Julie Frederikse has written two new additions to the Maskew Miller Longman series They Fought for Freedom, a set of short, accessible biographies of great South African opponents of apartheid. Though Helen Joseph and David Webster came from two different epochs in the fight against oppression, they shared common characteristics and a unique connection.
Joseph was born in England in 1905 and taught in India before moving to Durban. It was only after she was divorced that she moved into opposition politics, first in the trade union movement and then later in the Congress of Democrats – the white wing of the African National Congress alliance of the 1950s – and the Federation of South African Women. As a leader of the federation she played a significant role in the 1956 women’s march on the Union Buildings and was rewarded by the state for her work by being one of the last 30 of 156 charged with treason between 1956 and 1961.
In the 1960s she was banned repeatedly and under virtual house arrest, emerging in the early 1980s as an elder statesperson and symbolic figure for the United Democratic Front. She died on Christmas Day 1992.
Webster was born 40 years after Joseph in the Zambian copper belt, the son of a South African miner who had migrated northwards in 1922. His political education came through university politics, at Rhodes University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and through his work as an anthropologist in Mozambique and KwaZulu- Natal.
For most of his life, Webster was an academic teaching in the social anthropology department at the University of the Witwatersrand. He combined this with anti-apartheid activism. This commitment was to cost him his life: on May 1 1989, he was assassinated outside his house in Troyeville, Johannesburg.
Like the other books in this series, these biographies are short, simply written and readable. They do not pretend to be comprehensive but point to longer, more detailed works that demand to be written.