Ellen Kuzwayo

1914-2006

Writer, social activist

The longtime social-justice crusader and anti-apartheid activist Ellen Kuzwayo died in South Africa in 2006 at the age of ninety-one. Often called the "Mother of Soweto," she was a teacher, social worker, and prominent figure in the struggle to end apartheid in her country for decades. Her autobiography, Call Me Woman, was published in 1985 at the height of the South African government's human-rights abuses against its majority black population and helped raise awareness of the suffering that apartheid brought to nearly every black South African household.

Kuzwayo was born Nnoseng Ellen Serasengwe in 1914 in Thaba Nchu, South Africa. There, in the province called Orange Free State at the time, her maternal grandfather had a six-thousand-acre farm that was known as Tshiamelo (place of goodness) and had been in the family since the 1880s. A teacher and court interpreter, Kuzwayo's grandfather was involved in one of black South Africa's first political organizations: the South African Native National Congress. Kuzwayo's own father was a businessman with ties to Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city, and was active in the African National Congress (ANC), the successor to the South African Native National Congress. Her parents divorced when she was still young, and during her earliest years she lived among a large extended family with many aunts, all of whom were called Mma (mother). Even though the family adhered to the Anglican faith brought to South Africa by missionaries in the nineteenth century, it still retained some traditional African beliefs. In her earliest years, Kuzwayo spoke Setswana and Sesotho, both of which were languages of the Bantu group spoken by black South Africans.

Trained as a Teacher

Like several generations of family members before her, Kuzwayo was educated at a missionary school after the age of seven, and went on to boarding school when she was a little older. In 1931 she entered Adams College of Natal and earned a teacher training certificate. She then when on to Lovedale College, another mission school, to earn another teacher training certificate. In 1936 she began her teaching career in Natal Province, but she also became politically active. She was in attendance at the historic All-African National Convention in 1937, a gathering of representatives from thirty-nine different black organizations, and was inspired by the work of Charlotte Maxeke, the first national president of the National Council of African Women.

In 1941 Kuzwayo married Ernest Moloto, with whom she had two sons, but the marriage was an unhappy one, and Kuzwayo fled the physical abuse—and, unwillingly, her two young sons—in 1947. She found a Johannesburg-area teaching job in Pimville, which was part of the designated black township of Soweto, and became involved with a newly created arm of the ANC known as the Youth League. This was a more militant faction of the ANC, and both Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, two leading ANC figures, had been instrumental in its formation.

For the past several decades both the British and the Afrikaners (descendants of early Dutch settlers) had fought bitter legal, economic, and political battles against each other to control South Africa and its valuable resources, which included vast gold and diamond deposits as well as a large black population that was desperate for work because it had been displaced from the land that had provided for it for generations.

The more conservative National Party, which drew its support from Afrikaners, won the 1948 general elections and soon began implementing a policy it called apartheid, or "separateness" in the Afrikaans language. The Group Areas Act was passed in 1950, which imposed stringent new residency restrictions on blacks and other nonwhites, forcing many single-parent families to live in abysmal rural areas while their fathers worked in distant mines or cities; it was almost impossible to obtain official permission to move one's family because of a job.

Kuzwayo quit teaching in 1952, when the Bantu Education Act was introduced. The act created a vastly inferior educational system for black South Africans, one whose publicly stated goal was to prepare students for jobs on the lowest rung of the economic ladder—not to create a generation with unrealistic aspirations. According to Donald G. McNeil Jr. of the New York Times, Kuzwayo once said, "I did not have the strength nor the courage to teach the children of my community what appeared to be very poisonous to their minds. The National Party gave them an inferior education so those children were going to remain the slaves of white people."

Was a Classmate of Winnie Mandela's

Turning instead to social work, Kuzwayo was trained in that field by classes at the Jan H. Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg, the first such school for blacks in the country. One of her classmates was Winnie Madikizela, who married Nelson Mandela in 1958. Kuzwayo became a social worker, first with the Johannesburg municipal government and then with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and other privately funded organizations. She also served as the general secretary for the YWCA's Transvaal chapter for a decade. Much of her work focused on helping South African women, who bore some of the greatest indignities of the apartheid system. She worked on maternal health and educational initiatives that aimed to reduce infant mortality rates, and also developed small-business programs for women in Soweto and other townships.

At a Glance …

Born Nnoseng Ellen Serasengwe on June 29, 1914, in Thaba Nchu, South Africa; died of complications from diabetes, April 19, 2006, in Johannesburg, South Africa; daughter of Phillip Serasengwe Merafe and Emma Mmutsi (Makgothi) Merafe; married Ernest Moloto, 1941 (ended, 1947); married Godfrey Rossenbaum Kuzwayo, 1950 (died 1965); children: (with Moloto) Everington M. Moloto (deceased) and Bakone Moloto; (with Kuzwayo) Godfrey Kuzwayo. Politics: African National Congress. Religion: Anglican. Education: Adams College of Natal, 1931-35; Lovedale College, higher diploma teacher certificate, 1936; Jan H. Hofmeyr School of Social Work, 1952; University of the Witwatersrand, higher diploma in advanced social work practice, 1980.

Career: Natal seminary and school, assistant teacher, 1936-52; City Council of Johannesburg, South Africa, social worker, after 1957; also affiliated with the South African Association of Youth Clubs and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA)—Dube Center; YWCA-Transvaal Region, general secretary, after 1964; affiliated with Community University of the Witwatersrand, 1975-82; volunteer community worker, beginning 1983; National Black Consumer Union, president, after 1984; member of Soweto People's Delegation to Solve the Rent Boycott, beginning 1988; Foundation for African Business and Consumer Services, first vice president, 1988; South African parliament, 1994-99.

Memberships: National Black Consumer Union; Young Women's Christian Association.

Awards: Central News Agency Literary Award, 1986; University of the Witwatersrand, honorary degree; Order of Meritorious Service, South Africa, 1999.

In 1976 Soweto became the site of a notorious uprising. Angered over a new national law that mandated Afrikaans be taught in half of all black high school classes, students rioted and the police opened fire. Some 575 Sowetans died, many of them teenagers. The incident brought widespread international condemnation of the South African government for the use of firepower on its own children. Following the uprising, Kuzwayo became part of the newly established Committee of Ten that was formed to evaluate and recommend changes for the system of township government. Her support for a measure that would have allowed some landownership by blacks to alleviate Soweto's dire housing shortage fell into the category of "endangering the maintenance of law and order," according to South Africa's Terrorism Act. In 1977 she was taken into custody and held in a notorious Johannesburg facility for five months. She was never formally charged, because the act allowed for indefinite detention without trial.

Kuzwayo was in her early sixties by then, but she returned to her activism and social work. She was also one of a handful of black students allowed to enroll in the University of the Witwatersrand, which granted her a diploma in advanced social work practice in 1980. The achievement, as well as her prison experience, spurred her to begin writing her autobiography. She secured a generous benefactor in the form of one of the most prominent—and wealthiest—whites in South Africa: Harry Oppenheimer, whose family controlled South Africa's diamond mines and whose philanthropy and opposition to apartheid was well known.

Won Literary Award

Call Me Woman was published in England in 1985 and soon attracted an international readership. In it, Kuzwayo recounted the details of her idyllic childhood at Tshiamelo, early involvement with the ANC, and the personal hardships she had endured over the years. She had remarried, but was widowed in the mid-1960s. Her two sons from the first marriage suffered under the brunt of apartheid: one was expelled from college for his political activism, and the other was banished to a remote black homeland. She had a third son born during her second marriage, and he was just a teenager when she was arrested in 1977. Call Me Woman also recounted her time in detention, where she would hear teenage girls who were her fellow prisoners in a nearby cell singing hymns they had learned in Sunday school to bolster their spirits. Knowing they were as young as twelve and enjoyed none of the privileges that she did as a public figure, she would listen to them discuss the beatings and interrogations and felt devastated that she was unable to come to their aid. "Some days, hour after hour, I sobbed in vain," she wrote.

Kuzwayo's book was awarded the Central News Agency Literary Award in 1986, South Africa's top literary honor. She was the first black ever to win it and joined a list of prominent writers and fellow critics of apartheid such as John M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. It was one of many signs that even white South Africans were tiring of a system that remained in place through force, which seemed to incite only more violence. The year 1989 marked the beginning of the end of apartheid, and five years later the nation held its first free and fair general elections. Kuzwayo was elected to South Africa's parliament on the ANC ticket in 1994 and served five years. In 1996 she spoke before the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had been impaneled to hear grievances committed during the apartheid era and issue restitution orders.

In her early eighties by the time she gave her testimony to the commission, Kuzwayo noted that the country had become much more violent during her lifetime thanks to the spirit- and opportunity-crushing policy of apartheid. McNeil noted in her obituary that she said that in the 1950s she could tell a group of teenage boys loitering at the train station to walk her home safely. "Believe you me, today I cannot do that, because I don't trust the very children who ought to protect me because of the handling of the government of South Africa of those days. They turned our children into animals."

Kuzwayo wrote two more books: Sit Down and Listen (1990), a collection of parables about contemporary life in South Africa, and African Wisdom: A Personal Collection of Setswana Proverbs (1998). She died on April 19, 2006, in Johannesburg, of complications from diabetes. Survivors included two sons, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. She also left a legacy on film: she appeared in the classic Sidney Poitier film about South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), and in the documentary filmed in the 1980s about the loss of her family's lands, Tshiamelo: A Place of Goodness. She had inherited the property, but it was confiscated by the government in 1974 when the area was rezoned for whites-only.

Writings

Call Me Woman, Women's Press, 1985.

Sit Down and Listen, Women's Press, 1990.

African Wisdom: A Personal Collection of Setswana Proverbs, Kwela Books, 1998.

Sources

Periodicals

Guardian (London), April 24, 2006, p. 37.

New York Times, May 24, 1978, p. A3; May 25, 1978, p. A2; September 7, 1986; April 22, 2006.

Times (London), May 2, 2006, p. 54.

Online

Dietche, Julie Phelps, "Voyaging toward Freedom: New Voices from South Africa," Research in African Literatures, http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/kerkhoff/africanlit/AfriLitArchives10.htm (accessed May 14, 2008).

—Carol Brennan