Sarah Simatlane came to Johannesburg in 1978, from Kimberley, hoping for a better life. Instead, she was instantly arrested for violating the Group Areas Act and sent to the notorious Number Four prison in Braamfontein.
Simatlane still shivers every time she steps into the jail, even though she thought she had laid her ghosts to rest. ”When I went into that prison I was a naive young girl; I knew nothing,” she says. ”When I arrived at the jail, I was strip-searched. I had to open my legs while the wardens poked around in my vagina and ass.”
Today, Number Four, otherwise known as the Women’s Jail, forms part of the Prison Exhibitions and Tours on Constitution Hill. It is also the new home of the Commission on Gender Equality (CGE).
This week, old prisoners gathered at the prison to celebrate the launch of the commission’s offices and the Women’s Jail museum exhibition.
Built in 1910, the Women’s Jail was in use until 1983, and most inmates were short-term prisoners with sentences of less than three months. It gained its reputation through the detention of activists such as Albertina Sisulu and Fatima Meer, who protested against apartheid.
Joyce Seroke, chairperson of the gender commission and a former inmate of the jail, now works within the very walls where she was once imprisoned. Working in the jail, she says, represents the triumph of the nation over a system that ”once denied people their humanity and dignity”.
”It is ironic that every day, since the CGE moved to Constitution Hill, I walk through the same entrance I walked through on that fateful day in 1976,” she says. ”I proceed past the garden into the same atrium where I was stripped of my name and identity and given a number.”
For Simatlane it was the jail experience that gave her a political conscience. ”I learnt too much in that jail,” she laughs. Simatlane was in prison from 1978 to 1980, an unusually long time for someone who had merely defied the Group Areas Act. ”That is because no one knew I was in prison. I never stood trial, I was just detained — and my family back in Kimberley had no idea what had happened to me.”
Unlike Simatlane, Deborah Matshoba was first arrested for leading the Soweto protests and held for six weeks before being re-detained under the Terrorism Act. After being moved from Pietermaritzburg to Middelburg, she ended up at Number Four.
For Matshoba, the hardships of jail did not even come close to the fear she felt for her family. ”I was scared for my sibling and family, of what the police would do to them,” she remembers. ”I kept imagining what the police would do to my children, because I would not cooperate.”
After facing dire conditions in the other prisons, she arrived at Number Four underfed and with her hair falling out. But, at the women’s prison, Matshoba finally found a camaraderie that helped her out of the abyss she had fallen into emotionally.
”I remember [fellow prisoner] Jubie [Mayet] making an egg mixture and rubbing it on my hair. I drew courage once more when I got to Number Four.”