Long live the Black Sash

THERE are enormous gaps in our historical memory of the Struggle. Especially white South Africans over 40 are often blithely unaware of the role brave, ordinary people from their own community played in liberating our country. And we’re not talking here about the Ronnie Kasrils, Albie Sachses or Ruth Firsts.

We’re talking about the middle-class white women who responded only to their consciences in the mid-1950s and set up the Black Sash, which this week celebrated its 60th anniversary.

When one properly examines the history of the organisation, it’s clear that these mothers, sisters and daughters of privilege were not part of the greater underground through some twist of ideological fate. They weren’t generally drawn into the fight for civil liberties because their parents had emerged out of oppressive regimes elsewhere in the world.

They were, quite simply, motivated by the open discrimination, disenfranchisement and suppression of human rights which was happening everywhere against black people. And unlike the millions of other white people who ignored what they must have known was unfolding around them, they boldly stepped out in public in outrage.

Most of today’s children of democracy will know nothing about the Black Sash’s most overt form of protest, which was standing in a line on the side of main roads with placards decrying apartheid and racism. But children should be told the other stories of women devoting much of their time for free to assist the oppressed majority in whatever way they could.

This might have meant securing bail for women afflicted by the pass laws, bringing attention to the moral deficit in pension laws or railing against the segregation of libraries. They never let up, they never backed down – and have not stopped taking on great battles in our era, particularly in the realm of social protection. Mandela rightly called the Black Sash “the conscience of white people”.

We warmly congratulate these great South Africans on their birthday. And we admire their fortitude. There’s still a long way to go.