Female prisoners held during apartheid finally get a voice

Very few people know that Barberton Correctional Centre was one of the facilities where female political prisoners, who helped bring an end to apartheid, were held during the 1960s and 1970s.

It was used to incarcerate both black and white female political prisoners, but the Barberton name appears in little of the current historical information.

This is largely because national and international attention has tended to concentrate on the fate of a single prison as a metaphor for the struggle as a whole, namely Robben Island.

But now a project documenting the memories of former female prisoners of Barberton, which was notorious for the brutal treatment that took place there, promises to shed light on inmates’ experiences and to bring it to life to day visitors of Barberton Museum.

An exhibition on the women held at there during apartheid was officially launched last Tuesday evening. Speaking at the launch, Janie Grobler, principal museum and human scientist, who conducted the research, said the museum decided to present the exhibition as part of celebrating 20 years of democracy. “My research actually started about three years ago when I realised that very few people knew that political prisoners had been held at Barberton. Though a number of works on the history of the liberation struggle and the people involved with it appeared recently, almost none have given attention to these women. Apart from works written by the inmates themselves, very few sources describe the conditions they lived in,” said Grobler.

She said Robben Island and Pretoria Central, where male political prisoners were interned, are well known throughout the world, but very few people know Barberton was set aside especially for white women during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. “Most of these female political prisoners were sentenced under the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 and the Terrorism Act of 1967. Though Barberton was not the only prison where they were held, it did play an important role in the liberation struggle and the women who were held here deserve to have their stories told with the same passion as those of the men,” she added.

The women held at Barberton included those sentenced as part of the Bram Fischer Trial; Jean Middleton, Esther Barsel, Sylvia Neame, Ann Nicholson, Florence Duncan and Molly Anderson, as well as those sentenced during the Neville Alexander Trial; Elizabeth van der Heyden and Dulcie September.

The others who served sentences at Barberton included Dorothy Nyembe, Amina Desai, Sheila Weinberg, Stephanie Kemp, Violet Weinberg, Susan Jobson, Helen Hendricks, Dorothy Dlamini and Dorothy Kubheka.

Among those who attended the exhibition included executive mayor Cllr Lazaros Mashaba and his entourage of councillors, namely Chris Gololo – former member of parliament, Musa Linkwati – Mbombela circuit manager for the department of education and Vusi Gana – general manager for cultural affairs. The public is invited to the library to view the exhibition.