Rosemary van Wyk Smith is a warrior you’d meet at a tea party. When she says the words “Black Sash” it is with the inflection of an old soldier’s clipped allegiance. But she also reserves a gentle swish for the H in “white”.
Rosemary van Wyk Smith is a warrior you’d meet at a tea party. When she says the words “Black Sash” it is with the inflection of an old soldier’s clipped allegiance. But she also reserves a gentle swish for the H in “white”.
“It’s like being in war situation” she says, raising her eyebrows as she escorts me into the past. She leans forward on thick forearms; hers is a body not grown soft like many women of her age. “I joined the Black Sash in 1967 as a very timid mother of four,” she confides, although it’s clear her demure English manner is a courtesy now.
If she was indeed “nervous” to meet me, something in her warmly impenetrable eyes quickly dismisses intimidation. “As the situation deteriorated, I became more involved.” she nods, the soft light catching her cropped hair, “Nothing happens unless someone makes it happen.” And she’s a veteran of making history happen.
The Black Sash was a non-violent women’s resistance organization founded in 1955, who Van Wyk Smith concedes “used the relative safety of their privileged backgrounds to speak out.” But the strategist in her insists that taking advantage of their positions was imperative for producing transformation.
She quotes Margaret Mead to me advisedly: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
She “got on the barricades” herself, recruited by a movement that once used shoe boxes as filing cabinets, she discussed tactics in candle-lit basements anticipating police infiltration and hung protest banners from Grahamstown’s iconic Cathedral of St. Michael and St. George.
“That was quite effective,” she says with a wrinkled grin, her choice of words revealing a fondness for pragmatic results. “I wasn’t always emotional, it was always grounded” she says as her fingers hit the table in emphasis.
But for Van Wyk Smith, battle did indeed become more personal than that. In doing combat with the administration negotiating the rights of dispossessed non-whites and their families, her operations aimed at doing human justice to the Sash slogan ‘Making Human Rights Real’.
“It was so appalling” she says with hard eyes as she recalls interviews with detainees, “People came out quite wrecked human beings.” For the Black Sash, warfare also meant managing the wounds of fellow warriors and their families.
Victory is still astonishing, but the vigor in her suggests the struggle is not over: “It is amazing that we are sitting here today without Apartheid” she acknowledges, “without legislated Apartheid,” she adds darkly. “If I may say so, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are on paper,” she says, unsatisfied with the implementation since the ceasefire.
But then with characteristic grace she turns on me, as if we were having tea together. “The future is yours you know,” she says suddenly, laughing, then issues a gentle order: "Get going!”
