his parents in campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa.
Born Adelaine Florence Stocks in Port Alfred, South Africa, she lived in the country with her husband Walter during the ’50s and ’60s at a time when prisoners could be sold to farmers as cheap labour and black servants could be arrested if they were not carrying pass papers.
After a brief time in the UK in the mid ’50s, Ad and Walter returned to Pretoria and joined the Liberal party, the only non-race-based political grouping.
While Walter was working as an architect, Adelaine became in effect an unpaid political organiser, getting legal representation for black people who had been arrested, illegally entering the black townships to visit party members, and later, when the numbers of activists arrested was rising, ferrying food parcels to prisoners’ families.
Inseparable as a couple, both Walter and Adelaine became extremely active in the Liberal party’s Pretoria branch, she becoming its secretary and Walter later its chairman, until they were both issued with banning orders suppressing their activism.
She also attended the trial of Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants in Pretoria in 1963-64, and was sometimes their sole supporter in the whites-only gallery.
Adelaine was the leading activist of the two in between caring for her four children whilst Walter was at work. A diminutive figure, barely 5ft tall, she fought doggedly for civil rights in Pretoria, the capital city and citadel of apartheid.
In local black townships like Atteridgeville, Lady Selborne and Mamelodi, she signed scores of passbooks to keep their owners from being arrested – even though it was illegal for her as their non-employer to do so.
Driving an old Volkswagen minibus, Ad became a familiar figure to local activists and to the security police. She patrolled Pretoria’s courts trying to discover teenage defendants who’d disappeared into the system and alert their frantic parents.
One such defendant, 15-year-old Dikgang Moseneke, remembered her vividly in his memoirs as the only white person he’d ever encountered who gave him any support, bringing him a bar of cherished chocolate every day until he was sentenced to 10 years on Robben Island.
Reporting on Mandela’s trial, Moseneke went on to study for a law degree amid the harsh conditions on the island, and decades later became Deputy Chief Justice in the Constitutional Court, the country’s supreme
court inaugurated by Nelson Mandela.
For their anti-apartheid activism in the party, the couple were both imprisoned for two weeks without charge in 1961.
They were released because after their arrested, Ad had dashed away from special branch officers, and chewed up and spat out the incriminating evidence of a draft leaflet supporting Mandela’s defiance campaign.
Isolated on her own in a large women’s prison, warders would leer at her while she bathed, and she was haunted by the cries of black women prisoners being savagely beaten.
Although the separately imprisoned Walter lost his job, they couple were undeterred.
Walter got a new job and Ad was asked by the weekly anti-apartheid newspaper Contact to report on Nelson Mandela’s trial in 1962 in Pretoria’s Old Synagogue.
She invariably was the only person in the public gallery reserved for whites – the one for blacks packed. On entry to the dock each morning Mandela would turn to her and raise his clenched fist in salute, to which she would stand and return with her small white fist raised.
They had both first met Mandela in 1958, taking lunch to him and codefendants in the Treason Trial.
Then in 1963, by now notorious and regularly in the news, she was issued with a magistrate’s letter warning her not to undertake any more “subversive activity”.
Her activity prompted a cartoon in a national newspaper with the police minister instructing his head of security: “Go and find Adelaine Hain, check what she’s doing and tell her she mustn’t.”
In September 1963 she was presented with a banning order with a long list of restrictions designed to stop her political activism and render
> her a non-person who could not be quoted in public. It made it illegal for her to communicate with any other banned person.
The move presented the apartheid government with a dilemma when her husband Walter was banned a year later in 1964.
They were issued with special new clauses in their banning orders allowing them, exceptionally, to communicate with one other banned person: namely each other.
Despite the banning order she remained defiant, and her activism became clandestine.
Whereas before, she and Walter had together hosted parties for ambassadors to meet black activists in their living room, the banning order made it illegal for her to meet more than one other person at a time.
So her eldest child Peter, then aged 13, would bring each ambassador in one by one to talk to her in her kitchen.
Ad helped political prisoner Jimmy Makojaene escape over the border and she ingeniously smuggled in messages to others imprisoned, notably Hugh Lewin, by inserting them into orange piths or onion layers of food parcels, and into carefully unstitched bits of shirt collars of their clothes she washed.
When family and activist friend John Harris was arrested for planting a bomb on Johannesburg railway station in July 1964, she and Wal took in his wife Ann and baby David despite vehemently opposing his act of desperate resistance.
Harris had telephoned a 15-minute warning asking for the station concourse to be cleared. But the call was deliberately ignored by security chiefs and the bomb killed an elderly woman, maimed her grand-daughter and injured many others.
In April 1965, Harris became the only white activist to be hung amongst several hundred blacks in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Ad and Wal organised his funeral, with the-then 15-year-old son Peter reading the address after they were both prevented from doing so by the police.
In March 1966 they were forced to leave South Africa because Walter was deprived of earning an income after the Government instructed all architectural firms in Pretoria municipality – to which they were both restricted by their banning orders – from employing him.
The family moved to Britain where they lived in Putney for four decades.
In May 2009 she and Walter received a special award from Putney Labour Party for their activism when they moved to Peter’s parliamentary constituency of Neath living first in Clyne then Pontwalby, near youngest child Sally who with her own daughter Connie cared for them in their difficult latter years.
Former South African journalist and ITN news editor Jill Chisholm said: “Ad Hain was a modest woman who would have chuckled at the thought, but those of us who knew her know that she has a place among the heroes of resistance in South Africa.
“Her unshakeable conviction was that all the peoples of South Africa had the right to share in its governance and wealth, and she was willing to live out this belief despite being jailed, banned and, finally, forced into exile from the country she loved and served so well.
“She was a woman of great integrity and courage.”
Ad and Walter were also parents to Tom, Jo-anne and Sally.
A fanatical Chelsea FC fan, Ad became the matriarch of their extended family, which by 2019 included 11 grandchildren, 21 greatgrandchildren and two great-greatgrandchildren.