A Few South Africans: Annie Silinga

Sue Williamson
A Few South Africans: Annie Silinga, 1983
Photo etching/screenprint collage
Image: 70 x 52.5 cm

“I will carry a pass the day the Prime Minister’s wife carries a pass.” Annie Silinga told the huge crowd gathered outside the Cape Town City Hall during the Defiance Campaign in 1952. And to this day, neither of them do. For her steadfast refusal to submit to the indignity of the hated pass, Annie was arrested many times and sent away from her family back to the Transkei. “My children are orphans whose mother still lives and my husband is a widower though his wife is alive,” she declared, before returning to Cape Town once more to take her place in her family home and wait to be arrested again. “Mayibuye iAfrika” – Africa must come back – she cried good humouredly as white policemen came to arrest her for sitting on a Whites Only railway station bench. She was fearless in her fight for justice, and today, old and bedridden in her house in Jungle Walk, Langa, she has not changed. Although officials have urged her to take a pass so she may qualify for a pension, she laughs them away. “After all these years? No thank you.” A founder member of the South African Federation of Women, one of the 20 000 who marched to Pretoria on August 9, 1956 to protest the carrying of passes by women, and one of those who was to spend over a year in court as an accused in the Treason Trial, Annie’s cheerfulness, clarity of vision and refusal to submit to oppression have always directed her life. She remains a source of strength and inspiration to women everywhere. “Annie Silinga aknal’o ipasi Akalifundi, akanatyala” Annie Silinga hasn’t got a pass And she doesn’t need it. She’s not guilty. Note: Annie Silinga died in her home at Langa in 1984. The love felt for her by the community was attested to by the enormous crowd at her funeral.