Non-Persons

Suppression by banning

For most of the past 20 years, Winnie Mandela has lived in a uniquely South African limbo. She is "banned," an exile within her own country. The wife of Nelson Mandela, imprisoned leader of the African National Congress, the black 47-year-old former social worker is considered to be a threat to public order and white supremacy. Since 1962 she has enjoyed real freedom for a total of only eleven months, and she is now beginning another five-year term as a banned person. Thus she, along with 114 other black and white opponents of apartheid, remains an outcast, a legal leper with few rights and many restrictions.

Banning is one of the most chilling methods for suppressing dissent in South Africa. There is no requirement for formal charges, no trial, no appeal. Individual cases vary, but banned people may be confined to specific districts away from their homes and are often restricted to their quarters at night or on weekends. They must report regularly to the police and are never permitted to meet socially with more than one person at a time. (The authorities recently made a brief exception: Mrs. Mandela was allowed to attend her brother's funeral. On her way home, she was in an automobile accident and suffered a broken arm.)

Those who are banned are forbidden to write anything, even a diary, and the press is prohibited from quoting them--even after death. Their freedom to work is restricted; they are under constant police surveillance; their homes, telephones and cars are often bugged and their mail is intercepted. "Old friends would see me and cross the street to walk on the other side," recalls one former victim. Adds another: "You become a non-person."

While the privations of banning are harsh, they are not as unpleasant in most cases as the more common punishment of indefinite detention without trial. In 1960 the government began to practice detention in addition to banning, which was ten years old. The two repressive measures have become part of the grim pattern of national life. Over the years, banning and detention have been used to silence more than 1,500 critics of the regime, including 350 people seized during the Soweto riots in 1976 and scores of journalists, clergymen and antiapartheid leaders following the death in custody of Stephen Biko in 1977.

Following a wave of riots and demonstrations that disrupted official celebrations of the 20th anniversary of South Africa as an independent republic last May, the security police have stepped up their campaign of repression. Since then, Winnie Mandela has been joined in her unusual exile by a dozen or so people, including Student Leader Andrew Boraine, son of an opposition member of parliament. At the same time, nearly 600 people have been detained without trial, some of them for as long as seven months. Among those arrested: 18 union and student leaders and, embarrassingly enough for the government, the niece of Pieter Koornhof, Pretoria's Minister for Race Relations. Last week the government moved again, slapping a five-year banning order on David Johnson, president of the black students' society at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand. Protested one angry student: "No words can adequately express the revulsion we feel at such state action."

The rebanning of Winnie Mandela prompted sharp criticism from church leaders and liberal politicians. David Dalling, spokesman for the opposition Progressive Federal Party, called the decision "vicious and personally malicious." The Rev. Philip Russell, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, publicly deplored "the whole diabolical detention-banning machinery." The protests, however, made little difference. The government clearly intends to continue stifling all opposition to apartheid.

But in her own quiet way, Winnie Mandela rose to the challenge. She reported to the police station for the first time under the new banning order by deliberately walking through the door marked "white," a practice she intends to continue for at least the next five years.

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