At a Glance
The East Rand, Industrial Labour, and the World That Shaped Bertha Gxowa
The East Rand — the strip of mining and industrial towns extending east of Johannesburg along the Witwatersrand reef — was one of the most economically significant areas in South Africa and one of the most socially brutal for the Black workers whose labour sustained it. The gold mines and the factories that had grown up around them required enormous quantities of Black labour, and the migrant labour system that supplied that labour was designed with the specific purpose of keeping it cheap, mobile, and controllable: Black men came from the rural homelands on fixed-term contracts, lived in single-sex hostels, were paid wages that assumed they had no family obligations in the urban area because their families were supposed to remain in the homelands, and were removed when their contracts ended and the mines or factories no longer needed them.
The township communities that grew up around the East Rand mining towns — Germiston, Boksburg, Brakpan, Springs — were the places where this system revealed its human costs most directly. Women who had come to the urban area, either through their own labour migration or as wives and children of male migrants who had overstayed their permits, lived in conditions of permanent legal insecurity: their presence in the urban area was technically illegal under the pass laws unless they could demonstrate that they had been born there or had lived there continuously for more than fifteen years, and the constant threat of removal to the homelands they had never lived in or had left decades earlier was a form of political control as well as a practical constraint on their lives.
Bertha Gxowa grew up in this world and was shaped by it in the way that the liberation movement's grassroots activists were shaped: not by reading Marx or by attending political schools, but by the daily direct experience of what it meant to be a Black woman in the apartheid economy — to work for wages that barely covered survival, to live in housing that the government controlled and could take away, to raise children in schools that were deliberately under-resourced, and to be subject at every moment to the legal apparatus of racial control that the apartheid state had constructed. This experience was itself a political education, and the ANC Women's League that Gxowa joined in the early 1950s was the organisational vehicle through which that education was transformed into collective action.
The ANC Women's League and the Federation of South African Women
The ANC Women's League had existed since 1948, but it was through the 1950s that it developed into a genuine mass organisation with the capacity to mobilise women at scale across the country. The formation of the Federation of South African Women in 1954 — a multi-racial organisation that brought together the ANC Women's League, the Indian women's organisations, and white women's groups affiliated to the Congress Alliance — gave the women's movement a broader organisational base and a clearer political framework than the Women's League alone could provide. The Federation was explicitly non-racial, explicitly feminist in its analysis of the specific ways that apartheid oppressed women, and explicitly political in its determination to build a women's movement that was not separate from the liberation struggle but integral to it.
Gxowa's work in the Women's League in Germiston was the local, day-to-day expression of this national political vision. She organised meetings, recruited members, maintained the networks that allowed the League to function in the face of the apartheid state's constant attempts to disrupt it, and built the relationships of trust and shared purpose that sustained collective action over years and decades. This work was not glamorous and it was not, for the most part, the kind of thing that appears in the historical record — it left no documents, no speeches, no statements that historians can quote. It left only the organisation itself and the political consciousness it built in the women who participated in it.
The campaigns that the Federation and the Women's League ran through the 1950s were directed primarily at the pass laws — the system that the apartheid government was steadily extending to cover more and more of the population, and that represented for women a particularly direct assault on their ability to maintain households and families. A woman who could not demonstrate legal residence in the urban area could be arrested, charged under the pass laws, and forcibly removed to a homeland she had never lived in or had left decades earlier, separating her from her children, her employer, and her community. The Women's League's campaigns against the pass laws were therefore not abstract political demands but responses to the immediate, lived threat that the system posed to the communities in which Gxowa and others organised.
9 August 1956: The March to the Union Buildings
The 1956 Women's March to the Union Buildings was the culmination of years of organising by the Federation of South African Women and the ANC Women's League against the pass laws, and it remains one of the most significant acts of collective resistance in South African history. The logistics of assembling approximately twenty thousand women from across South Africa at the seat of government in Pretoria on a single day — without the communications technology that later organisers would take for granted, against the background of constant police surveillance, and drawing on the networks that Women's League branches like Gxowa's in Germiston had been building for years — was itself an organisational achievement of the first order.
Gxowa was among the women who made the journey to Pretoria, who stood in the amphitheatre of the Union Buildings and left their petitions at the doors of the Prime Minister's office, and who participated in the thirty-minute silence that followed — a silence that was simultaneously a demonstration of discipline and a statement about what the apartheid system had done to women's ability to speak publicly without consequence. The song that the women sang — Wathint' abafazi, wathint' imbokodo, "you strike a woman, you strike a rock" — became one of the defining anthems of South African women's resistance, and its meaning was inseparable from the specific women who sang it: women like Gxowa who had been organising in their townships for years, who had come to Pretoria not as a spontaneous protest but as the culmination of a sustained political campaign.
The march did not stop the extension of pass laws to women — the apartheid government proceeded with its plans regardless of the protest — but it demonstrated something more durable: that the women of South Africa's townships were organised, determined, and capable of collective action on a scale that the apartheid government had not anticipated and could not easily suppress. The political confidence that the march built, in the women who participated and in the communities they returned to, was a resource that sustained the liberation movement through the dark years that followed.
The Post-Sharpeville Years and the Maintenance of Grassroots Structures
The banning of the ANC in April 1960, following the Sharpeville massacre, destroyed the organisation's formal structures inside South Africa but could not destroy the relationships and networks that people like Gxowa had spent years building in their communities. The period between 1960 and the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983 is often described, in histories of the liberation struggle, as a period of organisational silence inside South Africa — a period when the ANC's internal capacity had been destroyed by the post-Sharpeville repression and the Rivonia arrests and when the movement existed primarily in exile under Oliver Tambo's leadership. This description is true at the level of formal organisation but misleading at the level of community and grassroots politics.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, township women like Gxowa maintained the informal networks — the relationships of mutual support, the shared political consciousness, the community organisations that were not formally ANC but that operated within the ANC's political tradition — that gave the liberation movement its social roots. These networks were not visible to the security police in the way that formal organisation was, and they were therefore harder to suppress. They transmitted political memory across generations, kept alive the commitments and values of the banned organisation, and provided the social infrastructure that made the rapid growth of the UDF in the early 1980s possible: the UDF did not build the liberation movement's community base from scratch, it organised and focused a base that people like Gxowa had maintained through two decades of repression.
The UDF Era, the 1994 Elections, and the Parliamentary Career
When the United Democratic Front was formed in August 1983, the East Rand townships were among its most active areas, and the women's organisations that Gxowa had been part of for three decades were among its constituent members. The UDF's Eastern Transvaal and East Rand structures drew on exactly the kind of grassroots organisational base that the Women's League had built in places like Germiston, and the transition from informal community networks to the more formal structures of the UDF was in many ways a natural continuation of what had always been happening at the community level.
The years between 1983 and 1990 were the most intense and most violent of Gxowa's political life — the emergency years when the apartheid state deployed military force in the townships and detained thousands of activists, and when the East Rand was one of the areas of heaviest political conflict. She navigated this period in the way she had navigated every previous period of repression: by maintaining the networks, by continuing the community work, by refusing to be intimidated into silence or inactivity.
After the 1994 elections, Gxowa was elected as an ANC MP — one of the many grassroots organisers who were given parliamentary representation in the new South Africa as recognition of the decades of work they had contributed to the liberation struggle. Her parliamentary career brought her a national visibility that her township organising had not, and she used the platform to continue advocating for the women's issues and community interests that had been the focus of her political work since the 1950s. She served in Parliament and remained active in ANC structures until late in her life, dying in 2011 in the democratic South Africa whose creation she had spent more than sixty years working toward.
Legacy
Bertha Gxowa's legacy is the legacy of the grassroots — the hundreds of thousands of township women whose decades of organising in ANC Women's League branches, in trade unions, in civic associations, and in the informal networks of community solidarity built the social base without which the liberation struggle's national leadership could not have functioned. She is representative of a category of historical actor that political history systematically undervalues: the organiser rather than the leader, the local rather than the national, the woman rather than the man. The fact that she was eventually an ANC MP gave her a visibility in the record that most women of her generation and her type did not achieve. But the parliamentary career was a recognition of what she had already done, not the measure of her contribution.
The 1956 Women's March, in which she participated, is commemorated annually on 9 August as Women's Day in South Africa — a public holiday that acknowledges the collective act of resistance that twenty thousand women performed on that day. Bertha Gxowa was one of those twenty thousand, one of the women from the East Rand townships who travelled to Pretoria and stood in silence and sang and left their petitions at the doors of power. The march is remembered because of the scale of what those women did collectively. The individual women who made the march are less remembered. That disparity is the problem that her story, and the stories of all the Bertha Gxowas of the liberation struggle, ask us to address.