XPost: alt.obituaries, alt.history, soc.history
XPost: za.politics, za.misc
Black Sash celebrates the life of Phoebe Brown:
Phoebe Brown (nee Barlow), who died on Saturday 25th July, will be
remembered as a quiet, shy, and unassuming person with a strong social conscience, and a deep concern for people whose situations were very
different from her own.
She grew up in Somerset West, and went to school at Herschel, an
independent Anglican school for girls in Claremont, Cape Town. While
still living in Cape Town she
volunteered to work for the Cape Flats Distress Association, which was
founded to help alleviate the problems of poverty, disease and
malnutrition on the Cape Flats.
Her contact with the Black Sash started in 1955 when the then
Nationalist government decided to remove ‘coloured’ voters from the voters’ role. Phoebe believed that every piece of legislation that was
passed by the apartheid regime was moving away from her values so she
needed to stand against it. She took part in many protest stands
opposite the Pietermaritzburg City Hall, and spoke about one
frightening march organised by the University of Natal. It was night
time and many carried banners, and torches; young men ran alongside
the marchers taunting them, and the police joined the unruly mob. At
least one of the marchers was set alight when a torch behind him fell,
although no one was seriously hurt.
Phoebe met Peter Brown at the Durban July Handicap in 1948, and they
were married in Somerset West on 15 April 1950, holding their
reception at the historic wine estate Vergelegen, owned by the Barlow
family.
Peter soon became very involved in anti-apartheid activities, with
many friends from a wide range of social and racial backgrounds. Among
his many activities, he was Natal Chairperson of the Liberal Party,
formed on 9 May 1953, and banned by the regime in 1968. He was also instrumental in the 1979 founding of The Association for Rural
Advancement to support rural communities in their resistance to forced
removals imposed by the Black Spots legislation designed to move black
people from freehold land in areas that the Nationalist regime
declared white. He was imprisoned during the 1960 State of Emergency,
and later ‘banned’ from public life for a decade from 1974 to 1984, confined to their house in the Pietermaritzburg district, and required
to report weekly to the local police station. When he needed to visit
their farm at Mooi River he had to have permission and was told on
which day he could go, and which day to return.
Throughout this turmoil Phoebe was always an enormous support to
Peter, she simply did not make an issue of their difficulties, nor try
to divert Peter from his political activities. She knew their house
was continually watched by security police, but tried not to be
intimidated by this. She was allowed to visit the schools of their
children, Christopher, Vanessa and Anton, and to move around
relatively freely, but she chose to stay at home in order to give
Peter as much support as possible.
When asked how she felt about the closure of the membership of the
Black Sash in 1995 Phoebe said that by this time she had began to feel
a bit alienated by the young, feminist, seemingly radical women who
had joined the organisation. She remembered a meeting she went to with
Joy Roberts, when they initially felt they had come to the wrong
venue, waited a while, and then discovered that it was, in fact, the
Black Sash meeting.
However, she remained committed to the work of the Black Sash,
regularly attending gatherings. One of the last things she said to me
was, “I was proud of having belonged to the Black Sash, and I still
am. I have always kept my Sash.”
- Mary Kleinenberg (1 August 2020)
http://www.blacksash.org.za/…/tributes-to-black-sash-stalwa…
--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com
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