Under Black Sash’s Banner, Affluent S. Africans Battle System : White Women Wage Own War on Apartheid

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa —  Bobbie Melunsky’s maid brought a tray of steeping tea and buttered scones into the lounge, where the lady of the house, surrounded by her oil paintings and antiques, dug into a thick file folder of her hate mail.

“Here’s a good one,” the 52-year-old homemaker said, extracting a leaflet that urges all white South Africans to phone Melunsky and other “traitorous dogs.” It helpfully includes the Melunsky family telephone number.

Another anonymous pamphlet purports to offer free food, free contraceptives and free swimming lessons at Melunsky’s pool.

Since 1964, when she had three toddlers at home, Melunsky has endured the white wrath that goes with fighting apartheid as a member of Black Sash, a group of white women who for more than three decades have worked to confront the white men who run South Africa.

2,000 Members

The 2,000 members of Black Sash--most of them middle-age, well-to-do homemakers and mothers--run advice bureaus for blacks, work in the black townships against abuses of state power and picket in their own neighborhoods against the system that grants whites a life of privilege at the expense of the black majority.

“These women have come out of the bridge, the golf, the tennis, out of the comfortable circuit of the very, very exceptional good life,” said Sheena Duncan, daughter of a Black Sash founder and herself a guiding force in the organization.

For their commitment to a one-person, one-vote democracy and black majority rule, Black Sash members have been shunned and harassed by government sympathizers, right-wing whites and even longtime friends.

Sons and husbands and fathers of Black Sash members have been stripped of government security clearances, fired from government jobs and kicked out of army officer candidate schools.

Detention Time

A dozen Black Sash members have spent as much as three months in detention without trial over the past two years. One 60-year-old member who joined the chapter here recently was questioned by police and asked to become an informer. She refused.

And, a few weeks ago, someone broke into the small Black Sash advice office in this coastal city in the middle of the night, poured gasoline on the floors and desks and struck a match. It was the second Black Sash office destroyed in less than two months.

“All of us feel a little more precarious these days,” said Duncan, 55. “But we can still say and do things in this country that a black activist cannot. And that puts a great responsibility on us.”

The Black Sash is a hybrid, part tea club and part fearless political machine. Not only do the members bake cakes and can fresh preserves for their Saturday afternoon fund-raisers, but they also attend rallies in black townships and stage protests in their own neighborhoods against everything from military conscription to residential segregation.

In Johannesburg’s northern suburbs recently, Kathleen Jordi stood at a busy intersection as her neighbors whizzed by in their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.

Jordi, 57, wore sensible shoes and a black sash over her shoulder and a poster reading: “Save The Weekly Mail--Stop Stoffel,” criticizing Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha’s decision to close an anti-apartheid weekly newspaper.

A few motorists mouthed curses. A few gave her a thumbs-up sign. Most just drove past. It was a fairly typical day. Later, Jordi went home and fixed dinner for her family.

“I feel desperate, really,” explained Jordi, the veteran of about 100 such Black Sash protests. “There are so few avenues of protest left to us. And since I can’t throw bombs . . . this is about the only way.”

The government prohibits public protests of two or more people, so Black Sash members stand separately, several blocks apart, along miles of city streets. Police in East London recently arrested several Black Sash members as they sat on a park bench deciding which one would take the first turn as a picket.

“I don’t think any of us believe we’re going to change people’s minds by holding a poster in front of them,” said Mary Burton, the Black Sash national president. “But we’re demonstrating to the (black) majority that there are white people prepared to do that.”

At 11 advice offices countrywide, Black Sash volunteers guide blacks through the white bureaucracy, from obtaining unemployment compensation to restoring South African citizenship. Some 8 million blacks lost their citizenship when the government assigned them to nominally independent “homelands.”

Black Sash also is one of the few liberal white groups working regularly in the black ghettos, fighting government threats of forced removals and consulting with grass-roots liberation leaders. Those activities, and Black Sash’s detailed reports on the plight of blacks, have drawn the attention of South Africa’s security forces.

So far the organization has escaped the government edicts that have effectively banned most anti-apartheid groups, including 23 this year.

The Black Sash has an almost impenetrable shield against such harsh, highly publicized government clampdowns because its members are all female, nearly all are white, and many are married to leaders of South African industry.

“We’re eminently respectable, unthreatening, white women,” says Ethel Walt, 62, the Black Sash chairwoman in the Transvaal. Her husband runs the South African branch of a large multinational corporation, which she asked not be identified for fear of reprisals.

(Although Black Sash membership is open to all races, fewer than a dozen members are black.)

Their position in white South Africa allows Black Sash members to take risks that might land black political activists in jail. It even lets them, as Melunsky put it, “get away with being a bit cheeky” with white figures of authority.

But it also sometimes causes them to be ostracized by their white friends, and although many spouses encourage the Black Sash work, it can also create conflicts.

Most of the 56 Black Sash members in Port Elizabeth, for example, are well known by the police and other whites.

When Des Chalmers hired a black political activist and a Black Sash member to work in his hardware store two years ago, white contractors in town boycotted his business and he went bankrupt. His wife, Judy, eventually took a paying job as Black Sash’s field representative here.

Black Sash member Viki Proudlock’s husband, a Port Elizabeth city engineer, thinks she’s too idealistic “and involved in something that’s very dangerous,” she said. Their 14-year-old daughter wrote a school essay recently on how she would react if her mother were arrested.

A female member of President Pieter W. Botha’s National Council, who considers Black Sash a radical organization, tried unsuccessfully to prevent her daughter from joining.

“When I see the horrors of apartheid, I find it hard to believe my mother is part of it,” said the daughter, Madeleine Stone, 34, who works full time in a Black Sash office.

When Sandy Stewart, a 30-year-old single mother, was arrested in front of her two young sons in 1986 and held without charge for three months, a prison warden accused her of being selfish.

“It worries me,” Stewart admitted. “I sometimes wonder: Am I being a responsible mother? But I think being political is an extension of nurturing. I brought children into this world and I’m trying to make it a better place for them.”

Stewart still receives late-night anonymous telephone calls. Vandals strung up a dead cat on her front porch recently and the police have even questioned her maid.

Anti-Apartheid Activities

Isobel Douglas-Jones, a Black Sash officer here, and her husband, Tim, the parents of 6- and 9-year-old boys, feel guilty about the amount of time they spend away from home on anti-apartheid activities.

“But it’s all part of living in a society as evil as this,” she said. “We couldn’t live here and not be involved.”

Black Sash was founded in 1955 to fight the removal of mixed-race Colored people from South Africa’s voting rolls, and it soon had 11,000 members. After losing that battle, the leaders decided to keep Black Sash alive as a permanent force for political justice. Only about 1,000 members stayed on board.

The group was isolated from the white public as well as black groups in the 1970s, when black consciousness rose to the forefront of anti-apartheid protest. But Black Sash’s ties to the liberation struggle improved in the 1980s with the birth of multiracial organizations, such as the United Democratic Front.

During the bloody township riots of 1984-86, Black Sash members attended political funerals and protest rallies, and black leaders often relied on the white, female faces to discourage violent confrontations between police and protesters.

Many members have joined Black Sash in recent years because they want to see for themselves what is happening.

“You realize the situation is terrible for blacks, but because of the way we’ve been brought up, you don’t see any way you can do anything about it,” said Michelle Laird, a 27-year-old mother of two who joined two years ago.

Laird, like most, made her first trip to a black township as a Black Sash member.

“My friends think it’s quite miraculous that I, as a white woman, could even go into a township,” Laird said.

That contact with blacks, an experience that few white South Africans have, gives Black Sash activists a hopeful view of a future under black majority rule.

“I don’t think they’re out to drive us into the sea,” said Walt. “If whites are prepared to give up some of their privileges, the country is big enough and wealthy enough to share with everyone.”

“We’d have to share, definitely, and it worries me a little,” said Cathy Binnel, a 48-year-old mother of two who belongs to Black Sash in Port Elizabeth. “I love my house and my antiques. But I’d still like to see it happen.”