NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9699

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From: [e-mail] (NY Transfer News)
Subject: S.Africa:Helen Joseph Dies
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Forwarded message:
[From soc.culture.african Tue Dec 29 02:21:48 1992]
From: Philip Machanick <[e-mail]>

Helen Joseph was one of the Congress Alliance leaders at the time of the
Freedom Charter, and was one of those charged with Treason and acquitted
in the 1950s.

Here is an obituary from the Sunday Star.
--
AUGUST 1989: The State of Emergency is begining to thaw and the political
tide is turning once more in response to the Mass Democratic Movement's
defiance campaign. Riding the crest of the new wave of activism is
84-year-old Helen Joseph.
  On the stage of Johannesburg's Selborne Hall, this grey-haired symbol
of the liberation struggle anticipates the still-unnanounced release of
the jailed ANC leadership.
  With her arms raised in imagined greeting and her face radiating joy,
she declares, "I'll be waiting to say, 'He-ello Kathy!'." The crowd,
celebtrating the 60th birthday of jailed Rivonia trialist Ahmed "Kathy"
Kathrada, bursts into song.
  Now the jailed and exiled ANC leaders are home. And Helen Joseph is
gone.
  She died in the Johannesburg Hospital on christmas afternoon after
suffering a stroke on December12. As she lay for days unable to
communicate and her ability to communicate and her ability to comprehend
an unknown quantity to friends, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Albertina
Sisulu all found time for a last visit.

Adulation

Joseph had to be seen in action to be appreciated, becuase for 26 years
prior to 1990, she was a "listed" person and it was an offence for the
media to quote her.
  Newspapers no more than hinted at the political significance of this
unlikely freedom fighter. For instance, when the Crossroads camp was
demolished in 1978, the Star reported that Joseph "spoke for 30 minutes
(at a protest meeting), in a quiet voice which shook with emotion, (but
she) may not be quoted".
  An Englishwoman who adopted South Africa as her home, Joseph did not
surrender her rather grand bearing. Patrick Keatly, writing in The
Gaurdian, chose "Parkhurstian" to describe her. Despite this cultural
distinction from the toyi-toyi generation of the '80s, Joseph commanded
the rapt attention, often adulation, of the township youth.
  Her social work career led her to politics. Employed to run the medical
benefit scheme for the clothing industrial council, she got to know the
deprivations of black workers but also worked closely with radical trade
unionists like Solly Sachs.
  First banned in 1957 [banning meant being restricted from contact
with more than a small group of people at a time, none of whom could
themselves be banned, and not being permitted to be quoted in the press,
among other things], she had the painful distinction of being the first
South African to be placed under house arrest in1962. Her house arrest
was only lifted after she became cricially ill with cancer in 1971. For
the rest of the '70s she remained unrestricted and speculated to a foreign
correspondent that cancer plus a heart attack had probably persuaded the
authorities "the old girl can't go on very much longer". But the '80s
brought another 2-year banning.
  With many South Africans resorting to exile, it puzzled observers why
this woman with a claim to English roots would not simply remove herself
from her troubles. Said her brother, Frank Fennel, Helen simply "does not
like quitters and refuses to be one".
  In 1962, as soon as he first banning expired, Joseph got into a car and
drove for 11 000 km, tracking down rural leaders who had been banished
to remote areas because they had resisted apartheid [this system was
abolished a few years afterwards; she managed to vist 36 of the 40
people who had been banished].
  She found Stephen Nkadimeng of Sekhukhuneland scratching out a living
in distant Zululand. Joseph told reporters: "Stephen is trying to grow
a few mealies, but the ground is too rocky. The last thing he said to me
as I left is, 'Nkadimeng is not afraid'."
  A simple fact, not an idle boast from this defiant African chief
applies equally to a woman of courage who chose the rocky ground of
South Africa.
--
Philip Machanick
Computer Science Dept, Univ of the Witwatersrand, 2050 Wits, South Africa
[e-mail]  phone: [phone]  fax: [phone]



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