Sheena Duncan
THE Black Sash is not disbanding, as Business Day posters proclaimed this week. We are alive and well and forty years old, celebrating our birthday. We will be continuing our work in our restructured form as the Black Sash Trust.
The Black Sash was formed in 1955 as the Women’s Defence of the Constitution League and later adopted the name The Black Sash because that is what the press called us after the black sashes we wore in mourning for the “rape” of the Constitution had become a trademark. We were an organisation whose membership was open to women resident in South Africa.
Until 1985 we operated as a single membership-based organisation, most of whose work was done on a volunteer basis. We ran the organisation on voluntary energy and commitment and were able to raise the costs of maintaining our advice offices and other projects on money we raised at our annual morning markets, jumble sales, book and cake sales, bridge drives and the other ways in which women raise money to drive the causes they care about.
But by 1985 we were feeling the pressures of an ever- increasing workload in the advice offices and the decrease in the number of women available to do voluntary work during office hours. They were now working in their own jobs and could only do the extra things in the evenings and at weekends.
This has affected voluntary organisations all over the world and is not unique to South Africa, but it meant we had to employ more people to do the work we used to do by ourselves and that meant we had to raise more money.
When the Fund Raising Act was introduced in 1978, we had taken a principled decision that we would not seek registration because of the way that Act was then used to prevent the work of organisations unpopular with the government.
For a variety of reasons connected with the loopholes in the Act and our consequent need for tax exemption, we formed the Advice Office Trust, which managed all the service programmes of the Black Sash, leaving the “political” work to the membership organisation.
We then had two parallel structures which answered to our needs at the time and worked efficiently in tandem. Now two structures are no longer appropriate or necessary and have been taking up a great deal of voluntary energy which could be better spent.
At our National Conference last weekend we adopted several technical and organisational resolutions which repealed the Constitution of the membership organisation and created one unified structure called the Black Sash Trust, which will put the programmes and projects of the Black Sash under professional management.
We will employ a National Director, but will seek to maintain and extend the involvement of volunteers in our work, especially in the enormous amount of lobbying and advocacy work in which we are now engaged. Because a Trust does not have “members”, these volunteers will be called
We would, of course, have preferred to close down the Trust, but it manages our money, so we had to dissolve the membership organisation.
In common with all South African NGOs and community-based organisations, we have been hard hit by the loss of skilled and committed people to Parliament, provincial legislatures and the administration. One day, the tremendous contribution of NGOs to the workings of government in the transitional stage will be recognised, but it has left us all hard hit for the immediate future.
It is very hard to think ourselves back into the heady days in 1955 and 1956 when more than ten thousand women marched and stood in silent vigil in protest against the Senate Act, the removal of the coloured voters in the Cape from the common roll, contrary to an entrenched Constitutional provision, and the early beginnings of detention without trial and the destruction of the Rule of Law.
We were rather different then. In our first manifesto, dated May 23 1955, we described ourselves as “mothers and grandmothers, wives and sweethearts …” We would never do that now. Our manner then seems curious to the granddaughters who now carry on our work. We used to wear hats and gloves. We now wear jeans and T-shirts with slogans like Womandla! But the commitment to democratic and accountable government and to justice and human rights has not changed.
What has changed is the way in which we can now work. We remember the days when Minister John Vorster replied to some communication from us by saying “your communication is in the waste paper basket where it belongs”, and the time when Dr Piet Koornhof accused two of us of coming to him “hiding behind the skirts of the Church” because we had gone to see him with a church delegation to protest the break-up of family life caused by the pass laws.
Well, we do not have to worry about Dr Koornhof any more. He has moved from the mass removal of populations and the breaking up of families to body building with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Cape Town, while we have moved from protest to advocacy in a new, open, and amazingly transparent system of constitutional government. It is not by any means perfect, but it is very different and we have no doubt that we have much to contribute to the building of a truly just society, based on our forty years of experience of how law and administration affects the lives of people.
This is still our strength. Our knowledge does not come only from academic study of Acts of Parliament and Regulations, but from our understanding, taught us by the people in our advice office queues and the communities with whom we work, of how these laws affect people at the receiving end of the policies of those in power.
We will be working in a different structure in the coming years, but we are not going away just yet.
Sheena Duncan is chairperson of the Black Sash Trust and a former president of the Sash