Bloody Sunday: The nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa's secret massacre

By Mignonne Breier

Winner of the Sunday Times Nonfiction Award 2022
Sunday, 9 November 1952. It should be remembered as a day of infamy but few know of a brutal massacre when police opened fire at an ANC Youth League event in Duncan Village in East London. In the cover-up that followed, the facts were almost lost to history. Bloody Sunday follows the trail of the remarkable Sister Aidan, who worked in the township, to piece together one of the most tragic days of the apartheid era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780624091158

Mignonne Breier

Mignonne Breier is a former journalist, lecturer and education researcher who has worked at the University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape and the Human Sciences Research Council. She is also the author of Letters to My Son, published in 2013. 

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9780624089810_FC

BLOODY

SUNDAY

THE NUN, THE DEFIANCE CAMPAIGN

AND SOUTH AFRICA’S SECRET MASSACRE

MIGNONNE BREIER

Tafelberg

For Margot, my mother

East London circa 1952

Duncan Village/East Bank Location, 1952, from the murder-trial court record

Preface

On an unseasonably hot spring day I found myself in the National Archives in Pretoria, in front of a cardboard box full of old brown folders tied with string, creations of the ‘Secretary of Native Affairs of the Union of South Africa’. I was investigating claims that police killed more people in Duncan Village, in East London, on 9 November 1952 than in the notorious massacre at Sharpeville eight years later. I was trying to find out if a death toll of that magnitude – which would make it the largest massacre in the apartheid era – could go unrecorded. I took out ‘Registration of Births and Deaths of Natives in the Union – General File – 1947 to 1952’. The file bulged with wafer-thin carbon copies of type- and handwritten correspondence. I turned the fragile pages and searched for my answer. I found it.

That day was effectively the end of a personal research project that has consumed my spare time for nearly seven years. Initially it was all about an Irish nun, Sister Aidan Quinlan, and then it became much more.

+ + +

I can’t tell you when I first heard of Sister Aidan. In some sense she has always been with me. I grew up in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, in the darkest days of apartheid, in what is still called ‘frontier territory’, the site of a century of wars between the Xhosa and the mainly British colonists. In the 1940s and early 1950s my parents, Bob and Margot Crozier, lived and worked at various mission schools in what were then the Ciskei and the Transkei. My father was a history teacher and school principal and my mother a Latin teacher before she became a full-time housewife. Their postings included Lovedale College in Alice; Healdtown near Fort Beaufort (where Robert Sobukwe was my father’s ‘brightest pupil’ and Nelson Mandela matriculated about a decade previously); Freemantle School near Lady Frere; and the Faku Institution at Mfundisweni, near Flagstaff.

I was born when they were at Mfundisweni. When I was two, they gave up mission education and moved to what used to be called Grahamstown, named after a British military officer, and is now called Makhanda, after a Xhosa religious and military leader. That is how things have changed in my time.

My mother changed too, it seems, from someone who enjoyed mission life to someone who resented that my father had ever ‘taken’ her to the ‘back of beyond’, as she put it. She warned me against following suit or doing ‘good works’ in what were then called ‘the locations’. ‘You will be the first to be killed,’ she would say. One day, to drive home the point, she told me about a nun who was burned to death in the township she served. She didn’t provide details but her veiled remarks were enough to ensure that the image of a flaming woman in a nun’s habit would haunt my dreams from time to time and restrain me from crossing the valley that separated our part of white Grahamstown from the black townships.

In 2013, twenty years after my mother’s death, I opened her Bible and found two newspaper cuttings dated 1952. Each contained a single picture, captioned, but with no accompanying story. The first showed a smiling young woman with round cheeks in a white wimple. The caption read: ‘Dr Elsie Quinlan, known as Sister Aidan at the Mater Dei Hospital, East London, who was killed during the rioting in the East Bank location on Sunday (9 November 1952).’

The second photo was of a burned-out classroom. The walls and corrugated iron roof had collapsed onto broken floors. The caption read: ‘All that is left of the Duncan Village Mission School for Native children after the East London riots on Sunday night.’

I realised then that Dr Elsie Quinlan, otherwise known as Sister Aidan, was the woman of my mother’s warnings and my early nightmares. But I had no idea what gave rise to her death and what else had happened that day. I decided to find out.

Many years later I still have unanswered questions but also enough information to tell a story that is far more complicated than the one I think my mother knew. It is not only about Sister Aidan, about whom I found a sizeable archive of material to work with. It is also about scores of other people who were killed by police that day, who have left only the slightest of traces in the written history of South Africa but who should be remembered too. A Daily Dispatch journalist called the day ‘Black Sunday’.¹ I call it Bloody Sunday, with its echoes of the massacres of that name in Russia (1905) and especially Ireland (1920) and Northern Ireland (1972). Sister Aidan was from Cork.²

In East London, the official death toll for the day was eight black people (seven African and one coloured) killed by police gunfire or bayonets and two white people killed by Duncan Village residents. According to alternative media and police sources, however, the police in Duncan Village kept shooting for several hours. These sources estimate that police killed between eighty people (those who died on the day) and more than two hundred (if the people who died subsequently of injuries are counted). Although the Sharpeville massacre, in which sixty-nine people were killed, and other killings post-1960 were investigated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, atrocities committed during the early apartheid period from 1948 to 1960 remain largely unexplored. Claims that far more people were killed in Duncan Village on 9 November 1952 than the official toll recorded have been reported sporadically over the years but have not been fully investigated and the names of the black victims are presumed to be lost to history. My book is based on multiple archival as well as oral sources. I believe it is the first to investigate the unofficial death toll claims, to show how the massacre was in all likelihood covered up, and to unearth some of the names of the victims.

This is what I found.

A few words about terminology

In this book I generally use the terminology of the time. The word ‘location’ is an example. Until the 1960s this was the word most frequently used to refer to the areas where black people were required to live in terms of segregation laws both prior to apartheid and during its early days. With the sprawling creations of grand apartheid, usually situated some distance from the city, came the word ‘township’. Although commonly used today to refer to all black areas, ‘township’ does not capture the particular nature of the ‘location’ in the 1940s and 1950s – which was typically sited relatively close to the cities, but often haphazardly developed, neglected and overcrowded.

The key events in this book took place in East London at a time when there were three locations in the city: the largest was East Bank location, followed by West Bank location and Cambridge. Alongside East Bank location was a relatively new development called Duncan Village. In the period that I describe, mainly from 1949 to 1953, the name Duncan Village was used to refer to both this section and East Bank location. In the 1960s, when most of the houses of East Bank location were demolished, the name disappeared entirely.

The outbreaks of violence described in this book were labelled ‘riots’ at the time. Today one might prefer to avoid the term because of its associations with white racist attitudes of the time. To me, the word still has value. In this book I draw a distinction between different forms of public violence. I see ‘uprising’ as a deliberate attempt to overthrow a government or other authority, ‘unrest’ as a state of ongoing ferment, and ‘riot’ as a relatively spontaneous eruption of violence in response to provocation or oppression. This does not mean that riots are without meaning or direction. To quote Martin Luther King, a riot is ‘the language of the unheard’.¹ The violent eruptions that I describe in this book amount to riots, arising in all cases in response to, or exacerbated by, violent action on the part of the police. The peaceful demonstrations that preceded the riots I consider to be ‘protests’, although protests can encompass violence.

The written texts from the 1940s and 1950s that I have consulted for the purposes of this book generally refer to white people as ‘Europeans’ and black people as ‘natives’, ‘non-Europeans’ or ‘Bantu’. I use these terms when quoting directly. Elsewhere I use the terms that are commonly used for redress purposes in South Africa today: white, African, coloured and Indian, with ‘black’ referring generically to the last three categories.

I have no desire to perpetuate the categorisation of human beings by race, but this has been such a predominant feature of South African life for so long, with so many associated advantages and disadvantages, that not to do so would render my narrative incomprehensible. The fact remains: one’s life chances in South Africa in the years that are the focus of this book were determined by the colour of one’s skin. In more complicated ways, that is still the case today.

PART ONE

BEFORE

I wonder if white people ever think of what goes on in the hearts and minds of persons against whom … stupid discriminations are practised … The white man is creating an unfathomable well of hatred against himself.

– Z.K. Matthews, Freedom for My People (1981)

1

Remembrance (1)

On the day it happened, Mxolisi Mhlekiswa¹ went to Eastern Beach, as he did on most Sundays, to play in the surf and watch the beautiful people of the locations of East London train and hone and display their bodies in various ways. Bodybuilders, weightlifters and boxers alike would race up and down the sand dunes, then go through their paces – posing, flexing, grunting, lifting, striking, dodging – to the delight of the girls who watched and giggled and preened in response. Families came for picnics, lugging food and blankets by bus or tram or on foot, and spending whole days in the sun, despite the wind. The city authorities did not trouble them, as long as they remained on the far end of the beach, beyond the esplanade, across the Blind River, at the edge of the Nahoon nature reserve, away from the places that white bathers enjoyed – Orient Beach, the aquarium, the esplanade.

For fifteen-year-old Mxolisi, living in a one-room house in East Bank location with his widowed mother and siblings – eleven in all – going to the beach was a weekly treat, to be dreamed about all week long. He had reached Standard 4 at the school of the amaRoma on top of the hill in the Thulandeville section of East Bank location, the school with the nuns and the white sister doctor. In a year’s time, he would be eligible for Welsh High School, the only high school and government school in the location. If he got as far as JC (Junior Certificate),² he could even become a teacher. But on Sundays he just wanted to be like the men on the beach.

Usually he stayed as long as possible, until the sun was about to set and his fingers were wrinkled from the seawater. Then he would run the six miles or so to Ventshu Street where he lived. It was his way of training for the day when he would be one of the beautiful people, displaying his muscles on the beachfront.

On the afternoon of 9 November 1952, Mxolisi was with his friends on Eastern Beach, watching the boxers train, when he noticed location people walking, running, with children beside them, babies on their backs, bundles on their heads, and bags in their hands. Mxolisi and his friends were curious and ran up to them. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘We are fleeing to our homes in the rural areas,’ they replied, ‘because things are bad in the location. The soldiers and the police are shooting the people.’ Mxolisi remembered his mother, who was recovering from illness; she was probably alone at home. He ran back to the beach, grabbed his clothes and, without stopping to change out of his swim shorts, but pulling on his top as he ran, he made his way back to East Bank location.

And so it was that after running from the beach, across Oxford Street and into Connaught Avenue, across the railway line at Panmure, down Frederick Street, then into Bantu Street, Mxolisi Mhlekiswa witnessed an event that became printed so indelibly on his brain that many decades later he still weeps with sorrow when he talks about it.

+ + +

For the authorities of East London and a good proportion of the white population in the city, 9 November 1952 was Remembrance Day, the Sunday closest to the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when memorial services were held across the Commonwealth to commemorate the dead of World Wars I and II.

The town clerk, H.H. Driffield, had gone to great lengths to prepare for the service at the Cenotaph in Oxford Street. He wrote copious letters of invitation, and filed the carbon copies along with the responses, programmes of previous Remembrance Day services, drafts of the one to come, letters about traffic arrangements, seating arrangements, the raising and lowering of flags, the number of chairs to be hired (175), alternative arrangements to be made in case of inclement weather (the City Hall was at the ready), the order of proceedings (in Afrikaans as well as English), and which religious leaders to invite to participate.³

Driffield’s main concern was balancing the demands of encroaching Afrikaner nationalism with the British loyalties of the town’s essentially English-speaking and opposition United Party-supporting population. In the end Driffield’s programme managed to strike a fine balance between Crown and Union. The ceremony started with prayers for ‘all in authority’, including Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother, the Governor General of the Union of South Africa, the ministers of the Crown and ‘those who are set in authority over us, that all things may be so ordered and settled by their endeavours, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations’. There was a prayer for peace and for the United Nations, a prayer for those who had died and for those who mourned them, and Scripture readings that emphasised the value of laying down one’s life for the love of God and Christ. The hymns were the favourites of many churches – ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, ‘Abide with Me’, ‘Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven’. A bugler sounded the last post and reveille. The service ended with ‘God Save the Queen’ but not before the new national anthem was sung, the Afrikaans one introduced by the National Party and called ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’.⁴

The South African Medical Corps, the South African Air Force, the Kaffrarian Rifles, the 3rd Heavy Battery, the Sea Rangers and the Memorable Order of Tin Hats were all handsomely represented. The SA Legion of the British Empire Service League had reserved a hundred places in advance and filled the seats. Church leaders came in their religious garb and representatives of all the City Council departments in formal dress. The mayor wore his gown with mayoral chain. And then there were the civilians, many of whom had lost relatives in the wars – women in hats and gloves, a few older children in their Sunday best, and the occasional besuited man who had not been to war or did not want to remember it in a military uniform.

+ + +

Only the police did not accept their invitation. In a letter sent three days before the event, Major A.L. Prinsloo, district commandant, regretted to advise the City Council that ‘due to the exigencies of service, members of the South African Police will not be able to attend’.⁵ What the exigencies were, he did not say, but subsequent events made them clear. The Remembrance Day service was scheduled for 3 pm to 4 pm. In East Bank location, on the dusty square of land called Bantu Square, another meeting was to be held at the same time, with its own agenda of remembrance, entirely different from that of the service in Oxford Street.

Major Prinsloo was expecting trouble at that other meeting and had ordered his men to prepare themselves to deal with it. Prinsloo cancelled all their leave, called in reinforcements from other areas, including thirty Zulu policemen from Durban, and had all the police in the city and neighbouring towns, as well as the reserve force, on standby. Many who attended the Remembrance Day service would have noticed heavy vehicles driving through the city in the preceding days, including troop carriers with armed policemen. They might have seen them again that afternoon, trundling down Oxford Street, turning at Connaught Avenue, heading in the direction of the location.

+ + +

There were no black people at the Remembrance Day service in East London in 1952. The event was strictly ‘Europeans only’ though Driffield had not gone so far as other councils, like Kokstad, and labelled the chairs accordingly.⁶ No one invited the black ex-volunteers from East London who had served in the wars, not even the families of the twenty-seven men whose graves lay in East London cemeteries and were listed in the records of the War Graves Commission.

More than half a million South African soldiers served in the two world wars. Of these, more than a third (over two hundred thousand) were black (African, coloured and Indian).⁷ More than eight thousand of these black soldiers were killed and thousands more were injured or taken prisoner.⁸

Soldiers of colour worked as trench diggers, stretcher bearers, labourers, hospital attendants, guards, cooks and messengers. They patrolled roads, built bridges, served administrations. With very few exceptions, they were not allowed to carry arms, despite many appeals to do so. Racial prejudices and fears (that blacks who carried arms for their country would have greater claim to the vote or that they might one day use such arms against whites) were at the heart of the government’s insistence that they play a non-combatant role only.⁹ Professor Z.K. Matthews of the University College of Fort Hare described their frustrations after the Second World War. In the countries in which they were stationed, he wrote, they worked alongside men of different racial and cultural backgrounds who treated them as fellow soldiers, not labourers, fighting together against the same enemy. ‘In the comradeship of war they had learned that colour was only skin deep and A man’s a man for a’ that!’ Several were decorated for bravery. They returned home with expectations of a better life. But they found on their return that South Africa had remained the same. They had been discriminated against in pay rates during the war. They received unequal benefits and gratuities with demobilisation. They were not welcomed home as heroes but shunned, as they had been before, as second-class citizens in the land of their birth. As Matthews said:

The colour bar was as rigid as ever; the pass laws and the poll tax laws were enforced just as stringently. There was no sudden rise in wages and the fact that a man had been on active service did not carry much weight with employers, military pensions were meagre and did not afford economic security. All these things engendered a mood of dissatisfaction.¹⁰

For white ex-servicemen from East London, the City Council built 143 new houses ‘with hot and cold water, electric light and servants’ rooms’ and sold them at the cost of construction.¹¹ Further provision in the area was made for a new school, cinema, and welfare, government and business sites.

African ex-volunteers from East London returned to the three overcrowded locations, where they could only rent, never own, property: West Bank location on the west bank of the Buffalo River, East Bank location and Duncan Village on the east bank, and Cambridge location on the outskirts of the suburb of that name. Close to sixty-six thousand people were living in these locations by 1949, so tightly packed that there were twenty-two times as many people per square acre in these areas as in the white suburbs.¹²

Two government commissions and an extensive survey by a City Council official had warned the council that the locations were overcrowded and unsanitary. Public health and economic welfare disasters were imminent, they said. But the council failed to build the houses needed, claiming they had run out of money ‘as a result of difficulties arising from the war’. Location inhabitants continued to live cheek by jowl, particularly in the Tsolo section of East Bank location, a mass of wood-and-iron shanties so overcrowded that when three burned down, 125 people were displaced.

This is the area where the other meeting of 9 November 1952 took place.

+ + +

Not all of Mxolisi’s classmates went to the beach on Sundays. Some had to stay at home and help with chores – carrying water, emptying slops, sweeping floors, washing clothes, caring for younger siblings. For those whose families kept cattle on the surrounding commonage, there was herding to be done, and milking, as on any other day. Some liked to hang around the people who would fill the streets, gossiping, drinking, playing dice, making music – whether kwela, traditional, swing, church or American-style jazz. This was the Sophiatown of the Eastern Cape. Listen hard and you could hear someone practising the saxophone or the trumpet; one family even had a piano. Children made music too – those fortunate enough had their own pennywhistles, Boy Scouts used their borrowed bugles and drums, others played guitars made out of tin cans or one-string basses out of tea boxes. A few liked to go to church and sing hymns. Mxolisi did too, at one stage, when he was an altar boy at the church of St Peter Claver Mission; but not anymore. He had not yet felt the pull of the tsotsis (gangsters) with their girls and knives and flashy American shoes. Mxolisi was still a scholar, but he was no longer a churchgoer.

Then there were the young people who attended the Sunday afternoon meetings on Bantu Square. These were organised by the African National Congress Youth League and men like the shopkeeper and saxophone player Alcott Gwentshe, the teacher Cornelius Fazzie, the journalist J.J. Matoti, and Joel Lengisi, who worked as a lawyer’s interpreter when he wasn’t working for the ANC, which was most of the time. For months now there had been meetings every other Sunday, usually in the afternoon to give the church people time to attend. They would start with hymns and songs and then came the speeches, many speeches, about the laws the people hated. Most disliked was the one called ‘failing to produce’ – failing to produce whatever piece of paper you were required to have at hand when the police asked you to show it to them.¹³ Most important were the papers you needed to seek work, to show you had found work, to live in the location, to be in the city after dark: the pass laws.

To say the ‘young people’ of the location attended these meetings is an exaggeration. Despite its name, most of the League’s members and all of its leaders were at least a decade older than the youth, some two decades. Youths were only tolerated, around the edges of the meetings, and were chased away when they tried to become involved. Still, the youths came, and hung around, mesmerised by the energy of the occasions, the power and charisma of the speakers, and the enthusiasm of the men and women who punctuated the meetings frequently with the call and response: ‘Mayibuye! iAfrika!’

+ + +

The Sunday meetings in East Bank location were usually held on Bantu Square, but when someone very important came to speak, the meeting was held on the sports field at Rubusana Park at the city end of the location. That is where the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws was launched on 15 June 1952.

More than twenty-five hundred people turned out to hear the acting Cape leader of the ANC, Dr James Njongwe, who travelled from his home in Port Elizabeth for the occasion.¹⁴ He reminded the people that the racist white government of the National Party had been in power for more than four years, passing many evil laws that needed to be defied. But the hardships of the black people went back further. The laws that required them to carry passes and limit the number of cattle they owned and build fences on their rural land dated back many years before. Some black farmers had been killed when opposing the fencing laws. Others had died during a miners’ strike. And thousands had laid down their lives for white people in the two world wars, with no due reward. ‘You have not been thanked for your participation in the two world wars,’ Njongwe told the crowd. ‘You have fought for the freedom of the white people. Now let us fight for the freedom of the Africans. Let us go into our own struggle.’

Njongwe then appealed for volunteers who would deliberately transgress apartheid laws, invite arrest and ‘flood’ the jails rather than pay fines. By 9 November, more than 1,322 Africans had been arrested in East London and most of them charged and jailed for one to three months or more with hard labour. The campaign had been peaceful until a few weeks previously. Then violence erupted – first in Port Elizabeth, then in Johannesburg, and finally (the night before) in Kimberley. Four whites were killed as well as an untold number of black people (officially the figure was forty but this was disputed). In each case the violence of the people was preceded by police violence.

The government had retaliated by banning leaders and prohibiting political gatherings. But on this Sunday, 9 November 1952, the Youth League of East London had permission for a religious meeting.

+ + +

It was Constable B.J. Kloot, of Duncan Village police station, who spotted Barend Johannes Vorster walking alone in East Bank location at lunch-time that Sunday. It was rare to see a white person in a location, particularly on a Sunday, but Vorster sold life assurance and burial policies for African Homes Trust,