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How to cite this thesis

Surname, Initial(s). (2012). Title of the thesis or dissertation (Doctoral Thesis / Master’s Dissertation). Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/102000/0002 (Accessed: 22 August 2017). Topic:

Were Women Hidden from South Africa’s Political History?: A Life History of Mina Thembeka Soga A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Historical Studies

of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg

by

Koena Mashala 201180231

In Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORICAL STUDIES

March 2020

Johannesburg, South Africa

PROF NATASHA ERLANK

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ABSTRACT

The history of South African women in the struggles against racial and gender oppression, inequality and segregation brought about by colonial systems is generally presented as a subservient history that occurred in the shadows of a more powerful masculine dominated history. Therefore, the stories of many very contributory and self-sacrificing women remain untold or sketchy.

With the above view, this study aims to narrate and discuss the contributions to South African history that were made by one Mina Thembeka Soga, an African missionary, teacher and social worker from Queenstown, in the Cape province. Her actions and perspectives were influenced by Christian feminist ideologies and liberal politics. As the president of the National Council for African Women formed in 1936 to champion the rights of African women amidst the suppression of their voices by the political machinery and gender ideologies, Mina Soga spearheaded various project for the support and emancipation of women and children such as feeding schemes for children, creches, schools, support for the disabled and hostels for the destitute. Eventually, Mina Soga found herself working over and above women’s issues by representing both men and women dispossessed of their lands mainly by the Glen Grey Actas well as those who were subjected to unfair and inhumane working conditions in capitalist formations.

The story of Mina Soga is considered from a common social theory perspective, shared by various feminist writers, which recognises that the history of women is basically the history of society and the two cannot be separated. Thus, the story of Mina Soga is linked with the various local and international historical developments as a way of showing this link. The study relied on a qualitative approach and used primary sources such as the original letters that Mina Soga wrote in her representations and the minutes of the NCAW. Secondary sources were also consulted.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I am grateful to my Almighty Morena FLG Modise for establishing me to finish this paper. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Prof Natasha Erlank, my supervisor. I am extremely grateful and indebted to her for her expert, sincere and valuable guidance and encouragement extended to me. To my peers Sibusisiwe Nxongo and Phindile Gumede, and a friend Isaac Mashifane, you three are the best. Finally but definitely not the least thanks to my wonderful family, my mother Euphodia Mashala and fathers Frans Mashala and Ariel Selolo, sisters Pontsho, Mathapelo and Boineelo, my uncles Oupa, Trevor and Aggrey, brothers Koena, Thabo, Khomotso, Paledi and Mohlankana, my babies Koki, Shibe, Fando and Bubu Mathibela, and finally the David Makhubo Secondary family. I am grateful for love, support and words of encouragement. I also place on record, my sense of gratitude to one and all who, directly and indirectly have lent their helping hand in my journey to finish this paper.

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Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ...... ii Affidavit ...... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv Table of Contents ...... v Table of Figures ...... vii List of Tables ...... viii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1 Introduction ...... 1 1.2 Problem Statement ...... 2 1.3 Purpose of the Study ...... 5 1.4 Methodology ...... 6 1.5 Theoretical Approaches ...... 13 1.6 Chapter Overview ...... 15 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 17 2.1 Introduction ...... 17 2.2 Gender and Social Theory ...... 21 2.3 Brief History of South Africa and how it Affected Women and Society ...... 24 2.4 Gender, Religion and Mission work ...... 32 2.5 Gender, Social and Economic Transformation...... 43 2.6 Gender, Power Politics and Governance ...... 50 2.7 Gender, Education and Socio-cultural factors ...... 59 2.8 Women and the Transformation ...... 63 2.9 Conclusion ...... 64 CHAPTER THREE: THE EARLY YEARS: FROM BIRTH TO KIMBERLY ...... 65 3.1 Introduction ...... 65 3.2 Early Family Life ...... 68 3.3 Christian Influences ...... 70 3.4 Early Education ...... 72 3.5 Bloemvale – The Background ...... 75 3.6 Teacher Training and Early Employment ...... 77

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3.7 Mina Soga And Marriage ...... 78 CHAPTER FOUR: MADRAS, AMERICA AND THE RETURN TO QUEENSTOWN ...... 80 4.1 Introduction ...... 80 4.2 The Great Depression and Black Poverty ...... 81 4.3 Soga, The AAC and The NCAW ...... 83 4.4 The Madras Conference ...... 86 4.5 Queenstown Before and During Mina’s Time...... 91 4.6 Mina Soga’s Role in Adult Education ...... 95 4.7 The Adult School ...... 96 4.8 History of Adult Education ...... 98 4.9 Prisoners ...... 101 CHAPTER FIVE: NATIVE REPRESENTATION AND MANY PROJECTS ...... 102 5.1 Enter Margaret Ballinger ...... 102 5.2 The Representation of Natives Act Of 1936 ...... 110 5.3 NCAW Under the NRC System ...... 112 CHAPTER SIX: UNENDING LAND WOES ...... 115 6.1 Introduction ...... 115 6.2 Teaching Wages and Working Conditions ...... 118 6.3 More Teaching Problems ...... 120 6.4 Some Land Success and More Quarrels ...... 122 6.5 Mina Soga, The NCAW And Labour Disputes ...... 124 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LAST ACTIVE YEARS AND FINANCIAL CRISES ...... 130 7.1 Introduction ...... 130 7.2 The NCAW, Urbanisation and the Family unit ...... 131 7.3 Pass Laws and Urban Residence ...... 133 7.4 Liberal Politics ...... 135 7.5 Financing the Challenges ...... 137 CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUSION ...... 143 REFERENCES ...... 147 Primary Sources ...... 147 Secondary Sources ...... 147 LIST OF LETTERS ...... 157

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Table of Figures

Figure 1: Genealogy of Mina Soga ...... 69 Figure 2: Original letter on the Glen Grey land title cancellations ...... 76 Figure 3: A snapshot from the original Constitution of NCAW ...... 84 Figure 4: Part of Margaret Ballinger original Manifesto ...... 105 Figure 5: Part of the original letter from the NAC to Soga ...... 118 Figure 6: A section of Soga's original letter to Ballinger - 26 January 1942 ...... 120

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List of Tables

Table 1: Timeline of Mina Soga's history covered in this chapter ...... 65

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

The years between 1920 and 1970 were a period that shaped the complexion and make-up of present-day South Africa. Those years gave birth to and nurtured government policies, local and international reactions and responses which laid the foundation of modern-day South Africa1. Within this era, white-minority government initiatives resulted in infamous laws such as the Native Land Act of 1913, the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, (which reinforced the system of pass laws restricting the movement and places of residence of Black people) that emerged as bedrocks of a repressive apartheid system2. In a period of significant socio-political developments, African women were mostly, supposedly, in the background of the struggle against colonialism and apartheid3, led by iconic figures such as the revered Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Albert Luthuli, Walter Sisulu, Andrew Mlangeni – all of them male. Black African women were, instead, remembered only in the context of that 9 August 1956 Women’s March to Union Buildings in Pretoria. This general assertion about the recording and writing of women’s history in South Africa serves as a platform to discuss and examine the place of the woman – particularly the Black African woman – in the history of South Africa.

Mina Thembeka Soga was an ordinary teacher and social worker who hailed from Queenstown, in the Cape Province. Her works in the fight to uplift the lives of black communities that had been intentionally excluded by the government of the day are used to tell the story of female participation in South African history, especially the socio-political and spiritual facets that contemporary historians have not dwelt much upon. She played a critical role in ensuring that the plight of Africans was heard in the Native Representative Council through her interactions with Margaret Ballinger, a Cape Province representative in the NRC. Her story is of a Christian missionary who laboured for democracy all her life. She represents a class of African women who have played a significant role in the social, political history of South Africa whose history and massive contributions remain untold or have been told in passing.

1G Nattrass, A Short History of South Africa (London: Biteback Publishing, 2018), 25. 2Ibid, 26. 3L. F Ntwape, A Histography of South African Women's History from c.1990, A Survey on Monographs, Journal Articles and Anthologies. (MHCS Dissertation. University of Pretoria, 2016), 17.

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As a teacher and missionary, Mina Soga became the first woman to represent the continent of Africa at an international conference, when she was present at the International Missionary Council in Tambaram, near the city of Madras, India in 1938. At the conference, she spoke on the theme of Africanizing the Church, as well as the deprivation being suffered by black South Africans. She travelled extensively to Egypt and the United States of America as part of her efforts to draw attention to the plight of the Black South Africans in a white-ruled country4. In 1942, Mina Soga established an adult education school known as Nkwanca School but later changed to Luvuyo Lerumo High School in Queenstown in Eastern Cape (www.therep.co.za). She was also a member of the Joint Council movement and a social worker who was instrumental in the formation of the National Council for African Women (NCAW) of which she became president in 1939.

Nigerian historian Utuk made particular reference to the prophetic nature of many of the statements Mina Soga made at Tambaram, particularly how her remarks anticipated the growth of feminism and womanism both in Africa and in the church.5 According to Utuk, Mina Soga was “visionary and determined…articulating, though in the language of her period, some of the things contemporary feminism are emphasizing: equal opportunity to all in all areas of life, irrespective of sex, race or nationality.”6

The study also attempts to show that the life that Mina Soga lived, which was characterised by positive social and political contributions in the trying colonial times and then apartheid times, was not a unique phenomenon. The literature review defends the view that many other women followed similar paths without being noticed or recognised.

1.2 Problem Statement

This study is motivated by the view that the history of South African women is generally poorly presented in terms of the importance of the roles played by black women in pre-democratic South Africa. Several scholars have conducted a series of research and come to a general conclusion that the recording and writing of what can be described as “women’s history” in South Africa only developed in the 1970s. One scholar highlighted this by insisting that,

4Ruth Seabury, Daughter of Africa (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1945), 55. 5E Utuk, From New York to Ibadan: The Impact of African Questions (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1991), 202. 6Ibid, 205.

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“Internationally, the study of women’s history was established during the 1950s-1960s…this trend reached South Africa only around the 1970s.”7Furthermore, Belinda Bozzoli and Peter Delius agreed that “women’s history did not constitute a significant or recognizable separate field of scholarship in South Africa”, based on a study they carried out as late as 1990.8

There are also views that the presentation of women’s history has been negatively affected by contextual issues that include the domination of males in the writing of history.9 This, to some extent, has led to the belittling of the roles played by women in South Africa’s struggle for democracy. Erlank discusses the effects of male-centric historical presentation in the naming of important landmarks and monuments after men. This, in her views, exhibits the underrepresentation of the roles played by women in South Africa’s history.10Walker has also argued that the presentation of the roles of black women in South Africa could have been affected by the fact that it has generally been researched and disseminated by non-black women.11

Helen Bradford presents a view that the male-centric presentation of history also created villains out of historical female figures. Male historians and male sources of this history were quick to point fingers at how women were sources of problems, without much assessment.12 In her essay “Not the Nongqawuse Story: An Anti-Heroine in Historical Perspective”, she discusses how the Xhosa nation had gone on to put blame on troubles that were a result of growing colonial domination in the Cape on a young Xhosa girl who served as a spirit medium.

Because of the above factors (i.e. Late development of women history, low importance attached to this history and male domination in its presentation), attempting to discuss and understand the place of African women in the public space of South African political life is a daunting task. Identifying where the African woman stood in the annals of South African political history equally requires considerable research. Regardless of the difficulties involved, it is necessary

7Ntwape, A Histography,1. 8Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism, Feminism and Southern African Studies,” Journal of Southern African Studies 9 no.2, (1983): 139-171. 9Ibid, 142. 10 N Erlank, “From Main Reef to Albertina Sisulu Road The Signposted Heroine and the Politics of Memory,” The Public Historian 39 no.2, (2017):31-50. 11C Walker, “Conceptualising Motherhood in Twentieth Century South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21 no.3 (1995): 417-437. 12H Bradford, “Not the Nongqawuse Story: An Anti-Heroine in Historical Perspective,” in Women in South African History: They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2007), 79.

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to show the importance of the history of black women and to detail how this history cannot be divorced from the mainstream social, political and economic processes that shaped the history of the period of interest (1920-1970), i.e., the period that Mina Soga was active.

Athambile Masola, a contemporary South Africa female historian, argues that even the so- called reliable historical sources, including archives, are generally questionable when it comes to black women’s history. She further states that information in archives has been used to present black women’s history from the presenter’s preferred perspective rather than from the actuality of it.13 She states,

Thus, my perspective as a black woman informs not only what I see and find in the archives but also how I make meaning of a cultural text such as a newspaper [in the archives].

Masola vehemently refutes the views that black African women were a subservient, immobile and freedom-less lot. This perspective, in her argument, has been developed intentionally through how and who interpreted information from past sources. She further contends that a black woman’s involvement in the analysis and writing of history from the same archived sources can effectively bring out what has been excluded in telling black female history – which is mainly black women’s triumphs and resilience in an oppressive world. The same approach can also be used to re-assess the veracity of the negative views on black women as contained in past sources that eventually became current archived data. Masola’s views challenge the reassessment of the writing of black women’s history including going through past sources to attempt to decipher, “What has been included? What has been excluded?”14 as far as this history is concerned.

Additionally, Marc Epprecht revisits arguments that blamed Basotho women in the coming of power of a conservative party in the country’s first pre-independence.15 The view that women, because of their excessive focus on domesticities and love for tradition and immobility, had inclined themselves with conservatism as an escape to a radical push that was needed to effect majority rule in Lesotho had long pervaded the thoughts of many male politicians and

13 Athambile Masola, “‘Bantu Women on the Move’: Black Women and the Politics of Mobility in The Bantu World,” Historia 63 no. 1 (2018): 93. 14 Ibid, 95. 15 M Epprecht, “Womens Conservatism and The Politics of Gender In Late Colonial Lesotho,” Journal Of African History 36 no. 1 (1995):29-56.

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historians. Epprecht denounces this view arguing that revisiting Lesotho history from a non- male centric perspective proves these views wrong and even points out to conservatism as a more relevant approach at that time as there were:

no empirical grounds for these assumptions. On the contrary, even the most ostensibly ‘conservative’ women often adopted non-traditional, self-emancipatory behaviour. In the context of a ‘modern’ colonial state with retrograde, often punitive policies towards women, such ‘conservatism’ was in fact rather progressive.16

These views, in addition to the other arguments presented in this section, demonstrate the need to relook what has been presented as the history of black women and further re-write it using female-centric objective evidence.

1.3 Purpose of the Study

This study is an examination of the roles played by black African women in the political, social and economic history of South Africa in an effort to determine how prominent or otherwise such a role was. The purpose therein is to determine with the help of documented historical writings and records if the role(s) played by Black African women in the political history of South Africa were significant enough to be mentioned in the recording of South African political, social and economic history.

This study was inspired by the writings of historians such as Penelope Hetherington17, Belinda Bozzoli18, Ester Boserup19, Natasha Erlank20and Claire Robertson.21The fact that all these women are themselves white (or European) South Africans, creates an interesting situation where the chronicling of South African women’s history has been mostly left to non-Black Africans. Hetherington acknowledges this situation when she wrote that “few of the writers on women in Africa, or on women and development…. have been Black African women”. Some (the writers), she described as “outsiders”; others as African-born “Europeans”22. In the same

16 Epprecht, “Women’s Conservatism”, 29. 17 Penelope Hetherington, “Women in South Africa: The Historiography in English”,The International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 no. 2 (1993): 241-269. 18 Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism”, 155. 19 Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (London: Routledge, 2013), 115. 20 Natasha Erlank, Reports on Colloquium Sessions: Writing and Teaching Gendered History in Africa in the Twenty-First Century: centenary of the UCT History Department." South African Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2004): 231-236. 21 Claire Robertson, Developing Economic Awareness: Changing Perspectives in the Studies of African Women, 1976-1988." Feminist Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 97-135. 22Ibid, 110.

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vein, Linzi Manicom, a South African feminist historian noted that “…with few exceptions […] South African feminist historians are white and middle class, reflecting the patterns of racial exclusion and hierarchy that structure South African academic institutions23. Despite the above assertions, there have been a considerable number of black female authors who have researched and authored about black African women. These include Athambile Masola 24 , Lindiwe Makhunga 25 and NombonisoGasacompilation on women writings.26However, it can be noted from the literature that these works are generally few in number considering the extensiveness of the history of black women in South Africa.

In an attempt to shine a light on how history represented the Black-African woman, this researcher herself is a Black African woman and will endeavour to examine how the Black African woman was portrayed in South Africa’s social and political history using the life and times of a little-known Black woman, Mina Thembeka Soga as a case study.

1.4 Methodology

According to Flick, Kardoff and Steinke, research methodology refers to a series of rules and guidelines that are adhered to in carrying out an inquiry27. Likewise, Beaudry and Miller have defined it as the processes that will be followed in collecting and analysing data as well as reaching a conclusion on a study28. Flick et al assert that research methodology is determined by the research questions that a study seeks to answer. This study sought to answer whether the roles played by women, specifically lesser-known women operating mostly within the confines of religion, education and politics have been well-presented. This research question necessitated a historical research design discussed further in the next sub-section.

Research design, according to Ranjit Kumar is “a plan, structure and strategy of investigation so conceived as to obtain answers to research questions or problems”.29 Researchers identify various types of designs including exploratory designs and explanatory designs meant to

23 L Manicom, “Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History, “The Journal of African History 33 no. 3 (1992):441-465. 24 Athambile Masola, “Bantu Women.” 98. 25 Lindiwe Makhunga, “South African Parliament and Blurred Lines: The ANC Women’s League and the African National Congress” gendered political narrative." Agenda 28, no. 2 (2014): 33-47. 26 Nomboniso Gasa, Women in South African History: They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2007), 315. 27 U Flick, E Kardoff & I Steinke, A Companion to Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 2004), 184. 28 J, S Beaudry &L Miller,Research Literacy: A Primer for Understanding and Using Research (London and New York: Guilford Publications, 2016), 125. 29 R Kumar, Research methodology: A step-by-step guide for beginners. Sage Publications Limited, 2019.

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explore and explain a phenomenon of interest respectively. A research design puts emphasis on the best data sampling, collection, analysis and presentation processes and decisions that will guide the inquiry. There are also descriptive designs whose main purpose is to describe a phenomenon of interest30. These three designs are some of the many common designs that are applicable to historical studies.

This study applied a historical research design as a method of inquiry. This is a design whose main focus is to gather historical sources and analyse them in an attempt to verify or nullify a given historical phenomenon.31 Paler-Calmorin and Calmorin state that a historical research design is helpful when there is a need to critically enquire what has been said and written about the past. This critique includes whether the past phenomena of interest occurred and if they did occur whether their presentation in current sources is accurate. However, Elizabeth Ann Danto puts the analysis and critiques aspect of research under histography.32 Histography, in her view, is a method rather than a design that “does not study the events of the past directly but the changing interpretations of these events.”33

Similarly, Paler-Calmorin and Calmorin also state that the historical research design’s application goes beyond the research for past happenings. It is a design that can enable the derivation of solutions to current problems through identifying and critiquing how these problems emerged. Thus, it has gained importance not only within the humanities and social fields but in economic fields where past acts contribute to current challenges.

Furthermore, Lisa Given further expands that a historical research design is naturally suitable in histography and is used by historiographers to analyse and understand past events.34 The study followed the phases that are applied when using a historical research design in histography as discussed by Given.35 These are:

1. Development of research objectives, propositions and questions 2. Collecting data from various historical sources

30 Ibid, 127. 31 L Paler-Calmorin and M, ACalmorin, Research Methods and Thesis Writing (Manila: Rex Bookstore, 2007), 23. 32 Elizabeth Ann Danto, Historical Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4. 33 Ibid, 4. 34 L, M Given, The Sage Encyclopaedia of Qualitative Research Methods: A-L; Vol. 2, M-Z Index (London: Sage, 2008), 26. 35 Ibid, 26.

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3. Verification and further analysis of collected data to ascertain reliability 4. Analysis of data from sources deemed to be reliable 5. Answering and concluding the research

Elizabeth Ann Danto, unlike Given, adds a hypothesis development stage as part of the historical research design. This stage goes along with histography methods that seek to analyse and interpret propositions of interest. Generally, this study held the proposition that the contributions of black African women have been underrepresented in the writing of South Africa’s past.

In this study, the historical phenomenon of interest was assessing the significance or triviality of the roles played by lesser known female figures in South Africa’s history between 1920 and 1970. The study further narrowed this role to women who showed evidence of Christianity- inspired feminist behaviour. Therefore, by virtue of having an interpretive and critical analysis aspect, the study applied histography methods within the historical research design.36

Likewise, the research design also took a biographical approach. A biographical research design uses the life story of an individual who is associated with a historical phenomenon of study interest (Merill & West, 2009). Hence, it links a life story of an individual to historical contexts that shaped the particular person’s history. This research studied the life of Mina Soga as a way of appreciating the historical representation of women in mission (Christian feminists), in the social, economic and political transformation of South Africa from the 1900s.Although, more emphasis was placed on the period between 1920 and 1970.

A qualitative research approach was applied in this study. Qualitative research is conducted in a natural setting and involves a process of building a complex and holistic picture of the phenomenon (subject) of interest.37 Qualitative research mainly relies on texts in data analysis. Data collected is basically broken down into textual forms in an attempt to answer posed research questions. The research objectives of the study appealed to a qualitative research approach. This approach was strongly linked to feminist epistemological philosophy. Basically, epistemology relates to how knowledge is constructed.

36 Elizabeth Danto, Historical Research, 5. 37 J, S Beaudry & L Miller, Research Literacy, 128.

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In Nico Botha’s view, feminist epistemology is a research approach where the history of the lives of women is reproduced by other women with a view of enhancing society’s understanding of women.38 Elizabeth Anderson asserts that feminist epistemology as a branch of philosophy centres on the understanding of what is known about women and how it was researched and disseminated.39 The research approach adopted in the study also strongly aligns itself with the feminist epistemological view, that is, how societies construct current and historical knowledge of women. Anderson, like Harriet Baber40, believes that patriarchy has influenced what is discussed about women, by whom it is discussed and the objectives of such discussions. Overall, patriarchal hierarchies that determine the flow of knowledge have adversely influenced the construction of knowledge on women. 41 Consequently, to undo patriarchy-centred knowledge creation and dissemination, and improve the understanding and accuracy of knowledge relating to women, feminist epistemology attempts to construct knowledge from a non-biased platform that would put women at the forefront in telling their story. This philosophical approach appealed to this study as it sought to understand how ordinary women affected the course of the political, social and economic history of South Africa.

Feminist epistemology emphasizes the telling of history from a female perspective. Its chief purpose is to narrate history from the point of view of women in order to highlight the part played by women in past events. Similarly, feminist history always aims to include gender in all aspects of historical studies. Susan Pedersen, an American feminist historiographer even wrote in a panel discussion that feminist history has two main purposes, namely:

To recover the lives, experiences and mentalities of women from the condescension and obscurity in which they have been…unnaturally placed”, and to re-examine and re-write the entire historical narrative to reveal the construction and workings of gender.”42

38 Nico A. Botha, “Towards the en-Gendering of Missiology: The Life-Narrative Of Mina Thembeka Soga,” Missionalia 31 no. 1 (2003): 105-116. 39 Elizabeth Anderson, "Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science," The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2017.

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In Walker’s definition to this concept, she describes feminist history as “one that sees the subordination of women in a given society as a problem, requiring explanation and challenge; and was not something to be taken for granted, or as part of the natural order of things.”43

Moreover, Joan Wallach Scott, puts the feminist writing of history as an important instrument that can be used to address gender inequalities. Gender inequality has been reproduced through male-driven views that women were generally a weaker sex with a minimal physical and contextual contribution to society.44 Scott writes that while previous historical studies have gone on to discover that women were actually as contributing as men in the making of history, these findings did not necessarily result in the diminishing of the views that women were weaker. In her view, Scott affirmed that feminism, rather than conventional, history is what will bring out not only the true story of women but their significant contributions in all spheres of life.

This study made use of academic writings that have discussed women’s contributions to the country’s political evolution in the period from 1920 up to the 1970s. It attempted to unravel the activities of Black African women, both in the private sphere and in the public sphere in the twentieth century. In this regard, the life and times of Mina Thembeka Soga were strategically used as a case study, in the sense that she represents the typical, church-going, Black African woman of whom little was heard, known about, or acknowledged at that time in South African history.

Primary sources from the Wits Historical Papers within their Ballinger collection were used as part of the research. The collection includes a series of handwritten letters which served as a primary means of communication in those times. Letters of interest to this study from the 1940s are between Mina Soga (who was the chair of the NCAW - National Council of African Women - at the time), Mr Ballinger (who was a senator in the Transvaal and Orange Free State) and Mrs Ballinger who was a member of the Native Representative Council for the Cape Province. The letters give insight on the public projects Mina Soga initiated and ran, with the help of the Ballinger family through personal donors and to an extent, state funding. The selection of

43 C Walker, Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945(Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1990), 417- 437. 44 J.W Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 135.

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letters can be extremely effective when used in conjunction with the study of the social conditions in South Africa at this time.

Assessing the letters, it can be noted that they included direct communications between Mina Soga and Margaret Ballinger where Mina Soga updated Margaret Ballinger on social projects, challenges and community events and the needs for various interventions. The second types of letters were those Mina Soga wrote to Margaret Ballinger for onward relaying to government officials, mainly in the Departments of Native Affairs, and responses from these departments that also came via Margaret Ballinger. The last group of letters were generally of a personal nature (less official in nature) between the two women. These involved personal discussions and encouragements, including the discussions of their political views and ambitions.45

Overall, the Ballinger Collection runs from 1894 to 1964. Part of the collection that includes correspondence and documents made to or by Margaret Ballinger and her husband William Ballinger run from 1930 to 1960. These covered “race relations, politics, the Protectorates, justice, crime, labour, cost of living, housing, health, education, food and agriculture, land and discriminatory legislation affecting Blacks, Coloureds and Indians, particularly strong in the industrial sphere with much on the history of the Black trade union movement. They also related to the Johannesburg Joint Council of Europeans and Africans, Friends of Africa and Liberal Party.”46 The documents in the collection also include various correspondents with various known historical figures including J.H. Hofmeyr, D.D.T. Jabavu, C. Kadalie, Chief T. Khama, D.F. Malan, C, J.C. Smuts and A.B. Xuma.

Furthermore, biographies of Mina Soga, as well as publications focusing on the role played by the Black-African woman in South African political history were used in this study. One important biographical work on Mina Soga that was immensely consulted was a book entitled the Daughter of Africa written by Isabel Seabury during Mina Soga’s lifetime and published in 1945.47 This book captures Mina Soga’s life from her birth up to the times she visited the Americas after the 1937 Madras Conference.

Isabel Seabury is an American Christian-feminist, author and educationist born in 1882. She was Mina Soga’s peer and like Mina Soga was into Christian missiology. She served in various

45 Based on my personal views after assessing the letters. Please see the Appendices for the letters –broken down by theme and date. 46 http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=A410/R/6576. 47 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 58.

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Christian mission portfolios including as a secretary for the Congregational Woman's Board of Missions and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Isabel Seabury met Mina Soga at the International Missionary Council in India in 1938 where she was also an attendee. She personally describes Mina Soga as a close personal friend, with their friendship starting at the conference.48

The study of publications, writings and journals will help to establish a pattern of coverage of Black African women to determine their role(s) in the country’s social, economic and political development.

Data was analysed using document analysis processes. Document analysis is a qualitative data analysis technique that involves the analysis of selected documents to study a research phenomenon and draw conclusions on it. 49 In this study, the documents of interest, as highlighted in the data collection section above were:

• Letters to and from Mina Soga • Official organisational documents (constitutions, minutes of meetings, memorandum, pamphlets, etc) • Government notices and other publications • Media publications (mainly newspaper cuttings) • Secondary sources including textbooks and biographies

The researcher thus had a wide array of both primary and secondary sources to rely on during the document analysis process. Document analysis was suitable for this study because of the following reasons that have also been discussed by Bowen 50 : firstly, the data collection processes resulted in the collection of a large volume of both primary and secondary documents that appealed to document analysis. Secondly, the period of research interest involved past periods where other sources of data were not readily available. Finally, the documents collected were deemed to be reliable, and from the sources concerned, this facilitated the generation of equally reliable information from these documents.

48 Ibid, 58. 49 Glenn A Bowen, "Document analysis as a qualitative research method." Qualitative research journal 9, no. 2 (2009): 27-40. 50 Ibid, 28.

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1.5 Theoretical Approaches

Munson and Saulnier identified two crucial theoretical patterns which influenced feminist- thinking as well as historians. According to them, the majority of Black women or “women of colour” were forced by poverty to take up jobs such as child-minding and therefore were unable to take part in feminist activities.51On the one hand, poor women had little or no opportunities to fight for their own freedoms because they were busy eking out a living, minding the children of wealthier, mostly white women. On the other hand, their employers had the time and freedom to spearhead the feminist (women activism) movements of the time.

Similarly, Munson and Saulnier noted that the few women who managed to get proper jobs were often offered low-paying positions and were paid lower wages than their male counterparts, even if they were doing the same jobs and carrying out the same functions. This was based on the perception that women in workplaces were still seen as mere caregivers and not genuine workers.

In addition, another theoretical pattern observed by this researcher is the strong presence of patriarchy within the society wherein Black-African women lived at the time. The family situation in an overwhelming number of Black-African homes was such that the man was seen and regarded as the head of the home. His word was law and it was final. If the woman had opinions of her own, she had to best keep them to herself, unless she was asked to offer them. Such prejudice towards women by men even extended to the ranks of the African National Congress in its fight against apartheid. Miller made detailed reference to this attitude when she spoke about “the gulf between the visual representation of women’s political agency and the realities for ANC women at the time”.52 Furthermore, she quoted from Hassim and revealed that:

Women endured hostility from their male comrades on individual and systemic levels, as gender inequalities were embedded in ANC policy, individual behaviour and even in the use of language. Thenjiwe Mtintso, a former soldier,

51 C Munson, and C.F Saulnier, (2014). Feminist theories and social work: Approaches and applications. Routledge. 19. 52 Kim Miller, "Moms with guns: women's political agency in anti-apartheid visual culture”, African Arts 42, no. 2 (2009): 68-75.

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recalls, “we were called umzane – the women – while the men were called the soldiers”.53

Such attitude within MK; Umkhonto We Sizwe (albeit ANC) ranks, was clearly an extension of the patriarchal mentality amongst men of that time.54 In other words, men saw women as unequal partners who could offer little or nothing positive in any given situation, but if need be, would merely be tolerated.

This study also adopted a social theory perspective. Social theory in the history of South African women, according to the works of various feminist-centric and general historians, revolved around the following:

1. Gender, power politics and governance55 2. Gender, religion and mission work56 3. Gender, education and socio-cultural factors57 4. Gender and socio-economic transformation58

These above factors that exhibited themselves in the life of Mina Soga are presented as major points of discussion in Chapter 2.

The above-mentioned factors were very much consistent with the environment that existed in much of Black-African communities in South Africa at the time Mina Thembeka Soga lived and was active.59 It is thus some of the reasons why the above approaches will be considered when re-tracing her history as a way of analysing the lifestyle of the Black-African woman during the country’s political evolution. As part of this study, therefore, such theoretical patterns that have developed over years as part of the feminist movement are used to tell the life story of Mina Thembeka Soga in an attempt to establish if women were visible or hidden from South Africa’s political history. Therefore, the study will develop feminist theories further as part of the literature review.

53 S Hassim, “Gender, Social Location and Feminist Politics in South Africa,” Transformation 15 (1991): 65-82. 54 Ibid, 80. 55 B. H MacLean,Strike a Woman, Strike a Rock: Fighting for Freedom in South Africa(Trenlon: AWP, 2004), Hannah E. Britton, Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 56 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903-39” The Journal of African History 24 no. 2 (1983): 241-256. 57 C Kros, The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education(Pretoria: Unisa Press. 2010), 57. 58 B. H MacLean, Strike a Woman, 89. 59 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 248.

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1.6 Chapter Overview

Chapter One of this study has presented the problem statement, the purpose of the study and the research methodology to be used. It also discussed important concepts such as feminism, feminist history and the personae of the subject matter Mina Thembeka Soga. It has equally provided a summary of the theoretical patterns that will be used as a basis for analysing the life story of Mina Soga.

Chapter Two discusses social theories associated with the life of women like Mina Soga, identifying the Christian feminist theories in the process. It discusses four broad forces that affected and cannot be divorced from the acts and thoughts of women in the making of South Africa’s history. These were gender, power politics and governance; gender, religion and mission work; gender, education and socio-cultural factors; and gender and socio-economic transformation.

Chapter three presents Mina Soga’s early family life and the Christian and education influences that shaped her views and philosophies. It also discusses her lineage, her move to Bloemvale and training as a teacher. Chapter Three aimed at shedding more light on the life of Mina Thembeka Soga herself, that is, her background, her philosophy, her principles and her place in the feminist movement that helped raise awareness about the situation of women at a delicate time in South Africa’s history. This chapter includes some narration and discussions of the relationship between the church and the anti-apartheid struggle, of which she was deeply involved.

Chapter four discusses the portion of Mina Soga’s life from the time she went to the International Christian Mission Conference in Tambaram in 1939, which is the same period when she became the National Council for African Women (NCAW) president. Her journey to America is also briefly discussed. The chapter is also marked by Mina Soga’s return to Queenstown after over a twenty -year stay in Kimberley. Important historical matters that affected life in South Africa at that time including the Great Depression and black poverty are also part of the discussion.

Chapter five discusses the change in the representation of Africans in parliament under the Representation of Natives Act. Mrs Margaret Ballinger, a liberal politician who worked with Mina Soga for over twenty years gets into the picture.

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Chapter six discusses various problems that bedevilled mainly the Queenstown community including teaching profession employment conditions problems, many land quarrels the Mina Soga dealt with, labour disputes under restrained trade unionism conditions, the pass laws and Johannesburg urbanization problems that Mina Soga attempted to end with the help of the Mayoress of Johannesburg.

Chapter eight discusses the unfortunate developments in Mina Soga’s personal life, specifically the financial woes she went through after failing to repay debts incurred for the purposes of running her many social projects. Mina Soga, due to old age and the debt crisis, unceremoniously retreats from political life, indicating the personal toll that the struggle for the betterment of the Queenstown communities finally took upon her.

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CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Introduction

This chapter reviews various academic and institutional sources that discuss the role of South African black women in the country’s socio-political and economic history. Sources from various historical eras within South African history, particularly those covering the pre- freedom era (1994), are analysed with the broad goal of assessing their views on the significance of black African women in South Africa’s history. The review also picks common historical events and epochs and assesses the roles of women, as presented in various forms of literature. The literature review starts by presenting a brief history of South Africa, pointing towards specific historical aspects that affected the roles of women like Mina Soga in the making of South Africa’s history.

The chapter then discusses four major areas and forces that can explain the gender relationships within the context of mainly South Africa black women. The same forces, factors and relationships are also discussed as part of the social theory that is presented at the end of the chapter. These are:

2 Gender and power politics and governance1 3 Gender and religion and mission2 4 Gender and education and socio-cultural factors3 5 Gender and social and economic transformation4

Deborah Gaitskell writes that the history of black South African women has been widely shaped by colonialism and capitalism. She asserts these as uniting factors of all African women in Southern Africa. Colonialism reinforced patriarchal structures. It brought new racially-based political power relationships that were felt differently by women and men. Women were themselves segregated by race, in addition to gender segregation. At the same time, capitalist structures also reinforced patriarchy by holding males as the preferred source of labour. Colonialism brought with it a new form of education and religion that women attempted to harness as a way of bettering themselves in the face of social and economic deterioration. Thus,

1 B. H MacLean, Strike a Woman; 90. 2 D Gaitskell, Housewives, 249. 3 C Kros, The Seeds , 69. 4 B. H MacLean, Strike a Woman…, 90.

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a multitude of social, political and economic changes that have been themed into the four factors above will be discussed.

Walker states that the presentation of the role of black women in South Africa’s struggle faces a severe historical risk in that “…documentary silence may be erroneously equated to historical passivity or worse, historical insignificance”.5 The author presents a view that while much has been done and achieved by black women in South African history, the presentation of this achievement is generally narrow and in most cases minimised to female-centric topics. Walker’s position is clearly evidenced by the African National Congress’ (ANC) broad view on the role of women in the struggle against apartheid. The ANC acknowledged the critical roles played by women in mass-mobilisation, trade-unionism and general resistance to apartheid before unfortunately diminishing this role by the statement that:

Although there is no doubt that the overt leadership has been dominated by men, the seemingly unacknowledged and informal segment of society controlled by women has been the key to many of the most significant mass movements in modern South African history.6

The ANC presents a common view that women did in fact play a critical role in the struggle but not one as critical as men’s. However, Thozama April critiques the discourse within which female historical contribution is presented. April states that while the ANC publicly acknowledge the roles played by Charlotte Maxeke in the struggle for democracy and equality, the nationalist discourse of the struggle,

do(es) not engage in a meaningful dialogue with Maxeke’s ideas about, for instance, gender inequality, ‘native womanhood,’ justice, education, health and employment.7

April presents a view that acknowledgement of women’s role in the struggle, as noted in Maxeke’s case, is full of belittling generalisations. Maxeke’s intellectual contribution to South Africa’s history is belittled by the male-centric views of women’s contribution to the struggle through acts of resistances like pass marches and nothing more. However, how Maxeke is presented, i.e., as an important female leader in the struggle for the emancipation of native

5 C Walker, Women and Gender, 3. 6 African National Congress, The Role of Women in the Struggle against Apartheid, 15 July 1980, 1. Retrieved March 22, 2018. https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/role-women-struggle-against-apartheid-15-july-1980. 7 Thozama April, Charlotte Maxeke: a celebrated and neglected figure in history. One hundred of the ANC and the Making of Colonial Queenstown, c.1859 –1877 (Cape Town: The University of Cape Town, 2008), 23.

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women, relegates her great intellectual contribution to fights for domesticities that occurred in the fringes of the “main” struggle for freedom, equality and democracy.

Moreover, April also bemoans a view held by male nationalists that female heroism occurred through an enabling environment created by male nationalists as previously argued by Lewis.8 Thus even when the roles played by women are acknowledged, it is with either inaccuracy or with intentional belittlement. April concludes that women’s intellectual history should be presented outside the nationalist struggle discourse (where it is viewed as a minor sub-aspect of a broader cause) as a standalone female-centric discourse.

Glaser presents the view that South Africa’s resistance movements were male-dominated institutions whose reporting of events was equally male-dominated. While women played critical roles in these movements, the liberation movements presented their views as “auxiliary” to the core objectives of the struggle.9 Despite the formation of key women’s movements such as the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) and the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) in 1948 and 1954, respectively, the focus on oppression and discrimination by race rather than by gender tended to minimize the visibility of these movements as well as their contributions to the history of the struggle. Bozzoli associates the veneration of male-led political activity and institutions to traditional male versus female roles in African societies. Males, who were regarded as institutional heads and were subordinated by their female partners, took the same patriarchist approach in the struggle against oppression.10 Frene Ginwala uses the case of the Bantu Women’s League in the 1920s to dispute female participation on the fringes of male nationalistic movements.11 This league was notably able to mobilise African women politically and to exert a major socio-political impact on South African society as a whole in the days when women were still not welcome in the ANC.

Glaser also presents a role that seems to belittle the role of women by confining their struggle to resistance activity that affected them as a gender.12 Glaser lists repressive legislation that constrained the free movement of women and that adversely affected the socio-economic rather than political status of the family as the leading activators of female resistance. These include

8 Lewis, D. “African Gender Research and Post-Coloniality: Legacies and Challenges,” in African Gender Studies: A Reader, ed. O Oyewumi (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 383. 9 D Glaser, Politics and Society in South Africa (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 15. 10 Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism”, 150. 11 F Ginwala, “Women and the African National Congress, 1912-1943,” Umrabulo 13 (2001), 5. Retrieved April 15, 2018, available at: http:// www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4670 12 D Glaser, Politics and Society, 15.

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the legislation that imposed passes on women in 1956. 13Bozzoli argues that the confined participation of women in socio-economic aspects of the struggle was not by choice but were a result of exclusion by males. Women were not generously empowered by their male counterparts to participate in the mainstream political platform of the struggle.14 The views by Bozzoli highlights a struggle within a struggle; women fighting not only to be free from oppression, but also to be included and recognised in the struggle.15

Goldblatt takes a more inclusive view that the struggle advanced by women, firstly centred on the rights of the woman and the child before focusing on the broader mass nationalistic issues.16 Goldblatt discusses the 1984 and 1985 bus and bread boycotts led by United Women’s’ Organisations (UWO) as being centred on matters that heavily weighed down the black household. These seemingly very women-centric struggles were, however, undertaken with the full knowledge of the effects of the increases in bus and bread prices on the apartheid political and economic machinery. UWO disseminated a view that if the apartheid government was not heavily involved in the overmilitarizing of the state with the intent to quell black people’s rights, then bread and bus prices would not be affected by inflation.17 Such views quickly lifted the so-called women issues into the broader political and economic framework that was not only about women but also black society in general.

The veneration of nationalistic and worker resistance over the fight against gender-centric oppression, as highlighted in the views of Bozzoli and Glaser above, is widely cited as having an inverse effect on the presentation of the roles of women in history. Bozzoli is of the argument that the absence of a strong feministic movement within the broader nationalistic views, including Marxism, is to be blamed for the reduced and weakened role of female contribution.18Bundy cites the subordination of Feminism and Marxism as a persistent scenario that belittled female emancipative participation in the struggle.19 Bundy agrees with Bozzoli’

13 Ibid, 15. 14 Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism”, 151. 15 Ibid, 151. 16 B Goldblatt, “Citizenship and the Right to Childcare,” in (Un)thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa, ed. A. Gouws(New York: Routledge, 2005), 113. 17 Ibid, 113. 18 Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism”, 155. 19 C Bundy, “An Image of its own Past? Towards a Comparison of American and South African Histography”, in History from South Africa, Alternatives and Practices, ed.P. M. Joshua Brown (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 117-143.

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s view that as a result of this forced subservience, female participation in the struggle generally weakened in both intensity and persistency after the 1954 marches.20

There is another view that the presentation of the roles of black women in South Africa could have been affected by the fact that it has generally been researched and disseminated by non- black women. Walker discusses this view and attempts to pre-empt it with an argument that this does not necessarily mean that the sources by non-blacks are biased and are therefore non- reflective of the subject matter.21 The writer further opined that gender, rather than race, should dominate in the presentation of women’s history,22 thus bringing a view that white women can effectively reflect on and present the experiences of black South African women. Ndebele, like Hetherington,23 vehemently argues against the above view that race does not necessarily affect historical presentation on both gender-related matters and history.24 Ndebele is of the view that biases affected by the need for racial self-exoneration on the plight of the historical groups being studied were too strong not to be affected by historical presentation.25

The next sections look at how the consulted works view the roles of women in specific areas of the South African socio-economic and political history. The sectors of interest in this paper are trade unionism, political and civic groups, women activity in guerrilla movements and women’s fight against repressive laws.

2.2 Gender and Social Theory

In an attempt to create a greater understanding of the life of Mina Soga and other women discussed in the document, some common theories that relate to female emancipation and female struggles in the modern world have been drawn from the literature. The Christian mission context of the works of Mina Soga prompts one to consider whether her contribution to history can be explained by the social theory. Kachuck clearly aligns the history of women with socially determined definitions of womanhood and manhood. How society defines the roles of women is clearly reflective of how they are discussed and described in history26.

20 Ibid, 123. 21 C Walker, Women and Gender, 422. 22 Ibid, 423. 23 Penelope Hetherington, Women, 245. 24 N.S Ndebele,“Defining South African Literature for a New Nation,” in The Subversive Imagination Artists, society and social responsibility ed. C. Becker (London: Yale University Press, 1994), 65. 25 Ibid, 65. 26 B Kachuck, “Feminist Social Theories: Themes and Variations,”Sociological Bulletin 44 no. 2 (1995): 169- 193.

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Additionally, whatever role women play in society, fairly depicted or not is a function of the social context in which this role occurs.27 This means, as highlighted earlier, women cannot be separated from the history of a nation and this view is followed in this thesis. Therefore, Beatrice Kachuck whose views have been cited above strongly believes that Feminism is a critical social theory that can broadly define the struggles of women. 28 Another feminist writer, Cecilia Winkler, also linked the twentieth-century political and civil struggles in the United States, including the fight for racially-equality, with feminist social theory and thought.29 She also believes that the history of women’s struggles cannot be divorced first from a gender oppression context and the general unfolding of political, social and economic events that form part of history.30

This section looks at feminist social theories from a Christian mission perspective as well as the political historical perspective. The Christian perspective has been chosen because the subject, Mina Soga, lived and worked as a Christian missionary all her life.31 Social theories are anchored on the belief that society’s current and past actions can best be understood by a contextual study of social factors that motivated societal behaviour. Additionally, social theory believes that societies’ actions can best be understood by looking at social and power structures, gender relations, ethnic, racial and other demographic diversities identifiable in a particular setting.32 Social theory eventually leads to an understanding of what a society behaves and why it behaves in certain ways in addition to understanding how this behaviour transforms over time. This study elaborates on some social theories below in a bid to appreciate the behaviour of African female missionaries operating within the political, yet highly deterministic fringes of South African societies before the attainment of democracy in 1994.

Social theory in the history of South African women, according to the works of various feminist-centric and general historians, revolved around the following:

2. Gender, power politics and governance33 3. Gender, religion and mission work34

27 Ibid, 182. 28 Ibid, 183. 29 Cecilia Winkler, “Historical Development and Theoretical Approaches in Sociology,” Feminist Sociological 2 (2002): xxxIbid, xxx. 30 Ibid, 83. 31 Deduced from her letters to and from Mrs Ballingers between 1940 and 1960. 32 C Winkler, “Historical Development…”, 83. 33 B. H MacLean, Strike a Woman; H. E Britton, Women in the South . 34 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 420.

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4. Gender, education and socio-cultural factors35 5. Gender and socio-economic transformation36

The twentieth-century history of South African women has seen the struggles, achievements and failures of women as a direct function of how the above factors influenced their lives, directly and indirectly.37 For instance, gender and politics, as a social theory issue, can be used to explain the low education of women prior to Apartheid, despite their larger numbers in basic school. The political processes that confined them to rural communities can indeed be blamed for the lower number of females in leadership roles, including in religious movements of the times. On the religious front, the patriarchal views of the church permeated female converts, leading to their undue subservience to male leadership.38 This was partly an effect of the socio- cultural traditional, ethnic systems that also perceived women negatively and convinced them that they played a lesser role in the national development domains. Finally, the role of women in social and economic changes that were going on as a result of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, and the disintegration of traditional family units have also been belittled by their expected minor roles in this change.39

Yet, various views have also been presented from both the perspectives of African women themselves and other feminist writers who seek to uphold the contribution of women in South African history. Women like Deborah Gaitskell, whose work has been hugely cited above, refute the physiological and psychological inferiority of women.40 Stories of African women who have defied the subservience expectations on the four realms of social theory cited earlier are not few in South African history. Their stories, just like their roles in society, have been suppressed by male dominance in the interpretation of South Africa’s social theory.41 Women have contributed to the development of the current South African society through how they interacted with the factors of change: political power relations and governance, the influence of religion and mission, socio-cultural factors and social and economic transformation as they affected South African history prior to 1994. Thus, as will be seen in the lives of Mina Soga and the other women fighting for political, socio-cultural, religious and economic change for

35 C Kros, The Seeds…, 70. 36 B. H MacLean, Strike a Woman, 93. 37 Ibid, 93. 38 Ibid. Deborah Gaitskell, Housewives”, 421. 39 Ibid. B.H Maclean, Strike a Woman, 94. 40 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 420. 41 Ibid. B.H Maclean, Strike a Woman, 94.

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and on behalf of the oppressed, the history of women is closely tied to, and cannot be separated from the history of South Africa.42

2.3 Brief History of South Africa and how it Affected Women and Society

In line with the argument that the story of Mina Soga, and the story of other South African women, cannot be divorced from the political, economic and socio-cultural changes, as advocated by the Social theory, the section below condenses South Africa history particularly between the 1900s when Mina Soga was born up until the 1960s when due to old age and ill health, she became less active in social works.

In 1893, when Mina Soga was born, South Africa existed as a collection of four independent but closely co-ordinated provinces: The Cape of Good Hope which was the largest, Transvaal, the Orange Free State (OFS) and Natal. British domination was strongly felt in the Cape and its expansion to the northern part of South Africa and Africa was growing.43 In 1890, a British contingent under Cecil John Rhodes British South African Company (BSAC) had successfully colonised Southern Rhodesia, to the north of the Limpopo, and was heading further north towards what would become Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Dutch settlers in the 1890s had been overwhelmed by growing British dominion through the imposition of South Africa as British territory under the crown. British expansion occurred under heavy opposition from local ethnic kingdoms and chiefdoms as well as from the Dutch settlers who were the first to settle at the Cape. Thus, many wars were fought, including the first Anglo-Boers war in 1880, the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1889, the Anglo-Zulu war in 1879 and a series of protracted Xhosa wars that lasted until 1879.

In 1910, the Union of South Africa came into being after the passing of the Union of South Africa Act of 1909 into law. The four colonies, The Cape, Transvaal, Natal and the Orange Free State, were consolidated into a coalition government between the Dutch and the British under the leadership of Louis Botha. The union meant that South Africa was now recognised as an independent nation, albeit with allegiance to the British Crown. Earlier on, it had existed as an administrative colony of the British and ruled by governors who did so on behalf of the

42 Ibid, 94. 43 G Nattrass, A Short History, 28.

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British Crown. The union came as a compromise for a workable political governance of South Africa between the British and the Dutch settlers.44

After the end of the much devastating Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), there was a need to stabilise relations and work towards the common interests of the Dutch and British. In 1908, as a precursor of the Act, a national convention was held where foundational principles of the union were laid. These, amongst other things, included the formation of a common view regarding African franchise in the largest province the Cape. An African delegation that travelled to England as part of a protest team against the union raised the threatened franchise of Africans in the Cape as one of the major reasons why they opposed the union. As will be seen in the life of Mina Soga, the coalition government held a very strong anti-African sentiment that fostered repression, discrimination and dehumanisation of African women through laws, social and political systems including religion.45 The peak of these ill-tendencies came in 1948 when for the first time after the union was established. An Afrikaner party (the Nationalist Party), after winning a majority in parliament, implemented Apartheid as a solution to the so-called native question.

Mina Soga lived most of her active political life within the realms of the Union of South Africa. Her experiences, actions and contributions to the history of South African women cannot be divorced from the above political vicissitudes. As will be seen later, her life was lived as a reaction to the gross changes that were occurring during this time. Under the Union of South Africa, despicable historical events, including the Sharpeville Massacre where the Apartheid police opened fire on unarmed, peaceful protesters who were expressing their discontent with pass laws at a police station in Sharpeville, Soweto, took place. About 69 persons were killed in the action. These included eight women while more than thirty of them were injured.46

The Apartheid regime officially began during this period, particularly in 1948 when the Nationalist Party came to power. Various political formations became very active during the union as a result of increasing repression, dispossession and discrimination and the growing urge for democratic governance. 47 In 1913, three years after the union was established, Charlotte Maxeke, who was deputised by Mina Soga in the 1930s when the National Council

44 B Nasson, The War for South Africa(Cape Town: NB Publishinhg Limited, 2010), 38. 45 W Beinart and S Dubow, Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 18. 46 M Mosegomi, “Soweto Explodes. (M. Mosupyoe, Ed.) Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. 47 B Nasson, The War and Nattrass, A Short History.

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for African Women was formed, started the Bantu Women’s League; in 1948, the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) was formed in response to the increasing pressure for female political inclusivity in political and civil formations.48 Women also fought against pass laws in this era with the march to the Union Buildings in 1956 being the most remembered action in these fights. Women unionisation in response to both generally oppressive working conditions and gender inequality within the workplace also motivated women like Emma Mashinini to move towards female trade unionism.49

On the global front, South Africa had fought in the two world wars on the side of Britain. Both world wars are associated with the increased engagement of women in previously male- dominated spheres of life including politics, religion and economics. In South Africa too, evidence of this change, which some scholars refer to as the second wave of feminism, is notable in the increase and rise of women’s associations in the political, religious, economic and social affairs of the nation, one of them being the African National Congress Women’s League.50 In religion, South Africa became the first country in Africa to send a female delegate, Mina Soga, to the International Missionary Council conference in Tambaram, India, in 1939. All these events, as emphasized earlier, shape the reaction of South African women, their challenges and successes as argued by the social theory.51

The Union of South Africa existed up to 1961 when the Republic of South Africa, under a new constitution, was established. Its end, however, did not mean the end of Apartheid. The change to a republic was by no means meant to accommodate all citizens under a more equal regime but was a method to reduce British influence over South Africa, particularly after the former had initiated various progressive measures towards majority rule in British colonies. In 1960, the then British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had given his famous “Winds of Change” speech in the Cape Parliament where he had emphasized the inevitability of black and Asian majority rule. In his words:

48 P Hetherington,Women in South Africa: The Historiography in English, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1993): 241-269. 49 History Online, S. A. List of women who were banned by the Apartheid government, 2015, Retrieved March 15, 2018, from South African History Online: http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/list-women-who-were-banned- apartheid-government. 50 C Corrin, Feminist Perspectives on Politics(London: Routledge, 1988), 279. 51 B Kachuck, “Feminist Social Theories: Themes and Variations,”Sociological Bulletin 44 no.2 (1995), 169- 193.

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The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it. […] As I see it, the great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West. Will they be drawn into the Communist camp? Or will the great experiments of self-government that are now being made in Asia and Africa, especially within the Commonwealth, prove so successful, and by their example so compelling, that the balance will come down in favour of freedom and order and justice?52

The rise of mass nationalism in the rest of the African continent had resulted in a sway on British opinion on colonial oppression. In 1957, the Gold Coast, now Ghana, was the first British colony in sub-Saharan Africa to gain its freedom from British rule. In 1961, Nigeria and Sierra Leone also got their independence from the same. Various other European colonies including Tunisia, Sudan, Guinea, Senegal and the Belgian Congo had also obtained their independence. While the Union of South Africa had technically been declared an independent state by the British in 1910, the unique nature of its independence was that it was not based on the majority rule perception that the populously-dominant Africans should form governments. Being under a degree of influence from the British through its membership to the Commonwealth of Nations, for example, the fear that the British government would eventually use its influence in South Africa to bring about majority rule was never distant.53 The republic was a step towards the establishment of an Afrikaner state and the abolition of British sentiment in South Africa. Under the leadership of Verwoerd, a referendum was held to determine if South Africa should form a republic or not. The Nationalist Party supported position of moving towards a referendum won by a slight margin signalling the change of South Africa into a republic.

Prior to 1910, when South African provinces existed as separate entities, The Cape Province, from whence Mina Soga hailed, was governed as an independent colony with its own parliament. This parliament had a peculiar view that all persons, black or white, male or female, had the right to vote as long as they met certain suffrage requirements. This system, termed the Cape Qualified Franchise system, was an application requirement at the time Mina

52 G Nattrass, A Short History, 27. 53 Ibid, 27.

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Soga was a young lady capable of voting. Because she met the suffrage requirements, which included being literate, owning assets or property up to a certain value, she was able to vote.

The Cape Qualified Franchise system, despite occurring in the background and context characterised by the dispossession of black people under discriminative laws such as the Glen Grey Act of 1892, did offer women in colonised South Africa the first hint of political participation. However, the system, from its inception in 1854, was always changing in the negative for African women. In 1892 for instance, the Franchise Ballot Act was passed into law. It made it difficult for African women to be part of the voters by increasing the minimum property value that was required for voting eligibility to 75 pounds from the previous 25 pounds. Other requirements were that one had to prove literacy and needed to have an occupation. These changes saw the disenfranchisement of many African voters. Additionally, despite the slight inclusivity of women into the voting system stated earlier, the issue of literacy was a challenge for most rural African voters.

Despite these challenges, the African vote was noted to be of transformative significance in the governance of the Cape. The black vote, for instance, was pinpointed in Cecil John Rhodes’ election victory in 1890 and the 1903 victory of Leander Jameson under the Progressive Party. This was to the chagrin of Dutch settlers who saw the African vote, as a result of its inclination towards British rule at the Cape, as a threat. From 1890 onwards, hardening of the voting environment is noticeable with various attempts to disenfranchise Africans being made, amongst them the creation of separate rolls for black and whites, which finally succeed in 1936 when the Representation of the Natives Act of 1936 was created. This Act discussed later in the document particularly in relation to how it affected the relationship between Mina Soga and the Cape governance, ultimately meant that blacks could no longer choose who they wanted as representatives in parliament. Meanwhile, while voting requirements increased to the exclusivity of black women, white women were given equal voting powers to men in 1930. Furthermore, poor white men who had been disenfranchised by the property value requirements were also given an equal right to vote, irrespective of their financial net-worth in 1931.

In 1994, South Africa became a democracy under a new constitution. A constitutional democratic view rather than a parliamentary democratic view was established. This meant that the constitution was a superior power to parliamentary majorities. This view meant that all persons, male or female, black or white were equal before the constitution. The first president

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of the new Republic of South Africa was Nelson Mandela who came into power after winning the majority of votes in the election.54

Under the new constitution, women attain similar rights to men in most regards. However, this did not necessarily mean that women’s subjugation was over. Various structural issues, including low education levels, poverty and excessive patriarchal domination, still get in the way of women’s equality and self-emancipation. Women, however, remain resolute in ensuring that their work and achievements in the socio-political realms are achieved inasmuch as they want their contribution to the positive political, social and economic change to be recognised.55

While the main objective of this thesis is not to narrate or outline the history of South Africa, it is not possible to separate the history of women of South Africa from its political, social and economic history.56 As a summary of this history, the timeline below shows some important events in the history of South Africa. These historical events are juxtaposed with the history of women of interest in this document, starting with the birth of Mina Soga, whose case is discussed in detail later in this document.

1893: Mina Soga is born in Queenstown. 1894: Glen Grey Act becomes law in the Cape. 1899-1902: Anglo: Boer War takes place. 1905: Charlotte Maxeke becomes the first black woman to attain a bachelor’s degree. 1910: Union of South Africa is formed. 1912: African National Congress (ANC) is formed. 1913: Land Act of 1913 sets reserves beyond which Black people could not own land. These reserves constituted 13% of South Africa for over 90% of the population. 1914: South Africa enters World War 1. 1918: The Bantu Women’s League is formed under the leadership of Charlotte Maxeke.

54 G Waylen,"Women's mobilization and gender outcomes in transitions to democracy: the case of South Africa." Comparative Political Studies, Sage Journals 40, no. 5 (2007): 521-546. 55 L. F Ntwape, A Histography…, 35. 56 C Walker, Women and Gender…, 424.

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1919: South Africa annexes German West Africa (now Namibia) and renames it South West Africa. 1921: The South Africa Communist Party is formed.

1923: Natives Urban Areas Act is created giving way to poor black neighbourhoods referred to as locations. Separation of black and white residences making it illegal for blacks to stay in white neighbourhoods without special permission. 1933: National Council of African Women is formed. 1936: Representation of Natives Act is enacted into law, ending the Cape suffrage system. 1939: South Africa joins the Second World War as an ally of Great Britain. 1939: Charlotte Maxeke dies. 1939: Mina Thembeka Soga becomes president of NCAW. 1939: Mina Soga represents South Africa at the International Missionary Council (IMC) Conference in Tambaram, India. 1943: Women are allowed to join the ANC. 1948: The National Party government comes into power and formalises segregation of non-whites through Apartheid. 1948: The African National Congress Women’s League is formed. 1950: Group Areas Act becomes law, intensifying racial segregation by residence and creating specific areas of location for South Africans of different ethnicities. 1954: Federation of South African Women (FSAW)is formed. 1956: Women march to Pretoria in protest of the imposition of pass laws against the free movement of women in urban areas. 1959: Abolition of the Representation of Natives Act takes place. 1959: Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, and the forceful removal of blacks to homelands occurs. 1960: Sharpeville Massacres take place in Soweto where 69 persons amongst them women and children are killed for protesting the pass laws. 1961: South Africa holds a referendum to form a republic. The Republic of South Africa is formed. South Africa leaves the Commonwealth of Nations and undoes most systems associated with British rule including the monetary system of using pounds.

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1964: The Rivonia Trial where Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life for trying to overthrow the government takes place in Transvaal. 1966: Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s prime minister, is assassinated. 1970s: Bantustan forceful resettlement are intensified with an estimated three million blacks being sent back to ethnically associated homelands. 1973: Black Women Federation is formed. 1976: United Women’s Congress is formed. 1976: An estimated (though debated) figure of over 700 people killed in uprisings against Apartheid educational systems of Bantu education and the forceful use of Afrikaans as a medium of teaching and learning. 1983: Natal Organisation of Women (UDF wing) is formed. 1984: Federation of Transvaal Women is formed. 1984:1989 Unending police and black people battles against Apartheid policies. Many black women are killed. 1986: PAC African Woman’s League is formed. 1987: United Democratic Front Women’s Congress is formed. 1989: Frederik Willem de Klerk succeeds PW Botha as South Africa’s, president, commits to a resolution of racial challenges in South Africa. 1990: Nelson Mandela is released from prison and negotiations towards inclusive governance begin. 1991: National Women’s Coalition is formed. 1993: South Africa adopts and new constitution. 1994: South Africa holds the first democratic elections.

The above events inspired and were in turn inspired by the development of many ideological views against oppression. Political oppression occurred in conjunction with other oppressive viewpoints and systems, including gender oppression. The next section discusses feminist philosophies that were inspired by the broad global and local political, social and economic changes including the two world wars, missionary influences and increasing education among women.

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2.4 Gender, Religion and Mission work

The role that religion has played in the shaping of the history of South African black women is widely discussed by many feminist writers including Nico Botha, Deborah Gaitskell and Meghan Healy-Clancy. Generally, they see religion as a force through which patriarchy has been extended and where women had to strive for equal recognition with varying degrees of success. The suppression of women in religion was generally met with a new breed of feminism in South Africa; Christian feminism. As Deborah Gaitskell puts it, understanding the lives of how women strive under religious subordination to male missionaries, “in more detail should demonstrate how different notions of Christian femininity are likewise being operationalized and embodied”.57Therefore, she presents Christian feminism as a response to religion-driven patriarchy. Christian feminism is discussed as a social theory that shaped the lives of women in missionary work in South Africa. Another theory relating to the development of the church is also discussed in this section.

Nico Botha emphasizes the views that female contributions and female voices in Christian missions were generally subordinated and deserved to be heard.58 One way of doing this was by presenting the life narratives of notable Christian feminists. This view is not uncommon and is held by various feminist writers including Deborah Gaitskell. Gaitskell views the issue of gender and religion as being helpful in attempting to spread and popularise the possibility of an undivided nationhood by race. Religion, in her views, supported and encouraged the interactions of colonized and white women and “helped keep alive the idea of a single society and thus aided the peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa”.59

Several authors have discussed Christian feminism as both a theory and a reality. In the words of Swierczek,60 Christian feminism refers to biblical and theologically based philosophies and views that support the view that women and men are all equal and that women are neither physical, spiritually or physiologically weaker than men. Christian feminism draws its strength from recorded Christian history both biblical and post-biblical. The core values of Christian

57 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 68. 58 Nico A. Botha, “Towards the en-Gendering of Missiology: The Life-Narrative Of Mina Thembeka Soga,” Missionalia 31 no. 1 (2003): 105-116. 59 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 68. 60 Magdalena Świerczek, “The Dilemmas of Christian Feminism,”The Person and the Challenges 7 no.2 (2017): 139-149.

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Feminism are the need to realise equality, end any form of discrimination and support a non- violent world. These values emanate from the Enlightenment.61

Christian Feminism is a trend within the general feministic movement where women are fighting for freedom from patriarchy. With the church, the development and dissemination of Christian ideology have generally been done along gender lines that were biased towards males and put males at the centre of the church and women on the fringes. Christian feminism attempts to correct male dominance in the church as a physical and ideological body and brazenly stands against established patriarchy-inspired beliefs.62 Male dominance and female subjugation in the church are attributed to generation-to-generation views of women as being physically and psychologically weaker than men thus necessitating the latter to lead. 63 Reconstructionists as Christian feminists fully subscribe to the reformist principles of female liberation and emancipation within the church. Reconstructionists, unlike the revolutionists, believe that the Christian movement can be saved from patriarchy and its embedded anti-female traditions and values.

Biblically, Christian Feminist arguments draw the stories of prominent women in the scriptures starting with Eve in The Book of Genesis.64 They put Eve at the centre of the relationship between men and God and boldly discuss the power in her disobedience. Other female figures cited by Christian feminists are women who defied the odds of their times by bravely going against convention and by gaining the favour of God. These include women like Ruth in The Book of Ruth, prominent female prophets like Miriam and female warriors like Jael Deborah and Huldahin The Book of Judges and 2 Kings. These figures inspire the view that women can take any position within the religious and political helms and indeed any sphere of life.65

There are various views that are held against the Christian Feminist movements. Critics draw upon the very same religious doctrines used by the feminist to argue that their views go against Christian principles.66 However, there is support within the broad Christian movement that the female quest for equality, non-discrimination and non-violence must be supported and be construed in light of the need of betterment of the religious movements, particularly their

61 Ibid, 145. 62 C. Nunes & H.J.M. van Deventer, “Feminist interpretation in the context of reformational theology: a consideration, “In die Skriflig 43no. 4 (2009): 737-760. 63 Ibid, 746. 64 IbidMagdalena Świerczek, “The Dilemmas”,146. 65 Ibid, 146. 66 IbidMagdalena Świerczek, “The Dilemmas”, 147.

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treatment of females.67Hampson did not believe in the view that Christianity and Feminism can be interlinked and dismisses the whole concept of Christian feminism. Her arguments are based on the wide divergence between feminist expectations and Christian theology and its patriarchal nature. This creates a scenario where the supposed female feminists are attempting to find a balance between their liberal egalitarian expectations and the rigid theologised male domination supported by the Christian doctrine.68

Nunes and van Deventer state that there are many forms of Christian feminist ideology but are able to focus on three, these being revolutionary, reformist and reconstructivist feminist theologies. This is an extremist level of feminism that critically points out to the over- patriarchal nature of Christian tradition, ideology and theology.69 It reconsiders Christianity’s central belief, i.e., the existence of a male God, a male messiah as well as male dominant biblical figures such as prophets, kings, judges, all depicted within an air of male superiority.70

One feminist writer who appears to hold the revolutionist notion of Christian feminism is Deborah Gaitskell. Gaitskell puts the roles of missionaries who came to spread Christianity and the imperialist dominance system in one basket. Starting with Christianity, Christian missionaries came into traditional African societies with an agenda to instil white and male dominance. One of the avenues they used in so doing was missionary education. They instil values of female inferiority; first to men by gender and secondly to whites by race. The agenda behind educating an African woman was to create a loyal subservient wife who would, using Christian values, serve the will of her husband. Optionally, she could also get a professional engagement but nothing fancier than being a teacher or a nurse, otherwise, her main professional role was as a domestic servant. Gaitskell showed magnanimous scepticism in the works of one Clara Bridgman (discussed later) who was instrumental in the formation of the Helping Hand for Native Girls, a Johannesburg-based social organisation that supported girls with training and placement in domestic roles.71 While such social movements, were highly praised for assisting women, they were no better than the political and social systems that meant to keep women under the unfair authority and the check of men.

67 Ibid, 147. 68 D Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Blackwell: Oxford, 1990), 65. 69 A. M Clifford, Introducing feminist theology (New York: Orbis, 2001), 15. 70 Magdalena Świerczek, “The Dilemmas…”, 147. 71 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives…”, 411.

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Reformist Christian feminists hold a different view from revolutionists and reconstructivists. The core of their beliefs is that Christianity, despite being modelled on patriarchy, and despite having embedded female-suppressive theological views, traditions and behaviours, can be reformed to a point where female emancipation in the church is realised. Reformists also believe that Christian feminism benefits everyone in the Christian movement including men. This is because apart from the liberation and emancipation of women, it touches on the equalities and freedoms of all people, males and females. Furthermore, it spans non-Christian societies as well where it mobilises freedom and independence irrespective of gender. Reformists believe in the emphasis of the biblical sections that exhibit the power of will of women as well as an important part of spreading the views of female equality in Christian history. They also pay important attention to egalitarianist sections of the Bible in their bid to substantiate the need for liberality in church gender relations. Additionally, they hold a strong view that women should hold significant positions, particularly positions of authority in the church as a way of stressing and acknowledging their equal importance in both Christian history and present-day Christianity.72

Judging from her activities, Mina Soga might perhaps have subscribed to a reformist or a similar view. Under this view, there was a belief that the Christian movement can be served from both male dominance and oppression and European-centric Christian religion views that seemed to work against Africans.

In 1939, German attacked Poland leading to the Second World War. The period between 1939 and 1945, while plagued with global struggle, provided an element of hope for South Africans. Firstly, there was a view that a fight of Nazi, Fascist and later Japanese oppression will eventually lead to the liberation of oppressed majorities. After all, they were fighting in these wars alongside white soldiers. Furthermore, an unusual alliance between workers and government developed, driven by communist ideology-based labour union linked to the Communist Party of South Africa. 73 The movement held the strong view that worker participation in strikes or any activity that may hinder productivity was tantamount to turning against the war efforts against the Soviet Union, of which the South Africa government, as an ally of Great Britain, the United States of America, France and the Soviet Union was part.

72 IbidA. M Clifford, Introducing feminist theology, 17. 73 Gentle, L., Callinicos, L. Jansen, M, Nieftagodien, N & Jordi , N , A History Of Trade Unionism In South Africa (Cape Town: Workers’ World Media Productions, 2018), 15.

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The second expectation that was widely held by women related to the change in gender perceptions on the roles and contributions of women in South African society.74 With South Africa choosing to join the war on the side of allies, this meant that hordes of initially white men had to be deployed to European and Northern African war fronts. At home, this resulted in a change in labour market dynamics. The vacuum left by white men going for war created a strong demand for labour. This demand could not be easily filled by men and, for the first time, most rurally confined African women found relevance in the urbanist capitalist economies.

Generally, a system that confined women to reserves while men worked in urban centres was partially relaxed and the general pass law system appeared to hold less during the time. As if to perpetuate the hopes of black people, there were talks and promises of reforms to segregationist practices including the pass laws. For black men and women, this was believably sensible considering the roles of black women and men in sustaining South Africa’s war economy. The growth of women’s contribution to the war economy fostered a belief that gender roles could actually change towards the better after the war just as much as the black men’s contribution to both direct military duty and indirect wartime labour efforts was expected to foster increased racial equality.

During and in the aftermath of the war, a remarkable growth of Christian Feminism was noticeable and so was the clergy’s response to it. In some religious movements, starting with the Salvation Army, the voices of women in the church were being heard and for the first time, there was an ordination of women into pastoral roles traditionally held for men. Other Christian movements too were beginning to recognise the role of women in the church. Feminist historians and conventional historians alike describe feminism as being motivated by key global phenomenon, and thus occurred in waves resembling the timing of such phenomenon. The second world war represented one such phenomenon. In the Western and European sense, women saw their importance in running war economies and were consequentially prompted to demand better from traditionally biased political, religious and cultural systems and institutions. As alluded above, in South Africa, women suddenly became important workers in industry and their highly observable contribution inspired a view of equality with men and a demand for better treatment.

74 S Chetty, “Gender Under Fire: Interrogating War in South Africa, 1939-1945,”Programme of Historical Studies (Durban: University of Natal, 2001), http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/women/Chetty- S_Gender_under_fire_War_1939-1945.pdf

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It is not surprising that during this period, the African National Congress (ANC) for the first time allowed women into its political ranks and also supported the formation of the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) in 1948 after the party for the first time admitted female members in 1943. Women, as a result of the war, became highly aware that they were part of the political solution in South Africa as well. However, it must not be construed that there was no demand for women equally prior to World War 2. In 1936, three years before the war, the National Council for African Women (NCAW), had been formed by women breaking away from the All-African Convention (AAC) as a result of excessive patriarchy. The archaic beliefs that women cannot lead in political change was slowly being proven wrong by the likes of the NCAW.

The three-self theory was developed by Henry Venn, an English missionary work administrator with the Church of England in 1841.75 The theory can be classified under social theory because it attempts to create an understanding of how indigenous Christian churches planted by western missionary movements should manage their administrative and theological affairs within the communities they were planted. To this study, this theory is important because of the strong sense of Christian mission in the life of Mina Soga who managed various missionary social support activities for people in the Cape in the early and mid-1900s.

The three self-theory was developed as a model of how indigenous churches established by the Church of England, primarily in Africa and parts of Asia should be managed. The theory is called so because it encompassed three concepts: self-supporting, self-governing and self- propagation concept.

The self-supporting concept was a view that the local indigenous missions must work towards supporting themselves with little or no foreign interference including interference from the establishing international mission. This interference also included freedom from theological imposition by foreign churches.76 Local missions needed to develop self-sufficiency also in carrying out humanitarian Christian charity works. Eventually, churches would develop the capability to finance themselves, run their own programmes and develop theological perspectives that resonated with the socio-cultural context of their indigenous localities. The self-governing concept stated that local churches should govern themselves. They were

75 P. V Rao, “New Wineskins: A Study on Indigenous Christian Missions Theory,”Religion.Volume 3 no. 8 (2014): 169-170. 76 Ibid, 170.

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supposed to develop leadership structures (both administrative and spiritual) from the own local realms. They should not have imposed leadership, policies as well as theological views. The final concept of the Three-self Theory was the self-propagating concept. By self- propagation, Venn meant that the local missions should grow in their communities by their own designs. Growing of the church by non-indigenous entities created the risks of failure to attain relevance in communities as a result of failing to resonate with the same communities’ needs and expectations.

The above concepts, in the South Africa sense, meant that churches had the responsibility for both spiritual and charity missions while attempting to become independent from their establishers. However, financial support, which under the three-self-concept was to be obtained from within the local communities was obviously a problem for black churches operating in small towns and rural communities. 77 This created a challenge in funding both the administrative and charitable missions of the churches.78

The Madras Conference of the International Missionary Council of 1937 and the Jerusalem Conference broadly discussed some of the conceptions related to the three-self theory. They discussed the need for the church to develop a theology that was reflective of, and understandable by, the indigenous communities it served. This was achievable through the use of local languages and the localisation of leadership.79 At the Jerusalem Conference, further, more defined principles on the missionary role of the church within its locality were emphasized.

(1) the interpretation of Christ in worship and art incorporated worthy characteristics of the people, (2) the Spirit influences all phases of the people's lives, (3) it actively shares its life with the nation in which it is, (4) it is alert to problems and acts as a spiritual force contributing to the good of the community, and (5) it is kindled with missionary ardour and a pioneering spirit.80

77 Ibid, 170. 78 B Finley, “Send Dollars and Sense: Why Giving Is Often Better than Going,” Christianity Today 43 no. 11 (1999): 73–75. 79 Peter Dorn, “The Three-Self Principle as a Model for the Indigenous Church,’ Concordia Seminary – Saint Louis Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary, 1982, https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.co.za/&httpsredir=1&article=1016&cont ext=mdiv 80 Ibid, 104-105.

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The above values, to some extent, can be viewed in the manner in which Mina Soga managed her social services support mission as will be discussed. The established Christian mission, therefore, had a duty and a commitment to uplift communities they were part of.81 Going back to the social theory context, it can be deduced that both male and female missionaries did charity work and social support driven by the purpose that religion had to play amidst the socio- economic deterioration of society primarily as a result of changing political power structures.82These power structures resulted in the dispossession of Africans by successive European governments, something which left communities injured. The role of missions became that of social transformation, that is, trying to alleviate community suffering as a result of power structure changes. The role of the church or mission as defined by ruling beliefs and philosophies of the times found relevance in the Cape Province social context where Mina Soga’s projects were carried out.

At the same time, not all churches shared the same view and responsibility on the disposed and increasingly marginalised Africans in South Africa. Other churches stood on the other side of the divide, perpetuating segregation and dehumanisation of African societies while relying on the same doctrines applied by pro-African churches. Pillay pinpoints one church, the Dutch Reformed Church, as one such Christian establishment that brazenly supported racial segregation based on Calvinist views.83 The church, unlike African churches, had been able to amass much wealth that it used to expand itself physically as well as philosophically.

Gaitskell, like Healy-Clancy presents a strong view that European and, in some instances, American missionary societies never intended to uplift women into missionary leadership positions. In the church, women, especially those who had a good mission education, were at best suited to be wives of men serving the missionary cause. This was the reproduction of African patriarchal societies that expected the subservience of women in the new religious dispensation. It was also direct transplantation of gender relations from the country'smissionary societies originated. Thus women, regardless of race, were expected to submit to the authority of men.

However, women went on to establish Christian missions as guided by the three self-theory discussed above. In Gaitskell’s views, it was not unusual for young Christian women to

81 J Pillay, The church as a transformation and change agent." HTS Theological Studies 73, no. 3 (2017): 1-12. 82 Ibid, 6. 83 Ibid, 9.

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establish small Christian missions which they oversaw, albeit with different levels of success. She writes about many young women, working in poor and remote corners of the Cape and the Natal Provinces setting up schooling centres based on missionary models. These attempted to teach Christianity as a core religion and integrate Christian beliefs with education.84 She cites the study of Agnes Lokwe who, though not that educated herself, opened a mission school in Cwaru that emphasized on teaching a sense of missionary responsibility and religiosity to poor communities that her no schools.85 Gaitskell’s views point to the fact that such initiatives were generally common within the Cape and Natal provinces where a sense of Christian mission saw women spearheading the education of communities. Even within European setups, Gaitskell states that there were some missions that were led and directed by women despite the prevailing patriarchal-domination trend in Christian mission.86 In confirmation, Ruth Seabury narrates how Mina Soga had been influenced by a group of Scottish women who ran the mission school she attended. 87 Mina Soga herself went on to establish a Christian-based education institution at Bloemvale Farm in Queenstown.

James Campbell writes that the growing female involvement in church hierarchies slowly impacted on how Christian ideology developed towards suiting feminist views of religion. Campbell asserts that the growth of women’s Christian movement as part of broader missions resulted in the feminisation of some beliefs.88 He states that women in the African Methodist Mission (AME) of the late 1800s generally drifted from the notion that the role of Christianity was to establish the true position of men, rather seeking more inclusive terms. They also started to resist the view that Africa was a fatherland or a land of the fathers choosing instead to see it as a motherland. While women’s missionary societies were formed to support broader, male- dominated missions, their impact grew beyond this subservient aspect and they became centres through which the female view of religion was told and applied.

Under the social theory, it is generally not justifiable to separate missions. In this case, the Christian mission and politics. 89 Missions operated in African communities that had been affected by political considerations from the arrival of the first European settlers in the 1600s

84 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives…”, 269. 85 Ibid, 267. 86 Ibid, 267. 87 Ruth Seabury, Daughter…, 156. 88 J. T Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 353. 89 D Glaser, Politics…, 124.

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to the formation of the Union in 1910, Apartheid in 1948 and on and on. To separate the role of the missionary efforts from the political environment, it therefore constitutes a deliberate attempt to suppress historical facts. With the relationships of politics and missions, women like Mina Soga found themselves at the centre of both the Christian mission and the repressive political worlds.

While in some instances, there was a deliberate effort to remain apolitical, as stated in the objectives of the NCAW, it was almost impossible to resolve some day-to-day challenges faced by rural and township dwelling black communities without resorting to political facts, political engagement and sometimes direct political confrontation. As Cilliers puts it, the separation of religion and the state in the history of South Africa is almost an impossible fit.90 In some instances, religion took a hard line through direct confrontation to repression and segregation and in some cases, it took a pacifying role whilst acknowledging the evils of the political solutions to the so-called Native Questions and other issues that perpetuated the suppression of mainly black people based on race. Politics split denominations by race mainly because of the differences in social forces that were at play, from a racial angle. Cilliers discussed how racial segregation eventually led to the split of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) as church leaders yielded to racist sentiment.

The AFM was divided into four sections as a result of the influence of the South African social politics on the ecclesiastical politics. The sections are the white section, the mixed-race section, Indian section, and the black section. These sections came as a result of racial segregation and discrimination. The four sections in the AFM were not equal in power and responsibilities. The white section of the church was the major and domineering section in the AFM. Although other sections like mixed race and Indian were also inferior to the white section, the black section was the most inferior section. The four sections in the AFM were able to move into structural unity in 1996.91

The church succumbed to racial division only to reunite in 1996 after the end of Apartheid. This shows a close negative link between politics and religion, as looked at from a social theorist’s lens.

90 J. Cilliers, "Between separation and celebration: Perspectives on the ethical-political preaching of Desmond Tutu." Stellenbosch Theological Journal 1, no. 1 (2015): 41-56. 91 M. S Kgatle, “A socio-historical analysis of the sections in the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa from 1908 to the present,” Verbum et Ecclesia 38 no. 1(2017).

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From another extremist view, colonialists also substantiated racial segregation and racial subjugation to narrow-context, quasi-religious, views such as Calvinism. Calvinism is a protestant theology based on the views of John Calvin, a breakaway from the protestant movement initially established by Martin Luther. The settlers appealed to some sections of the Calvinist beliefs that were promoted under the Dutch Reformed Church that spoke of a superior and inferior typology of humanity. Obviously, the “heathen” African communities and other European settlers on a non-Calvinist appeal, such as the British, were an inferior bunch that did not deserve the same privileges that the superior groupings had. Despite the perpetuation of such views, there is strong evidence of missionary work by the Dutch Reformed Church that included building some of the first schools for Africans.92

Kgatla and Magwira attempt to explain variances between Afrikaner Calvinism and European Calvinism. Afrikaner Calvinism developed into a hard-liner separatist and segregation-centred religious philosophy in variance to European Calvinism that became more open and receptive to diversity driven by the liberal trends of the Enlightenment era. Afrikaner Calvinism, however, developed from the Dutch settlers of 1652 who, as a result of long geographical separation with Europe, were not influenced by the softening ideologies that affected European Reformists. Calvinism, which was a widely held view amongst the Dutch settlers, and which had been developed under the Dutch Reformed Church and the only legal church for Dutch settlers until 1887, was fine-tuned through reinterpretation to impose and spread the idea of Dutch superiority that needed to be both built and defended.93

In 1935, the Dutch Reformed Church held a conference where its views on missions in South Africa and the relations between blacks and whites were to be concluded 94 . The church attempted to strike a balance between the views that all people were equal before God and the view held by the state that whites were superior. The church formally took a stance that the views and practices of the government were legitimate. It made a flimsy differentiation that as a church it did not believe blacks were inferior because of race, but because of low cultural

92 T Kgatla and A Magwira,“The defining moments for the Dutch Reformed Church mission policy of 1935 and 1947,”Missionalia 43 no. 3 (2015): 365-383. 93 Ibid, 372. 94 Ibid, 374.

42 development. Like the AFM case cited earlier, the relationship between missions and religion could not be separated from the political activity and ideologies that justified such activities.95

Similarly, from an African missionary perspective, the relationship among religion, missions and politics took another dimension. The problems that missions sought to solve for African communities emanated directly from political questions. Extreme poverty among Africans was a result of land and cattle dispossession that forced them into a capitalist mode they were not prepared for. Poor education was a result of segregationist policies that aimed at progressing whites academically at the expense of blacks while poor social amenities and housing challenges could also be attributed to both earlier dispossessive laws like the Native Lands Act of 1913 and the Group Areas Act in the 1950s.96 Thus, the myriad of challenges that Africans faced and for which black and white missionaries alike attempted to solve were in a sense political problems with socio-economic consequences. Likewise, social and economic transformation issues that women struggled with were not divorceable from politics. These are discussed in the next subsections.

2.5 Gender, Social and Economic Transformation

Social and economic transformation in the 1920s was a function of increasing colonial domination in the lives of black Africans. A coerced and changing economic landscape that saw the growth of an African urban population that did not rely directly on the land they used to own for sustenance but by wages from capitalist entities was a major hallmark of the social and economic transformation of black communities.97 With thousands forced out of their lands into urban squatter camps, women too found themselves being part of this change.

While both the colonial administration and remnant traditional systems attempted to reproduce old gender roles, women gradually defied these roles. The reproduced roles were that women would remain part of a subordinate domestic workforce that looked up to males for most sustenance. Women, however, found themselves being part of the growing, albeit repressed urban workforce. The engagement of women in new roles required new forms of female intervention. This section discusses some of these interventions particularly the growth of self-

95 Giep Louw, History of Missions in The Eastern Cape, 2006, Retrieved from http://ngkok.co.za/Artikels/Overview-of-Mission-in-the-EC-June-06.pdf. 96 M Roth, MThe Rhetorical Origins of Apartheid: How the Debates of the Natives Representative Council 1937-1950 Shaped South African Racial Policy (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2016), 220. 97 Ibid, 128.

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support groups as a mechanism to deal with poverty and backwardness that black women found themselves in this transformed environment. It also discusses trade unionism as a more direct confrontation with one of the causes of the deprivation and suppression of women within the 1920s capitalistic South Africa.

The history of apolitical self-support women groups in the eastern parts of the Cape Province can be traced to the 1920s when African missionary women began to mobilize women so that they could work towards improving their lives. Prominent among these groups was the Bantu Women’s Home Improvement Association (BWHIA). 98 These associations were partly motivated by the growing urbanisation of the menfolk who were primarily the economic providers of households leaving women who, until the advent of the Second World War, were heavily restricted from urban centres. Structural prohibition of women through non-provision of family-friendly accommodation and legal barriers that included various types of squatting and pass regulations created morally, socially and economically devastating circumstances. The organisations, amongst other things, were a response to these transformations brought about by capitalistic urbanisation.

In addition, the organisations identified and filled in important vacuums that the government and local communities neglected or did not see much value in. With the government spending less on social services in townships and rural communities dominated by blacks, and with virtually no services being provided in informal squatter settlement, the groups took it upon themselves to help assist as much as they could.99 While groups like BWHIA were mainly domesticity-focused, others took community causes into their hands, particularly the National Council for African Women (NCAW) that went as far as providing hostels to homeless persons and creches for single township mothers, and the Daughters of Africa that also took community development through the provision of education to blacks. By taking community responsibility, the associations, despite being “women’s associations”, generally served the needs of the deprived and impoverished African rural and township societies.

Other self-support organisations went beyond the domestic realm and provided social- infrastructural maintained support and helped run important social amenities such as libraries, clinics, creches, homes for minors without parents and homes for the aged. The National

98 Catherine Higgs, “Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927-1998,” African Studies Review 47 no. 3 (2004):119-141.

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Association of Coloured Women (NACW) was one such organisation that went beyond the regularly expected domesticities of the home with the support of black American women. 100Once again, the role of education and missionary activity is emphasized in the operations of the NACW. One of its founders, Mary Hall Xuma was an African-American educated woman who identified with the South African women’s quest from liberation both from oppressive political systems and from gender inequality. African-America influence and missiology (the study of religion) is also felt in Maxeke’s NCAW. Maxeke had been educated in the United States and, upon her return, started organisations modelled along the lines of similar, U.S- based, self-help organisations predominantly for poor and uneducated black women. Another self-support group proponent, Cecilia Tshabalala who started the Daughters of Africa (DOA), had studied in the United States where she was inspired by similar groups for African-American women.

While Higgs insisted that Zenzele associations were apolitical and literally shunned any political association and activity,101 Hadfield associated the groups with a growing political consciousness and involvement by women in the Cape.102 In her view, while they were not outrightly political movements or affiliates, they groomed politically prominent women that included Charlotte Maxeke who was to become the leaders of the nationally prominent National Council for African Women (NCAW) and was instrumental in the building of the preliminary women’s unit of the ANCE, THE Bantu Women’s League in 1918. 103 In agreement, Healy-Clancy stated that the DOA, together with its leader Tshabalala, played a crucial role in integrating women into the ANC in 1943 when the party opened up for women for the first time. 104 Furthermore, the DOA was instrumental in the organisation of the Alexandra Bus Boycott in 1944.105 These assertions show that women, despite participating in self-help organisations, did not necessarily lose political consciousness.

Overall, Healy-Clancy summarised the characteristics of the women’s self-support associations as:

100 D. Y Curry, Duke, E.,D. & M.A. Smith, Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People,(Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 2009), 277. 101 Catherine Higgs, Help Organizations…, 134. 102 L.A Hadfield, Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (Michigan. Michigan State University Press, 2016), 149. 103 Ibid, 153. 104 M Healy-Clancy, “The Daughters of Africa and Transatlantic Racial Kinship: Cecilia Lilian Tshabalala and the Women’s Club Movement, 1912-1943,” American Studies 59 no. 4 (2014): 481-499. 105 Ibid, 489.

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• Domestic support activities • Community and social support activities • Pioneered by educated, mostly Christian women, • Supported and inspired by African-American women experiences • Apolitical (although others like the DOA were brazenly political in nature)106

Various associations described above fit into these categories, including the National Council for African Women (NCAW), discussed in detail in later chapters of this document, the National Council for Coloured Women (NCCW) and The Daughters of Africa (DOA).

Women-led trade unionism took place in a background where trade unionism, like nationalism, was heavily influenced by the patriarchal nature of African ethnicity. Gasa presents the view that regardless of the intactness of patriarchy, women were able to thrive in this political space and to advance the first mass communicated feminist views. Gasa observes that women’s unions directly confronted women’s suppression at the workplace by calling for equality in working conditions between men and women. They advocated for the equal and dignified treatment of women, not only to white capitalists, but also to the males in trade unions and liberation movements. 107 Walker traces the feminist ideological development and dissemination role of women’s trade unions to the period between 1940 and 1950.108 The emergence of female-centric trade unions marked the beginning of the distinction between workers’ rights and women’s rights. Conventional trade unions, in their patriarchal nature, did not view women’s struggle in the workplace as consisting of, firstly, the need to be heard as women and, secondly, the need to be heard as workers.109

Trade unions were indispensable socio-political institutions in the fight against oppression in South Africa. The capitalist nature of the pre-1994 era repression, i.e. where black people were not only exploited by race but by racially-aligned social classes, motivated worker unionisation as an arm to fight for the rights of the oppressed social classes.110 Unions operated in alliance with political parties that were advancing the broader struggle following varying ideologies,

106 Ibid, 490. 107 Gasa, Women…, 354. 108 C. Walker, ed. Women and gender in Southern Africa to 1945. New Africa Books, 1990: 432. 109 S Hassim, “Gender…”, Gender, Social Location and Feminist Politics in South Africa.” Transformation 15 (1991): 65-82. 110 D, Lewis, Desiree "African gender research and postcoloniality: Legacies and challenges." In African Gender Studies A Reader. (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005): 381-395.

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which were mostly centred on Marxist ideologies in the fight against oppressive capitalist tendencies.111

Women played significant roles in the formation, mobilisation, administration and unionisation of trade movements in South. The ANC acknowledges the effectiveness, relevance and significance of the role played by The Federation of South African Women (FSAW). FSAW was formed in 1954 and is reported to have had a membership of over 230 000 women. FSAW’s objectives were both political and socio-economically feminist in nature.112 It was this movement that came up with the Women’s Charter, a blueprint for the attainment of women’s rights. The political goal was the attainment of majority rule, a goal shared by political movements, and the socio-economic goal was to create a South Africa were women were socio-economically liberated.113 The strong political orientation of FSAW, as presented by the ANC refutes the notions of Bozzoli114 and Glaser115 that women’s mass mobilisation was generally for the advancement of social issues that only affected women and these being subservient or a subset of the broader nationalistic agenda held by male-dominated political parties.

Gasa discusses the various roles played by women in trade unions. The general air of Gasa’s presentation acknowledges the roles of women in trade unionism while advancing the view that historians of that time did not give as much reverence to women unionists as they should have.116

Female trade unionists fought for the rights of women in the workplace and their activities in this area increased significantly in the 1970s.117 Gibbs presents a case study of women in Port Elizabeth whose struggle involved fights for equal treatment at the workplace, women-specific benefits like maternity leave, maternity pay, childcare support activities like crèches, slow advancement of women, healthy working standards amongst others. Gibbs reports that women

111 Ibid, 388. 112 African National Congress, The Role of Women in the Struggle against Apartheid, 15 July 1980, 1. Retrieved March 22, 2018. https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/role-women-struggle-against-apartheid-15-july-1980 1980. 113 Ibid, 2. 114Belinda Bozzoli, “Marxism”, 25. 115 D Glaser, Politics, 35. 116 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 37. 117 P Gibbs, “Women, Labour and Resistance: Case Studies from the Port Elizabeth/Uitenhage Area, 1972–94”, in Gasa, N. (ed), Women in South African History: Basus'iimbokodo, Bawel'imilamho/ They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers. (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007): 150-177.

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eventually began to lead their own forms of resistance without having to wait for male leadership.118 Generally, women’s working conditions were more appalling in comparison to those of men.119 In addition, in the early 1900s cases of girls as young as 12 working in harsh factory environments were recorded. Gibbs states that women’s strikes prompted the labour unrests witnessed in the country between 1973 and 1982.120 Increasing political awareness versus deteriorating working conditions and better organisations amongst female-centric trade unionists gave these strikes the required momentum. In Port Elizabeth, large striker numbers were recorded in 1973 with over 7000 female strikers downing tools, over 2000 in 1975 and over 8000 in 1983. Lambert and Lambert as cited by Gibbs states that the women’s strikes in the PE were successful in nurturing a significant level of political and class-consciousness.121

Trade unionisation and the growing inclusion of women into trade unions prompted the government to create repressive laws that affected the participation of African women in trade unions. According to Walker, in 1953 the government reinterpreted the Industrial Conciliation Act to exclude women in the definition of employee. Women had fought this exclusion since 1923 with a famous case of Okolo vs The Industrial Council for the Clothing Industry delivering a judgement enabling women representation and participation in unions.122 Such legislative changes were not powerful enough to stall women’s need for emancipation at the workplace. The Federation of South African Women (FSAW) was formed in 1954 a year after these debilitating yet resisted changes.123

Black women, through their active involvement in trade unions, played an important role in the political awareness and involvement of women.124 Walker states that poor education amongst black women and women generally resulted in the exclusion of women in mainstream politics. In the 1940s, women’s trade unions became a source of knowledge and information on political rights and matters for women. Walker states that the political agenda of the Communist Party of South Africa was mainly disseminated through trade unions. 125 Through trade unions, women inspired other women to apprehend principles of non-racialism, equality and all forms of repression. In Walker’s view, women’s trade unions had a magnificent impact that drove

118 Ibid, 166. 119 Walker 1991Walker 1991, Women and gender in Southern Africa, 434. 120 Gibbs, Women, Labour and Resistance,162. 121 Ibid, 162. 122 Walker 1991, Women and gender in Southern Africa, 435. 123 Ibid, 435. 124 Ibid, 436. 125 Ibid, 436.

48 uneducated, underprivileged and oppressed black women for the first time to “challenge the dominant ideology of white supremacy and its corollary racial exclusiveness.”126

Whether in politics, civic groups or trade union groups, women were able to effectively organise themselves into a powerful force to fight the impositions of the colonial and Apartheid systems. Below is a timeline of notable women’s political, trade and civic organisations complied from Walker,127 Hetherington,128 Hassim129 and Gasa.130

1913: Orange Free State Native 1918: Bantu Women’s League 1933: National Council pf African Women 1948: African National Congress Women’s League 1954: Federation of South African Women (FSAW) 1973: Black Women Federation 1976: United Women’s Congress 1983: Natal Organisation of Women (UDF wing) 1984: Federation of Transvaal Women 1986: PAC African Woman’s League 1987: United Democratic Front Women’s Congress 1991: National Women’s Coalition

Walker (1991) states the national political, civil and workers’ groups were effective enough to engage international support from organisations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WDF). It must also be noted that these were by no means the only women’s organisation that existed during the period between 1900 and 1994. Several local, but highly effective, women’s groups operated in townships and rural communities.

126 Ibid, 57. 127 Ibid, 58 128 Penelope Hetherington, Women, 250. 129 S Hassim, “Gender,” 68. 130 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 69.

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2.6 Gender, Power Politics and Governance

This section discusses how the roles of women in the history of South Africa were affected by political power shifts that consistently moved towards an increased oppression of black people. Oppression was mainly carried out through setting up legislative justifications that would justify government discriminatory actions against black societies. As stated by Gaitskell, political oppression affected women more than it did men, mainly because the system viewed women as less privileged and less capable than men.131 Women took various actions, including extreme ones like directly training as guerrillas who held the views of toppling the white government through military acts. These activities and the views that shaped them are discussed in this section.

Black women, either as part of coalitions or as part of stand-alone movements, took the lead in the fight against some of the most repressive and dehumanising legislation of the time. Gasa cites Wells who puts black women in the Western Cape at the forefront in the fight and condemnation against various 1954 enactments which include the Native Resettlement Bill, the Natives Land and Amendment Bill, the Separate Representation of Voters Act.132

Wells, as cited by Gasa summarises the resistance to these repressive pieces of legislation as a total condemnation of the whole apartheid legislative system. The 1954 responses were by no means the first actions against repressive legislative systems. Gasa discusses the work of the Bantu Women’s League formed in 1918. The league mobilised resistance to pass laws and was at least successful in forcing then Prime Minister, Louis Botha, to relax the enforcement of pass laws.133

Pass laws were a heavily resisted form of repression that not only limited freedom of movement, but also had an inverse effect on the social and economic lives of all black people.134Initially, these affected males, until the mid-1960s when they began to apply to women as well. The Federation of Commercial Women’s Unions (FCWU) played a major role in the resistance of pass laws against women in the Western Cape.135 The union organised door- to-door campaigns and gatherings to mobilise and educate women on the motive behind the

131 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 72. 132 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 70. 133 Ibid, 71. 134 Ibid, 71. 135 Ibid, 72.

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new passes and why they should be resisted. The harshness of the pass laws displaced over 2500 families within the Cape between 1954 and 1956.136 At least half a million people had been arrested or detained in offences relating to the pass laws by the end of 1960.137

Additionally, more repressive laws were enacted, particularly the General Laws Amendment Act that legalised the detention of offenders for ninety days without trial or access to legal representation. Clark and Worger cite the brave example of Joyce Sikakhane, an investigative journalist, who was detained using these harsh laws on the accusation that she was a terrorist. Upon her release, after spending 17 months without trial, she continued her reporting of oppression and worked with Steve Biko before being banished into exile for 20 years.138 In 1956, the peak of the anti-pass laws was reached when women marchers descended upon the Union Buildings in Pretoria and spread throughout the country.139

The participation of women in the formation, leadership, administration and support mobilisation of mainstream political parties in South African history is moderately discussed in various sources. The African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) is one of the most notable political movements led by women. It was formed in 1948 out of the need to increase women’s representation in the African National Congress. Prior to this, there was limited acceptance of participation of women in the ANC with women being only admitted into the party in 1943.140 Women proved a political force to reckon with in terms of mass mobilisation and mass engagement to the point where the league gained broader acceptance in the ranks of the mainstream ANC. Its first president, Lillian Ngoyi, was the first woman to be admitted into the ANC National Executive Council. Gasa states that women’s political organisations like the ANCWL did not only cater for the interests of women but soon became important movements for black persons of all genders. The Defiance Campaign of 1952 meant to protest repressive laws was one such broader and non-gender focused activities that the movement is accredited with.141

Badat writes that the activities of women did not go unnoticed by the Nationalist Party and women in the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress and other political organisations became

136 Ibid, 72. 137 N. L Clark &W.H Worger, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Routledge, 2014), 55. 138 Ibid, 56. 139 Department of Arts, Culture and Technology, Women Marching into the 21st Century (Pretoria: Department of Arts, Culture and Technology, 2000), 1. 140 ANC. A Short History of the Women`s League, 2017. 141 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 58.

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targets for arrests, detentions, killings and abductions.142Gasa mentions that members of the ANCWL and the FCAW were part of the 156 persons who were targeted for the Treason Trial.143 The Terrorism Act, a notorious law that legalised the arrest and detentions without trial for persons suspected to be threats to the apartheid states, was crafted, amongst others, in response to women’s mass mobilisations in political parties and trade unions.144 The leaders of the ANCWL during the Pretoria March, Lillian Ngoyi, was also arrested. The list below, compiled from various sources, identifies some of the notable names of black females who were banned under the Apartheid system. (The list is not exhaustive).145

• Baard, Francis • Ditsego, Rebecca • Gaso, Margaret • Gqirana, Violet • Hashe, Viola • Lungile, Lydia • Mabandla, Brigitte Sylvia (nee Nqoma) • Madapu, Magade • Makgalemela, Mary • Mandela, Winnie • Mashaba, Bertha • Mashaba, Tshintsheng Caroline • Mathebula, Rosina Manase • Mkize, MhloshaneAnnah • Mngoma, Verginia alias Venus alias Thoko • Mswane, Florence Grace (nee Mkhize) • Ndzanga, Rita Alita

142 S. Badat "The challenges of transformation in higher education and training institutions in South Africa." Development Bank of Southern Africa 8 (2010): 1-37. 143 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 58. 144 Ibid and Badat, 2010. 15. 145 History Online, List of women who were banned by the Apartheid government, 2015, Retrieved March 15, 2018, from South African History Online: http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/list-women-who-were-banned- apartheid-government.

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• Ngoyi, Lilian Masediba • Palmer, Josie • Ramphele, Aletta Mamphela

Sources: Gasa, Walker, www.sahistory.co.za146

The list above generally indicates that there was a remarkably large involvement of women in political systems that threatened the existence and stability of the Apartheid government.

Walker also gives credit to women on the grassroots in the success of the Communist Party of South Africa’s mobilisation campaigns.147 Walker writes:

Individual women played a far more prominent part in it (CPSA) than in any other political body, and several important female political leaders of the 1940s and 1950s emerged publicly at these times.148

Thus, women were not only passive members and supporters of political parties but were crucial in the mobilisation of memberships and the dissemination of a political ideology meant to recruit new members. Walker further discusses that this political significance of women occurred in a background where some members of the party seemed to endorse, rather than to challenge the conventional views on domestic apolitical roles.

Apartheid South Africa was a basket of social and political ideologies and philosophies that both magnified and vilified the roles of women while attempting to develop a certain way of thinking within the oppressed black populace. Political ideologies such as Socialism, Communism, Nationalism, Black People’s Consciousness and Pan-Africanism all benefited from the input of black women in one way or another.

The 1940s were an important time in the history of communism. The triumph of the Soviet Union in setting up a communist federation motivated the need to spread Communism to the rest of the world’s oppressed people.149 The rise of mass nationalism in South Africa was

146 Nomboniso Gasa, Women; South African History Online, Second War and its impact, 199-1948 (South Africa: 2016); Accessed September 13, 2018. https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/second-world-war-and-its- impact-1939-1948 147 Walker, Women and Gender, 425. 148 Ibid, 425. 149 R Suttner, "The character and formation of intellectuals within the ANC-led South African Liberation Movement." African Intellectuals: Rethinking politics, language, gender and development (2005): 117-154.47.

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strengthened by the attainment of independence of several African countries that were under British, Portuguese and French colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s. Pan-Africanism and Black People Consciousness (a movement rather than ideology) were both hinged on the need from African people to originate themselves by recognising and revering unique values that separated them as a race.

Within the movements and ideologies discussed above, the issue of gender and feminism were not always explicitly debated, clarified and supported. Black urban women who joined these movements reinterpreted and advocated for the explicit inclusion of women’s interests in these groups. Their support also included conscientisation of other black women with some playing critical leadership roles. Magaziner discusses this view that black women, in the name of Black Consciousness, raised feminism as part of consciousness. 150Magaziner cites the words of Maphiri Masekela, a Black Consciousness activist, who stated that women, in their consciousness, should embrace their own uniqueness by gender.151 According to Magaziner, Maphiri argued that:

although black women were indeed black, they were not always the same as men in that they were charged with a unique task: child-bearing and the early politicisation and conscientisation of the Black child.152

Magaziner also discusses female leadership in the Black Consciousness movement citing Juliann Kunnie’s presentation that the election of Winnie Kgware as first female president of the South Africa Student Associations, which was an affiliate of the movement, represented the degree to which women gradually, but surely entrenched themselves into formerly male- preserved political areas.153

Women were instrumental in the customisation of communist ideologies to suit the needs, challenges and expectations of black women.154 Suttner relates women’s active participation in Communist activity to a number of women studying in Communist International

150 D Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 158. 151 Ibid, 165. 152 Ibid, 166. 153 Ibid, 166. 154 Hassim, 2006 and S, Hassim, “Gender, Social Location and Feminist Politics in South Africa.” Transformation 15 (1991): 65-82. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.596.1483&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

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(Comintern) affiliated universities abroad.155 Hassim further states that this stance was not always supported by the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) that believed that women should not have a struggle of their own but should be part of the mass national struggle for the liberation of South Africa and the installation of communist rule.156 However, women persisted in aligning communist ideologies of equality for all with equality that was also based on gender, thus driving feminism into the communist view.

With regards to the development and adaptation of socio-political ideologies, women are generally criticised for not fully embracing feminism.157 Hassim further states that women adopted other political agenda that took feminism as a minor goal within the broader struggle for nationalist independence. This according to Hassim generally resulted in women putting more energy into the broad struggle at the expense of their own struggles as women. In some cases, women considered the main struggle against apartheid as more important and more deterministic of their future.158 They thus chose to fight for the end of women’s subordination within the ranks of mainstream struggle movements rather than start purely feministic groupings. Hence, a hint of feminism could be found within Communism, Pan-Africanism and many other ideologies and concepts.

The 1960s saw a new phase in the resistance of Apartheid, described by some as militant nationalism.159 This phase involved the recruitment and training of militants to carry out acts of sabotage and to prepare for an armed struggle. Convinced that mass mobilisation through protests, acts of defiance, riots, boycotts amongst others were not having the desired effect and were generally being crushed by the militarised Apartheid military and police systems, decisions to establish military wings were taken by the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress.160 These political movements formed, Mkhonto we Sizwe (MK), a military wing of the ANC and Pogo a military wing of PAC. These movements carried several sabotage operations between 1961 and 1964.161

155 Suttner, The character and formation of intellectuals, 137. 156 Hassim, “Gender”, 69. 157 Ibid, 69. 158 S Meintjes, “The Women's Struggle for Equality During South Africa's Transition to Democracy,” 1996, Transformation, 30. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://pdfproc.lib.msu.edu/?file=/DMC/African%20Journals/pdfs/transformation/tran030/tran03000 4.pdf. 159 Assa Okoth, A history of Africa: African nationalism and the de-colonisation process. Vol. 2. East African Publishers, 2006. 160 Ibid, 310. 161 Ibid, 310.

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The involvement of women in the structures of the military movements is well presented in the works of Shireen Hassim titled Women’s’ Organisations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority. Within the ANC military movement, women played important roles in the various activities carried out by MK.162 Hassim also focuses on the resistance that women in the MK faced from stereotyped views that military duty was generally a male-centred area. Nonetheless, women, as reported by Hassim, were able to thrive and rise up to leadership roles despite the deep-trenched resistance they primarily faced. Hassim cites Cock’s perception that:

there is no doubt that women have played an important and courageous part in MK activities. Undoubtedly the nature of the struggle and the breakdown of normal male- female encouraged many women to discover new capacities within themselves.163

Nevertheless, Suttner is sceptical that women did not reach their full potential in the MK mostly because of male subjugation.164Suttner is of the view that women were generally subjected to lesser military roles rather than real combat not because they were incapable but because of rigidly defined male-female roles that had pervaded military movements. Moreover, Suttner’s overall presentation creates the view that the effectiveness of the role of women in the military was negatively affected by men. He argues that the view that bravery and heroism were traits reserved for males was generally held by both the leadership and cadres on MK. Modise and Curnow confirm the existence of this view and attitude meant to reduce the equal participation of women in the military space:

When it comes to men, it's heroism. When it comes to women it's almost like you should be ashamed. Why otherwise do we not accept that women played a part in the [armed] struggle? 165

Houston and Magubane however put women at the forefront of the MK by stating that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Joyce Sikakhane were effectively responsible for setting up the MK underground in townships.166 Their activities included the recruitment of young cadres into the movement. On a direct leadership level, persevering females like Thandi

162 Hassim, “Gender”, 95. 163 Ibid, 95. 164 R Suttner, Women in the ANC-led Underground, 126. 165 Tandi Modise, R. C, Thandi Modise, “A Woman in War. Women and the Aftermath,” 2000, 36-40, Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/Thandi%20Modise.pdf. 166 Houston and Magubane, 2004.

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Modise were able to rise to the top rank of commanders. Modise, for her role in the public resistance leadership, spent 10 years in prison.167

The colonial systems in South Africa, and indeed most of the continent, expropriated tracts of land from its native owners, putting it in the hands of white corporate and individual minorities. In South Africa, this was achieved through the enactment of various laws and the use of brute force. Below is a list of some of the laws that were passed to deprive the black population land ownership, occupation and access.168

• 1885: Resolution 159 of 1855 • 1886: Occupation Act (No: 8) 1886 • 1887: The Squatters Act (No: 11) 1887 • 1895: Squatters Law Act (No: 21) 1895 • 1902: Native Reserve Location Act (No: 40) 1902 • 1903: Crown Land Disposal Ordinance (No: 57) 1903 • 1912: Land Settlement Act (No: 12) 1912 • 1913: Natives Land Act (No: 27)1913 • 1923: Natives (Urban Areas) Act (No: 21) 1923 • 1934: Slums Clearance Act 1934 • 1936: Native Trust and Land Act (No: 18) 1936 • 1937: Natives Laws Amendment Act (No: 46) 1937 • 1950: Group Areas Act (No: 41) 1950 • 1951: Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (No: 52) 1951 • 1954: Natives Resettlement Act (Act No: 19) 1954 • 1964: Bantu Laws Amendment Act (No: 42) 1964 • 1984: Black Communities Development Act (No: 4) 1984

The colonial and apartheid laws worked through depriving blacks of ownership rights to land and controlling access and occupation to both urban and rural land. These laws often resulted in mass evictions as the government responded to changes in laws i.e. in cases where certain

167 Tandi Modise, R. C, Thandi Modise, A Woman in War, 38. 168 B. H MacLean, Strike a Woman, 15.

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areas were declared as white zones. The socio-economic problems associated with landlessness included the emergence of squatter camps that municipalities regularly bulldozed.169

In response to land-related segregation, several women figures arose to bravely confront the repressive political system’s stance on land. Meintjes discusses the Dobsonville protests of 1991 as an example of women’s brave resistance to Apartheid laws that denied black society access, occupation and possession of land. Meintjes mentions a Maria Thiko and Nthabiseng Hlongwane as unsung heroines who led women in a naked protest against the Transvaal Provincial Administration’s (TPA) demolition of their residences.170 The Dobsonville protests were largely described as a success in that they forced the administration to concede to the women’s and community’s demands for urban land thereby halting mass evictions. However, Meintjes is not impressed by the level of exposure that was given to the roles played by women and their leadership in the protest.

Land protests and actions to halt forced evictions were not only urban features in South Africa’s struggle for freedom. Rural women who took bold steps to mobilise communities against mass evictions include Nomhlangano Beauty Mkhize and Lydia Kompe (Rural Women’s Movement,1990). They were actively involved in leading the resistance against the 1975 plans to evict households living in Driefontein to various parts of the province. Mkhize and Kompe were able to spearhead both legal battles for the community and protest resistance. According to the Transvaal Rural Action Committee, Kompe was able to mobilise women from the broader rural Transvaal to come together and moot a fight against forced evictions.171 The committee’s publication records part of her speech.

Because of her efforts, the Apartheid government relented on its plans. Mkhize was leader of the Rural Women Movement in 1980. Through the movement, she worked towards the socio- economic emancipation of women against both the oppressive forces of the Apartheid system and patriarchy. The Rural Women’s Movement’s objectives sum its anti-oppression agenda on both the political and gender fronts. These, according to the Movement were to create forums

169 C Clifton, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Ohio: Cambridge University Press,2002), 98. 170 S Meintjes, “The Women's Struggle”,1996. Accessed March 24, 2018. http://pdfproc.lib.msu.edu/?file=/DMC/African%20Journals/pdfs/transformation/tran030/tran03000 4.pdf. 171 Transvaal Rural Action Committee, Rural Women's Movement: Holding the Knife on the Edge. Transvaal Rural Action Committee, 1994.

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for rural women to unite against oppression and “demand that women have equal rights to land” (sic).172

Despite widespread evidence of Mkhize’s contribution to the emancipation of rural women during Apartheid, a search through the literature reveals that her history is not widely recorded. However, the Presidency however was able to recognise her contributions through awarding her with “The Order of Luthuli in Bronze” for “Her outstanding contribution to the fight for worker’s rights and equality for all citizens.” 173

2.7 Gender, Education and Socio-cultural factors

One of the forces that shaped the history of women in the 1920s was the development of black education and how it affected gender roles. The education of the African woman in South Africa cannot be discussed outside the roles of Christian missions and the state in influencing the status of African women. While the colonial governments in the colonies and the missionary societies from Europe and the United States wanted African women educated, each had their own reasons and agenda behind this education.

American missionary organisations, such as the American Board of Foreign Missions and European equivalents that included the London Missionary Society, set-up various christening- related educational systems in Natal and the Cape Colonies in the late 1800s. Missionary societies saw themselves as having a divine role to play in the quick civilisation of natives under the banner of Christianity. Christian civilisation encompassed and required a certain degree of western education that would help the native to appreciate and understand the world in a manner that the missionaries wanted them to. While education by missionaries was offered to both males and females, Meghan Healy-Clancy observes two different objectives behind the education of each gender.174

The education of males was meant to develop responsible Christian citizens who would take up ecclesiastical professions in the support of the growth and perpetuation of the Christian movements. Responsible, educated, Christian males who were loyal to the church were bound to support the social reproduction of the new African family that mimicked the monogamous

172 Ibid. 173 The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa (2018, March 24). Nomhlangano Beauty Mkhize (1940 -). Retrieved from The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national- orders/recipient/nomhlangano-beauty-mkhize-1940 174 Meghan Healy-Clancy, The Daughters, 2014: 481-499.

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western families that the missionaries hailed from. In Healy-Clancy’s views, the polygamous, African family unit and its extended family structures and households were not best suited for the development of the Christian faith. Traditional families whose religion centred on the worship and veneration of ancestors were an abomination in the eyes of God. Conversion of families to Christianity was basically the first step towards the civilisation of the African household. Western education was the second. The gender roles of males as heads of households were, according to Healy-Clancy, more or less reproduced in the new Christian- centred education efforts.175 Healy-Clancy also asserts that this reproduction of the female role as subservient was largely due to the family and gender relation structures of the missionary families. In the American-based societies, males took control of the mission’s core objectives of Christianisation while women supported men. American mission women were therefore educated with the expectations that they would play supportive, rather than domineering roles in Christianity. These roles, which as highlighted earlier reproduced themselves amongst African female students and later professionals, included teaching and domesticities.

While males were educated to dominate, females were educated to follow and support men. Elsewhere in the literature, there are examples however of western female missionaries who exhibited traits of independence and non-subservience and whose education appeared to have been driven by the need for self-emancipation. Isabel Seabury writes about the Scottish Presbyterian Church Mission women that started working in South Africa in 1824 under the leadership of John Ross.13 The mission established the first printing press that specialised in the production of Christian literature and stationed it at Lovedale. Three of its female members were responsible for running both Christian and educational affairs in Queenstown and ran the Emgwali were Mina Soga learnt. These were described as young, educated women, but confident and independent enough to run Christian educational facilities. As is later discussed in the document, their independence and self-confidence in a missionary and professional world dominated by men inspired Mina Soga to be independent and not to be held down by gender.

The governments of the colonies also saw a need to educate Africans, albeit for different reasons. The main purpose of educating Africans was the need to create a labour force that was capable of serving growing capitalist needs. At the same time, there was a stronger need to ensure that this education would result in the growth of political consciousness that would

175 Ibid, 490.

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question, firstly, the colonial political systems and, later, the Apartheid political systems of the Nationalist Party. As the capitalist economy developed, there was a growing need for a class of African professionals who would serve other Africans in the areas of health, education and social services. This growing need necessitated a growing function of the state in the education of Africans.

With the growing need for an educated, professional yet subservient African class, African women found a place for themselves although it was not a very comfortable one. One reason that saw women’s participation in teaching and nursing professions was a general propagation of missionary and colonial structures. In the missionary worlds, women played major roles in teaching and later nursing professions. Also, within the white demographic structures, the teaching and nursing professions were also amongst the most available career options for educated low and middle-class women. This structure reproduced itself amongst the black African females who had the privilege of attaining an education.

Healy-Clancy notes that while American and European missionaries had their agenda behind the education of the African woman. These did not always come to fruition. Missionaries, as highlighted above, considered the view that an educated African woman was a solution in the creation of a Christianised African family structure where the woman would act as a “civilised” wife of a mission-involved male. Even notable schools of the time, including Inanda Seminary which was one of the first schools to admit girls into higher education in Natal and Emgwali in the Cape, strongly held the view that their female graduates were designed to be good wives for Christian clergyman. Several female graduates vehemently refused to go by this stereotype. Their education became a means of self-liberation rather than a means of service to men.

On the political front also, women resisted the state agenda of educating females (and males) without making them too politically conscious to eventually think about changing the political systems of the day. Healy-Clancy lists examples of women who attended Inanda Seminary in Natal and had a great political influence on South African society against the objectives and expectations of the state and, to some extent, the mission.176 These include Charlotte Maxeke who later became the founding president of the National Council for African Women (NCAW).

176 Ibid, 491.

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Other highly-politically active women who passed through the same included Nokutela Mdima, Nokhukhanya Luthuli, Angeline Dube amongst others.

Generally, missionary educational institutions were less concerned with the politically-related outcomes of the graduate but were more concerned about their role in the Christian mission. The state noticed trends of political consciousness amongst mission graduates and this went against that state’s own educational agenda. This led to the increased control of mission education whose climax was the Bantu Education Act of 1953. This restricted church- participation in the running of educational institutions and the provision of education to blacks.

Black women also played pivotal roles in the fight to improve the status quo of the socio- economic space for the impoverished and marginalised black people. They played various parts in the fight and advocated better education, health, shelter and the social system in general. This section briefly reviews their participation in the struggle for better education.

Russell quotes the infamous words of Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Bantu Affairs in the 1950s:

There is no place for an African in the European community save as certain forms of labour. 177

This statement summarises the philosophies behind the institutionalisation of what came to be known as Bantu Education; an inferior form of education designed to ensure that black people become knowledgeable, but only knowledgeable enough to work in minor and subservient roles that perpetuated the notion of white supremacy. Russell observes that the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) and the Federation of Women’s Commercial Unions (FCWU) took a solid stance against Bantu Education.178 The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), formed in 1954 as a political rights advocacy group for black women, was quick to respond to the introduction of Bantu Education by encouraging resistance through educating women and society about the sinister agenda behind this system.179Gasa states that women did not only respond to the Bantu Education Act with protests but were active in several attempts to set up alternative education systems to support blacks. The

177 DEH, Russell Lives of courage: Women for a new South Africa. Universe, 2003. 115. 178 Ibid, 116. 179 H.E, Britton Women in the South African parliament: From resistance to governance. (University of Illinois Press, 2010): 224.

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withdrawal of black children from the formal education system because of the Act necessitated this role.180

Some scholars discuss how the entrenched anger and frustrations that black South Africans had with the Bantu educational system eventually exploded in the Soweto uprisings of 16 June 1976.181 The Nationalist Party’s decision to further entrench Bantu Education through making Afrikaans the compulsory medium of teaching and learning sparked riots. There was also significant participation of female students and activists including the deaths and detentions of several of them.182

Later in the struggle, the Malibongwe Conference organised by South African women who had been exiled by the Apartheid system discussed Bantu Education not only as a tool for black mass oppression but also as an instrument for suppressing women.183 Bantu Education, in its many imperfections, had another imperfection of assigning the black woman to the lowest of post-academic roles- roles that unfortunately resonated with the patriarchal thinking of African ethnicity. This view that education, or lack of it, resulted in women being bound by customary and traditional norms instead of adapting with the changes in the social, economic and political climate was also expounded in the 1954 Women’s Charter. 184 The acknowledgement that without proper education, women were most likely to live under two spheres of repression – gender and race, was as significant as it was critical in the creation of an important linkage between education and female emancipation.185

2.8 Women and the Transformation

In 1992, women from various political and civil affiliations came together and consultatively formed the Women’s National Coalition as a joint front to prepare South Africa’s ascendancy into democracy.186 The important roles played by organisations like the WNC was to ensure that the rights of women would be included and well-articulated in the expected constitutional

180 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 56. 181 M Mosegomi, Soweto Explodes (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2007), 45. 182 Ibid, 45. 183 L. F Ntwape, A Histography, 47. 184 Nomboniso Gasa, Women, 57. 185 E Unterhalter, “Apartheid Education and Popular Struggles”,in Anti-Apartheid Movements, ed. V. D. Johnson (London: Zed Books, 1991), 105. 186 S Meintjes, “The Women's Struggle”, 56.

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changes. 187 Waylan generally attributes the roles played by the coalition as a success in guaranteeing the representation of women’s rights in the new constitution.188

2.9 Conclusion

In conclusion, women in South Africa played various critical roles in the struggle for women’s and black people’s emancipation. As presented in the beginning of the document, the context of the presentation of women’s history had an impact on how the history of women has been communicated. Women played significant roles in the formation, mobilisation, administration and unionisation of trade movements in South Africa. Women-led trade unionism took place in a background where trade unionism, like nationalism, was heavily influenced by the patriarchal nature of African ethnicity. Black women, through their active involvement in trade unions, played an important role in the political conscientisation of women. Black women, either as part of coalitions or as part of stand-alone movements, took the lead in the fight against some of the most repressive and dehumanising legislation of the time, especially the pass laws. Women also participated in the formation, leadership, administration and support mobilisation of mainstream political parties in South Africa. They were also involved in military activities from the 1960s.Black women also played pivotal roles in the fight to improve the status quo of the socio-economic space for the impoverished and marginalised black people. Finally, women played important roles during the transitional period. The important roles played by organisations like the WNC was to ensure that the rights of women would be included and well-articulated in the expected constitutional changes.

In all these roles, as discussed by Meintjes, women generally faced three kind of struggles: the struggle against oppression as a woman, the struggle against oppression as a worker and the struggle against oppression as a black person. 189 Without doubt, these three centres of oppression influenced female participation in trade unions, national political parties and women’s political and civic organisations whose general agenda was to emancipate women from these forms of repression.

187 G Waylen, “Women's Mobilization and Gender Outcomes in Transitions to Democracy”, Sage Journals 40 no. 5 (2007): 521-546. 188 Ibid, 535. 189 S Meintjes, “The Women's Struggle”, 57.

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CHAPTER THREE: THE EARLY YEARS: FROM BIRTH TO KIMBERLY

3.1 Introduction

This chapter looks at the life of Mina Thembeka Soga from the time of her birth up to the time when she left for America. It relies on both primary and secondary sources that capture the events of her life during this period. The chapter also places Mina Soga’s life in the context of political, social, cultural and economic historical developments that occurred during this period. Below is a timeline of events in the life of Mina Soga.

Table 1: Timeline of Mina Soga's history covered in this chapter

Month/Years Event Activity June 1893 Born in Manzimahle, Queenstown, the Cape Province 1900 Family buys farm - Nina relocates to Bloemvale Farm with father and sister 1900 Home-schooling by her uncle and later by private tutor Starts formal schooling at a Presbyterian-Scottish school manned by three 1901 Scottish ladies 1910 Attains First Class in Teacher Training - Emgwali Training College 1910 Starts to teach in Queenstown 1910-1935 Teaches in Kimberley 1910-1937 Concentrates more on teaching and learning 1910-1937 Teaches in Kimberley 1910-1937 Also Teaches in Queenstown 1910-1937 Takes training in Kindergarten teaching 1910-1937 Begins adult education classes in Queenstown 1937 Attends AAC conference in Kimberley 1937 Becomes member of Queenstown Joint Council for Europeans & Africans 1937 Raises blind people's concerns at KG inauguration 1937 Goes to Johannesburg to learn about social work organisations 1937 Amongst the founding members of NCAW 1937 The NCAW is formed Nominated to represent S.A. at the Madras, International Missionary Council 1938 in India Mar-39 Mother Aylmer Novili passes away

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Mar-39 Travels to America under auspices of the International Missionary Council Fights the encroachment of better-funded white businesses in black areas Mar-46 causing unfair competition Native Service Contract Act - Mina Soga sent enquiry to Native Affairs Dept Apr-48 but had no replies Mina Soga and the NCAW plan to boycott Queenstown Advisory board over May-46 the Services Contract Act Wins civil dispute over building material costs after being sued by her Apr-48 supplier 1954 Mina Soga leaves the NCAW presidency, becomes an honorary president 1954-1959 Mina Soga attempts to revive farming activities at Bloemvale 1954-1959 Mina Soga finally gets title to part of Bloemvale 1960 Mina Soga loses her farm due to foreclosure by a creditor 1960 Returns to America to raise funds to reclaim her farm Mina Soga's life details are sketchy though expectations are that she was in 1960-1981 the U.S.A. 1981 Mina Soga dies

Mina Soga was born on the fifth of June 1893 in a Xhosan chieftaincy in Manzimahle, 80 Kilometres from Queenstown. Her great grandfather was a Xhosa chief who was reverently referred to as “Soga” which means “the brave one” in Xhosa. The family took the surname Soga with the adoption of the British birth registration systems. Mina’s great grandfather is identified as Langa a prominent Xhosan chief of the early 1800s.1 Modern history mentions a chief by the name Langa who was one of the sons of the great Xhosa chief Phalo. Phalo died in 1835 while fleeing from British captivity. The chief was noted for resisting increasing colonial dominance of the British over the Xhosa in the Cape.2

Manzimahle was a predominantly Xhosan location 82km to the north-east of Queenstown. In the 1850s, Manzimahle represented traditional African chieftainships that still yielded an element of power, the few remnants that had not been totally crushed by colonialism. The 1850s presented a severe challenge for Xhosa chieftainships. The establishment of King William’s

1 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 7. 2 J. B. Peires, "Xhosa expansion before 1800." In Collected Seminar Papers. Institute of Commonwealth Studies, vol. 20. Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1976: 1-14.

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Town - what was then referred to as the “Kaffrarian Capital” by the British under the leadership of Sir George Grey, who was the high commissioner of Cape Colony in that time, had one objective of transforming traditional black communities like Manzimahle into capitalistic and so-called “civilised” societies. Strong traditional bounds that chiefs and their followers held were perceived to be a threat to this objective. An opportunity to crush chieftainships came up in 1856 when some Xhosa chiefs in the Cape Colony ordered the killings of all cattle that were affected by the cattle-lung disease. It is said that a young prophetess named Nongqawuse had given the chiefs a vision from the ancestors. This vision required the killing of all cattle and the burning of all crops as they had been contaminated by colonial witchery. This was in resistance to administrative orders that all affected cattle were to be taken to designated spots where they would be treated. As it was, the Xhosa chiefs were of the view that it was better for their cattle to perish than to have them taken under the care of the British. This resistance by the Xhosa chiefs stood in the way and many were arrested and tried in King William’s Town. While actual numbers are not given, many Xhosa chiefs in the area were sent to the gaols with some exiled to the Cape.3

Not much is written about Manzimahle in South African history. However, one does not expect it to be much different from the rural, tribal communities that at that time were being subjugated by European domination and being coerced to transform into so-called “civilised” societies. Judging from various simple aspects of Manzimahle life, evidence of a developing strong European presence could be noted.4 Children, including Mina Soga’s own father, were being baptised with Christian names; the father was christened Phillip, birth dates records were kept and parents were beginning to wonder and worry about the modern education of their children. As a sign of changing times, two years after Mina Soga’s birth it became a law for all births to be registered and for all persons born to be surnamed under Act 7 of 1894.5 It appears that the British’s attempt to disintegrate tribal rural communities had taken a significant form in the year Mina Soga was born.6

3 G.S Hofmeyer, “King William's Town and the Xhosa, 1854 - 1861", 1981. 4 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 7. 5 Genealogical Research Services, xxx. 6 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 5.

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3.2 Early Family Life

Mina’s father was called Philip Rulumente Soga. He was married to Novili Aylimer and they had fourteen children. By the time Mina reached adulthood, only two of her siblings, Mary and Martha appeared in her letters. In one source, it is mentioned that most of Mina’s siblings perished from the 1918 flu epidemic while some became “victims of climate and lack of medical provision.”7

The Spanish influenza was a worldwide pandemic that originated in Spain and spread to almost all parts of the world claiming an estimated 100 million lives globally between 1918 and 1920. In South Africa, the pandemic is suspected to have been brought in from Europe by World War 1 soldiers who decked in Cape Town.8 With the end of World War 1 in 1918 South African regiments that had taken part in the war alongside the British had been demobilised and were highly suspect in the further spread of the disease to the rest of South Africa. One mentioned regiment is the South African Native Labour Corps (SANLC). The corps, which consisted of about 25 000 black men, were mostly stationed in France and the last of this contingent left Europe in January 1918.9 The pandemic spread from Cape Town to the rest of South African and to most parts of Southern Africa including Southern Rhodesia10.The Cape Province was devasted by the epidemic. African households that ordinarily did not constitute a health priority perished in hordes. These included Mina’s own siblings and as Seabury puts it, “lack of medical provision” played a major part in the decimation of Africans during that time.11

In general terms, in the words of Seabury, Mina’s family could be described as quite modernised in comparison to other households in Manzimahle that time. It is described as a “scrupulously clean, modern, home with broad interests and real culture …and surpassed in homes of very educated people today”. The parents are attributed to have developed a strong quest for education, hygiene and social advancements despite their low levels of education in comparison to other Xhosa households and families in Manzimahle. The late 1800s were generally years of misfortune for African households in the Manzimahle area and most of the Cape Province. In the 1850s the establishment of what was then referred to as the “Kaffrarian”

7 Ibid, 7. 8 H Phillips, Influenza Pandemic (Africa), 2014, Retrieved from https://encyclopedia.1914-1918- online.net/article/influenza_pandemic_africa. 9 B. Willan, “The South African Native Labour,”Journal of African History 19 no. 1 (1978):xxx. 10 Now Zimbabwe 11 Seabury, Daughter, 7.

68 system championed by Sir George Grey had the effect of capitalising African economies. Furthermore, cattle, which was the Xhosa store of wealth and standard of value, had been reduced in number by a series of disease outbreaks and the 1957 cattle killing episodes. Land and cattle formed the basis of the Xhosa pre-colonial economy.

Figure 1: Genealogy of Mina Soga

Source: Extracted from Xhosa Expansion before 1800, JB..Peires

Chief Langa who is mentioned as Mina’s great grandfather appears in various historical sources as one of the sons of Phalo. The above genealogical hierarchy traces Langa (who was later named Soga). Mina Soga therefore came from a long line of paramount chiefs, and in her own words:

My grandfather would have been a duke, or something like that if he had been a European. The name “Soga” is really the name that my great-grandfather was greeted. Each high chief is given a name that is significant.12

12 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 5.

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In their descriptions, several publications mention Mina Soga’s royalty, though she herself talked about it more in jest. The Intercollegian, Volumes 55-56 of 1937describes her as, “a member of a royal African family”, p152 while R.P. Barnes in Christian imperative: our contribution to world order described her as “a princess among her own people.”

In a poem by S.E.K. Mqhayi,13 her royalty is emphasized and so is her tribal lineage.

The princess travels overseas,

The daughter of the Dlomo clan of the royal house;

The one by whom the Thembu people swear, -

The Zondwa of Madiba.

Of Hala and Ndaba;

Of Cedume and Bhomoyi.

Thus, Mina’s royalty was indeed considered an important part of her personality.

3.3 Christian Influences

Mina Soga admits that here grandparents were never Christians by Western Standards. She nevertheless points out: “I have never met better Christians”14

By this, she meant that regardless of how traditionalist beliefs were looked down upon by some sections of the Christian and missionary communities, some traditionalist Xhosas like her grandparents lived virtuous lives that were in fact more exemplary than those of some Christians. She commented for instance on how Christians judged a person’s beliefs by dress.

Since it is the life, not the dress that decides whether one is Christian or not I can I all honesty say my “grands” were devout people. If the African dress spells heathenism then they were heathen, but I have never met better Christians.15

13 Samuel Edward KruneLoliweNgxekengxekeMqhayi, a Xhosa poet born in 1875 14 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 7. 15 Ibid, 7.

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Whilst her grandparents were never Christian by the existing standards, her parents, Phillip Soga and Novili Aylimer, were. During this time Christianity was making inroads into Xhosa communities. According to Giep Louw, the first Christian missionary society to affect the eastern parts of the Cape was the London Missionary Society that established its presence at Chief Ngqika’s kraal in 1799.16 Several missions soon followed including the William Shaw of the Methodist Church in 1823, the Anglicans in 1855 (Queenstown St Mark’s Mission), the Dutch Reformed Church from 1852, the Berlin Missionary Society in 1836 and the Roman Catholic Church.17 By the 1890s, when Mina was born there had been ample time for the Christianisation of Xhosa communities in the now Eastern Cape.

In the background, the spread of Christianity in the Cape Colonywas not without its incidents. There was a strong resistance to Christianity that was driven mainly by Xhosa traditional prophets. Christianity was seen as a scourge that had brought disease to people and cattle and was synonymous with European colonisation. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the weakening of the Xhosa pre-colonial social, cultural and political systems through various machinations of colonial rule had weakened this resistance. In addition, the 1852 cattle- slaughtering incidents had an unintended effect of perpetuating Christianity. Firstly, the incident resulted in the placing of doubt and the questioning of Xhosa prophets by the masses who generally took their word as it was. Secondly, the Kaffrarian society, also unintentionally empowered by the same incident experienced socio-cultural changes brought about by migration, education and institutionalisation of Christianity. All the factors that affected the growth and spread of Christianity in the Cape obviously affected Mina Soga’s family as noted by their Christian nature.

Mina Soga’s parents belonged to the Church of England denomination referred to as the Episcopal. It is in this church that Mina was christened. Seabury describes Mina as being passionate about God from a very early stage in her life when she was about six.18 Her father Phillip played a crucial part in feeding her quest for Christian knowledge in her early years.

16 Giep Louw, History of Missions, 1-4. 17 Ibid, 2. 18 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 8.

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3.4 Early Education

Mina Soga’s first experiences of academic education were at home. She was home-schooled by one of her uncles, her father’s younger brother. This was in 1899 when she was six. Her father later engaged a governess who taught her also from a home environment between 1899 and 1901. The concept of a governess, as a teaching instructor was basically more English than local and shows the extent to which British values had permeated the Soga family. Governesses were either live-in or live-out servants who carried out the duties of privately educating children in a home environment. This was an imported skill that came with the immigration of British female employment seekers to South Africa.19 These were not highly paid professionals and were classified as low labourers in the classes of domestic servants. In the documents consulted, the researcher was not able to ascertain whether Mina Soga’s was one of the British governesses or a local who had acquired this skill because of interaction and training by the British.

Around 1902, Mina’s father bought a farm called Bloemvale and part of the family had to move. Mina moved with her mother to the farm where there was a school about three miles from her new home. She and her sister Nona attended this school. When Nina was nine, in 1903, her father, encouraged by her commitment to education ad self-development, enrolled her at Emgwali Girls’ Institution20 run by Scottish women. Mina described her experiences at this school as highly inspiring and uplifting. In her conversation with Seabury, she stated: “Every lesson of my life...I learned from them…They taught me thrift. They taught me honesty - scrupulous fearless honesty.”21

Thus Mina, doubtlessly confessed how a Christian missionary education at the hands of the Scottish Presbyterian mission was crucial in her life. As background history, the Scottish Presbyterian Church Mission started working in South Africa in 1824 under the leadership of John Ross.22 The mission established the first printing press that specialised in the production of Christian literature and stationed it at Lovedale. Lovedale became the first mission for the church educating Africans in various fields that included teacher training, medical courses,

19 G. M Swiegers, "Britain and the labour question in South Africa: the interaction of State, Capital, labour and colonial power, 1867-1910." (PhD diss., University of the Free State, 2014), 307. 20 M Rall, Petticoat pioneers: the history of the pioneer women who lived on the Diamond Fields in the early years (Kimberley Africana Library Friends, 2002),76. 21 Ibid, 76. 22 Ibid, 76.

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printing, publication, agriculture in addition to offering basic education. The mission concentrated more on the values of Christian education and in educating African communities.23At the time Mina becomes an older woman, Lovedale is still mentioned in her letters as an existing mission. At one point she even writes about how she helped younger persons to attend Lovedale’s standard six courses. The same mission established Fort Hare University as the first university for blacks in 1916.

Various views, some quite negative, can be found in the sources on the roles of missionary educational facilities like Lovedale and Emgwali. Referring specifically to Lovedale, Duncan viewed the institution as geared towards the production of professional yet subjugated females. Duncan went on to discuss that Lovedale, where Mina learned had the main goal of preparing young African women for three things: it “educated wives and mothers, useful servants (and) the best teachers of their countrywomen.”24 Furthermore, Duncan commented that educated females like Mina were crafted to “marrying into and thereby, consolidating mission church leadership.”25

However, from her history, Mina defied the above views. While she became a teacher, she never married into the church and neither did she act like someone whose training had prepared her to be a mere servant of the system. The colonial system at this time held very few positions for educated women. Being a teacher was one of them.

On a different issue, Mina Soga’s early educational experiences are in no way comparable to the experiences of same-aged African children in the Cape Colony during that time. In the 1900s the shortages of school space juxtaposed with the traditionalist paternalist beliefs of educating boys at the expense of girls resulted in most girls attending only basic classes late in their teens or not attending at all.26In the pre-teen years, girls dominated in numbers in schools but as they progressed, they became victims of both socio-cultural paternalism and racial inferiority impositions. They dropped out to become wives and loyal servants. Thus, in her letter to Mrs Ballinger (discussed in detail in a letter chapter), Mina cites adult illiteracy as a major socio-economic and political developmental hindrance amongst the adults of her

23 G. A Duncan, The origins and early development of Scottish Presbyterian mission in South Africa (1824-1865) http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/she/v39n1/06.pdf 24 Ibid, 409. 25 Ibid, 410.

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generation and attempts various interventions that included an adult school that she opened in April 1940 in Queenstown.27

During this time, the government had little interest in educating the black child and this role was primarily taken by Christian missionary societies.28 While a department of Education had been established in the Cape, its role was to develop labourers for the growing capitalist demand for workers in the gold and diamond mines. Additionally, it aimed to impose English beliefs on Africans with a view that this would make them easy to govern. White education and black education were different with whites affording to enter more resourced private schools.29

As a teacher, however, Mina Soga seemed to have fitted into the career pattern that existed for black and white women alike in the Cape. Young professional females who excelled in their studies were expected to become either teachers or nurses.30 Those who became teachers, typically started working in mission schools at the age of nineteen though Mina started at seventeen and a half. At such age, these women took the missionary burden of educating poor African children from dispossessed backgrounds while at the same time attempting to develop strong Christian beliefs and morals in them.31 They worked in lonely, under-equipped and under-resourced schools. The schools often had no proper class structures resulting in unsuitable mixtures of learners of all ages, some older than the teachers.32 Mina met this description well, as Seabury described one of the schools that Mina went through as dilapidated and soaking of water from the ground and roof whenever it rained. Thus, the physical state of the schools that teachers had to contend with at that time can be described as challenging. Government grants were advanced by the Cape Department of Education based on schools meeting a certain enrolment. These, however, appear to have been inadequate in improving the appalling state-of-affairs at newly established schools.

In addition, in the early 1900s female teachers were grossly underpaid than their male counterparts. Young female teachers operated under a male head and were in most cases considered as assistants to this male head. They often taught levels below standards (i.e. Sub

27 Letter to Mrs Ballinger dated 8 November 1942 28 Essays, UK. (November 2013). Education During the Period 1860 1910 History Essay. Retrieved from https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/education-during-the-period-1860-1910-history-essay.php?vref=1 29 Ibid, xxx. 30 D Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 248. 31 Ibid, 249. 32 Ibid, 250.

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A and Sub B) while the males took Standards one to Standards twos. The qualifications for teaching in the early 1900 were a standard four pass. But Mina appeared to have gone further and gotten herself a certificate in teaching (the one in which she was the highest performer in the whole Cape).

Despite these conditions, female teachers produced by institutions like Lovedale persevered, driven by the missionary motivation. One female at the time believed that theirs was a role to educate and enlighten the African race, education was a pivotal part of the Christian mission.33

3.5 Bloemvale – The Background

Mina Soga’s move to Bloemvale Farm which had been purchased by her father occurred under the auspices of the Glen Grey Act which was enacted in 1894 under the leadership of Cecil John Rhodes. The Act was named so because it was intentionally targeted to apply to the Glen Grey area (present day Lady Frere area) although it later applied to the whole of the Cape.34 The agenda behind this Act was to create a pool of labourers for British farming communities from amongst the Xhosa men. The Act aimed at achieving this by abolishing the communal ownership of land and putting land into the ownership of individuals. All African men who were not accommodated as landowners were not entitled to stay on the previous communal lands and had to seek employment on the farms and from these farms they would be accommodated as labourers. The imposition of a labour tax, as was put by Cecil John Rhodes in his speech to the House of Parliament in the Cape in 1894, would force young men into employment. The real agenda for this tax was to provide a labour force for colonial capitalists through the final destruction of African traditional economies. As Lacey puts it:

Rhodes’s policy had nothing to do with the granting of political and civil rights to Cape Africans. His aim was to reduce a growing African peasantry to a labouring class and yet keep them from becoming fully assimilated and proletarianized.35

Secondly, it was meant to politically subjugate Africans. To quote the words of Cecil Rhodes in the debates preceding the Glen Grey Act:

33 Ibid, 251. 34 C Clifton, The Politics of Evil, 912-915. 35 Marian Lacey, Working for Boroko: The Origins of a Coercive Labour System in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), 15-16.

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They are turning out a dangerous class. They are excellent so long as the supply is limited, but the country is overstocked with them. These people will not go back and work, and that is why I say that the regulations of these industrial schools should be framed by the Government, otherwise, these Kaffir parsons would develop into agitators against the Government. Let me go on and point out the way in which the minds of the natives should be occupied.36

Rhodes was of the belief that if Africans are engaged as labourers they would be less of a threat to the perpetuation of colonial administrative and governance systems.

Thus, the Soga family moved to the new allotments under the Glen Grey Act. The family kept this farm for a long time, but it appears from Mina’s letter they spent over twenty years fighting for title to this land in one form or another. In 1943, the family’s title to the land was cancelled, a matter Mina fought over with the Chief Native Commissioner of the district.37

Figure 2: Original letter on the Glen Grey land title cancellations

36 The Glen Grey Speech. A transcription of Cecil John Rhodes’ Speech on the Second Rereading of the Glen Grey Act to the Cape House Parliament on July 30, 1894.https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/glen_grey_speech.pdf 37 Chief Native Commissioner of Glen Grey’s letter to Mina Soga dated 8th of September 1943.

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In 1913, the Land Act intensified the dispossession of land from Africans during this time was not operational in the Cape province though its change was immediately enforced in the other four provinces, i.e. Transvaal, Natal and the Orange Free State. Like the Glen Grey Act, it favoured European acquisition of African lands and imposed strict ownership requirements in very small and miserable tracts.

By 1944, the family still had no substantive title to this land they had acquired half a century earlier. Later in the document, it will be narrated how Mina spent much of her time and effort fighting the effects of an Act enacted a year before her birth, both on her own behalf and on behalf of fellow households in the Glen Grey District. In 1957, Mina Soga was eventually able to get title to the farm. She and her remaining siblings were allotted parts of the farm each with its own title.38 Mina Soga carried out several social work projects at the farm including adult education, feeding schemes and also attempted several businesses there including maize production. Mina Soga’s portion of the farm was later auctioned in January 1960 as a result of debts incurred in the purchase of tractors meant to enhance the sustainability of the social projects.39

3.6 Teacher Training and Early Employment

Mina started teacher training at Lovedale Missionary Institution as soon as she left Emgwali.40Mhlongo presents the view that she remained at Emgwali Girls Institution for her teacher training programme.41Seabury described her as an exceptional student whose second- year pass surpassed that of every other student-teacher in the Cape. Lovedale was one of the missions set up by the Scottish Presbyterian Church Mission in 1824. As mentioned earlier, it was a multi-skilling institution offering various technical and academic disciplines of which teacher training was one.

Upon completion of her studies, Mina taught at Emgwali Girl’s Institution before moving on to Kimberley and Queenstown. In Kimberley, she was one of the pioneer teachers of the first secondary school for blacks that was established there in 1927. Mina played her educational roles teaching in various schools and taking various additional training including in

38 Mina Soga letter to Mrs Ballinger dated the 14th of February 1957. 39 Mina Soga letter to Mrs Ballinger dated the 27th of January 1960 40 M Rall, “Petticoat pioneers”, 76. 41 Mhlobo Jadezweni. Beyond Dudlu Ntombazana! – The Voice of S.E.K. Mqhayi.

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kindergarten education. In the primary and secondary sources consulted in the writing of this document, there is not much that has been written on Mina’s work, missionary and personal life in Kimberley. A brief history of her outstanding teaching capabilities is captured by Seabury who described her as an outstanding, innovative and highly committed teacher. She credited Mina with the development of a new method of teaching that was adopted by all other schools in the province after it was noted that her classes did not need to go to the next grade and had to skip it altogether. Mina was described by Seabury42 as a passionate teacher who had strong interests in the histories of Africans, especially the political history of colonisation, the slave trade and the history of the Christian movement. She also loved to teach about the achievements of Africans. She played an intermediary role of getting learners from Queenstown into Lovedale. She further encouraged them to work hard and proceed to the Fort Hare University.

Despite this brief narration, there is quite a jump between 1910 when she graduated as a teacher, to the period around 1935 when her missionary, social and educational roles are publicly discussed again.

3.7 Mina Soga And Marriage

Mina’s love and personal life remain hidden from the source and this fills the writer with a lot of curiosity. From sketchy information available, however, by the time she went to the Madras Conference she was unmarried. Mqhayi who wrote a dedication for Mina described her as a “maiden” i.e. a woman who has never gotten married or have had any children in Xhosa culture:

That today they feel the chest of a maiden, The maiden who never sleeps at another person’s house, Should she do that she got lost!!!43

Marriage took place in a few forms, one of which involved the prospective bridegroom abducting a female and then paying the bride price. Another common way would be to have an arranged marriage. Under this system, the parents of the man consorted with the parents of the woman to have the two persons married with or without the two’s consent. This was to be the

42 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 7. 43 Extracted from a poem wrote in honour of Mina Soga a few days before her DEPARTURE TO THE Madras Conference by S.E.K. Mqhayi, a well-known Xhosa poet. It was extracted from the works of Mhlobo Jadezweni (Beyond Dudlu Ntombazana! – The Voice of S.E.K. Mqhayi)

78 case with Mina’s father, Rulumente Phillip Soga, who initially intended to marry the daughter of Chief Mapassofro a nearby chieftainship. As Seabury puts it, the messengers sent to get the chief’s daughter ended up changing their minds and asking for Novili Aiylimer’s daughter, whose family had hosted them through the night, daughter hand in marriage. Thus, a daughter could also be given away in marriage to a man whom she had never met.44

44 Ruth Seabury, Daughter,8.

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CHAPTER FOUR: MADRAS, AMERICA AND THE RETURN TO QUEENSTOWN

4.1 Introduction

As highlighted earlier, Mina Soga’s written history in Kimberly is generalised between the years 1910 and 1935. From the writer’s perspective, Kimberley represented a turning point in Mina’s life. In her earlier, educational and career, life in Queenstown, Mina has been described and venerated more for her Christian and academic virtues including in the works of Seabury who wrote her biography in 1945. From the time Mina resurfaces in history in 1935, not only was she a renowned teacher, she was a socio-politically-engaged and highly-contributory community activist now involved with politically-affiliated movements especially the All African Convention (AAC). Nico also described the Kimberley era of her life as the beginning of her missionary studies, a Christian-faceted community and women-centred activism. In the 1930s she is identified as one of the key players in the mobilisation of women in Kimberley into the AAC.1

In 1935, the AAC held a convention in Kimberley to discuss the way forward on two repressive pieces of legislation that had been passed by the colonial administration. These were the Native Trust and Land Act and the Representation of Natives Act. The AAC felt compelled to discuss these in a background of inactivity by the African National Congress (ANC) during this time. Mina Soga, who was at this conference, was not happy with the administrative structures of the ACC. Firstly, she was concerned about the male-dominated hierarchy of the AAC and, secondly, she opposed the lack of due recognition that the ACC gave the Women’s Council, one of its wings.

Generally, various challenges that black women and black people were in general were facing during this period can be traced directly to the adversity of the economic climate in which they existed. Already dispossessed and oppressed, the changing economic scenarios motivated various forms of mobilisation amongst women. All this occurred in the background of the Great Depression, which was a global economic slump characterised by unemployment, low commodity prices and low demand, among other economic ills.

1 Nico A. Botha, “The life-narrative of Mina Thembeka Soga,” Missionalia 31 no. 1 (2003): 105-116.

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4.2 The Great Depression and Black Poverty

Between 1929 and 1937, the world went through one of the most historically consequential economic declines that was eventually termed the Great Depression. The Great Depression affected all economies causing massive poverty, unemployment and hopelessness to populations of both developed and developing economies. Various explanations for the causes of the depression are discussed in political and economic literature, albeit with much debate. The cause that has come to gain much acknowledgement than others is that it was a result of overproduction of both primary and secondary commodities as a result of the end of the First World War. With many countries setting on recovery and rebuilding plans after the war, in a bid to curb war-time deprivations, the global economy generally grew rapidly between 1917 and 1929. This growth was stirred by increase demand the world over.

The United States, having been less affected in terms of capital destruction by the war, had the greatest capacity to produce goods in factories, farms, mines and other sectors of production. This resulted in proportional economic boom in the U.S. Inspired by growing economic prospects, there was phenomenal growth in asset prices as well as speculative bubbles (economic term used to describe massive increases in asset prices that are not supported by any economic activity). With global production catching up as a result of economic recovery programmes, the world was soon in an overproduction mode. This mode occurred against high prices of assets. The markets soon noticed the imminent fall of asset prices in realignment with declining demand and started panic selling of financial assets result in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, a well-document event of great interest to economic and political historians.

Other economic and financial ramifications of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression are beyond the focus of this document. What can be noted however is that the South African political, social and economic landscape was severely bruised by the depression.

The consequences of the Great Depression on the African population are readily noticeable. Mina Soga and the NCAW held various socio-economic support activities in the late 1930s when the Great Depression was declared to have ended. Its legacies, however, remained with the black population, rural and urban, and manifested itself in severe impoverishment, homelessness, malnutrition and unemployment.

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During the years of the Great Depression, Mina Soga was a teacher based in Kimberley. She was involved in the mobilisation and organisation of women including into the wings of the women’s chapter. During the Great Depression years, the only commodity that did not suffer was gold. The need to maintain value as well as to support what was then termed the “Gold Standard” currency system by South Africa and other economies increased both the demand and prices of gold. People flocked to the gold mines of Kimberley and Johannesburg in search of employment. This influx created hordes of poor and homeless local and regional migrants mainly from Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Increasing poverty amongst households resulted in malnutrition in black children, a problem that Mina Soga and the NCAW considered as dire and in need of urgent intervention.

Officially, the Great Depression ended in 1934. But for the majority of blacks and a section of rural whites, this did not translate into economic recovery at personal and household level. But for whites, there was a better chance out of impoverishment than blacks owing to the concern that the Hertzog government eventually developed on white poverty. In 1932, the Carnegie Commission was set up to research on white poverty and identify interventions that could be put in place by the government. During this time, poor export performance for agricultural output, and one of the worst droughts in South Africa’s modern history had massively reduced agricultural income. Unemployed whites eventually found themselves competing with blacks for low-paying, manual, jobs in urban centres. With blacks generally being paid less, they were more appealing in comparison to equally-low skilled rural whites. Hertzog attempted to cushion whites at the expense of blacks by introducing employment affirmative action for uneducated whites. This meant that they now ranked higher on the employment priority list especially in government public works programmes. For blacks, there was no intervention except the expectation for them to return to the reserves. One key characteristic of the black urban population, during this period, was its impermanence. Its existence in urban areas was controlled by the supply and demand for labour. If labourers were not needed, they had to return to the reserves.

By the time the NCAW was formed in 1937, poverty amongst black was at crisis level. There was a clear vacuum of addressing the challenges by blacks that the NCAW and other women’s

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social association had to take. Botha puts it: “prevailing racist sentiment ensured that the economic burden was passed onto those who could least afford it; the majority of Africans.”2

The NCAW launched various, albeit small scale projects, in an attempt to better the lives of impoverished rural and urban blacks. These targeted the homeless, the unemployed, the sick and the children, while others catered for special groups like persons with disabilities. Mina Soga, in her own capacity, started many programs in Queenstown including the construction of a men’s hostel where poor unemployed job-seekers would be accommodated for the night. In doing so, Mina Soga as well as other women in groups responded directly to government policy vacuums on black poverty.

During the same period, the dire circumstances of the impoverished black populace were worsened by the unfortunate state of black political and trade organisations during the time. The African National Congress (ANC) was facing factionalism challenges, policy direction disagreements and poor funding making it too weak and too divided to act. The Industrial and Commercial Union, the strongest union at that time, was also facing internal squabbles and was on the verge of its demise. As a reminder, in 1929, William Ballinger, husband to Margaret Ballinger, was sent from England by the Independent Labour Party in an attempt to save the organisation. His fallout with Clement Kadalie resulted in the latter resigning. This is also the same period that motivated the formation of the All-African Convention (AAC) in 1935 after some sections of the African political and social section were concerned by the weak reaction of the ANC to the growing challenges including the Hertzog Bills discussed elsewhere.

4.3 Soga, The AAC and The NCAW

Mina Soga was a founding member, first secretary-general and organiser of the National Council for African Women in 1937. Charlotte Maxeke was its founding president. The NCAW was founded as a welfare organisation with an interest in the socio-economic upliftment of black women. Its founding constitution summarises the goals and objectives of the movement as co-operative philanthropy. The movement aimed to uplift South African women through co-

2 N Botha, " The life narrative of Mina Thembeka Soga”.

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operation with any willing entities including the white government. It was not to be politically affiliated as stated under Clause 1 of its constitution:

This Council is organised in the interests of no particular propaganda but excludes from its programmes party-political and religious questions of a controversial nature.”3

Figure 3: A snapshot from the original Constitution of NCAW

The NCAW originated from the All-African Convention (AAC). It was a movement which was borne out of the need for a united front to resist bills that were, according to the white government, a solution to the native question.4 The native question was basically the nature and extent of inclusivity of black persons into the state. The Native Representation Bill, The Native Trust and Land Amendment Bill and The Urban Areas Amendment Bill were targeted

3 Extracted from the original 1937 Constitution of NCAW – http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/inventories/inv_pdfo/AD1715/AD1715-18-1-1-001-jpeg.pdf 4 From The Awakening of a People by T.I. Tabata, 1950.

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at secluding Africans and depriving them of freedoms of movement and ownership of land and property amongst others. The convention was therefore called and from its echelons NCAW was established. It was expected, however, to be an affiliate of the AAC, but this did not happen with the NCAW choosing to speak for itself. Mina Soga, as reported, was previously a member of the AAC.5

The organisation was described as aiming to take a non-political route to the upliftment of women and the community. In the minutes of the 1940 AAC convention in Bloemfontein, its representative stated that Mina Soga almost lost her seat in the NCAW as a result of political activities that were aligned to the AAC.6 The same representative, C Khuse, went on to boldly state that the NCAW did not consider itself an affiliate of the ACC, because it was vehemently opposed to the view that is should not have direct discourse with the government and any engagements that the NCAW wanted to have with the government had to be done through the AAC. The NCAW under the leaderships of Charlotte Maxeke, Mina Soga and others wanted “to enjoy equal rights with their men-folk.”7

Clearly, the women openly refused to stand as secondary partners in a male-dominated association. At the 1937 AAC Convention, Mina stated that large numbers of women had been mobilised to join the NCAW from the Cape, Orange Free State and Transvaal. The minutes of the December 1937 convention of the same indicates the NCAW growth and Mina Soga’s hand in it:

National Council of African Women : In pursuance of resolution 20 of the Convention of 1936 calling for the establishment of a National Council of African Women in connection with the All African Convention, Miss M. Soga (Queenstown) reported that during the interval several branches had been formed in the Cape, O. F, S. and Transvaal in consequence of which a conference had been called to formally constitute the body on Friday the 17th December 1937. Mrs. M V. Ballinger, M.P., and Mrs. J. D. Rheinallt Jones had been requested to attend and advise.8

5 From Women and the African National Congress: 1912-1943 – http://www.anc.org.za/content/women-and- african-national-congress-1912-1943 6 Minutes of the All African Convention, 1940 Bloemfontein. 7 D. D. T. Jabavu, Minutes of the All African Convention. Lovedale Press, 1936. 8 Minutes of the All African Convention, 1937, p45-46

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What was left was a meeting to formalise the NCAW which was to be held in the same month (December,1937).9 This heralded the formation of the NCAW.

4.4 The Madras Conference

In 1938 Mina Soga was chosen as one of the delegates who would represent South African missionary churches at the International Missionary Council (IMC) third conference at Madras Christian College in Tambaram, India.10 The first conference was held in Edinburgh in 1910, the second in Jerusalem in 1928, and this was the third one being held in India.11 The theme of the Madras Conference was “The upbuilding of the younger churches as a part of the historic universal Christian community.”12

Five sub-themes that were deliberated upon were “Church and Mission, Mission and Unity, World Mission and Church, The Kingdom of God and Mission, Mission, Religions and the world of Cultures”. The conference discussed the role of the church in missionary work. It resolved that the church and its mission were inseparable. The church was an institution and the mission were its intentions on society. While the church carried out its missionary role, it was to take cognizant of its localities, i.e. to be more receptive of differences in ideology. This resolution was commented on by Mina Soga in her speech at the conference. The speech read:

Behold me in this awkward dress of the West. It doesn’t become me particularly or go with me, yet the white men led us to believe when he came to Africa that everything African was heathen, and without intending to do so confused us. We began to believe that everything Western-even the things of the white man – was Christian. If we wore clothes just like his we would be more civilised-and perhaps more Christian. So, millions of my people have assumed that by changing their dress they would take on Christianity. They have changed the

9 Minutes of the All African Convention, 1937. 10 E.J Schoonhoven, "TAMBARAM 1938." International Review of Mission 67, no. 267 (1978): 299-315. 11 W. Gunther, "The History and Significance of World Mission Conferences in the 20th Century." International Review of Mission 92, no. 367 (2003): 521. 12 W.A. Saayman, UNITY and MISSION: A study of the concept of unity in ecumenical discussions since 1961 and its influence on the world mission of the Church (Pretoria. University of South Africa, 1984), 40.

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exterior, but the heart is not changed. Christianity must be based on a changed heart.

And for that, the African must be at home with his God. Our people knew God before the white man came or before Jesus was introduced to us. We worshipped on the altars of stone and by sacrifice to our ancestors, who could speak to the great God as we could not. Then came the missionary. He told us of Jesus, who had made the ultimate sacrifice to our ancestors, so that no longer need we present the slaughter of goats and cattle on the altar. It was blessed by his eternal sacrifice, by his blood shed for all. We could find in him what God was like.

White men-built churches for us but we did not feel at home in them. We had worshipped God out of doors or in round African huts. I went into one of those churches to find God. As I looked around at the strange-shaped building, so unlike our houses and the walls that went up straight and angular. I said to myself is God here and if he is, can he speak to me in African. I struggled, because I wanted to find him. But it was not until one of my people took me to a round thatched church with a stone altar in it that I felt at home in my very soul. Then I said, “aah, God is here, and he speaks to me in the tongue of my people.13

In the views of Nico, Tambaram made a sterling contribution towards the identification and demonization of racism in the church.14 While the convention skirted around the term “racism”, it identified racial hierarchies that existed within the Christian church framework as well the perpetuation of racially-biased theology.

At the conference, as shown in her speech above, Mina discussed Christian-based pan- Africanism, a view that Africans had their own unique ways of Christian worship that connected them to God. Africans should be allowed to worship God in their own African socio- cultural context and not be coerced to follow the footsteps of the white man in worship. At the

13 Seabury, Daughter, 9. 14 Nico Botha, From New York to Ibadan. The impact of African Questions on the making of Ecumenical Mission Mandates, 1900-1958 (New York, Bern, Frankfurt and Paris: Peter Lang, 2005), xxx.

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same conference, she is said to have ushered in a new type of feminism that was ahead of her time. The following described her:

Visionary and determined, Soga was, interestingly, articulating, though in the language of her period, some of the things contemporary feminism are emphasizing: equal opportunity to all in all areas of life, irrespective of sex, race or nationality.15

In addition, Mina felt that the conference at Tambaram had opened her ways to the world. She had seen for herself how Christianity can bring people of different races and nationalities together.

The conference’s tone on racial relations must have resonated well with Mina Soga who by this time was engaged with the AAC, an entity attempting to tackle racially oppressive and segregating developments like the Native Trust and Land Act and the Representation of Natives Act.

Mina also felt that the conference was a source of recommitment for her and the other missionaries to works towards the achievement of Christian salvation together with missionary roles towards the upliftment of society. In her journal article, written after the conference she stated that

In word and indeed, Christ taught his followers the indispensability of co-operation. In whatever duty he had to perform, He asked for their assistance. He did the superhuman and they did the human work.16

In the above statement, she was stressing on the need for co-operation in the fight to alleviate various forms of human suffering and deprivation. It was the role of the church to uplift the lives of communities just as the followers of Christ had done during Christ’s earthly ministry.

The Tambaram conference period, from a geopolitical perspective, has been described as tense. It was during this period that the National Socialists (Nazi), the Fascists and the increasing militaristic Japanese were setting up extremist policies that involved the concurring and annihilation of races they considered undesirable.17 In September of 1938, two months before

15 Ibid, 17. 16 Mina Soga, “The Need for The Missionary To‐Day: His Place and Function,” International Mission Review 28 no. 2 (1939): 217-230. 17 A Beevor, The Second World War (London: Hachete, 2012), 863.

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the conference, the Nazis had invaded Czechoslovakia while the world stood and watched. In November, Nazis had engaged in a blitz against the Jewish communities in German in what was to be later known as the Night of Broken Glass and on January the fifth, 1939, Germany had annexed the Danzig from Poland. On the Eastern-Asian front, Japanese forces and Chinese Nationalist forces were at full-scale war after the Marco-Polo Bridge incident of 1937. The Tambaram Conference was thus described as a miracle by some delegates considering the boiling global tensions that soon became the Second World War.

Mina was however amused at the unity and camaraderie that was shown by delegates at the conference. In one citing, there is mention of a Chinese and a Japanese delegate in cordial engagement despite the sharp tensions between their two countries. She was also amazed by the German delegates who were shaken by the happenings in their country.18 Mina also met with delegates from fellow African countries, particularly those from Uganda and Southern Rhodesia.

Within the social environment that African Christian missionaries, such as Mina Soga, were operating in, gender had and immense part to play in one’s role in the church and its mission. The patriarchal dominance of males was visible in the leadership and representation of the church and as well as its theology and doctrines. While most South African Christian feminists rarely questioned Christian, male-centric doctrines, they did question the leadership of males in the church and literally demanded representation and leadership by women.

Their voices were becoming more and more powerful and, in 1938, women were for the first time in Africa able to send a female delegate to the International Mission Council conference held in Madras, India. Out of seven black delegates and five white delegates, one woman was nominated to be part of the delegation, an event that has been excitedly discussed in the history of female missionary work. Mina Soga was nominated by one Clara Bridgman, who herself was the only female member of the nomination committee of the South African National Christian Council that was set to select attendants to the conference. In the accounts of Seabury, male committee members were visibly shaken by the nomination of a female to represent South Africa.19 But Clara Bridgman insisted that the reason why Mina Soga had been chosen to the committee was to instil a degree of representativeness of females. There was even more

18 Ruth Seabury, Daughter, 16. 19 Ibid, 17.

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consternation when Bridgman announced that not only was she nominating a woman for the conference, she was indeed nominating a black woman. This woman was described as interdenominational. A woman who was beyond church sectarianism having been part of the Anglican Mission, having been educated within a Scottish Presbyterian environment and having similarly interacted with Methodism and perhaps more surprisingly with the Calvinistic Dutch Reformed Church.

Mina Soga, in the views of Clara Bridgman, was like most African women in missions not that important to the male-dominated ecumenical societies like the National Christina Council. This is despite their immense contributions in mission work to support impoverished, segmented and oppressed African populations. Clara Bridgman had to states that Mina Soga’s mere lack of familiarity was not a sign of insignificance. She was to re-emphasize:

Yes, I know most of you have never heard of her but some of you must have. She is a teacher and a social worker in Queenstown, belongs to the Anglican Church and has a Christian vision that will make her just the one, I think.20

To reiterate, this was a movement, like most Christian movements of the time, that believed in male leadership and representation of the church. Furthermore, there is a view suggested by Seabury that race might have had an influence on their perception of women nominees too.

Like Mina Soga, Clara Bridgman was involved in missionary work. She was instrumental in the foundation of the Helping Hand for Native Girls in 1919 to uplift the lives of young black females who were increasingly urbanising due to dispossession and to prospects of getting an economic footing in the cities. The foundation bought a house in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, and converted it into a hostel for women. Mina Soga was at times a visitor at this establishment and often stayed there whenever she visited Johannesburg. Some of her 1945 letters were addressed from this hostel (76 Hans Street, Jeppestown, Johannesburg) 21 indicating that perhaps she took regular residence there. Johannesburg was the hub of commerce and many young women imagined a life there. However, due to various reasons, not many of them found any meaningful career or educational prospects in Johannesburg. The foundation built a hostel that accommodated young women and prepared them for work engagements by providing

20 F Ludwig, "Tambaram: The West African Experience." Journal of religion in Africa 31, no. 1 (2001): 49-91. 21 Letter addressed to Mina Soga, dated 12 July 1945.

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rudimentary training and placements mainly in domestic roles. Clara Bridgman was involved in the running and formation of various other women’s social groups including Charlotte Maxeke’s Bantu Women’s League.22

From the Tambaram Conference in India, Mina travelled to the United States of America. Mina preached in twenty-four United States cities over a period of six months. According to Kalu and Low, her American journey and message were very timely. 23 During that time, the Christian church was struggling to reconcile itself along racial conceptions and her presence was considered an inspiration to many Christian churches where the matter and issue of race within the church was apparently unresolved.24

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Mina Soga was a founding member of the NCAW, which was a splinter group from the All-African Convention (AAC). In the views of the researcher, to understand the significance of the socio-political roles played by Mina Soga in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it is important to understand the political, economic and socio-cultural contexts that motivated the foundation of the NCAW. This chapter, therefore, relooks at Mina Soga’s role in making the history of women using the NCAW as a focal point. A brief history of Charlotte Maxeke, the founding leader of the NCAW and Mina Soga’s predecessor is also reviewed.

The NCAW’s constitution generally defined the organisation as a women-centric informational, philanthropic and patriotic institution. more so, it was not confined to supporting and helping women only. Two of its objectives were non-gender specific and highlighted the issues of unity and philanthropy in general.

4.5 Queenstown Before and During Mina’s Time

Mina Soga exercised her role as the president of the NCAW from Queenstown in the Cape Province. Mina having stayed in Kimberley for over twenty years was now back home again. Queenstown was an urban centre that was experiencing rapid growth in the 1940s due to wartime commodity demand. Historically, Queenstown had grown to attain a significant position as an economic hub amidst rural communities in the eastern part of the Cape. The

22 Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives”, 252. 23 Ibid, 253. 24 O Kalu & A Low, eds. Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities (Cambridge. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), 365.

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town was reportedly established in the 1850s when settlers, attracted by fresh water and abundance of fish, settled on the banks of the Komani River. Some scholars attribute the formation of this time to the need to put a permanent frontier against the warring Xhosas who were fighting against European control and dispossession. Sir George Cathcart who was the Cape governor mooted a plan to abet the disposed tribal groups amongst them the abaThembu, amaMfengu and the amaNgwane and a small section of the San from returning to the disposed land through populating it with Dutch and British farming communities who would defend it, in what came to be known as the Cathcart System. The warring communities overpowered by the Europeans settled on the fringes of Queenstown where rural communities gradually paved way for locations.25

The settlement grew in size with rudimentary infrastructure and by 1953 it had been declared a formal colonial settlement. In 1879 it was given the status of a municipality and in 1880 a railway connection to Eastern London provided further growth impetus. The municipality integrated both urban and rural lifestyles with rural communities in the peripheries interacting with the urban folk, albeit to the chagrin of the Dutch settlers who were the dominant white group in Queenstown.

The rural hinterlands of Queenstown struggled to maintain their pre-colonial status quo, but in 1913 the Native Lands Act, which was crafted to create more farming land for Europeans at the expense of the majority of Africans, saw most of the communities that had settled on the fringes of Queenstown losing their lands to Europeans. This led to increased migration to Queenstown whose economic influence was on a growth path. This resulted in the proliferation of new locations, one of the largest being Mlungisi. In these locations, severe accommodation shortages, lack of adequate social amenities, unemployment, criminality and of course labour woes persisted with very little state intervention.

Perhaps the history of Queenstown would be incomplete if the Bullhoek Massacre of 1921 was not mentioned.26 There was government resistance by one Judaist faith formation called the

25 Megan Voss, Urbanizing the North-eastern Frontier: The Frontier Intelligentsia and the Making of Colonial Queenstown, c.1859 – 1877. A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Cape Town: The University of Cape, 2012), 143. //open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/12056/thesis_hum_2012_voss_m.pdf 26 Robert R. Edgar, “The Finger of God: Enoch Mgijima, the Israelites, and the Bulhoek Massacre in South Africa”, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv35q8nm.

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Israelites led by an African prophet called Enoch Mgijima.27 This led to a very controversial series of events that led to the massacre of 200 worshippers from Mgijima’s cult. It has been interpreted from different angles by historians. It is argued that the worshippers refused to vacate European land they had gotten accustomed to temporarily occupying during Passover celebrations.28 In 1921, their leader supposedly had a vision that the world would come to an end and they should stay put at the land for which they had a few days’ permission to gather. The group gave away its worldly possessions but by some accounts, as the world had not ended on the forecasted date, the group became desperate, stealing from surrounding communities for survival while still refusing to vacate. The settler government decided to act by sending a force of over 800 military men and policemen. The group still refused to leave, and all negotiations failed. There was an attack on the group that fought back using rudimentary weapons. By end of day, over 200 persons had died, over 140 had been seriously injured and many others including the church’s leader were arrested.

This event, despite its various interpretations which ranged from deranged religious fanaticism to a fight for the disposed and landless, shows the degree of impunity with which the Queenstown political powers treated Africans during this time.29

Back to Mina Soga, by the 1940s when Mina Soga re-joined the Queenstown community from Kimberley, she found it in even a sorrier state owing to increasing migration and the addition of further repressive movement and settlement regimes. Mina Soga was one of the lucky Africans who had access to a formal home in central Queenstown. Most Africans then settled in squatter camps that had mushroomed in and around formal locations. Mina settled in Komani Street, in Queenstown from where she conducted her business as president of the NCAW. Other members of the leadership lived in other parts of the country and executed their duties from their residential addresses. Her residence, in the 1940s, was located roughly 200 meters from the centre of Queenstown, commonly referred to as “The Hexagon” because it was designed and built in a hexagonal structure mainly to enable enhanced defence in the event of attacks from the Xhosa tribes who were evidently agitated by the settler community that had

27 D. H Makobe, “The Bulhoek Massacre: Origins, casualties, reactions and historical distortions,” Militaria 26 no. 1 (1996): 22-37. 28 Ibid, 25. 29 Ibid, 26.

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resulted in their land dispossession. At the centre of the hexagon, there were plans to set up a fully rotational canon that would stand as the last point of defence if need be.30

Judging from modern remnants of houses in Komani Street built around that time, these were quite modern pieces with corrugated still roofs. They had inside ablution facilities and an average of 2 to 3 bedrooms, in addition to a kitchen and a lounge.

But even in these formal townships, the infrastructural conditions under which residents lived were deplorable. A tabloid section dated the 14th of March 1946 highlighted the challenges that residents faced. These included untarred main roads that resulted in the creation of unhealthy and dusty conditions to residents, lack of adequate street lighting, lack of bus stops, etc. What is striking about this piece of communication was the harsh response with which the municipality, through its mayor had to residents’ complaints. The mayor of Queenstown in 1946 branded the Residents Location Committee that had been formed to engage council as a terrorist movement:

Another item of correspondence of a different nature was received from the Locations Residents Committee which the mayor scrutinised and referred to as “a more impertinent letter”. He told the council that writers actually addressed the council in Latin terms. At the response of the councillors the letter was read and provoked some amusement. It seemed that the Residents Committee was somewhat dissatisfied with the attitude of the Council to certain location affairs…

The Council agreed that any further letters from this quarter should be recorded and that communications will only be considered if received through the Location Advisory Board.31

The council at the time, in the above communication, exhibited a great deal of detachment in dealing with African problems in location. Additionally, it castigated their representation and opted to deny them direct interaction with the council. Thus, there was a community in serious urban development problems versus an administration that grossly looked down upon its representatives.

The problems of residence associated with the growing African urban communities in Queenstown were by no means constricted to the Cape. In Johannesburg, the NCAW found

30 Megan Voss, Urbanizing the North-eastern Frontier, 127. 31 Unnamed newspaper, dated 14 May 1946.

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itself dealing with the various challenges of urbanisation including shortages of accommodation, poor or non-existent urban infrastructure, increasing homelessness and moral erosion. These issues became the preoccupation of the NCAW 1955 conference.

4.6 Mina Soga’s Role in Adult Education

Adult education was an important concern of Mina Soga. She dedicated her own financial resources and efforts towards the educating of adults mostly in Queenstown. Upon her return from the Madras via America tour, Mina appeared to have been reinvigorated with the need to expand adult educational facilities at their Bloemvale Farm. In her letter to Margaret Ballinger dated the 12th of May 1948, Mina stated that this adult school was started by her mother in 1933, albeit in an informal manner. During this time Mina was staying in Kimberley where she was a teacher.

Mina wanted to turn the adult classes started by her mother into a formal school for adults with adequate infrastructure that included a library. In one of her first letters to Mrs Ballinger dated 23 December 1943, Mina Soga stated how adult education would improve the lives of the marginalised black population. The school would be donor-funded, fully formalised with a board of directors as well as modern infrastructure. In her view, black people would benefit from learning domestic sciences, personal hygiene, the use of money, principles of civil government and current affairs. The areas of study Soga focused on would have an immediate impact on improving a black person’s social, economic and political consciousness. The domestic sciences and hygiene for instances would quickly enhance the general appearance of black persons and black households in a modernising world while the use of money would have an impact on the household’s ability to use and save money. For political consciousness in a world that was turning repressive, it was important for black people to be well-versed in the principles of governance as well as current affairs. Soga envisioned a modern facility that could accommodate fifty persons as students. It would require lecture rooms as well as reading rooms. Soga attempted to leverage a current visit by the Commission for Social, Health, and Economic Conditions in Urban Areas that had visited Queenstown and condemned the living standards there to convince the government to fund the proposed adult education school and its programmes. In her letter to the commissioner she indicated that adult education was a sure way to remedy this scenario.

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4.7 The Adult School

Soga, as hinted above, raised concerns about the school with the Commissioner of Native Affairs. This was an administrative office established under the Native Administration Act of 1927. 32 It created roles of Native Commissioners, Assistant Native Commissioners and Supreme Native Commissioners to deal with matters peculiar to Africans living in specific jurisdictions. Commissioners were therefore appointed to act on behalf of the Minister of Native Affairs who had the power to change the roles and responsibilities, as well as powers and authorities of the commissioners. Mina Soga found herself dealing with one such commissioner as she attempted to get government funding and assistance for the education of black persons. Initially, she requested funding of between 500 to 800 pounds. She personally was willing to be part of the new school if seconded by the government. She was already working in education hence the convenience of this move.

While Soga did not get the grant requested, as early as April 1940 (according to her letter to Mrs Ballinger dated the 8th of November 1942) she had established the school, albeit in a rudimentary state. Initially it had two teachers whom Soga paid from wages she got from her job as a teacher. Margaret Ballinger advised her that getting funding for the building from the government was almost impossible and this would later prove to be true. Government money requested indeed never came (except very little grants e.g. 25 pounds) but the school went up anyway. From the letters, it also came out that Soga expected some of her contacts from overseas, possibly the ones she had interacted with at the Madras International Missionary Council and others she had met in her trip to the Americas, to help with donations. There is however no good evidence of this from the letters leading to the conclusion that Soga mainly used here own personal funds to support the school. Even after she was advised by Ballinger to write directly to the Provincial Superintendent of General Education, Dr de Vos Malan, no concrete contribution was made by the government at that time. The move to propose the institution to the commissioner was a brave one considering the negative attitude of the government towards the upliftment of blacks.

By 1942, the schools had still not received any government grants despite the interventions by Ballinger as well as Soga’s own direct efforts to engage government officials including the Superintendent of General Education. Margaret Ballinger (in a letter dated the 15th of

32 The Native Administration Act of 1927.

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November 1942), stated that the government did not have a formal adult education policy and this policy vacuum was making it impossible for the government to fund the school. Soga had requested that the school be inspected as a move towards fully formalising and possibly enhancing its chances of being funded by the government. To her despair the government did not send an inspector but a Native Departmental Visiting Teacher. From the sound of things, the teacher had a lesser capacity to pass an effective opinion on the school and this did not please Soga. By this time the school had been open for two years and was being funded by Soga from her own pocket. The two teachers who worked at the school each got 2.2 pounds per month from Soga’s 7.10 pounds per month. More than half of her teaching wages went to paying wages for the teachers. To make matters worse, the Education Department had again refused to fund the school infrastructure, specifically a reading room. On a positive note, however, there was a possibility that she would get a 25-pound grant towards the school’s running costs from the Progress Trust which was probably one of the private donor funding entity associated with the Ballingers. Mrs Ballinger, in her letter dated November the 15th, stated that she had put in a good word for the school thereby enhancing the possibility of the 25 pounds being paid out. This particular grant came and Soga was grateful that Ballinger had helped to secure it (Letter dated 31 December 1942).

In November, the Education Department made a surprise turn and provided one teacher to teach health education at the school. This teacher, fully paid by the government, could only teach day classes. On 1 November 1942, P.E. Stander, who was the Inspector of Schools and responsible for Queenstown school inspections, notified Soga of this development. In the same letter, the more pertinent areas of study would not receive any teachers. These included accountancy, banking and civil law. One thing that proved certain was that funding of this noble initiative, whether by government or private donors, would be a major challenge. Soga literally vowed that she would do everything in her capacity to keep this school open until the Education Department fulfilled her vision (Letter dated 8 November 1942). In the same letter, she noted the significance starting and maintain the school at whatever cost as follows:

There is a great need for a general rise educationally in the standard of the African People if at all they are to be an asset to themselves, their children and the other man.

Soga believed that education was the primary tool that would uplift Africans. An uneducated African, in Soga’s view, was not valued by her immediate society (including family) and indeed by communities. Educating Africans, in Mina Soga’s view, was a way of instilling

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personal and societal value in the lives of poor Africans. Her interactions with Margaret Ballinger would continue to advocate for adult education, among many other challenges faced by Africans in the Glen Grey District.

4.8 History of Adult Education

Colonial rule in South Africa generally did not show much concern for the literacy of adult blacks.33 The capitalistic structures of the colonial economy did not initially require a huge input from educated blacks. Blacks were important only in the provision of manual labour; firstly, in the mining and farming sectors and gradually in the factories.34 In the 1930s, the Great Depression suppressed labour demand resulting in even a lower demand for professional black persons. Adult education between 1920 and 1940 was generally organised in fragmented forms without any particular policy or trend.35 All the same, two types of adult education needs can be identified. The first was the need for basic education, i.e. the ability to read and write amongst blacks who had never gotten the opportunity to go to school. The second need was for the upgrading and development of professional skills by those who had some form of basic education but wanted to better themselves professionally.36

Mina Soga’s school preliminarily concerned itself in developing basic education amongst blacks. It also aimed to develop certain modern qualities amongst its black adult students. These included hygiene and grooming. The school later upgraded its vision to include professional development. Its areas of teaching interest included basic economic, basic law, home economics, personal grooming, current affairs and the operations of government.37 When the Department of Native Education finally decided to support Mina Soga’s adult education initiative, it was with a teacher to take a less consciousness-building course - basis health.38 The department flatly refused to support the other areas politically and intellectually aligned areas of learning.

33 J Aitchison, “Struggle and compromise: a history of South African adult education from 1960 to 2001”, Journal of Education 29 no. 1 (2003): 126-177. 34 Ibid, 134. 35 Ibid, 134. 36 Ibid, 135. 37 Mina Soga’s letter to Mrs Ballinger, dated 23 December 1943. 38 Letter from the Inspector of Education to Mina Soga, dated 1 November 1942.

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In his letter dated 11 November 1942 addressed to the Chief Native Commissioner’s request for teachers at Mina Soga’s adult school, the Chief Inspector of Schools in Queenstown, P.P. Stander wrote:

I have to inform you that the Cape Education Department has appointed Jean’s teacher to undertake the work from 1/1/43. She will concentrate mainly on health education in its various aspects. My Department is not at present prepared to conduct evening classes in Civil Law, Banking and Accountancy etc.39

This was in November 1942 when the Native Affairs Department (NAD) finally transferred all issues relating to her school the Cape Department of Public Education.40 In the previous year, the same inspector who approved a teacher for Mina’s school had visited and inspected her school and had rated it badly to Mina’s dismay. There is no further information on how he had decided to change his mind.

The colonial government’s lack of support for Mina’s school might also have had something to do with its expectations of black education. Black education was expected to provide people who were only educated enough to serve the needs of the colonial capitalistic political economy. The educational system thus concerned itself in instilling the types of knowledge that would support the subservience of black people under white rule.

Education was a threat to the system that the colonial regime wanted to prevail in South Africa. It was also not a surprise that the Cape Department of Public Education linked education to potentials for resistance. The South Africa Communist Party (SACP) had been formed in 1921 spurred by the Communist International (Commitern) a wing of the Russian Bolsheviks that intended to spread communism to the rest of the world. In 1925 the SACP had started an adult education school in Johannesburg.41 This school, amongst other things, hoped to instil political consciousness along with socialist and communist principles that at that time had been inspired by the socialist revolution in Russia. The SACP’s adult education initiatives were motivated by the expansion of the party and its inclusion of the black working class as members. The party noted that despite a decent-sized membership, most black members lacked an

39 Letter from the Inspector of Education to Mina Soga, dated 1 November 1942. 40 Letter from Chief Native Commissioner to Mina Soga, dated 5 November 1942. 41 Raymond Suttner, Paper to be presented to CODESRIA’S 30TH Anniversary Conference, Dakar, 8-11 December 2003. http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/suttner.pdf

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understanding of the party’s viewpoints and ideologies. 42 The inability to comprehend communist and socialist philosophies made it difficult for the party to strengthen its ideological basis. Furthermore, the party wanted to mobilise black perception towards majority rule, having adopted a position that communism in Africa would not flourish under minority European rule.43

In the 1940s, the same era Mina sought funding to support her adult education programme, adult education was to some extent associated with radical political and neo-political groups including the SACP mentioned above. At its inception, the Night School Movement (formed by the SACP, supported by the ANC) was dominantly an urban phenomenon mostly because the parties that formed it were generally urban. The night school initiative started by the SACP grew into other parts of South Africa. In the Cape the Cape Non-European Night Schools Association (CNENSA) was established inn1945 with the same hope of instilling literacy and knowledge that would result in black people having a better understanding of the political state of affairs that affected them.44

In Queenstown, there is no record of any formalised night school activities. This is both from the broad literature and from the primary records reviewed. This lack of formalised black education movements in that part of the country is also directly substantiated by the fact that Mina Soga mentions getting funding from overseas donors as a possible source of funds in addition to her own funds. No mention of any local movement is made.

In her letter to Margaret Ballinger dated the 12th of May 1948, Mina wrote that the Department of Education had finally given her adult school a grant. Prior to the grant, Mina was responsible for meeting all the operational costs from her own account and this amounted to 14 per quarter including boarding. Ever since its existence, the school had been applying for educational support grants from the Native Department of Education without any success. Mina had applied for a developmental grant between 500 and 800 pounds for infrastructure development and for operational costs and had not been able to get this since 1942 when she had made a request to the Commissioner of Native Affairs for funding.

42 Edward Roux, Time Longer than Rope. A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. 2 ed, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 108-109. 43 Ibid, 108. 44 Daphne May Wilson (1988) the African adult education movement in the western capefrom 1945 to 1967 in the context of its socio-economic and political background. https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/20146/thesis_hum_1988_wilson_daphne_may_1.pdf?sequence=1

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4.9 Prisoners

In 1941, Mina Soga wrote to the Commissioner of Native Affairs in the Cape Province expressing her views against the prison system in the province. Firstly, it still believed in the archaic principles of punishment rather than rehabilitation. The prison system, as it applied to black people, was designed to inflict vengeful punishment that did not prepare inmates for their future. Soga believed that black prisoners deserved better and the Commissioner of Native Affairs must take steps to bring about this betterment. The organisation she led, the National Council of African Women (NCAW), had proposals on how the prison system could be improved.

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CHAPTER FIVE: NATIVE REPRESENTATION AND MANY PROJECTS

5.1 Enter Margaret Ballinger

Margaret Ballinger came into Soga’s sphere as a legislative necessity. The Representation of Natives Act No 12 of 1936 called for the representation of black people by selected white members of parliament (MPs) voted for by blacks who qualified to vote on the basis of literacy and property ownership. This particular Act was central to the relationship between Mina Soga and Margaret Ballinger who was elected to the Native Representative Council (NRC) to represent black people. The purpose of the Act was:

to make special provision for the representation of natives in Parliament and in the provincial council of the Province of the Cape of Good Hope and to that end to amend the law in force in that province relating to the registration of natives as voters for Parliament or a provincial council; to establish a Natives Representative Council for the Union; and to provide for other incidental matters.

Mina Soga quickly went to work on engaging Margaret Ballinger on the challenges that black communities under her jurisdiction faced. The various letters she was to write display the commitment and tenacity with which she relentlessly followed upon various matters that were brought to her attention by the communities she was part of.

The Representation of Natives Act was crafted by Hertzog out of the need to reduce the African franchise that had proved to be consequentially against the previous government’s electoral expectations. The history of franchise in South Africa started in 1852 when the right to vote was given to all British subjects in the Cape without reference to race. Africans in the Transkei were later included in this roll in 1887 giving blacks who met certain criteria rights to vote directly for senators to represent them in parliament. At this point, the harsh restrictions on qualifying to be listed as a voter were arguably harsh for all persons regardless of race. In 1903, there was an observation that the African vote had contributed to the victory of the Progressive Party under Leander Jameson. This event turned attention to the rights of African to vote and, from this time onwards, several attempts were made to move Africans to their own different roll that was less deterministic of who gets into power. The Commissioner of Native Affairs in 1903 was of the view that such state of affairs where the African vote was potentially deterministic of power politics should be curbed. Additionally, there were views that the

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African roll, which the Cape wanted to uphold while other northern provinces did not want, was a potential area of contention that may affect the formation of a union of provinces. Thus, the removal of Africans from a common roll, despite only happening in 1936, almost 30 years later, is traceable to early 1900 events.

To represent Africans in parliament, the government adopted a council system between 1924 and 1927 where four senators who were somehow affiliated to Africans were appointed to represent the needs of Africans in parliament. This operated in the northern provinces while the Cape maintained its use of the same roll for all registered voters. These four senators met with selected African representatives who were mainly chiefs. This system broke down in about 1927 mainly because the government was not happy with the franchise and land expectations and demands of the chiefs in the councils. The government had expected them to be content with other social and economic challenges that did not necessarily relate to political power and political determination.

The chaos in the late 1930s soon provided other reasons to bring the native representation issue into the fore again. Africans, by this time, were demanding democratic rights and this was misrepresented by Hertzog as the formation and mobilisation of anti-white systems. The government reconsidered that it needed a broader representation of Africans so as to understand their needs and the sources of political and economic discontent. More importantly, this chaos, as argued, gave Hertzog another opportunity to attempt a change of the voting system in the Cape by presenting the council system that had failed to work elsewhere as a solution. Africans would have representation in parliament through elected white officials and they would elect these from a different roll. There was resistance to the proposed change with Africans arguing that it turned them into lesser citizens. Nonetheless, in 1936, the Representation of Natives Act came into being.

Margaret Ballinger was one of the four senators who were elected from the African roll to represent the needs and interests of Africans in the Cape parliament. Margaret Ballinger was elected on a non-partisan ticket (as an independent) until she eventually formed her own party in 1953 following the abolishment of Native Representation. The Act provided for 3 white representatives of Africans in the Union’s House of Assembly, 2 representatives in the Cape Provincial Council and 4 national senators.

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Margaret Ballinger got into the political picture of Mina Soga’s life in 1937. In that year Ballinger, in her electoral manifesto prepared for the 1937 parliamentary elections, stated that she was nominated by the African National Congress (ANC) as their official representative for the Eastern Cape Electoral Circle in 1937. This did not mean that African political movements had recognised the official capacity to nominate representatives to the council. Rather their power was in influencing their membership to vote for a particular candidate and in the 1937 election, in the Eastern Cape Electoral Circle, this candidate was Ballinger. In her manifesto, Ballinger mentioned that she did not belong to any political party, including the ANC, and hers was a cause for the African people regardless of their political affiliation. Magaret Ballinger was however receptive of the support he got from the ANC and her victory in the 1937 election cannot easily be divorced from this association.

Ballinger’s manifesto presented various socio-economic and political concerns namely the end of racial segregation and pass laws, the need for wage increments, addressing the concerns of landless Africans, education of Africans, improved access to quality housing, addressing the special needs of African women and children and putting an end to statutory crimes. 1Ballinger also talked about the lives of African teachers she had helped to improve from as early as 1922. She used to assist teachers in their personal capacity to pass professional examinations. She had also facilitated interracial relationship improvements amongst European and African women through the First Joint Committee of African and European Women.

1 From an original Manifesto of Margaret Ballinger published in 1937 by herself.

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Figure 4: Part of Margaret Ballinger original Manifesto

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Margaret Ballinger was born Margaret Hodgson in 1896 in Scotland. She migrated to South Africa with her family in 1904. She was educated in Port Elizabeth before getting an honours degree in History from the Rhodes University. She proceeded to Oxford under a Queen Victoria scholarship fund where she obtained a master’s in arts degree. She returned to South Africa and taught at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. Margaret Hodgson married William Ballinger in 1934. William was a trade unionist with the Independent Labour Party in England. The ILP was concerned with the policies and leadership of the Industrial and Commercial Union, a South Africa trade union that was affiliated to the ILP under the leadership of Clement Kadalie. William Ballinger was forwarded to South Africa as an advisor to the ICU. To depart briefly, the ICU had been formed in 1914 under the leadership of Kadalie, a Nyasaland born immigrant.2 It was formed in response to the effects of First World War economic decline which saw alarming prices increases that were not matched by any wage and salary hikes. It broadly appealed to the black and coloured communities of Cape Town before it expanded to the rest of South Africa where an estimated total membership of 250 000 was recorded. The ICU-related problems that William Ballinger was sent to consult on were the inability of the union to set goal consensus leading to its division into different factions battling for members. Additionally, there were views expressed against the increasing militancy of the union that made the government uncomfortable. The union was broadly noted by its members as failing to address any of the concerns it had mandated itself to resolve. In 1929, the growing conflict between Ballinger and Kadalie resulted in the latter resigning. Ballinger was worried about the poor financial management and lack of financial accountability in the ICU. One of their confrontations, Kadalie walked out of the ICU, saying of Ballinger, “I asked for an advisor, not a dictator.”

This is the Ballinger who married Margaret. It can be noted that like Margaret, Ballinger found nothing strange in working with black Africans towards goals that would emancipate them politically, socially and economically.

There were several similarities between Mrs Ballinger and Mina Soga despite them coming from different socio-economical and racial backgrounds. Firstly, both women exhibited a strong sense of leadership under adverse conditions and male domination. Mina Soga’s quest for self-determination and the emancipation of the female voice in the All-African Convention (AAC) resonates with Margaret Ballinger’s quest to stand out in and represented the subjugated

2 Now Malawi.

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in a male-dominated parliamentary system. Yet, both women were able to make an impact on the societies they served. They also faced a level of resistance even from the males whose interests they also represented due to patriarchal leadership views. In the case of Margaret Ballinger, some African men under her representation openly preferred a male candidate to represent them in parliament albeit with little success. Mina Soga also faced resistance amongst the Queenstown men whom she spoke for.

Both women also relied on Christian values for guidance and were not hesitant to apply these in political situations. Thirdly, despite different levels of education, they were both schooled women from the perspectives of their demographic counterparts. Mina Soga, with a teaching diploma, was viewed as quite educated for a woman from an African community perspective while Ballinger, with her Master of Arts, could be considered highly educated for a white woman of her time.

Both women, during the different courses of their lives, were responsible for the formation of powerful pro-African and pro-women, liberal movements which they also led. Mina Soga, as previously discussed was a founder member of the NCAW, an organisation which she led for 15 years. Margaret Ballinger was one of the founding leaders of the Liberal Party in 1953.Finally, a notable common trait between Mina Soga and Margaret Ballinger was that of non-racialism. Both women were evidently comfortable and confident enough to interact across racial lines even when the segregated and separatist socio-political environments brought about by the Native questions, and finally by Apartheid in 1948, were strongly meant to keep people apart. They both aligned themselves to organisations that fostered racial co- operation amongst women. Mary Ballinger was involved with the Joint Committee of African and European Women while Mina Soga was associated with the National Council for Women (NCW)3 a local branch of the International Council for Women (ICW).4 The two women have also been described as very eloquent speakers. Mina Soga is discussed so by Seabury 1945 who stresses Mina’s oratory capabilities and command of language as striking and very impressionable on her audience. Margaret Ballinger is described as one of the best speakers in parliament whose eloquences could only be challenged by a few persons of her time, specifically Jan Smuts.

3 Not to be confused with the NCAW. 4 Nico A. Botha, “Towards the en-Gendering,” 111.

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They had their differences too. Margaret Ballinger was a family woman, who was married and had children. On the other hand, Mina Soga lived her life as a spinster. The opportunities that were available to both women also differed with Mina being unable to represent Blacks in parliament. Margaret Ballinger, on the other hand, was able to hold such an office due to the then privileges of race. Despite their differences and similarities, the two women were brought together by political changes in 1936 under the so-called Hertzog bills.

Margaret Ballinger, perhaps, appealed to Mina Soga because, as a woman, she could understand and represent women’s issues better. This view resonates with one of the reasons that Mina Soga and colleagues broke out of the All-African Convention (AAC). Excessive male dominance was shadowing women’s issues, and in addition, women were forbidden from directly engaging the government on matters that concerned them. Mina provided an indirect link to the government via the National Representative Council (NRC), a women-led representation that was not tainted by undue male domination. In the political frays that Margaret experienced, issues of gender and gender dominance were broadly noticeable. For starters there was a faction of her constituency who did not believe in women’s leadership and, secondly, the parliamentary and political processes she was part of were male-dominated and male hegemony could always be felt and noticed.

Wollheim discussed how bravely and eloquently Margaret Ballinger stood in parliament and how she refused to be cowed by politically strong, highly-backed and vocal Nationalist Party members. 5 Margaret Ballinger had a tough role of presenting “Native” challenges and pinpointing government’s lack of responsibility in this cause. She had to present contentious issues like the need for free access to land for blacks. She was also very vocal on the issues of urban space for blacks.6 She had striking parliamentary competence as described by Wollheim.

Through all this Mrs Ballinger never lost her cool. Nor did she ever reply to any such attack on the same level. Always she had her facts at her fingertips, her arguments lucidly and logically assembled and always her speeches were models of eloquence displaying a complete command of her subject. This is not to say that she never got angry. Few who heard her will ever forget her

5 O.D Wollheim, "Tense novel, but flawed." The Argus 17 (1984). 6 L Manicom, "Ruling relations: rethinking state and gender in South African history." The Journal of African History 33, no. 3 (1992): 441-465.

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devastating replies to some particularly stupid argument when she often left her opponent virtually speechless and quivering with impotent rage.7

Wollheim did not hesitate to express the type of abuse Margaret Ballinger went through in parliament. However, she was a calm and composed politician who did not allow male and political dominance to silence her in her cause for a better life for Africans.

Even Mina Soga herself corroborates the above views on Margaret Ballinger parliamentary capabilities. Mina Soga and part of her NCAW delegation had an opportunity to view parliamentary sessions in Cape Town in February 1945. Mina Soga was really impressed by Margaret Ballinger’s presentation, her skill, as well as eloquence. She wrote to Margaret Ballinger afterwards: “One must see you during the parliamentary session as I did to appreciate your task.”8

However, this does not however mean that she was happy and comfortable with all this confrontation. Furthermore, parliamentary duty kept her busy and highly engaged beyond the normal. Wollheim took count of all the number of parliamentary sessions she attended over her illustrious 23-year parliamentary service. Parliament required her presence six months of every year excluding special sessions. This was physically demanding to her and in one of the letters, Mina Soga consoled Margaret Ballinger that she appreciated how involving her parliamentary work was in addition to a very demanding constituency in the words: “Many thanks to your letter, I wish we could somehow help to ease your work. Can we do anything?”9

Despite being appreciative that Margaret Ballinger was a busy person, Mina at times really insisted on her action towards community causes. For instance, in December 1943, she and the NCAW wanted her presence at their December conference where many matters that affected her office were on the agenda. From her letter, it can be noted that she was apprehensive that some constituency members did not really appreciate the efforts of Margaret Ballinger nor the fact that she was overwhelmed by work. On 1 December 1948, Mina Soga spoke against the view that Margaret Ballinger must always attend NCAW conferences. She spoke to her colleagues about how overwhelming being a member of the NRC was to Mrs Ballinger. She confided to Mrs Ballinger thus:

7 Ibid. Wollheim, 1984, 4. 8 Letter from Mina Soga to Mrs Ballinger, dated 8th of February 1945. 9 Mina Soga letter to Mrs Ballinger, dated 22 July 1948.

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I had to refuse an ardent request from the N.C.A.W. Board of Officers to have you address our meetings. I refused because I know how overworked you are.10

One must see you during the parliamentary session as I did to appreciate your task.11

The undertones of the above statements, suggesting that people needed to see Margaret Ballinger at work to understand her suggests the low appreciation point raised earlier. This lack of appreciation of Margaret Ballinger’s work, especially in the late 1940s might has been tied to the growing negativity against the Native Representative Council (NRC). Various debates had raged over the use of the NRC to represent Africans in parliament. By the 1940s, parliamentary representation issues had transitioned from the need to have the previous voting system where all persons eligible to vote were on the same roll to the need for direct parliamentary representation of Africans by Africans in parliament.

However, discontent could have been against the NRC system, and not necessarily against Margaret Ballinger. This can be justified by the view that in the 1954 election, she was able to maintain her seat in parliament under her new Liberal Party formed in 1953.

5.2 The Representation of Natives Act Of 1936

In July 1936, the government passed the Representation of Natives Act 12 as an envisaged solution to what had become known as the Native Problem.

The causes and interests that Ballinger mentioned in her manifesto are almost the same as those that Mina Soga represented as a member and leader of the National Council for African Women (NCAW). In her 1937 electoral manifesto, Ballinger stresses on the following:12

1. Abolition of racism, and the need for racial equality for all persons in South Africa. 2. Free access to land for all. 3. Equal educational opportunities for persons of all races. 4. The establishment of a minimum wage for urban employees. 5. Assistance to farmers with funding and infrastructure. 6. Abolition of any taxation of Africans under twenty-one. 7. Old age pensions for Africans.

10 Mina Soga to Margaret Ballinger letter, dated the 2nd of December 1948. 11 Letter from Mina Soga to Mrs Ballinger, dated 8th of February 1945. 12 Extracted from Margaret Ballinger electoral poster of the June 1937 election.

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8. Abolishment of repressive employment legislation particularity the Master and Servant Act. 9. Political rights for all South Africans.

As a Christian woman and as a professional African woman struggling under the bonds of a segregating and repressive system. It is therefore not a surprise that Soga and Ballinger would engage in a much focused and somewhat close political and personal relationship. Ballinger had the right access to the offices and systems that Soga did not have. As a white woman in the NRC she had access to the political and administrative leadership of government and the capacity to air grievances and issues in parliament for the sake of the various causes she represented. Soga, on the other hand, had access to the people – the men, women and children of African origin, whose causes Ballinger pledged to try and address. Additionally, Soga herself, like the other Africans was a victim of the system Ballinger was fighting. A critical interdependence can be seen between the two women and judging from the volumes and frequencies of their interactions, they became even closer with time. Soga became much more comfortable with Ballinger to the extent that she would share her financial problems with her especially in the later years of their relationship.

All the same, Mina Soga maintained a sense of independence despite the fact that she and the people represented, under the then political dispensation, had to rely on a third party to air their views in parliament. In one of her letters, she lightly stated that the people of Queenstown were treating her like she was Mrs Ballinger’s deputy. She wrote: “The people of your constituency give me nor rest. They take me to be your lieutenant.”13

The two women maintained close political interdependencies from 1937 to the fifties. The same statement however also reveals the close interaction that the two women had as part of their political intercession for the subjugated and the poor.

13 Letter to Margaret Ballinger, dated 9th of November 1944

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5.3 NCAW Under the NRC System

Whether Mina Soga in her personal capacity and in her capacity as the leader of the NCAW supported the African parliamentary representation system brought about by the Representation of Natives Act of 1936 is a debatable matter.

Between 1937 and 1953 when this system was operational, Mina Soga was forward and involved through Margaret Ballinger, the elected representative for the Cape. During interactions between NCAW and Mrs Ballinger, Mina raised land, education, labour, accommodation, political representation, poverty, crime and other matters that bedevilled communities. She made rigorous follow-ups as can be seen in her letters. Though she acknowledged that their representative was busy, this to her did not mean that the challenges of Africans should be filtered in volume. All challenges and interventions that needed the NRC were duly channelled, some in Mina’s personal capacity and other under the NCAW.

It can be noted that Mina Soga and the NCAW worked hard to ensure that Africans got something out of the prevailing political environment. This does not mean that Mina did not want more. Mina Soga might have believed in the equal representation of Africans in parliament but went with the NCAW view of apolitical engagement with the government. There is evidence of this in one of the conference minutes of the NCAW. Mina Soga, in 1937, had to battle for her seat in the NCAW because there were some members who wanted to vote her out owing to the political direction she was taking. In one of her letters, however, she presented a negative view of direct representation. Her arguments against it were not that Africans should represent themselves, but she feared that the African politicians were not sufficiently organised to represent the people in parliament effectively. She somehow held a hope that the system would eventually come to an end and Africans would sooner or later represent themselves in parliament. She wrote:

I understand that the people of Queenstown have joined the boycott propaganda. I am personally against it. They don’t want European representation in parliament. I hear they say. This is not a constructive way of demanding direct representation. The people are not sufficiently organised for one thing and until the law grants our wishes, we should continue with the present system.14

14 H.K Tafira, "Collaboration, Complicity and “Selling-Out” in South African Historiography." In Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa. (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016): 221-259.

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In the same letter, she lamented the lack of adequate planning amongst the mobilisers of the pro-direct representation boycotts:

So far, the Africans have not planned on how they were going to fight for direct representation.15

However, she saw unfairness in the system but decided to make it work for the social and economic betterment of Africans. Her views concur with those of Jordan Ngubane, 16 a prominent journalist and author in the 1940s. He led extensive debates on the legitimacy, equity and effectiveness of the Representation of Natives Act and its National Representative Council. Ngubane asserted the unfairness of the system pointing out that it should never have been accepted in the first place. However, the resistance and boycotts that were manifesting in the views of Ngubane needed to occur in the presence of viable alternatives to the NRC. Like Mina Soga, Ngubane believed that resistance to the NRC had been handled poorly in a manner that exposed Africans to government reprisals driven by the government’s long-standing fears of African mass-mobilisations and demand for self-governance:

We on the African side should do all in our power to make the other side see the reason and justice of our cause. Only when those efforts fail-as they are doing in certain directions- should we resort to other methods, remembering always that a blind refusal to negotiate while we are badly organised and therefore impotent is plainly foolish.17

Like, Mina Soga, he saw lack of organisation as severe weakness in the African quest for self- representation in parliament. Mina Soga, despite expressing reservations about the NRC, believed it had some benefits. Ngubane also viewed it as an important stepping stone in ending discrimination.

Mina never maintained that the NRC was perfect. In 1948, she raised her concerns over the low numbers of Africa representation even under the NRC system. In her letter to Mrs Ballinger, she wanted her to ask parliament for such a change. If more senators were appointed, then there would be wider representation of the Africans in parliament. Besides, she already acknowledged that there was too much work that the representatives did and increasing numbers would facilitate faster responses to issues.

15 Ibid, 225. 16 Jordan Ngubane, Should the NRC be abolished (Cape Town: African Bookman, 1946), 18. 17 Ibid, 15.

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Mina Soga was also active in ensuring that at least the will of the African people in the Cape were represented in the election of NRC members. She was attempting to get the best out of the available options - to get candidates who at least cared like Mrs Ballinger. She confided in Mrs Ballinger that the constituency did not want to be represented by the three potential nominees, i.e. Wilhelm, Schibbs and Stewart. She also urged Mrs Ballinger not to leave parliament, her fears being that the constituency would get someone who would poorly represent it.18

In 1959, the NRC system ended due to a legislative change. The Promotion of the Bantu Self- governance Act of 1959 came into being and Margaret Ballinger was not to represent Africans in the NRC anymore. Nonetheless, her correspondence with Mina Soga continued into 1960 where it finally sizzled out. Black representation was purportedly passed to tribal authorities of the eight most populous ethnicities in South Africa. Homelands or Bantustans where Africans could have “political rights” were created.

18 Letters from Mina Soga to Margaret Ballinger, dated 14 and 28 May 1960.

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CHAPTER SIX: UNENDING LAND WOES

6.1 Introduction

The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 was passed to control the access and possession of land by Africans. The purpose of this Act was:

to provide for the establishment of a South African Native Trust and to define its purposes; to make further provision as to the acquisition and occupation of land by natives and other persons; to amend Act No. 27 of 1913; and to provide for other incidental matters.1

This law’s immediate effect was the reorganisation of reserve land and a continuous movement of Africans who lived in these lands. In December 1942, Soga wrote about residents who had previously lost allocated land but had been reinstated after Mr Smit’s intervention. This land case is one of the many that Soga would be involved in over the course of her recorded life. Land occupiers who had lost lands, as seen in the letters, sought the intervention of Mina Soga in her capacity as leader of NCAW and as a community activist who was known to be closely linked with the representative system through Margaret Ballinger.

The modern-day Eastern Cape was demarcated as an area of high concentration for Africans. There was movements in and out of Eastern Cape and Transkei lands in forced compliance to the Act. Mina Soga found herself dealing with the Native Affairs Commissioners, on land grievances in addition to the unresolved matter of adult education. Later in life she would also fight to maintain her own farm that was threatened by unfair sequestration.

Communities and households lost their lands through several ways. Firstly, the Native Trust and Lands Act of 1936 resulted in a marginal increase in land that could be owned and occupied by Africans in the reserves. This land was increased by a meagre 6.2 million hectares. Secondly, the Act consolidated its demarcation of areas where Africans could not own land and where only white ownership was permitted. These two moves resulted in the re- organisation of settlements with several settlements that were outside the reserves being outlawed and being classified as squatter camps. Additionally, Africans had to move from these areas into old reserves created by the Native Lands Act of 1913 as well as into added space

1 Extracted from The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936.

115 created the 1936 Act. Within these movements, some African settlers in the reserves lost their lands to new Africa settlers. Other lost lands to whites who now owned these lands2. Land squabbles became common with disposed persons seeking to find either new lands to settle on or to retain the rights of the lands they had lost. Mina Soga found herself dealing with these two main classes of land claimants.

While Soga and Ballinger talked about the success of Africans who had gotten their lands restored to them, they cited some unfortunate cases where the same land was never given back. Several households were refused the right to land ownership in the trust lands due to bureaucratic tactics of the government. The magistrate who was responsible for seeing through the transfers in Glen Grey reportedly kept changing the transfer dates. Later, the same official decided that a wholesale transfer of land would result in the conscientisation of other Africans who had lost their lands under both the Native Land Act of 1913 and The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936. Soga bitterly complained about these attitudes to Ballinger in her letter dated the 31st of December 1942 and advised that her people have been disposed of long enough to wait any longer for the transfers. But the land problems that Soga had to deal with were just beginning.

More land problems occurred in the Glen Grey area such that Ballinger wrote to Soga requesting that a meeting with the communities involved be convened either at Lovedale or Fort Hare. Ballinger proposed the meeting would include all the members of the NRC. Soga, as the one closer to the land problems was in the best position to get the concerned African dwellers to come to the discussion table. In her response, Soga agreed to the meeting but was of the view that it should take place” on the spot” meaning in Glen Grey. Soga felt that holding the meeting away from the affected communities could have an effect of excluding them from matters that deeply concerned them. Therefore, the meeting was therefore to be held as soon as possible in Glen Grey.

By August of 1943, the meeting suggested by Ballinger to discuss the escalating problems in Glen Grey had not yet been convened. Soga wrote to Ballinger reminding her of the importance of this meeting given the restlessness shown by those who had been disposed of their lands. Ballinger, however, would only be able to make it to Queenstown by November of 1943 when

2 From The Natives Land Act of 1913 and its legacy appearing in Forum by Alan Dodson SC, Johannesburg Bar http://www.sabar.co.za/law-journals/2013/april/2013-april-vol026-no1-pp29- 32.pdf

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she travelled to that part on parliament business. On 4 September 1943, Soga wrote again to Ballinger stressing that November was too far for a meeting. She insisted that the matter be given the urgency it deserved because her people, the dispossessed, landless Africans could not endure suffering any longer. She wrote:

I see your difficulty, but November does seem too far away to starving people: People who have no lands through no fault of their own3

Mrs Ballinger instead, gave Mina Soga the responsibility of coming up with a possible land transfer and ownership policy that was based on the traditional customs of the people. Ballinger also strengthened Soga’s resolve to take a legal route in an attempt to address the Glen Grey land woes. In her letter dated 15 August 1943, Soga wrote that the people were willing to take a legal route to the matter and asked if Mr Ballinger would be interested in representing them in their case. She also revealed to Ballinger that she had studied the land transfer regulations and was confident these would make a good case. Additionally, she had collected enough evidence from the various cases she had discussed with the dispossessed communities and this, in her own view, could strengthen their cases. Soga asked Ballinger to collect these documents for scrutiny and return them at a later date. The issue of legal costs was also discussed. Soga felt that the Legal Aid Bureau should assist the dispossessed in their cases as they did not have the financial resources to represent themselves. Ballinger’s intervention on the engagement of the Legal Aid Bureau was being sorted.

Soga went on to approach the Chief Native Commissioner on the Glen Grey land disputes. The outcome of this was negative as expected. The commissioner stated that all ownership titles to land in the Glen Grey District had been cancelled by order of the Governor- General of that time (Nicholas Jacobus de Wet). No claims of land could therefore be made against the state and this meant that legally, Soga and the dispossessed Africans could not legally do anything about it. The letter written by the Chief Native Commissioner to Soga (which appears to have been the second one addressing this matter) stated that only claims of one claimant against another can be heard or claims where a magistrate had passed a decision that was being contested by a claimant could be addressed by the Land Appeal Board. Persons appealing such land rulings were however to fund their own legal costs.

3 Ibid, 29.

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Figure 5: Part of the original letter from the NAC to Soga

For the rest of 1943, Soga did not touch on the Glen Grey lands affair again, possibly dismayed by the attitude on the Native Affairs Commission (NAC) and even by Ballinger’s delays on meeting the constituency over the matter. However, she was not silenced by these situations. Later on, she would raise the matter again and again and continue in her fight for the repossession of lands forfeited by Africans in Glen Grey.

6.2 Teaching Wages and Working Conditions

Mina Soga was intensely involved with teacher grievances in almost all of her recorded adult life. As far as teaching was concerned, Mina Soga experienced most of these grievances personally, being employed as a teacher. Secondly, she engaged teachers at her adult school, some of whom she had to pay using her own money and thirdly as the NCAW leader. many female teachers approached her with their various concerns, some of which she forwarded to the NRC via Margaret Ballinger while others she took to the local and provincial educational commissioners.

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On a personal level, Mina Soga had to battle unfair remuneration systems that some female teachers were exposed to. In 1942, it was learnt through her letter to Margaret Ballinger (date the 26th of January 1942), that she earned less than other teachers in her grade by 15%. This is despite the fact that she had taken in two dependants whose needs she fully met. Soga, during this time, stayed in Queenstown with a boy and girl from the community whom she paid fees for, bought clothes for and fed, among other needs. She was paid and taxed as a person who did not have any dependants. During this time, Mina Soga had been able to start the adult education school she previously proposed to the Commissioner of Native Affairs. She had failed to get the 500 to 800 pounds grant she wanted from government in order to set up the facility and had gone on to set up structures using her own resources (and meagre donations from overseas).

Income tax was related to one’s wages and the number of recognised dependants. Unfortunately, the consideration of dependants was more favourable for males than for females. As Ballinger would write in a letter dated the 11th of February 1942, the taxation system was rigidly and unfairly formulated such that unmarried women like Soga paid more taxes than men with the same number of dependants. Ballinger had looked into the issue but could not find an immediate fix to the matter. This meant that Soga, who greatly needed money to finance an educational cause that the government had reneged upon, was also to suffer heavy taxation in the process. At the point of raising the complaint to Ballinger in her letter dated the 26th of January 1942, Mina Soga was paying out two teachers for her school out of her own wages and, as alluded earlier, was taking care of two dependents who were still to complete their schooling. It is therefore not surprising that Soga felt the pinch of the tax system on every penny she earned. Her money served a greater cause far beyond personal use. In the NCAW conference of 1942, it was not surprising that the plight of female teachers was a major part of the discussions. Female teachers, as it emerged from her letter dated 31 December 1942, were demanding equal pay to male counterparts.

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Figure 6: A section of Soga's original letter to Ballinger - 26 January 1942

Soga and the female teachers were however not the only women struggling with the tax and wage challenges narrated above. Her sister, who owned a small shop in the native areas, had challenges of her own that still required Soga’s attention. Being a small shop owner, Mina Soga’s sister was bound to pay a stipulated wage to her employees. Unfortunately, the nature, level and size of business made it impossible for her to afford to pay these wages. Ballinger’s advice to Mina, in response to her letter of the 11th March 1942 on this matter, was to write to the Wage Board requesting a waiver. She was to motivate that this particular shop served poor Africans in a Native Area, was comparatively small and therefore paying wages stipulated by the Wage Board would grossly deprive its owners of an income – as she was already getting meagre returns. This matter apparently never came out again in later letters. It could be that it was resolved – judging from the persistent nature of Soga’s follow-ups or it sizzled out without being resolved.

6.3 More Teaching Problems4

In 1942, Mina Soga wrote about the wages and tax problems she faced as a female teacher to Ballinger. Two years later, more problems relating to her career as a teacher had surfaced

4 Based on accounts expressed in Mina Soga’s letter to M. Ballinger, dated 26 February 1944.

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(Letter dated the 26th of February 1944). In 1944, Soga was a first assistant teacher who taught Standard Four and Standard Five. She suffered from heart problems and had to get a month’s sick leave. After unsuccessfully requesting the school to get her a temporary teacher to relieve her during this time, she went on a boycott. After the boycott, she was promoted to teach Standard Six. When she returned, she had recovered but her health remained delicate. The Education Department tried to ease her burden by getting her an assistant teacher. The major problem was that she was transferred from teaching Standard Six to Standard Five. In her view, because Standard Five students came from several schools from the district and needed more preparation and adaptation, teaching Standard Five was more physically taxing on her health than teaching the more adapted Standard Six students. To her annoyance, the change was made without consulting her and she was therefore very bitter about it.

On the 3rd of March 19445, Ballinger responded to her bitter complaints. She had taken this matter to the Chief Inspector of Native Education. This did not sit well with the local schools’ inspector, Mr Stander, who felt his office was side-stepped in the process. Mr Stander responded by visiting the school and approaching Soga while she was still in class. He began to scold her and to tell her how Mrs Ballinger had no control and authority over the schools. According to Stander, Ballinger actually needed permission from the principal to enter the school. Mina Soga mentioned that she maintained her calm and let Stander simply “ramble on in that strain”. In this letter, the relationship between Mina Soga and the principal, who is identified as Mr Nomgqato kwana, is shown to be a bitter one. Mina Soga believed the principal was scared of being beaten by a woman in the field and was always difficult on her. The matter was made worse by the fact that the education inspectors always took the principal’s side of the story, ignoring her own concerns.

By the 29th of May 1944 when Soga wrote another letter to Mrs Ballinger concerning the unfortunate developments in her life as a teacher, the situation had escalated from bad to worse. Soga’s heart problems had returned, and she was not able to attend class. She complained that the people who suffered most were the students who missed classes as a result of her absence. It appears that the skirmishes between the school’s inspector, Stander and Soga had culminated in her demotion. In Soga’s view, the principal had taken the inspector’s side without full consideration of the facts at hand. In an earlier encounter, he had fired some threats that the principal could easily exercise her powers over Soga (with support of the department). In a

5 As per letter dated 3 March 1944 from Ballinger to Soga.

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short space of time, the principal had brought some charges against Soga (these were not itemised in the letters). Soga wrote that she felt she was being victimised for being a woman who stood up and questioned things. She also said that the role of principal was determined by one’s gender and one had to be male to be one. The position of an assistant teacher was therefore very precarious as she did not have much recourse, she wrote in her letter (dated the 29th of May 1944). She had even gotten a salary decrease when she had qualified to teach.

The teaching environment challenges that Soga was facing would soon motivate her to consider the many other challenges that female teachers in Transkei and the Cape Province were facing. In the 1940s there were some changes that had negatively affected the teaching profession. The Great Depression of the 1930s had resulted in a salary cut for teachers and Soga was one of those affected by these cuts. Soga noticed that urban teachers like herself were paid less than rural teachers and had complained about it to Mr Hobson who has replied that the Education Department generally had very poor standardisation processes on salaries. Mr Hobson had accepted that teachers suffered because of these weaknesses which however could not be corrected overnight. During this time, the Cape Province had various teacher unions. The effects of these unions are not felt in any of Soga’s letters indicating that they might not have been very visible in the immediate Queenstown localities.

6.4 Some Land Success and More Quarrels

In September 1943, Soga appeared to have toned down on her quest for the restoration of lands that had been lost by African communities as an immediate result of the Native Trust and Lands Act of 1936, read in conjunction with the Native Lands Act of 1913. In her letter dated the 12th of July 1944, she indicated that for her the struggle for land was far from over and talked about some successes in her quest for land restoration. The Macubeni people had successfully been assisted to keep their commonage and were very grateful for the intervention of both Soga and Ballinger. Macubeni was an African location in Lady Frere, within the Glen Grey District.6 They told Soga that they also wanted to meet Ballinger to express their appreciation and had raised a sum of money to travel to Cape Town. In another letter to Ballinger, dated the 12th of July 1944, Soga is happy that some people had gotten their lands back. It seemed that the complaints and follow-ups with the Native Affairs Commission were paying dividends after

6 Allison Drew, Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873–1936 (London: Routledge, 2007), 303.

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all. In October 1944 her joy over the matter is interrupted by the news that new owners of land in the Glen Grey District had received title deeds ahead of the old and querying claimants to the same land. Soga reconsidered taking legal action to resolve this situation.

During the same period, more land queries appear to have been directed to Mina Soga by different communities (possibly encouraged by the noted successes recorded in some land cases). Mina Soga persistently approached Smit over these matters like in the case of one Nteteni Kapase whose land had been reallocated to someone else. Other complainants on land matters that are recorded in her letters include a Diamond Fuzani and Wilson Kolobeni who, in a later correspondence, is said to have gotten his land back also. Mina Soga also had a case that involved eleven male complainants that required her to travel to Queenstown. At this time, she was writing from Bloemvale Farm in Lady Frere. As it appeared, she was not permanently based at number 11 Komani Street in Queenstown by this time.

In 1944, Soga’s influence and recognition amongst the traditionally patriarchal societies of the Glen Grey District appeared to have soared. She had become a point of reference for men seeking assistance and advice on land and she would convene gatherings and men would attentively attend. During this period, female leadership was generally uncommon and unappreciated. Even the African National Congress had only accepted women to join the movement as members a year earlier in 1943.7 She was indeed defying the odds imposed by gender and proving patriarchal stereotypes wrong.

Between October and December 1944, Soga wrote two letters to Ballinger, one dated 30 October 1944 and another dated 27 December 1944. Both letters were mainly concerned with attendance to two forums. The first one of these was the National Representative Council (NRC) whose conference was being held on the 22nd of December 1944 and the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) conference set for the 20th to the 22nd of January 1945.The membership of NCAW wanted to attend the Pretoria conference of the NRC to air out their views and, according to Soga, they were growing impatient of not receiving confirmation of their attendance. The Bantu Welfare Trust had assisted by raising money for the attendants whose remaining handicap was now the confirmation form the NRC. Soga wanted Ballinger to quickly take up this matter with the NRC. Soga had also been invited to the IRR conference

7 A Short History of the Women`s League - http://www.anc.org.za/content/short-history-womens-league.

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and was in a dilemma because it coincided with the opening of schools. She acknowledged that she needed to take some leave days to attend.

The year 1944 had come and gone, with Soga having had quite a run. With ailing health and meagre financial resources, she had tackled land rows and had laid foundations on debates about the educational system remuneration and its unfairness against female teachers. She had stood as a centre on intervention for labour quarrels and had worked as an advocate for the increasing number of impoverished people in the Glen Grey District. But 1945 would be a year that carried forward the land, employment and poverty challenges forward and added new challenges, all requiring her attention.

6.5 Mina Soga, The NCAW And Labour Disputes

Mina Soga never described herself as a trade unionist and neither did the National Council for African Women (NCAW) present itself as a labour movement. However, various reasons, among them trade union vacuums among the Queenstown workers, compelled Mina Soga to act. From her correspondence with Mrs Ballinger, it is notable that Mina Soga was mostly involved in labour disputes between 1945 and 1950 though it is possible that she could have been involved for a much longer period.

What is striking about Mina Soga’s involvement in labour issues is the evidence of the support given to male workers against an expectation that as a women’s organisation, the NCAW would have been primarily involved with women labour issues. This is not to say it did not. The structurally male-dominated labour force of Queenstown and other cities and towns made males the key victims in labour crises.

In her letter dated the 19th of July 1950, addressed to Mrs Ballinger in her capacity as the town’s representative in parliament, Mina discussed the various challenges that the Queenstown labour movement was facing. The movement was suffering from poor leadership and administration and factional battles for leadership and control. As a result, it concentrated less on labour matters and employee relations leaving workers virtually unrepresented. Workers, according to Mina’s letter, did not know of their rights and privileges because the union was not there to educate them.

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I am organising the workers ‘union which dies when Nalane left and I hope they will not worry you so much. What I found was startling ignorance and lack of leadership: that was why they wrote to you. I gave them a lecture on the necessity of trying to fight local differences where possible. I have asked Mr Green (Employment Bureau) to go to the location and tell them how to go about their complaints. I found Mr Green rather sympathetic and he was shaken for good when I went to see him, but he is more out than in his office even during the specified hours of interview.

The two trips cost me 2.10 pounds. If I could afford, I wouldn’t even have mentioned it but I am not earning anything.

In the above extract, Mina Soga describes a role she had to play in the worker’s movement due to necessity. The workers from the locations were not informed about this to address their grievances and ended up writing to Mrs Ballinger directly. The town had an employment bureau where workers, under the leadership of their union,were supposed to take their grievances to. The situation above indicates that even if workers were to take their issues to the employment office, the likelihood of getting assistance quickly was very low owing to the fact that the officer who manned this office, despite being described by Mina Soga as sympathetic, was rarely around. At her own cost, Mina Soga had travelled to Queenstown, presumably from Bloemvale, to intervene in the employment representation vacuum created by the workers’ union.

The above challenges, i.e. poor representation of labour by unions and lack of proper leadership, occurred in the background of a growing African working class that was settling in Queenstown. By the 1910s, Queenstown had grown into a hub of industrial and commercial activity for the surrounding rural hinterland of the eastern parts of the Cape. The Native Lands Act of 1913 had forced most young men into the rapidly urbanising Queenstown as a result of dispossession and the imposition of taxes. This was aimed at creating a huge force of cheap labour for capitalistic settlers mainly on the farms, mines and in factories. DBSA/Palmer Development Group described the capitalistic growth of Queenstown and its influence on surrounding rural areas as follows:

By 1910 Queenstown has developed into ‘the regional centre of industry, commerce and education’. Industry included quarrying, brickmaking, building, wagon-making, milling, a butter factory, the bottling of aerated water, and a brewery (which marketed

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throughout South Africa). The town had good road and rail links with major centres and its agricultural hinterland and had in place a municipality with strong institutional links to the Cape colonial administration. At the same time though, there had been absolutely no attempts to extend services and develop infrastructure for black communities which had settled around the town, in areas such as Esikidini and Mlungisi. These areas resembled ‘slums’ with overcrowding and no facilities or services such as reticulated water.8

An increasing worker population, a growing industrial and commercial base, exploitative working conditions, low wages and poor or lack of adequate residential infrastructure all created a situation ripe for employee-employer conflict.

Mina Soga did not only intercede for the workers as a collective union but particular individuals who came to ask for her assistance in her capacity as a member of the NCAW. But by August 1950, a month after Mina Soga had written to Mrs Ballinger about the escalating wage disagreements, the workers were becoming more and more agitated. Their complains were now been expressed in boycott actions. Mina Soga held discussions with the workers and attempted to calm them down. By this time, the local employment bureau inspector who had earlier been described as sympathetic to the workers’ complains was now in an unengaged and uncaring mode, further worsening the deteriorating situation. The deteriorating situation is noted in a follow-up letter to Mrs Ballinger, written on the 3rd of August 1950. Mina Soga’s representation to the local labour inspectors on the wage grievances had resulted in the provincial labour inspectors’ visit to Queenstown. Mina Soga had moved around the township conducting small consultative meetings where she collected the grievances of the workers for presentation to the provincial inspectors. Mina Soga also appointed two representatives to stand for the workers in her absence. These were identified as Rev L.S.Sofa and Sixitshe.

While the mid-1950s brought the wage-related challenges to Mina Soga’s portfolio of community problems, these were not the only labour challenges she dealt with. In 1943, other documented problems included those of specific persons. There is a story of one Bennet Nomwa. This individual approached Mina Soga complaining about his very low wage of 3 pounds a month despite being married:

8 ECCESC Queenstown: socio-economic profile and led strategy draft report submitted to ecsecc February 1999 citing DBSA/Palmer Development Group (1998:41).

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I have just been talking to Bennet Nomwa whom I got employed at the post office in 1938. Sometimes he acts as a mail porter. He is married and is only getting three pounds a month plus 18/ cost of living allowance. Please investigate this and help him if you can.

In 19459, Mina Soga wrote about cases of the three men from Queenstown Bowkers Park Creamery who came to complain about their wages. Others were Carlton Klaas, Bennet Soldati and Fred Gqosho who also complained bitterly about wages and unfair working conditions. Carlton Klaas had never gotten leave in his entire working time and at the same time earned 1.1 pounds a month. Judging by the wages of that time, he was indeed a very dire situation. Mina Soga took up such cases with the Native Representative Council requesting it to intervene by engaging, if not ordering, the Wage Board and the Employment Bureau in Queenstown to have such matters addressed.

The cases above are some of the many cases the NCAW helped or attempted to help. The difference with the 1950 situation was that this was on a case-by-case basis and not at the union level. By 1950, The NCAW, under Mina Soga, intervened when trade unions were too disorganised and too weak to represent the mounting labour grievances of communities.

Another difference between the 1945 and 1950 issues was that in 1945 trade unions, particularly the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA)-affiliated ones, had formed an unusual and unexpected, almost alliance-like understanding with the white coalition government. Because the communist party was a product of Soviet Union Communist International (Commitern) movement whose agenda was to spread communism to other parts of the world, including Africa, the CPSA was naturally supportive of Soviet Union causes. The Soviet Union had entered the Second World War in 1941 when its first ally, Germany, broke the Non-Aggression Pact that was signed by the countries on 31 August 1939. The pact initially provided for the sharing of territorial spoils of weaker Scandinavian and Eastern Europe neighbours. None of the two countries would attack the other and none would intervene if one country attacked or annexed the agreed neighbours. However, in 1941 Germany embarked on an exercise to conquer Soviet territory and the pact between the two countries broke down. The Soviet Union entered the war in alliance with Great Britain, France and, a few months later in December, the United States.

9 Letter from Mina Soga to Margaret Ballinger, dated the 27th of June 1945.

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South Africa, under the influence of Smuts, entered the second world war as an ally of Britain. Hertzog and the Nationalist Party outfit wanted to remain neutral,10 while some historians go so far to suggest that they wanted to support the Nazi cause on the side of Germany.11 Despite historic debates in the Cape parliament, a decision to support the alliance led by Britain was adopted in September 1939. As alluded above, it was only in 1941 that the Soviet Union, a supporter of the CPSA entered into an alliance with Britain, technically making it an alliance with the South African government that had committed resources, including manpower to fight in the war against Germany. The communists in the CPSA saw themselves as allies with the government on the basis that the government was fighting on the same side with the Soviets. The CPSA publicly denounced any strike action between 1941 and 1945 on the argument that fighting with the government on the labour front would reduce its capacity to contribute to the war effort and this was tantamount to reducing the Soviet Union’s and alliances war capacity. Thus, during this period, workers found themselves incapacitated to take strike action and other collective forms of protest against the capitalist employers. Unfortunately, worker grievances did not go away. Some of these grievances were brought to the attention of lesser known women like Mina Soga who took them up with the Native Representative Council (NRC). Historically, such effects of the second world war and the seemingly small interventions of women like Mina Soga are basically unrecorded with focus being on the militaristic and political fronts that are presented as male-dominated historical phenomena.

In the 1950s again, based on the letters that Mina Soga wrote to Mrs Ballinger who was part of the Cape Native Representative Council, there were even more labour matters that were addressed to Mina Soga’s door in Queenstown. The political dynamics that resulted in Mina Soga being part of the worker-related matters was somehow inverted from the 1941-1945 ones. Between 1946 and 1950 the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and the African National Congress (ANC), among other movements, were part of nationwide strikes including the mine strikes of 1946 and 1948. In 1950, residents from Alexandra Township in Johannesburg marched demanding the right of franchise and an end to discrimination and were attacked by armed police leaving more than 18 people dead. The Nationalist Party, which had won majority seats in the 1948 general elections, saw a communist hand in these events and attempted to suppress communism through the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. The

10 South African History Online, Second War and its impact, 199-1948 (South Africa: 2016); Accessed September 13, 2018. https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/second-world-war-and-its-impact- 1939-1948 11 Ibid.

128 ban of the party badly affected labour movements that were under its auspices with some of them disintegrating. Under apartheid, trade union relations were structurally weakened, first by the ban of the CPSA mentioned above and, secondly, by the division of unions on the basis of race. Thirdly, a ban on African trade unions under the Bantu Labour Settlement of Disputes Act of 1953 ultimately left African workers at the mercy of their employers. During this time, employees had to bargain with powerful employers and hope to get something out of it. Like in the early 1940s when some of them were overwhelmed by these structural weaknesses of worker representation, they took the matters to the NCAW, but by this time the Native Representative Council had long been abolished by the Nationalist Party when it took full control in 1948. All the same, disgruntled employees continued to see the power held by women’s organisations, in this case the NCAW, to at least find some form of intervention for them in the middle of all this chaos.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LAST ACTIVE YEARS AND FINANCIAL CRISES

7.1 Introduction

Mina Soga left the presidency of the NCAW to Gertrude Jumantha Mdledle who took over in 1955 before being shortly replaced by Magdeline Madge Sesedi who was at the helm of the organisation until 1964.Mina Soga remained very active in the NCAW where she was declared an honorary president for life. Her work in the political and social spheres continued as did her contact with the Native Representative Council (NRC) which was later dissolved in 1959 by the Nationalist Party government.

After 1954, Mina Soga’s activities seemed to defy her age. She was very much involved in community affairs including community politics and at this stage appeared to be politically more vocal against Apartheid and the growing plight of oppressed and poor African men and women. As president of the NCAW, there is evidence that she was called upon to be less politically- aligned or politically-engaged. Perhaps the fact that she no longer had to lead the NCAW was a reason for her change in political tone. On the other hand, the ever-harshening political environment under Apartheid somehow forced her out of political silence.

In her letter addressed to Mrs Ballinger, dated the 27th of January 1960, Mina Soga laments the deteriorating state of affairs in South Africa, including the abolition of the Native Representative Council. She boldly states that she was glad the world opinion against South Africa was growing but was cautious that the duty to end oppression lay directly in the hands of South African women and men.

During this period, Mina Soga emphasized and reemphasized to Mrs Ballinger that the latter should fight to stay in parliament for as long as possible. Mina Soga felt discouraged by the repulsion of the Representation of Natives Act by the Nationalist Party. The Nationalist Party was evidently against the NRC from the start. It rarely supported its actions nor took heed of its word. To some Africans however, it represented a flick of hope in parliamentary representations. Some, like Mina Soga, despite the political weaknesses of the system, committed to working with it and stretched it to the limit, challenging it to represent African affairs in the Cape Parliament. Indeed, some battles were actually won through the NRC, especially land related cases in the Glen Grey area, as indicated in some of the letters between Mina Soga and Margaret Ballinger.

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With the end of the NRC era came the beginning of the homelands representation system under the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959. Black people were supposed to be politically independent and fully represented in the homelands that corresponded to their tribe. Ten Bantustans were established with four of them namely, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Transkei declared independent from the Republic of South Africa with self-contained governments which were however never recognised by the vast of the South African and international populace.

For Margaret Ballinger to stay in politics, she had to be voted in parliament under a new party. She took heed of Mina Soga’s call and remained active in politics under her newly formed Liberals Party.

7.2 The NCAW, Urbanisation and the Family unit

In December 1955, Mina Soga addressed the 19th Annual Conference of the NCAW which was held in Orlando Johannesburg.1 Mina Soga’s speech focused mostly on the issue of the so- called illegitimate children and the increasing cases of broken African families as well as delinquencies by children. Mina Soga showed much concern about the breakdown of African socio-cultural values that venerated the family. At the same meeting, where the mayoress of Johannesburg, Mrs L.V. Hurd, commended the NCAW of its highly visible family upliftment charity works that included the establishment of safe creches for black children. Mina Soga had a few principles she thought were important in maintaining African family life stability. These were:

• The encouragement of proper African marriages including the payment of lobola. • Taking steps to ensure that rapid urbanisations and rural-to-urban transition did not erode traditional African family values. • Adopting religious principles that encouraged family upliftment. • Taking responsibility for social problems emanating from one’s action.

In 1955, Johannesburg represented a centre of urban refuge for previously rural, disposed African societies. The prospects of getting employment in the many gold mines in the city and

1 NCAW Annual General Conference Minutes, 17 December 1955. http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/inventories/inv_pdfo/AD1715/AD1715-18-2-1-001-jpeg.pdf

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in the expanding manufacturing sector drew both foreign and South Africa migrants into the sprawling townships of the city. Various statutes that governed land ownership and control by blacks and whites had an adverse effect on black land ownership.2

The coming of apartheid in 1948 had a severe compounding effect on the urbanisation of black people. Firstly, Apartheid prompted the forceful removal and relocation of blacks from areas that had been regulated for whites. This was mainly achieved through the application of the Group Areas Act of 1950 and other past and new pieces of legislation. Various laws had been enacted to control the presence of blacks in urban areas as well as in so-called white areas. In 1934, The Slums Clearance Act had the effect of forcing people from informal settlements into the few formal black establishments that were there. The Natives Urban Areas Consolidation Act legalised permanent residence of certain black people in urban localities. Its effect was to make the continued stay of most black urban dwellers illegal.

Push factors into urban areas like Orlando in Johannesburg, where the 19th Annual General Conference of NCAW was held, were dispossession either by the new legislative regimes that came under Apartheid in 1948or by earlier laws like the Slums Clearance Act. The pull factors into urban centres also included a growing, albeit reluctant, acceptance of the growing modern urban cultures. As urban centres offered better economic and educational opportunities than rural areas for blacks, young and middle-aged persons flocked into cities, resulting in massive growth of the black urban population.

Unfortunately, the housing situation was not adequate in accommodating all those who wanted to live in urban areas.3 In 1951, it is reported that the backlog for black housing in South African major cities particularly Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town were as high as two hundred and fifty thousand units. To compound the problem, there were over two hundred thousand squatters in the fringes of urban areas in the same period.4 One writer, states that the dispossession of people in rural lands occurred in the absence of any meaningful urbanisation policy. When the National Party came into power in 1948, it did not address either the causes of the rural to urban push factors or the urban accommodation problems.5 The

2 D.V Soni, “The apartheid state and Black housing struggles”. The apartheid city and beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa, ed. David M. Smith (London & New York. Witwatersrand University Press, 2017), 52-65. 3 Ibid, 55. 4 Ibid, 55. 5 A Mabin, "Dispossession, exploitation and struggle: an historical overview of South African urbanization." In The apartheid city and beyond. (London: Routledge, 2003): 24-36.

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Nationalist Party, in its manifesto had promised to deal with the urbanisation particularly the squatter problem. In actual fact, it came with laws and offers that were highly resisted by the growing black urban population including the law on the establishment of independent homelands were blacks could “independently” stay after renouncing South African citizenship. This was done under the Bantus Authorities Act of 1951.6

By 1955, when Mina Soga addressed these pressing urbanisation issues, forced removals and slum clearances were a common activity in Johannesburg. At the same conference, Mina Soga highlighted the terrible living conditions of black persons in township relating them to how they fostered crime and immorality. Overcrowding in the townships resulted in immoral living conditions that were also partly to blame for the problems of illegitimacy. Poor lighting also created a conducive environment for criminals. Mina thus pointed at Apartheid and black discrimination as the cause of the appalling living conditions for blacks in Johannesburg and indeed other urban centres. She cautioned that black people had a choice especially on matters on immorality that had been brought about by this rapid and poorlyco-ordinated urbanisation.7

The morality issues were widely unintended consequences of urbanisation on African communities. The masculine nature of rural-urban migration resulted in married men leaving their villages and farmlands behind. Women were left to look after the farmlands and the family. Urbanisation systems that were developed in response to the preliminary boom in post- world war economics did not support family migration. Men who were lucky to find formal accommodation moved into men’s hostels and this created morality issues that amongst other things resulted in “illegitimate” children who were born out of wedlock. Women in urban centres like Orlando took the responsibilities of looking after these children who were never considered part of the man’s integral family.

7.3 Pass Laws and Urban Residence

In 1956 South African women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in protest against pass laws. This event has come to be well remembered and well-celebrated by South Africans at large. Without the intention of demeaning this celebration, it appears that society views this

6 D.V Soni, “The apartheid state”, 56. 7 NCAW Annual General Conference Minutes, 17 December 1955. http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/inventories/inv_pdfo/AD1715/AD1715-18-2-1-001-jpeg.pdf

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as South African women’s finest moment. However, there are many roles and many battles that women fought behind the scenes in the creation of a democratically transformed South Africa of which this particular event is just one. The above opinion was arrived after noting the contributions of otherwise unknown and unsung South Africa women in the development of Africans who despite being the majority and the natives of the land lived on the side-lines. These contributed towards the education, nutrition, health, accommodation, employment and general well-being of African society and were thus responsible for the humanisation of African society at a time it was treated with oppression, prejudice and contempt.

Mina Soga was heavily involved in the fight against the freedom of movement of all Africans, male and female, from as early as the system came up. In the views of the NCAW, pass laws had negative effects on families. Firstly, they divided African families and then put up a list of restrictions that made it possible for families to interact. With males in urban areas and females in the reserves, traditional African family structures where family units co-existed in villages were destroyed. This brought with it the problems of immorality, as men who were left in the cities were more likely to get engaged with other women who were not their wives. This brought a new family problem, one that during this time was referred to as the problem of illegitimate children. These were children who were born outside marital relationships, and whose fathers cared or chose not to care about them. These children were a woman’s problem.

Secondly, pass laws took away any of the little drops of freedom that might have been left from colonial, capitalist conquest and its oppressive and dispossessive systems. Without the freedom to freely move around, one really felt the pain of oppression especially when other racial groups, predominantly whites, had unrestricted movement. Thirdly, pass laws created a double- edged sword that took away hope in African men and women. African youths and indeed adults who flocked into cities like Queenstown and Johannesburg did so in search of opportunities and in hope of a better life. They hoped to get jobs that would support an independent. The life they sought in the cities could not be attained in the reserves because of land dispossession. Without land, which many historians have described as a core means of production for Africans, young Africans had to turn to other means of production to survive the factory. Nevertheless, the pass system made most of them unwelcome there and exposed them to unimagined levels of poverty and destitution. Technically, black people had nowhere to go.

There is evidence from history that pass laws had a more severe effect on women than men. In the early 1900s, the capitalist system created an economy that best suited the needs of men than

134 women. It did this by providing better freedom of movement for men than women and additionally created the notorious men’s hostels where men could dwell during their working stays in urban areas. It strengthened the stereotypes that women were to stay at the reserves as they had no major role to play in the rapidly capitalising South Africa society. Sadly, this view was to some extent perpetuated by missionary educational perspectives that attempted to create a successful stereotype of a good woman as a humble, obedient wife who served a husband under Christ.

In one of her letters, Mina Soga briefed Mrs Ballinger of the diplomatic efforts that the NCAW and the residents of Queenstown had put forward in response to the municipalities to implement the Native Urban Areas Consolidation Act that was passed into law in 1945. The NCAW had held consultative meetings and had made press representations of its opposing views against the restricted movement of all persons above sixteen who, if the municipality did not concede, were expected to carry passes. In her letter she wrote:

As per telegram, the Advisory Board without consulting us accepted the Act for Queenstown and of course it was rejected through the press. They have sort of withdrawn the acceptance but the atmosphere is bad. Persecution of the masses is imminent by the Locational Superintendent and Board. The former said the Act will check influx into towns. I am sending you the cuttings.8

Mina Soga saw the Act as an instrument to persecute poor Africans rather than checking the influx of people from rural areas. However, the above pass law was not new. The Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 was already in use and was implemented with the views that Africans did not have a permanent home in urban areas. They lived in reserves and their presence in towns and cities was to provide labour to the capitalist system. If the demand for labour was high, more Africans could flock into cities and towns to take up employment and if labour demand went down, they were to leave the towns and cities.

7.4 Liberal Politics

Liberal politics was not new in South Africa. The liberal political culture in South Africa is traceable to the early 19th century in the Cape. A belief that all people were equal and there was no inferior race, driven by liberal thought, had already been evident in the Cape. Liberalism

8 Mina Soga to Mrs Ballinger – Letter dated the 12th of April 1946.

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was also associated with the Cape principle and concern for responsible government that would assimilate Africans in the transforming political and economic landscape. Its effects were mostly visible through the Cape Qualified Franchise system where people of all races had the right to vote provided they met certain literacy, residence and income qualifications. Liberal political thought remained under threat; firstly because of its lack of cohesion with the British expansionist policies that were hinged on race superiority and, secondly, on Afrikaner nationalism that was also drawn on racial, religion-backed superiority. Until 1936, when the Cape voting system was eventually abolished and replaced by the Representation of the Native Act, numerous attempts to suppress liberal political outcomes, particularly the right to an equal vote in the Cape, were notable. For instance, in the 1902 negotiations to end the Anglo-Boer War, a proposal that the British would suppress the liberalists through reducing or denying African voting rights was tabled and agreed to as one of the conditions of the Dutch’s surrender.

Mina Soga was a staunch supporter of liberal politics and encouraged Mrs Ballinger not to leave parliament as a result of the fall of the Representation of Natives Act but to ensure she was voted back into Parliament under a liberal banner. Mina Soga supported the liberals because they primarily represented the same views she shared on racial and gender equality. Her interaction of over 25 years with Margaret Ballinger, a devout liberal, only strengthened her liberalist views. Therefore, she hoped the Liberals and the Progressives would soon unite and provide a stronger front against Apartheid. She expressed to Mrs Ballinger:

Whatever happens, I hope you won’t get out of Parliament. See that your party elects you. I hope that one day the Liberals and Progressive parties will unite.9

This was in her letter to Mrs Ballinger dated the 14th of March 1960. As Mina Soga had hoped, Mrs Ballinger was elected to Parliament under her party, the Liberals Party of South Africa.

The Nationalist Party was not pleased with the non-racial nature and policies of the LPSA and saw it as a potential risk against extremist Apartheid politics. In 1965, it conjured an Act of parliament to ban multi-racial parties. This Act targeted both the liberals and the progressives. The liberals chose to disband the party than to run it along racial lines.

9 Mina Soga to Mrs Ballinger – Letter dated the 12th of April 1946.

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7.5 Financing the Challenges

The responsibilities that Mina Soga took upon herself laid a great financial burden on her personal life. Mina had worked towards building an adult school, building a modern library, establishing a hostel for men in the fashion of the hostel established by the Helping Hand for Native Girls in the 1920s and establishing additional school buildings to support adult education activities. Additionally, she and the NCAW carried out various social intervention programmes including school and pre-school feeding programmes and girls’ training programmes amongst others.

From her correspondence with Margaret Ballinger, as well as from the various minutes of the National Council for African Women (NCAW), at least four sources of funding that supported her causes can be identified. The first was member contributions from the NCAW. Ordinary members who could afford to make donations and contributions were asked and encouraged to do so. Unfortunately, due to the very low-income demographics of the membership, very little money could be raised through these means. This lack of funds could be used to explain how the NCAW was never a full-time commitment to leadership. Mina Soga for instance, remained a schoolteacher and even looked for additional employment with the Red Cross in her tenure as president. Other members of the NCAW executive team also maintained their full-time occupations, operating from their homes.

The second source of income was donations from overseas, particularly, the United States of America and Canada. During the Tambaram Conference, Mina Soga was able to make many acquaintances with north American Christian and missionary societies, one of which she toured with to the United States. These acquaintances were in a better position to provide her funding, especially funding for capital projects like expansion of the library and the school. She indicated the importance of this source in her letters, including the one addressed to Mrs Ballinger dated the 27th of January 1960. The same letter revealed the other source of funding, i.e. Mrs Ballinger. It is not clear from the letters whether Mrs Ballinger funded Mina Soga from her own account, but Mina Soga regularly asked for money, mostly as loans she would later repay. The fourth source of funding identified from Mina Soga’s correspondence was loans from trusts and organisations like the African Trust. A commercial financial institution, the British Kaffranan Savings Bank also appears as a reluctant but available lender. In her telegram dated the 9th of February 1951, Mrs Ballinger passed on the bad news that the Department of Native Affairs was not going to fund Mina’s hostel development because it did not finance

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urban property development but urged Mina Soga to consider the bank in King Williams Town. She wrote:

Native Affairs informs me no loan possible for urban property. Stop. Mr Warren advises you apply British Kaffranan Savings Bank in King Williams Town.10

The Department of Native Affairs was never fully committed to funding NCAW community support and development projects. Numerous attempts to get it to fund the many projects carried out by the group are recorded. Only a few projects, specifically child nutrition programmes, appeared to get the assistance of the department. Unexpectedly though, a school that Mina Soga’s mother had started in 1933 got a small grant to pay for the teacher. All along, Mina Soga had been paying the teacher from her own pocket:

Another gain: the school started by my late mother fifteen years ago has at last been given a grant by the Education Department. From 1939 I have been paying the teacher 15 pounds a quarter including board and lodging at my home. Then I had to feed the children for the last two years. Mr Smit, and our School Inspector, also a Mr Smit, helped me to get the grant. But this is all by the way my chief reason for writing to you is to request you to help me get a loan from the fund which you a member.11

The sixth source of funding came from Mina Soga’s small business and farming projects. These included the growing of food crops, particularly maize (referred as kaffir corn), which was then processed into corn flour, a traditional staple for black South Africans. She also ran a canteen as a cash generating project. The money from these projects was never regular nor adequate. She had to seek bridging loans while waiting for harvests. In one of her letters to Mrs Ballinger she wrote (dated the 28th of June 1948):

Now concerning financial matters, I need a loan of 100 pounds very badly to meet certain building accounts which cannot be postponed e.g. the payment of the builder according to the agreement I have, I must pay him in four portions and I must not fail in this. My fear is that some of the portions will come due before I have the money. I expect to have 250 bags of kaffir corn for sale but that is going to take three months from now or even four according to the rate of the thrashing machine. The second portion of the payment will have been due. That is the worry. It seems as if the

10 Mina Soga to Mrs Ballinger – Letter dated the 12th of April 1946. 11 Mina Soga Letter dated 12 May 1948, addressed to Mrs Ballinger.

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government was going to hire my home on the farm for a health centre but they are jolly slow about it. In short, I would like some friends to lend me 100 pounds. Of the fund I hoped to get help from is low then I don’t know what will happen to the building I shall make an appeal later.

Kindest regards, yours truly M.T. Soga

P.S. If I get the said loan elsewhere, I will let you know.12

Discouraged by the poor prospects of funding, Mina Soga resorted to funding some of the projects with her meagre teacher salary. Unfortunately, this was never enough even for herself. She was poorly paid and more painfully paid less than males of equal or lower qualifications and capabilities. 13In addition, she had taken in dependants who depended on this salary. Generally, of all the five sources of funding for social work projects that had the potential of benefitting Africans, none was a guaranteed source. To get funding in America, she had to get there first while the Native Affairs Department, funding trusts were not as forthcoming as she had hoped for. Mina resorted to borrowing from Margaret Ballinger whom she would pay once she received income from her projects, the government or from official loans.

As the building went up, more and more money was required to pay the builders and to buy building materials amongst other costs. Mina Soga relied more and more on borrowings. As noted in the letters above, the building, as a resulting of funding shortages was not going as fast as it was. In February 1942, while the building was still in its mooting stages, Mrs Ballinger had advised Mina Soga that the Native Department of Education had indicated the very low likelihood of funding the school building project albeit it might consider funding the teacher payment. 14 Mina Soga persisted with the projects, seeking funds from various sources mentioned above. By 1948, the building was still not complete and as already alluded grants and donations were not very forthcoming. Mina Soga, at the advice of Mrs Ballinger, approached commercial financiers to get loans to complete the building. She never expected repayment to be a problem as she believed that her farming and business projects, friends in America and even local well-wishers would at some point get involved.

12 Mina Soga Letter dated 31 December 1942, addressed to Mrs Ballinger. 13 Mina Soga Letter dated 31 December 1942, addressed to Mrs Ballinger. 14 Mrs Ballinger letter to Mina Soga dated the 11th of February 1942.

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Another plan that Mina Soga put into action was the expansion of her farming projects. She had the hope that with adequate farming resources, she would be able to carry out agri-business ventures like growing kaffir-corn and selling it as cornflower. Whilst Mina Soga, by this time was already carrying out these farming practices, it was not until towards the mid-1950s when as a retired teacher, she decided to engage in farming on a fulltime basis. This too required adequate funding for farming implements. As a land-owner, Mina Soga was able to use her title deeds for her allotment of part of Bloemvale Farm bought by her father in 1902 under the Glen Grey Act to secure the loan that she primarily used to acquire tractors.

First, Mina Soga bought two tractors for 400 pounds and spent over 300 pounds on repairs alone. She later decided that one of the tractors was not worth keeping and sold it for 175 pounds incurring a heavy loss in the process. She bought two more tractors for a further 800 pounds also borrowed using the farm as collateral. Mina Soga’s plan, as she later recalled to Mrs Ballinger, was to hire out the tractors to assist African farmers who had no access to such equipment. They hired tractors from European farmers in the area at exorbitant costs. In addition, the government had restricted tractors from white farms to be hired out to black farmers as part of its many segregation efforts. She would be able to relieve the African farming community in Queenstown while making an income to sustain the projects that were not getting expected government funding and herself.

Unfortunately, she was failing to make the revenue that she expected from the tractors and the farming. The loans she had taken out were due for repayment. The harvests that she had come to expect could not come because of bad climatic conditions. As a result, she desperately required 700 pounds to settle the loan. This was indeed a dire situation for her. Failure to repay the loans could result in her losing the farm. The farm was not only personal property to Mina Soga. It was part of a bigger social project and a community intervention amidst illiteracy, limited access to education, nutrition, health challenges and destitution. Failing to pay up could mean the projects that Mina Soga had worked for all her life could be auctioned off along with the farm. The letters she wrote to Mrs Ballinger could not have expressed her fears and desperation more.

By February 1960, the fears that Mina Soga had in relation to the foreclosure of her part of Bloemvale came to pass. In the letter, Mrs Ballinger advised that while the technical details of the matter could forbid the sale of her land to a non-African since it was in an area designated to Africans, if the land was rightfully auctioned to another African nothing more could be done.

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In a letter in response to her plea, Mrs Ballinger responded:

I am answering your letter at once since I fancy the letter you raise if an urgent one. I can’t understand how anybody who could sell you tractors can take your land since your land must have been part of the scheduled or released area and could only be sold to another African. Of course, if you were forced to sell to another African to get money to pay for the tractors then I fancy there is nothing further to be done about it.15

This response was to a letter Mina Soga had written to Mrs Ballinger informing her that her farm had been auctioned and she was desperately looking for money to repay the buyer so that she could reclaim her projects. Mina Soga was considering going to America to raise this funding, but her passport was in the way. Mrs Ballinger, in the response letter, pledge to support her case in getting a passport.

Mrs Ballinger further referred this matter to Dr Eiselen whom she pleaded to urgently intervene. She did so through forwarding the letters that Mina Soga had written herself explaining the farm sales matter and requesting assistance.16 Mina Soga’s farm was part of a greater educational cause for Africans and Mrs Ballinger was of the view that in his capacity as the Secretary of the Department of Bantu Education, Dr Eiselen would be able to see reason in the cause to save Mina Soga’s farm from being auctioned. Dr Eiselen, however, was not very forthcoming as indicated in Mina Soga’s letters. He was not giving the matter the urgency that Mina Soga believed it deserved. With the farm under sale and potentially new ownership, educational programmes would not go on and this was a major disruption. By April 1960, Mina Soga was slowly getting the conviction that Dr Eiselen may not respond as soon as expected or perhaps might never respond to her at all. She was now considering approaching the Institute of Race Relations for some form of intervention while awaiting her passport so that she could sojourn to America where she expected funding assistance by way of donations. She expressed this in her letter to Mrs Ballinger dated the 11th of April 1940:

Many thanks to you letter. I am going to write to IRR. Dr Eiselen had not written to me yet. I pray that God may give him grace to help me get back my farm. If he succeeds, I shall immediately apply for my passport.17

15 Mrs Ballinger to Mina Soga – letter dated 5th of February 1960. 16 Mrs Ballinger letter addressed to Dr WWM Eiselen dated the 25th of February 1960. 17 Mrs Ballinger letter addressed to Dr WWM Eiselen dated the 25th of February 1960.

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Mina Soga wanted more time to repay the debt and this was to be done through refunding the buyer, provided he was willing. As a reminder, by this time, Mrs Ballinger was no longer a member of the Native Representative Council as a result of the repeal of the Representation of Native Act by the Nationalist Party. She was however still involved in parliament and Mina Soga was of the hope that she would continue as a parliamentarian under the liberal banner. Mina Soga, at the same, admits that the personal problems she was facing had taken a toll on her political and current affairs involvement. She requested that Mrs Ballinger get her the Hansard so that she could keep up.

The written correspondences between Mrs Ballinger and Mina Soga end in 1960, owing to the repeal of the Representation of Natives Act and the latter’s movement to America. Efforts were made by the researcher to trace any sources that shed light on Mina Soga’s second visit to America and whether it achieved the desired outcomes without much success. The sale of the portion of Bloemvale Farm that Mina Soga had inherited from her parents and upon which she had invested in social and economic infrastructure appeared to have taken quite a toll on Mina Soga who at this stage was 63 years old. Even at this age, Mina Soga was not ready to give up yet. Unfortunately, the political, economic and social environment she lived in was relentlessly harsh.

Mina Soga died in 198118, though some sources debate the year of her death to be 1989.19Thus she was 88 when she finally passed on. But her legacy, despite the unfortunate end to her Bloemvale social projects persists to this day.

18 Gerald H. Anderson, "Missionary Biography: A Select Annotated Bibliography." Missiology 27, no. 4: 459- 465. 19 Ibid, 459.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUSION

The life of Mina Soga was a fight against the social challenges that were imposed on African societies by the effects of colonisation, dispossession, oppression and segregation under three eras of South African governance: the British governance era before 1910 when she was training a school teacher, the Union of South Africa era between 1910 and 1961, when Mina Soga was growing up as a young woman in Kimberley and Queenstown and the Republic of South Africa era in 1961. In the theoretical foundations of the study, it was argued that Mina Soga’s life cannot be divorced from the various transformations that affected South Africa society, economics and politics during her time. Mina Soga responded to the social challenges of fellow Africans though feminist Christian-mission based social work and through socio- political representation and engagement of marginalised women and men of South Africa, mainly with the Cape Province. From the life she lived, as narrated and discussed in the document, Mina Soga can be described as a woman of great contribution to the Cape society. Yet, as argued in the various feminist writings, her history is not as widely known or written from a South African perspective. It can be noted that without attending the International Missionary Council meeting in Tambaram in 1939, Mina’s history would have remained in oblivion. The conference she attended, however, is by no chance the climax of her life despite being the major reason for her international attention. Her successes and her immense contributions lie in the feeding of the hungry masses, providing shelter, helping the needy, supporting the blind and the disabled, educating both children and adults and representing the masses amidst their various challenges. These included land dispossession, poor working conditions, poor salaries and wages, moral challenges and lack of political representation.

As argued in the literature review, the stories of self-sacrificing women like Mina Soga are rarely talked about. Their contribution to South African history remains in the shadows. The masculine presentation of South African history is partly to blame for this state of affairs and the existence of fewer female and feminist-centric historians has also resulted in the consideration of female history from a male-centric, hence male-domination, perspective. Dedicating over 60 years of her life to missionary work that was heavily integrated with political representation and feminist viewpoints, Mina Soga’s life story can only be described as exceptional. In the next section, the various roles that Mina Soga played in the history of South Africa are summarised.

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Mina Soga was without a highly, committed and self-sacrificing missionary. At a time when society expected missionary work to be the domain of European men and women, Mina Soga persevered in missionary work, carrying with her what Clara Bridgman, who nominated her for the International Mission Council conference in Madras, described as an interdenominational flair. She was above ecumenical differences, interacting with Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and even the controversial Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church. In Tambaram, Mina Soga advocated for Christianity in African terms. She separated Europeanisation from Christianisation stating that Africans must embrace Christianity in the comfort of their culture. This, in the views of a researcher, was a superior brand of pan- Africanist Christianity that acknowledged that cultural differences between European missionaries and African converts should never be misconstrued as African inferiority.

Mina Soga carried out various social programmes in resonation with Christian missionary work. She started an adult school, built a library, established a hostel for homeless young men, fed the blind and the disabled and started a school feeding scheme for malnourished. As a social worker, she initially carried out these projects under the auspices of the National Council for Women, of which she became president. Later in the late 1940s Mina Soga used her own resources and sourced for donations and grants from government and well-wishers. While attempting to fund her many projects, Mina Soga often incurred heavy debt and in her last projects to resuscitate farming activities to create a sustainable stream of income, she ended up losing part of her farm and relocating to America where she hoped she would be able to raise funds to restore the farm and the projects to her account. At some point in her life she was also professionally employed as a social worker by the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society.

Within the political climate that constantly curtailed African political representation, first through the removal of the Cape Qualified Franchise in 1936, and the repeal of the Representation of Natives Act in 1959, Mina Soga endeavoured to ensure that African people in Queenstown were represented in their various grievances. She forged an alliance with Mrs Ballinger who was an elected representative of the Cape, whom she took upon various issues that needed the attention of government. These included land issues, particularly the effects of the Glen Grey Act, wage and labour issues, education and infrastructure issues, as well as pass and urban access issues. Mina Soga was able to have various dispossessed land restored in the Cape. Her political representation also included mobilising women to stand up and speak. With the NCAW, Mina Soga was also part of the women’s march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in protest against the pass laws. Mina Soga was able to interact at high political levels and

144 confidently express herself. In 1949 she organised women of the NCAW to meet the Minister of Native Affairs to express the various grievances that Africans living under an oppressive system had.

That Mina Soga had strong feminist values cannot be doubted. She advocated for the equality of women to men in all spheres of South African life. Aligning her feminist views with Christian Feminism, Mina Soga exhibited reformist Christian feminist tendencies where she believed the Christian patriarchy was a matter that required reformation. Her advocacy for African women to form their own representative group away from the male-dominated and restrictive All-African Convention in the late 1930s is another testimony of her feminist views. Women, she believed, should be able to stand up and speak for themselves. They needed not to be a class of humans below men.

As a teacher, Mina prided in being one of the best, having attained the highest score in her teaching qualification category in the whole of the Cape Province. Mina was committed to teaching in very under-resourced schools and in creating literacy opportunities for hundreds of South Africans who did not get the opportunity to go to school. She is described as having unique and exceptional teaching skills that helped to get the best out of her learners. As a teacher, Mina Soga suffered under the gender and racially discriminative government employment system. She however persevered as a professional teacher for most of her life.

The above are the many roles that Mina Soga played for the benefit of South Africans in the Cape. Whilst she disappears from active involvement in these roles in 1960 when she was 67 years old, her legacies remain to this day. As argued earlier, her life can be looked at from the social theory lens as a response to social economic and political transformation around her, such a response being aimed at cushioning poor black people who were negatively affected by such changes. These changes included international events, including the First and the Second world wars, the Great Depression, mass nationalism in Africa, all such events having an influence on how South Africa’s political, social and economic structures responded.

The NCAW, the organisation that Mina Soga founded exists to this very day, over 80 years on. The organisation continues to champion the rights of women and children as well as serving their social and economic needs. The organisation still embodies the principles that women are equal to men and women need to speak for themselves. Mina Soga’s liberalist views that South

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Africa exists for all who live in it and that people of all races are equal in it were eventually what inspired constitutional, rather than parliamentary, democracy in the 1993 interim constitution.

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LIST OF LETTERS

Day Date Document Type Sender Receiver 5 Apr-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Apr-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Apr-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Apr-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 11 Apr-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 11 Apr-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 11 Apr-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 16 Mar-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 16 Mar-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 25 Feb-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger Dr Eisselen 25 Feb-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger Dr Eisselen 5 Feb-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Feb-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Feb-60 Letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 27 Jan-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jan-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jan-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jan-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jan-60 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Feb-57 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Feb-57 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Feb-57 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Feb-57 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Feb-57 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

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22 Jan-57 Letter - T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 22 Jan-57 Letter - T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 22 Jan-57 Letter - T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 22 Jan-57 Letter - T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 22 Jan-57 Letter - T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 22 Jan-57 Letter - T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 6 Oct-54 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 6 Oct-54 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 6 Oct-54 Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 7 Nov-51 Telegram T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 7 Nov-51 Telegram T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 9 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 9 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Feb-51 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 2 Dec-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-50 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Aug-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Jul-50 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 18 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 18 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 18 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 20 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 7 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 7 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 7 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 7 Mar-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

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28 Feb-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 28 Feb-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 28 Feb-50 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 8 Feb-49 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 8 Feb-49 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 8 Feb-49 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 8 Feb-49 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 31 Jan-49 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Jan-49 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Jan-49 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Jan-49 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Jan-49 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 2 Dec-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 22 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 22 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 22 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 22 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Aug-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga tue22-date incomplete T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger tue22-date incomplete T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger tue22-date incomplete T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 26 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 26 Jul-48 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 20 May-48 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 20 May-48 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 20 May-48 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 20 May-48 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 20 May-48 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 20 May-48 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 19 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 May-48 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

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29 Apr-48 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 29 Apr-48 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 29 Apr-48 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 29 Apr-48 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 29 Apr-48 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 29 Apr-48 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 12 Sep-46 letter Private Secretary T.M. Soga 9 Sep-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 9 Sep-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 9 Sep-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 9 Sep-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Jun-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Jun-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Jun-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Jun-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 11 Jun-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Jun-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Jun-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 27 May-46 letter Private Secretary T.M. Soga 19 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 19 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 19 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 19 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 19 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 19 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 May-46 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 14 May-46 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 14 May-46 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 14 May-46 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 14 May-46 Newspaper Article Unidentified Tabloid (Daily Representative?) Public 14 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 May-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 10 May-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 10 May-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 1945 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 1945 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Apr-46 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 15 Apr-46 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 15 Apr-46 letter Ballinger, Mr T.M. Soga 11 Apr-46 letter Private Secretary Forster, Mrs 3 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 3 Apr-46 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Mar-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 21 Mar-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 21 Mar-46 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

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14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Mar-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 21 Feb-46 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Feb-46 letter Mrs Ballinger Forster, Mrs 5 Feb-46 letter Mrs Ballinger Forster, Mrs 18 Nov-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Nov-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Nov-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Nov-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Nov-45 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Nov-45 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 5 Nov-45 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 30 Apr-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Apr-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Apr-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Apr-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Apr-45 letter- T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Jul-45 letter T.M. Soga 12 Jul-45 letter T.M. Soga 10 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga 10 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Jun-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 10 May-45 letter Private Secretary T.M. Soga 8 May-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 May-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 May-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 16 Feb-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 16 Feb-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 16 Feb-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 16 Feb-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 16 Feb-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 16 Feb-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 8 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Jul-45 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger application for 17 Jan-45 building permit District Controller of Building Materials T.M. Soga application for 17 Jan-45 building permit District Controller of Building Materials T.M. Soga

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application for 17 Jan-45 building permit District Controller of Building Materials T.M. Soga 27 Dec-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Dec-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Dec-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Dec-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Dec-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 27 Dec-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 30 Oct-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Aug-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Aug-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Aug-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Aug-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 14 Aug-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 18 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 12 Jul-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 29 May-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 23 Mar-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 23 Mar-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 23 Mar-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 23 Mar-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 23 Mar-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger Mr Hobson (Chief 3 Mar-44 letter Mrs Ballinger Inspector) 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Feb-44 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

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8 Sep-43 letter Chief Native Commissioner T.M. Soga

8 Sep-43 letter Chief Native Commissioner T.M. Soga

8 Sep-43 letter Chief Native Commissioner T.M. Soga

8 Sep-43 letter Chief Native Commissioner T.M. Soga

4 Sep-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

4 Sep-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

4 Sep-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

4 Sep-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

4 Sep-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

4 Sep-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

4 Sep-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

31 Aug-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

31 Aug-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

31 Aug-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

29 Feb-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

29 Feb-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

15 Aug-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE Letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger

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15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 15 Jun-43 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 6 May-43 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger Inspector of Education: Department of Public 9 Apr-43 letter Education T.M. Soga Inspector of Education: Department of Public 9 Apr-43 letter Education T.M. Soga Inspector of Education: Department of Public 9 Apr-43 letter Education T.M. Soga 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 31 Dec-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 15 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Nov-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Nov-42 letter Chief Native Commissioner T.M. Soga Inspector of Education: Department of Public 1 Nov-42 letter Education P.E. Stander T.M. Soga Inspector of Education: Department of Public 1 Nov-42 letter Education P.E. Stander T.M. Soga Inspector of Education: Department of Public 1 Nov-42 letter Education P.E. Stander T.M. Soga Inspector of Education: Department of Public 1 Nov-42 letter Education P.E. Stander T.M. Soga 1 Apr-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Apr-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 1 Apr-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga NODATE letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger NODATE letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 19 Mar-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Mar-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 11 Feb-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Feb-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Feb-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 11 Feb-42 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

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26 Jan-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Jan-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Jan-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Jan-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 26 Jan-42 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs Commissioner of Native 23 Dec-41 letter T.M.Soga Affairs 25 Sep-41 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 8 Jun-37 Manifesto Mrs Ballinger public 28 May-56 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 May-56 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 May-56 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 May-56 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 May-56 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 28 May-56 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 5 Oct-57 letter T.M.Soga Mrs Ballinger 23 Oct-46 letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 6 Aug-46 letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 6 Aug-46 letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 6 Aug-46 letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 12 Jun-46 letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 12 Jun-46 letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 25 May-46 Letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 24 Oct-45 Letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 24 Oct-45 Letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 24 Oct-45 Letter Mrs Ballinger Secretary of Native Affairs 3 Sep-45 Letter Secretary - NAD Mrs Ballinger 8 Jun-45 letter Mrs Ballinger Mr Mears - NAD 24 Apr-45 Letter Mrs Ballinger 23 Apr-45 Letter Mrs Sibelekwana Secretary of Native Affairs 14 Apr-45 letter Secretary - NAD T.M. Soga 22 Mar-45 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga 22 Mar-45 letter Mrs Ballinger T.M. Soga

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