At a Glance
Soweto and the Making of a Journalist
Joyce Sikhakhane was born in Johannesburg in 1943, and she grew up in the world of the Witwatersrand townships — the world of Soweto, of Orlando, of the urban Black South Africa that apartheid had created and continued to engineer through the Group Areas Act, the pass laws, and the systematic denial of permanent urban residence rights to African people. She grew up in a world that the dominant South African media — white-owned, white-edited, white-oriented — largely did not report on except when it was threatening or criminal, and her impulse to become a journalist was in significant part an impulse to make that world visible, to insist on its existence and its humanity in the face of a media system that preferred to treat it as peripheral or invisible.
The barriers to Black women entering journalism in apartheid South Africa were formidable. The profession was racially restricted in practice even where not always formally by law; the major newspapers were white-owned institutions that reflected the racial assumptions of their owners and their primary readership; and the additional barrier of gender — in a profession already male-dominated in most of the world — compounded the racial exclusion that Joyce Sikhakhane faced. That she broke through these barriers and established herself as a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail was an achievement that required not only talent but persistence in the face of structural hostility.
The Rand Daily Mail of the 1960s was, under Laurence Gandar's editorship, one of the few South African newspapers willing to engage critically with apartheid — to publish reports on prison conditions, on the treatment of political prisoners, on the lives of Black South Africans in ways that challenged the comfortable ignorance that the mainstream media maintained about the apartheid system's human consequences. It was not a radical newspaper — it operated within the constraints of South African press law and the commercial imperatives of a publication dependent on white advertisers — but it was a newspaper in which critical journalism about race was possible in a way that it was not at most of its competitors. Joyce Sikhakhane's reporting from Soweto for the Rand Daily Mail was part of this critical tradition, and it made her one of the most important Black voices in South African journalism of the decade.
The Underground: Courier Work and the Network Around Winnie
By the late 1960s Joyce Sikhakhane was active in the ANC underground — not as a military operative but as a courier, a role that required the ability to move through Johannesburg's surveillance environment carrying information and maintaining the communication lines between different parts of the underground network. The focus of the network she was involved with was Winnie Mandela — the wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, who had become the most important internal voice of the ANC's resistance after her husband's imprisonment and who maintained connections between the internal movement and the external mission that the apartheid security apparatus was continuously trying to sever.
Winnie Mandela in the late 1960s was already under intense surveillance — the Security Branch knew that she was the most important link between the imprisoned leadership and the continuing internal resistance, and they watched her movements, intercepted her communications, and maintained pressure on everyone who had contact with her. Operating as a courier in this environment required the ability to move carefully, to behave normally under observation, and to accept the risk that one was being watched without allowing that awareness to produce the kind of behavioural change that would confirm the watchers' suspicions.
Joyce Sikhakhane did this work alongside her journalism, maintaining two parallel lives — the public life of the journalist, the reporter who moved through Soweto and through the city's institutions and whose movements had a professional justification, and the private life of the underground courier whose movements served a different purpose. The combination gave her a cover that was in some ways more effective than that available to activists whose entire existence was political, but it also meant that the exposure of one life endangered the other.
The Raids of May 1969: Arrest and the Beginning of the Long Night
The Security Branch's raids of May 1969 swept up a network of activists connected to Winnie Mandela and the ANC underground. The raids were coordinated, pre-dawn operations of the kind that the security police had perfected over the previous decade — arriving at multiple addresses simultaneously to prevent warning and escape, using the element of surprise to catch activists before they could destroy documents or alert others. Joyce Sikhakhane was among those arrested.
She was taken to Pretoria Central Prison and placed in solitary confinement under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act. The Terrorism Act of 1967 had given the security police detention powers that were, if anything, more comprehensive than those of the earlier ninety-day law — indefinite detention without charge, without access to legal counsel, without any obligation to inform a court or the detainee's family. Section 6 was specifically designed for use against those suspected of terrorism-related activities, which in the apartheid state's definition included virtually any form of organised opposition to the racial order.
Solitary confinement for 180 days is a form of torture that does not leave physical marks. The psychological effects of complete isolation — from family, from friends, from human contact of any kind, from the social relationships through which people maintain their sense of themselves — are well documented in the clinical literature and in the testimonies of survivors. The isolation removes the external reference points through which a person constructs their identity; the interrogation that accompanies it is designed to exploit the vulnerability that isolation creates; and the combination produces forms of psychological damage that can persist for years or decades after the physical confinement ends.
Joyce Sikhakhane's 180 days of solitary confinement under interrogation changed her. She has spoken and written about the experience with the honesty of someone who has worked through its consequences rather than suppressed them, and what she describes is the experience of a self being dismantled — of the social, political, and personal identity that she had built through her journalism and her activism being stripped away by the combination of isolation and interrogation until what remained was something damaged and diminished that she had to spend years rebuilding.
The Pretoria Twelve: Trial and Acquittal
After her release from solitary confinement, Joyce Sikhakhane was charged in the Pretoria Twelve trial — the treason prosecution of the twelve activists arrested in the 1969 sweep. The trial was the apartheid government's attempt to destroy the network around Winnie Mandela and to prosecute the internal ANC underground for its activities, using the evidence gathered through the detention of the accused and through informants within the network.
The trials of this period — the Bram Fischer trial, the Rivonia trial, the various treason and terrorism prosecutions of the 1960s and early 1970s — were the apartheid state's preferred method of dealing with the liberation movement's leadership: not the extra-judicial violence that would become more common in the 1970s and 1980s, but the use of the legal system to imprison and neutralise activists through the mechanisms of criminal prosecution. The trials were intended to be both punitive — removing the accused from political life — and demonstrative — showing other potential activists what happened to those who challenged the state.
Joyce Sikhakhane was acquitted. The state's case against her and others among the Pretoria Twelve did not meet the evidentiary standard required for conviction, and the acquittals were a partial legal victory for the accused. But the acquittal came after months of detention, the psychological damage of solitary confinement, the disruption of her journalism career, and the exposure of her underground activities — a price that the acquittal did not undo. The apartheid state had achieved much of what it sought regardless of the legal outcome: it had removed her from political circulation for the duration of the detention and trial, damaged her psychologically, and demonstrated to others the cost of involvement in the underground.
A Window on Soweto: Writing Back Into Existence
A Window on Soweto, published in 1977 by the International Defence and Aid Fund in London during Joyce Sikhakhane's exile in Britain, is one of the essential personal documents of the anti-apartheid movement. It is simultaneously a memoir of growing up in Soweto, a social portrait of the township world, a journalist's account of life under apartheid, and a record — partial, carefully managed, but honest within its management — of what the detention and the Pretoria Twelve trial had done to the person who had lived through them.
The book was written at a particular moment — in the years immediately following the Soweto uprising of June 1976, when the world's attention had been drawn to the South African townships in ways that the apartheid government had spent decades preventing. The image of Hector Pieterson being carried through the streets of Soweto after being shot by police had become one of the defining images of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the world was newly attentive to what it meant to grow up Black in the townships that had produced that uprising. A Window on Soweto answered the world's suddenly awakened attention with the depth of a lifetime's experience — not the dramatic images of the uprising but the texture of ordinary life, the social world, the human relationships, and the political conditions that had produced the generation that rose on 16 June 1976.
The act of writing the book was itself part of Joyce Sikhakhane's recovery from what the detention had done to her. Writing — the professional act she had been trained in, the vocation through which she had first asserted her existence in public life — was the means through which she rebuilt the self that the isolation of Section 6 detention had damaged. The book is, among other things, an account of that rebuilding: of how a person who has been psychologically dismantled by state violence reconstructs themselves through the act of testimony and narrative.
Legacy: The Journalist as Witness
Joyce Sikhakhane's legacy is the legacy of the witness — the person who was present, who paid the cost of being present, and who told the truth about what they saw and experienced. Her journalism from Soweto in the 1960s was witness work — the insistence on making visible a world that the dominant media system preferred to ignore. Her detention and its aftermath were the cost the apartheid state exacted for that insistence. Her memoir was testimony — the effort to ensure that what had been done to her and to others was recorded and understood.
She was one of the first Black women to enter South African journalism professionally, and she did it at a time when the profession's racial and gender barriers were almost absolute. She maintained her journalism career alongside underground courier work for the ANC, accepting the risks that combination entailed. She survived 180 days of solitary confinement in Pretoria Central Prison and wrote her way back to herself. These are not small achievements in any framework for assessing a human life.
The democratic South Africa that emerged from the transition she had been detained for helping to build gave her back the country she had reported on as a young journalist — gave it back transformed, though not without complication and not without the unfinished business that all transitions leave behind. She returned to it and continued the work of journalism in the new dispensation, bringing to that work the experience of what the old dispensation had tried and failed to do to the people who reported honestly about it.