Black Sash Offices
Founded in 1955, the Black Sash was an organization of white, primarily upper-class women dedicated to ending the injustice of apartheid. They used their privilege to campaign against disenfranchisement and pass laws.
In the late 1950s the Black Sash began operating advice offices in the Black and Coloured townships. As volunteers, members of the Black Sash would aid people, primarily women, in obtaining passes or in fighting pass violations through legal assistance and bail money.
On May 25th we met with Mary Burton, a Black Sash member who joined a few years after the opening of the advice offices and who is currently writing a history of the Black Sash. She described the advice offices as “the intersection of the micro and macro” and said that, within the offices, welfare work was political work. Because they maintained relationships across the racial divide and ensured an ongoing conversation and awareness of the painful oppression of apartheid, Burton feels “the existence of advice offices kept the Black Sash alive.”
I gained more insight into the advices offices while visiting the University of Cape Town archives, which houses a large collection of Black Sash papers. Among the most poignant documents were questionnaires that Black Sash members used when interviewing clients. The questionnaires include information about the female client’s family, work history—or work history of her husband, if applicable—and residency.
Some of the questionnaires indicate judgment on behalf of the Black Sash members. Two of these documents include handwritten notes about the clients: “Annie has a bad manner” and “these people are clean and respectable.” I wonder what, if any, racial tension this may have created within the advice offices.
A British visitor to the advice offices, Lady Joy Packer, wrote an article for the Cape Times, chronicling a day in the advice office. Her article reads as a human interest piece, following “the ladies” of the Athlone Black Sash advice office and describing some of the people they have worked with. Packer combines narrative with criticism of the apartheid system, asserting that the situation will worsen if the Bantu Laws Amendment Bill is enforced. She does not include many details of the advice office, but she incorporates elements—“her indignation at the injustice of the system,” for example—that portray the workers as a committed force for justice.
This article and the questionnaires reveal painful stories of families wrenched apart, and I can understand why Mary Burton feels these advice offices were so critical from a political standpoint; affluent white women connected with African women in an intense and intimate way, generating emotional fuel to power the resistance movement.
-Jessie