Extraordinary, untold stories of a continuum of resistance
A compelling exhibition has opened at the Apartheid Museum. It tells the story of a family’s fight against oppression over four generations, in two countries, writes Helen Grange
ONE FAMILY. Four generations of political struggle. Considering the sweeping historical changes in South Africa and the widely differing circumstances that faced members of the family with each generation, this continuum of resistance was extraordinary.
Descended from Thambi Naidoo – Gandhi’s collaborator in the Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) in South Africa in the early 1900s – that family are the Naidoos. Their poignant and heart-warming stories, which span decades and unfold in South Africa and London, are explored in a compelling exhibition titled Resistance in their Blood. It opened at the Apartheid Museum on Saturday.
Thambi Naidoo played a key role in mobilising the Indian community in Durban against oppressive British laws between 1906 and 1913. He and many of his friends and relatives – among them his wife Veerammal, son and mother-in-law – were imprisoned for their involvement in a defiance campaign against an ordinance forcing Indians to carry certificates to be shown on demand by the police. Thambi was in prison 14 times.
Gandhi called Thambi “the bravest and staunchest of all” the satyagrahi (loosely translated as person who asserts the truth), and his legacy inspired generations after him to resist racial oppression wherever they found it.
Thambi and Veerammal had nine children, among them Naransamy (Roy), born in 1901 in Pietermaritzburg. Roy was a trade unionist who organised the campaign by Indians against the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act. He was instrumental in the 1952 Defiance Against Unjust Laws Campaign and served as vice-president of the Transvaal Indian Congress and chairperson of the Transvaal Peace Council.
“Indians cannot improve their lot until they come out in open defiance of segregation,” said Roy at the time.
“The days of going to government officials, hat in hand and begging for minor concessions, are over.”
Roy married Amma, another activist who was imprisoned in 1947 during the Indian Passive Resistance Campaign, and who went to prison twice during the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws. Amma was elected to the executive of the Federation of South African Women, formed in 1954, and a year later attended the Congress of the People, which adopted the Freedom Charter.
In 1956, she was among the 20 000 marchers to the Union Buildings to protest against the proposal to institute pass laws for women. When the Transvaal Indian Congress was revived in 1983, she was elected vice-president.
The family home on Rockey Street in Doornfontein came to be known as “People’s House”. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Moses Kotane were frequent visitors.
Recalling his visits to Rockey Street, Mandela wrote: “We were hungry and tired. Amma, wearing that free and easy smile of hers, presented us with a meal of crab and rice. It was my first time to see these creatures cooked and merely the sight of them made me feel sick… I tried to be as graceful as was possible… Thereafter I became much attached to the Naidoos and enjoyed crabs very much.”
All five of Amma and Roy’s children – Shanthie, Indres, Murthie, Ramnie and Prema – joined the ANC liberation movement and, as repression increased under the apartheid government, they began to suffer vengeful persecution from detention and solitary confinement to torture.
In 1961, after much deliberation, the ANC decided to resort to armed struggle, forming its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Indres was one of its earliest recruits.
On April 17, 1963, he was caught with Reggie Vandeyar and Shirish Nanabhai as they were blowing up a railway signal box in veld just outside Johannesburg. Indres was shot, and taken bleeding to Rockey Street. The three men were detained, severely tortured and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment on Robben Island.
“My family had always believed in a peaceful resolution to our struggle in this country. But in 1961 I decided to take up arms against the regime. It was necessary. It was our form of struggle to bring about peace,” Indres told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing years later.
Murthie and Prema were involved in setting up civic associations in Lenasia, Alexandra and Laudium, and a support committee for political prisoners, over which Prema was detained in 1981 and interrogated continually for six days and nights.
Murthie also endured spells of detention, once being held in solitary confinement for a fortnight in a small cell of about 3m by 2m and interrogated, verbally abused and assaulted.
Shanthie, now 82, and recently awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver, was also arrested and banned several times. In 1969 she spent 371 days in prison, most of it in solitary confinement, and was mercilessly tortured.
“I was forced to stand for five days and nights while they fired questions at me. I lost all sense of time. I began to lose my hold on reality.
“I had terrifying hallucinations, like nightmares, in which the questions became mixed up with broken dreams,” Shanthie recalls.
In 1972, she went into exile to London to join her sister Ramnie, who had left South Africa in 1967 to join her husband Issy Dinat, who had fled to London after spending four months in detention. He had helped other activists leave the country.
In London, Ramnie worked at the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa and was active in the ANC and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Dinat had become a member of the ANC’s Barnet unit in north London, serving on the party’s finance and fundraising committees. He also worked for the anti-apartheid movement in the Middle East, Greece and Botswana.
Ramnie remembers: “We missed our extended family in Rockey Street. So we recreated Rockey Street, but on a smaller scale. Paul and Adelaide Joseph, Esmé Goldberg, the Sepels, Ben and Mary Turok, and May and Dennis Brutus were frequent visitors.”
The next generation took up the baton. Kuben, Prema’s son, was arrested for organising a demonstration during his matric year and had to write some of his final exams in jail. Today he is the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank.
Ramnie and Issy’s children, Sean and Natalya Dinat, were active in the ANC in London from an early age. Sean went for military training in the MK camps in Angola in 1984, aged 19, and Natalya graduated as a medical doctor from Patrice Lumumba University, Moscow, in 1991.
Their cousins, Thava and Nava and Subethri, were all active in the liberation struggle during the 1980s. Murthie’s daughter Zoya and Prema’s son Duggy became teachers, driven by a desire to have a positive influence on young lives in uncertain times. Subethri is a senior manager in the National Treasury.
Indres died last year, aged 79, and Prema, a Johannesburg councillor since the democratic elections of 1994, is retired as the ANC chief whip.
Emilia Potenza, the curator of exhibitions and education, said at the opening: “This is a story about choice. Every person faced the same circumstances at these points of history, but very few responded in the way this family did. Between 1908 and 1989, 21 members of the same family were imprisoned. It’s a story of an unshakable commitment to non-racialism.”