Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons by Shanthini Naidoo (review)

Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons honors the women who survived imprisonment during the movement to end South African apartheid. It recognizes women as dedicated freedom fighters playing key roles of leadership in the struggle, and a documentation of herstories from which, in much of the literature, save for narratives on legendary figures like Winnie Madikizela Mandela and Miriam Makeba, women are absent. It also sheds light on prisons as a space for political struggle.

Naidoo's style of writing, easy flowing but penetrating, makes the book suitable for the average reader. It is an invaluable teaching tool at the university level among the disciplines of history, ethnic studies, South African studies, women's studies, and mental health. Readers interested in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the aftermath of apartheid will also find this book an excellent companion to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid (2003) and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (1998). It is also suitable reading for high school classes on social justice and anti-apartheid activists.

The author, Shanthini Naidoo experienced the tail end of apartheid as a youth. Later, while studying for a master's degree in journalism, her reporting on the of death and funeral of Winnie Mandela in 2018 motivated her to seek out the six women incarcerated with Mandela, defendants in the less-well-known Trial of Twenty-Two in 1969. Her first book, Women in Solidarity: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid (2020), which was published in South Africa, was the product of subsequent conversations with the four remaining survivors. That book was subsequently published in the United States, which is the title under review.

Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons is an emotionally difficult journey for the reader, yet the underlying theme of the universal desire for freedom and human rights made possible by activists makes this a necessary read. The book's twelve chapters pivot around chapter 3, "The Trial." In 1969 South Africa's government arrested twenty-two activists—fifteen men and seven women—and accused them of terrorism, and twenty-one charges were levied under the Suppression of Communism Act. The arrests appeared orchestrated to break the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress (ANC). Despite brutal torture, solitary confinement, and threats of violence toward their families, the seven women refused to testify against their comrades and the prosecution crumbled. The twenty-two were released in the fall of 1970.

While covering the death of Winnie Mandela, Naidoo sought to learn more about the women who survived imprisonment. Chapters 4–7 focus on the four survivors: journalist Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin, trade unionists Shanthie Naidoo and Rita Ndzanga, and activist Nondwe Mankahla. Deeply troubling is the brutality that emerges from the interviews, the survivors' unresolved trauma resurfacing as raw, open wounds passed on to younger generations, and reflected in South African society today. Intricately connected to these sections is chapter 12, addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Of focus is the lack of specificity in documenting gender-based violence against women, instead characterizing such brutality as "serious ill treatment" (175). This flaw is critical, as violence against Black women under apartheid continues in other forms and contexts in postapartheid South Africa, described as parallel to entanglement in the cycle of poverty, lack of resources, economic instability, and unhealed trauma. An open-air prison.

The book's strengths are in the author's interaction with the reader, sharing her thoughts and emotional responses as a journalist during the time of Winnie's death, and in her desire to explore unspoken events surrounding the imprisoned women, Winnie's comrades. Naidoo's approach to the survivor's experiences and the impact of the barbarity of apartheid, during and after, makes for an informed, compassionate journalism that can be extended to other populations presently under siege.

Journalism can expose injustice, acknowledge its occurrence, and motivate...