Standing in her own name

One of the sure-fire ways to attract the ire of feminists is to refer to them as the wives of their spouses. They will insist on their own identity. They were individuals — with rights and privileges — before they were wedded.

My posthumous apologies go out to the late Sally Motlana who, apart from her sterling role as head of the Black Housewives League and Number Two at the South African Council of Churches, I’ve always known as the wife of Dr Nthato Motlana. Growing up in the 1980s, one was aware of the civic role of the Committee of Ten led by Nthato. When the jackboot of apartheid cruelly morphed into mowing down black schoolchildren, apart from Abu Baker Asvat, for whom Albertina Sisulu worked as a nurse, the other physician who treated police victims without cost was Nthato.

Perhaps Nthato’s stay in the civic and political limelight was as a result of the adage that behind every successful man stands a resolute woman. Mrs Motlana was the proverbial woman in the saying. After Nelson Mandela was arrested in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, he was swiftly moved to jail in Pretoria.

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Thus captured, he did not ask to see Winnie, his wife. Instead, the Black Pimpernel asked for Nthato’s wife. On her way from Johannesburg to the capital, Nthato’s wife was stopped by security police.

When they asked who she was, she responded: “I am Sally Motlana.” After reading Mukoni Ratshitanga’s book, I now know that Sally was a political powerhouse in her own right, bringing impeccable struggle credentials. Before Mandela went on the lam, which culminated in the arrest at what has now become known as the Nelson Mandela Capture Site in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, he checked in at a house in Dube, Soweto — the Motlana household, dressed in rags. The woman of the house thought the man at the door was of the riffraff bent.

It was only when he opened his mouth to speak that the penny dropped: it was Mandela. “Sally, vula maan! (Sally, just open!)” Looking at the anecdotes in the book, it is difficult to imagine how Sally Maunye’s boyfriend couldn’t have married her.

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