Blanche La Guma
Blanche La Guma—member of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the Federation of South African Women—served her community as a nurse and fought for freedom in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Along with her husband, Alex, Blanche La Guma battled oppression as a Coloured woman and was under constant scrutiny from the Special Branch for their political activities. Both she and Alex endured restrictions and time in prison, and they eventually moved to London and then Havana to both protect their family and continue their work for the ANC abroad.
La Guma wrote her memoir In the Dark with My Dress on Fire in 2010, years after, as she says in the book, her work in the struggle ended. Her personal story is engaging, and it connects to many themes and historical events we have read about in class and learned about while in Cape Town—including District Six, the communist party, activism across racial lines, life under restrictions, and Coloured identity.
She writes on her life in exile, a perspective that we have not read much of so far. The La Guma family left South Africa in 1966 and did not return home until 1994. By then, Alex had died, and her sons had grown up abroad. At times disoriented and at times empowered, she found both opportunity and pain outside of South Africa, enjoying a breadth of experiences; when Alex died in Havana, a city she describes fondly, in 1985, she was at peace with his body staying in Cuba, saying “we had no home but exile” (188).
Reading La Guma’s memoir, I hear her voice as a wife, mother, and nurse. At the same time, she writes extensively on the need for armed struggle. She knew that this would bring pain and death to her country and her people but also knew that it was necessary—and not any worse than what they were already enduring under apartheid. She attended the ANC meeting in Durban in 1961 where they decided to take up armed struggle and form Umkhonto We Sizwe—“spear of the nation”—known as MK. She writes, “We were going to start a guerrilla war from scratch. We knew this meant that some would die. But we also knew that you either go for it and take whatever is going to come, or you sit and do nothing and things just keep getting worse” (81).
Many stories from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States focus on Martin Luther King’s practices of nonviolence and peaceful protest; as students we are often told a story where freedom is won through love and compassion, though that story belies the depth of nonviolence. In learning about the many layers in the fight to end apartheid, I have grappled with what pushed the movement, and the individuals participating in it, to violence. Reading this memoir I came to understand that freedom and justice could only be won through a strategic armed struggle, and Blanche La Guma was willing to risk all that was precious to her to win that struggle.
-Jessie