Women's Prison at Constitution Hill

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Last night we went to a photo exhibition of historic buildings in New York City, hosted by the US Consulate General. While the exhibit was interesting, the setting was much more so for Bob and I: it was held at the former Women's Gaol (Jail) or prison on Constitution Hill, which is now a museum. This was the place where women who were arrested for things like not having the proper pass in the white part of town, holding hands with a white person, or operating a home business were held in appalling conditions during apartheid. The interpretive material was very well done; they had interviewed a number of former prisoners and wardresses, posted their stories and some photos, and set up small exhibits of artifacts from those days.

And those days weren't so long ago - the late 70s and forward. While we were looking at the exhibits, a woman came up to me and started telling me her story; she had been arrested and imprisoned there at age 14 because of the pass law. Black people were required to carry passes that allowed them to be in white areas. When they were brought in, the women (and young girls) were stripped, searched, and given a brown dress and headscarf to wear. No underwear, no shoes. The headscarf was actually given because the whites believed that black hair was dirty and needed to be covered to keep the situation clean. There were two buckets in each cell of many women; one was the toilet, the other was drinking water. Imagine the smell. If a woman was menstruating, she was given a cloth pad with no way to hold it in place. This forced her to walk hunched over to hold it, or to have blood running down while she used both hands to scrub floors. The women were given the jobs of scrubbing floors every day and picking up rocks in the yard. One of them said they believed that the wardresses threw the rocks back out in the yard at night so the women would be kept busy the next day. Every practice was designed to degrade and dehumanize the prisoners. Like many prisons, there were beatings and sexual abuse. There were both black and white wardresses, and the black wardresses did not fair much better than the prisoners in how they were treated.

It appears that during the late 70s and 80s, many of the prisoners were there as political prisoners, with a revolving door for some. The leading ladies against the apartheid struggle all served time there. The woman who came up to us had fought the police with rocks and a dustbin lid, and she is still living the pain of those days. She was one of those interviewed and comes to the museum to tell her story to whomever will listen, and, I suspect, solicit funds. She says she is not working, and when I asked her how she was surviving, she said, "God provides." She did not appear destitute in her appearance. She said she has a flat that she pays for from the money that the government provides for her son's schooling - I really don't know how that works. There is a history book for sale at the museum bookshop, and she says that they sell it for R300 and she gets nothing. I said that the proceeds of the book keep the museum going, and she repeated that she gets nothing for her story, although she was given 2 copies of the book. I have heard this sentiment before in the township: people come in to interview and photograph the poor, the desperate, and then sell the book or photos, while the subjects get nothing, they say. Having the proceeds support the museum or going back into the infrastructure or schools of the township is too distant a connection for them; they want to see money in their pocket. They don't want people to make a living from the misery. I can see their point, but I believe that telling the story makes a difference in what happens to relieve the misery; if the stories are not told, the photos not shared, then people don't know and can't help. The museum needs to keep going to serve this purpose, and education of current and future generations is worth the sacrifice, in my opinion. Of course, there are those folks who come in only to gather stories to make a profit, and the township folks are justifiably hard put to tell the difference.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the camera with us to take photos.

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