The story of Bibi Dawood Of Worcester

by Zubeida Jaffer

Her hand rested on the knob of the radio as she hit the metre band relaying the late afternoon news of the BBC World Service.

It had become a daily ritual. The luscious green Indian countryside with its destitute brown clay houses faded into oblivion as she strained to hear some news, any news of developments in her beloved country.

She allowed nothing to interfere with this time when those sound waves passed across the sea and struck the tiny village many hundreds of kilometres outside Bombay, connecting her with a country of which she had once been so active a part.

Her children watched her but could not understand their mother’s obsession. They were too young to remember. Shabiera was five and Gulzar four when their mother bade farewell to the people of who crowded into the Le Sueur Street home of her father in Worcester in 1968.

The house overflowed with tears that night before she went into exile and, outside on the sidewalks, the numbers steadily grew to witness the sad parting.

Ayesha Mukadam (nee Dawood), or Bibi as she was fondly referred to by all, had been ordered to leave the country of her birth.

She was served with an exit permit on 7 May 1968 which stated that the holder, nationality South African, was “leaving the Republic of South Africa permanently.”

A child of Worcester born to an Indian merchant and a Malay woman originally from Calvinia, she left behind her dying father confined to bed with Parkinson’s disease, barely thirty days after her mother died.

In a photo display at the predominantly white Worcester Museum, she stands alongside her seven classmates and her teacher-they were the standard five class of 1939- an acknowledgement by default that she had indeed existed.

This standard five pupil neatly clad in black gym and a white shirt staring from the photograph was to grow up to face charges of high treason.

She was the child who grew up to be one of the most “hounded and hated” women in Worcester and who was sent into exile against her will.

And this is the central fact of her life: In 1968 she boarded a ship in Table Bay Harbour as an “unusual woman for her time” who had led her community in their fight against Aparthied; when she got off in Bombay, India, she was an “Indian wife” to be left to fend for herself in an isolated village while her husband joined thousands of Indian migrant workers in the Middle east.

Twenty-two years after her departure, her name remains on the lips of the generation she helped lead in the fight against apartheid in this rural town in the Western Cape.

“She was not a person with a lot of bookish knowledge, she was not well-read in theory, but she was fearless,” said her youngest brother Achmat as we sat behind the shop’s counter in Le Sueur Street where Bibi had worked after having completed standard eight. At the time, students attended high school at the Sohnge Training College for teachers and had to travel to Cape Town if they wished to matriculate.

Achmat Hadjie had helped his sister in her fight. But she had been the one with the “guts”, he said. “Do you think they will let her come back?” asks his wife, Shahida apprehensively as she prepares take-away meals for customers in the shop.

It was from this shop that many had been sent to the endless stream of political prisoners who filled the Worcester jails during the fifties when the ANC launched its Defiance Campaign against six segregation laws.

Mariam, bibi’s mother known as Ama, prepared the meals to show her support for her daughter’s stand. Ama’s father, who came from a familt whose trade it was to erect the huge stone buildings which still stand in many towns in the Western Cape, loaded his family onto an ox-wagon and headed for Calvinia for his next assignment. It was there that Ama was born and where her uncle, Abraham Esau a Calvinia black-smith led the resistance against the Boer commandos in 1901.

It was on the night of 10 January 1901, hours after boer commandos galloped into his Northern Cape Town that he was thrown into jail as his grand-niece was to be fifty years later. Despite protests of the local people, Abraham Esau was tied to a gum tree on 15 January and lashed by boer commandos until he fainted. Three weeks later, he was put in leg irons, tied between two horses, and dragged at a brisk pace for more than a kilometre to the outskirts of the town where they shot him several times, killing him.

Bibi’s father, Dawood Hadjie Achmat Tambe, known by all as Abba, was one of many Indians who came to South Africa at the turn of the century. He arrived in Durban by boat in 1899 at the age of 26 years-a tall, forceful man.

Her was one of the more fortunate Indian immigrants who arrived in this country as a dependent of a Cape Town shop-keeper, thus avoiding the fate of other Indian immigrants who had to work as indentured labourers on the hot cane fields of Natals.

Crossing the beautiful rolling mountains of the Boland, he arrived in Worcester where a number of Indian families were already settled. With time, he was able to acquire a working knowledge of the Afrikaans language through which he bound his family closely with the local Coloured and African people who patronised his shop.

As the heat hung heavy over the last day of 1927, a third child was born to Abba and Ama. They prayed to God in gratitude for this gift, not knowing what great joy and sorrow this daughter would bring.

Ayesha Bibi was to grow up in a community where there was little distinction between African, Coloured and Indian. In the 1936 census, compiled by the Department of Statistics, the population of just over 12 000 in the town of Worcester was more than half Coloured, with only 40 Indians and 375 Africans. The Whites totalled 5,631.

Linked together through the Afrikaans language, these people of colour lived and loved together and eventually were to stand together against the White town intent on separating them.

In India, far from the Worcester mountains where she was to lead the fight against this separation and the Paarl valleys where she was to be imprisoned for her activities, Ayesha Bibi has lived with her two children in the village whose people she had married.

Sarwa, a few hundred kilometres south of Bombay. A village with about 100 dwellings scattered across the hills where women, children and the aged struggled to survive while the able-bodied men sought work in the Middle East.

Bibi prepared the staple fish diet for her children daily and waited for the months to go by so that she could enjoy the company of her husband. He came home once every two years and spent two months with the woman for whom he had gone to such great lengths to marry.

In April 1951, when she walked down to the trade union office in Russell Street, Worcester to “throw in her weight” against the repeal of the Coloured Voters act, she could never have known that this would lead her to Sarwa and a suffering different from the many months she had spent in south Africa jails.

Along the red dust roads carving along the Indian hillside, the post had reached her from the nearest Post Office in an adjacent village. Draped in a sari, she sat down to read my letter.

I wanted to tell her story. As a child, I remembered my parents travelling to Worcester to bid farewell to this woman who was leaving the country on an exit permit. Years later, in 1981, I visited the family in Worcster as a journalist to help gather information about her involvement. Her only sister, Amina, wept as she fearfully dug out the photographs of Bibi which you see on these pages. Photographs hidden away as far as possible to prevent the police from finding them. The family continued to live in a grip of fear of the night raids which they had experienced for many years before their sister left.

I needed to tell her story. I needed to understand how a woman from a conservative Indian background could have risen to the prominence she did in this rural town in the Cape.

She sat down and replied to my letter.

“My story is just an ordinary story depicting a particular phase in history.

“It all began like this. I used to read the daily newspaper- Die Burger and the Cape Times- for my father. I started hating the Apartheid laws especially the Group Areas Bill and the Pass Laws. In 1951 came the call from the trade union movement, supported by the left, to stage a one day strike on 7 May. I then decided to throw in my weight against these unjust laws. I went to the trade union office in Russell Street and volunteered to help organise the strike,” she writes.

Bibi helped make that strike in protest against the removal of the Coloured people from the Common Voters role a success.

In Worcester, the stayaway was virtually total. The 11, 150 Coloureds, 4, 967 Africans and 78 Indians listed in the 1951 census stood united against the White population of 9, 202.

It was around about this time that people were beginning to feel the brunt of Apartheid. In 1949, apartheid had been introduced on trains in the Cape Peninsula. A few months later, the ban on marriage across the colour line was further extended to include all “non-whites”. It had previously prohibited only White and African marriages.

The population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act of 1950 continued the process of segregation. The aim of these laws, the Minister of Interior, T.E Donges, declared was “to remove points of contact” between people defined to be members of different racial groups.

Prising apart the close-knit Worcester community was to prove no easy task. Shortly after the strike, they formed the Worcester United Action Committee and the 24-year-old Bibi was elected secretary to chairman John Alwyn, a man who was to play a prominent part in the resistance alongside her.

“We then had regular public meetings every Thursday evenings at the Winston Hall in Parker Street,” writes Bibi. There they were take up the problems related to pass laws, inadequate housing, increased rentals.

Her younger brother Hassan, a builder by trade, watched as his sister “threw in her weight”. He was her driver, taking her to address meetings in the outlaying towns of Robertson, Wolseley, Montagu.

“That was the time when they started taking the people’s places and paying them almost nothing,” he told me with a certain sadness. “She got involved because she saw what was happening. She felt she had to stand up for the people most of whom have died by now.”

At the time, there existed in Worcester in the “Coloured” area, conditions of indescribable squalor, on a par with the worst in the most slummy areas in this country.

In the area bounded by Grey, Mylne, Buitenkant and Le Sueur Streets, huts were being built at random. Worst of all, for the authorities, “there was no segregation, coloureds and natives were living together”.

Joseph Mphoza, 64, former security guard at one of the leading textile factories in the town, Hex Tex, was one of those who had built his shack “in the backyards of the coloured people”.

Now on a hot October afternoon in 1990, he welcomed us into his house in Zwelethemba, the African location of Worcetsre. Tall and imposing, he seated us down in the tiny council house which had become his home in 1954. he went off to fetch his 81 year old neighbour, Charlie Sogwagwa, “who also knew Bibi”.

A former ANC chairman, Sogwagwa spends his days preaching. He wants to speak about Bibi. “Kwaai rosie gewees daai…”, he says. “She was arrested with Mphoza in the early hours of the morning and sent by airmail to Johannesburg.”

“I met Bibi through John Alwyn,” said Mphoza. “We were in the ANC and they in United Action Committee.” John Alwyn had prepared the ground work for the establishment of organisation in the “Coloured” area.

Mphoza and Bibi’s activities became one when preparations for the ANC’s  Defiance Campaign started.

A huge banner hung over the platform of the Winston Hall: “Malan will not succeed where Hitler failed.” So crowded was the hall, that people inside could hardly move, while many stood outside, listening to the speeches through the loudspeakers. Sharing the platform with Bibi was the ANC’s Thomas Ngewnya and trade unionist ray Alexander. They, together with Bibi, made the call for volunteers to defy the Apartheid laws. Several hundred men, Africans and Coloured rushed forward to hand in their names. Bibi, with pencil and paper in hand was ready to receive them.

“I was to personally train a few hundred volunteers,” she writes in her letter to me.” On 26 june, the first batch of 125 went into action. Half of them were sent to the Post Office and the other half to the railway station. At that time, there was only one bench reserved for Non-whites on the Worcester Railway station. The second day another batch went into action and so it went on.”

By July of that year, worcetser had taken the lead in the Western Cape, with 8—volunteers signed on in the town alone, and large numbers also in neighbouring villages.

Bibi’s home became the centre of the campaign. Former city councillor, Cassiem Allie of Capuchin street, athlone had a loud speaker system connected to his car in those days when he first arrived at her home.

Struggling to hold back his tears, the 79 year-old man fondly recalls memories of the “live wire” of Worcester. “In 1952, I joined Bibi and other defires to enter the Worcester Post Office on the White side. We were removed after the post office closed and were not arrested on that day.”

“I was a town councillor at the Goodwood Town Council and Bibi called on me to speak in Worcester’s shanty township to criticise the local municipality for the filthy conditions the people lived in who worked in the food industry, producing food for the people of this country.

Many people in Worcester earned less than two pounds ten a week and Food and Canning Workers union leader, ray Alexander was to link up with Bibi to assist in efforts to unionise workers in industries other than the food industry.

“Miss Ray” as she was affectionately referred to by the workers, valued the dedication and hard work of this energetic young woman, who by 1953 had become a card-carrying member of the ANC and proposed that she represent South Africa at the Women’s International Democratic Federation Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her proposal was accepted by the newly-formed Committee of women, a formation set up to build the Federation of South African Women.

Bibi was very excited when “Miss Ray” called her with the news. “I went home and told my parents about it.” She writes. “They objected and said how can a young unmarried girl go alone overseas, I told them not to worry and that nothing would happen to me that put then to dhmae.”

“Miss Ray” intervened, assuring her mother that she would be well looked after. “Ayesha had none of the rhetoric of other activists. She was petite woman with a powerful voice and great dedication. We wanted her to represent us,” said ray Alexander.

Bibi writes: “I then started my journey from Worcester to Johannesburg by train and from Johannesburg to London by air. In London I was joined by 20 other ladies from different parts of the United Kingdom and we travelled to Copenhagen by boat.

In Copenhagen, the third world congress of women met from June 5 to 11 June, 1953. she took her seat on the platform alongside fifty of the 1, 990 delegates to be honoured as an oppressed south African by women of the world.

With her hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck and a loose scarf thrown over her shoulders, Ayesha Bibi Dawood could have been any young Indian woman from Cape Town. But she was not any young woman. She was a fiery speaker and a dedicated activist against Apartheid.

From Copenhagen she travelled to the world peace Council conference in Budapest, Hungary and from there went on to address a rally of the World youth Congress and Festival in Bucharest, Rumania.

During her trip to Hungary, she visited factories, addressed meetings of workers and spent two weeks at a holiday resort at Lake Balaton.

In an attempt not to attract the attention of the South African security police, she did not return home immediately but instead went to India to pay a visit to her paternal grandmother, little suspecting how that visit was to influence the course of her life.

It was the village of Gonger outside Bombay that she was to meet Yusuf Mukadam, a handsome young man from the nearby village of Sarwa. He was a worker in the Royal Navy. 

Six years later, as the ship docked at Durban harbour, Yusuf, like many other Indian young men those years, “skipped the boat” and with the assistance of local Indians made his way to Cape Town by road and then to Worcester where he was to take his bride.

For Bibi, India was a striking contrast to the other countries she visited. She told the ANC newspaper, Advance, on her return home in July, 1954 that in the small village which she visited, people were conservative.” They were shocked because I would not cover from head to foot as other women do when I went out. 

“Unemployment and the severe housing shortage are serious problems in India,” she said then. “In all towns many people live and sleep on the streets.

“It is obvious that India’s vast population cannot be supported on the present primitive agricultural economy. Only rapid industrialisation will solve these tremendous problems.

“There is bitter criticism of Nehru’s failure to fulfil his promises and a growing opposition to his party from large sections of the population. But as regards his foreign policy, I found much support for closer relations between India and the socialist countries and for world peace.”

Back in South Africa again, she said: “I am determined to work hard for my people. My trip overseas gave me courage. We in South Africa are not isolated. All over the world people are struggling for their rights.”

Fearlessly she addressed the people when they gathered in the Winston Hall or on the vacant fields between Sakkies Dorp (a squatter camp that has since been demolished) and the old council houses which still stand in Riverview.

Within weeks, she together with the chairman of the United Action Committee, John Alwyn were arrested in terms of the Suppression of Communism Act and charged with incitement. They wre both sentenced to nine months imprisonment (suspended in Bibi’s case) in the Worcester Regional Court early in 1955.

The basis of the charge arose from speeches that the two made. The police evidence against Bibi was outlined in court records as follows:

She had said “It doesn’t matter what race you belong to, we must all pull together.” She had called on women to play a greater part in politics and stressed the danger of war. “We shall not retreat in the face of scare stories by Malan and Donges. They have already lost.” She went on to speak of the newspaper Advance. “Advance is the only the newspaper which talks the truth- support it.” She had called on the people to sell this paper and collect money for it.

Then, after saying that her trip overseas had given her new spirit-she had been treated as a representative of the Non-European people- she made her only reference to the Europeans in South Africa: “We want nothing from the White man-only our rights.”

It was these final few lines of the police report which formed the basis of the indictement against Ayesha Bibi Dawood.

She was found guilty of “whipping up hostility against the Europeans”-inciting Non-Europeanbs to violence against the Europeans.

It could not have come as much of a shock. In the three short years of her involvement, she had been briefly arrested on a number of occasions. In the aftermath of the defiance Campaign, she was also heavily implicated in the trial of her chairman, John Alwyn who was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment with hard labour for contravention of the Suppression of Communism act.

With the changes taking place in the country presently, it is heartbreaking to think that so much had to be endured to bring an end to this unjust system. Alwyn did thirteen and half months hard labour for calling on the police to break the Apartheid laws. He was charged with associating himself with “a certain Asa Dawood” (the authorities referred to her as Asa not Ayesha) who had said: “It doesn’t help to talk and do nothing. We must stand together. I now ask for volunteers to join up to break the Apartheid Laws.”

Commenting, when the matter had gone on Appeal in the cape Supreme Court, the Justice Steyn commented: “Mr Molteno (for the accused) submitted that the accused was only advocating a long-term policy to attain his ideal of equal rights and with it the repeal of certain named undesirable laws.

“The accused had however associated himself with Asa Dawood who urged and advocated immediate action.”

“In my opinion there can be no doubt that the accused was equally responsible with Asa Dawood when she called for volunteers to contravene Apartheid laws, and that they were aiming and scheming for the abolition of the Apartheid laws and laws relating to the Suppression of Communism, to the carrying of passes by the natives and to Group Areas and to Native locations.”

On Mr. Donald Molteno’s plea that the sentence was unduly severe, the judge said “the maximum the Act permitted was ten years” imprisonment with hard labour.

When she was first arrested during the defiance campaign, it came as a shock to her family, “but we were aware of it,” said her youngest brother, Achmat as he shared with me impressions of his sister’s life.

“We knew that if you go up against them, they threaten you, detain you. That was always in the back of our minds-sometimes in the forefront,” he said with a laugh.

“My parents were concerned about her physical safety. But their attitude was not against the stand that she and all of us took. Apartheid was nonsense. We all supported her in every way possible, but were apprehensive when things happened, you know.”

From his home in the “wit bloke” (council houses in the Coloured area where Africans lived before Apartheid was introduced), old man sakkie bitterhout recalls how Bibi came to wake him up in the middle of the night to warm him of a police raid.

The 78 year-old man, who is still seen on cycle in the town every day, saw old man Abba with his traditional red fez, standing on the stoep as security police came on one of many occasions to look for his daughter.

Whenever there was “trouble” in the town, they came to look for Bibi and Abba was seldom at a loss for words.

“Waar is asa?” (where is asa- they called her Asa not Ayesha) they asked Abba. He replied: “Ek weet nie waar Asa is nie. Julle boere mose se is kind 21 is, hy kan makk wat hy wil. Nou hy lankal 21 gewies,” relates community leader david Petersen who had taken me to meet “Oom Sakkie”.

David has fond memories of Abba who offered him a job when he was fired for striking at a diary where he worked. This was when he really got to know Bibi. “I know about her of course. Everybody spoke about her. I do not think there was anybody at the time in Worcester who went to jail as often as she did. I really admired her.”

“She was an ordinary person with no frills, yet powerful.” I was there when the boere came to fetch her one day and after a while heard Abba saying: “Bibi, wat draai jy so lank? She opened the door and said: “Die boere moet wag tot ek reg is.” The security police just looked at her. I could see that even they feared her. That’s what it looked like to me. They did not say a word and were those types who were very rude. It was then that I had experienced the power in her voice,” said David.

On the last Sunday of August 1954, while Bibi still faced incitement charges, delegates representing many local organisations met in Worcester to form a local committee to prepare for the Congress of the People. This campaign was designed to gather in the demands of the mass of the people in order to formulate their vision of a new South Africa. In June of the following year, about thirty people from Worcester set out for that congress in Kliptown, writes Bibi.

“When we got as far as Beaufort West, our lorry was stopped by the police and we were all taken to the charge office. There we turned back.”

A year later, she was arrested and charged with high treason.

“In 1956 I was arrested at 4 o’ clock in the morning and taken to the charge office,” she writes. “from there I was taken in a big black car with three policemen. On the way everyone sat quietly until we got to Cape Town. When I got there I met a number of people I knew. Nobody knew where they were taking us. There were two planes ready to take us to Johannesburg. There the police vans were ready to take us to Fort Jail. It was on our way to the jail that I noticed the newspaper posters saying that 140 people were arrested for high treason. Only then did I realise what was going on.

“At the jail, I was taken to a cell. Next door I heard voices.” I shouted: “I am Ayesha Dawood from Worcester” and wanted to know who was next door. They started singing freedom songs. I knew then that I was not alone. I was held in isolation for 22 days and released with 155 other Treason Trialists,” she writes.

The accused were only allowed bail on condition that they surrendered their passports, reported weekly to the police and did not attend gatherings.

Inside the walls of the Johannesburg Drill Hall where she stood trial with 155 others, she was to meet the most eminent leaders of the South Africxan oppressed. And not one of them who subsequently travelled through Worcester failed to stop by the house of this lightly built powerful Indian woman who stood her ground during those strenuous months.

For Ismail Meer, trialist and member of the Natal Indian Congress, Bibi’s appearance at the Drill hall on the morning of December 19, 1956 caught him off-guard.

Outside the Drill Hall, described as a bare, draughty iron-roofed relic of the colonial past, vast crowds had gathered in surrounding streets, singing Congress songs as the kwela-kwela vans of prisoners, also singing lustily, were driven to the make-shift court.

“I was this woman walking in wearing eastern clothes and I wondered who she was. I would not have imagined that she came from the Western Cape. I presumed that she came from somewhere in natal or the Transvaal,” said Meer.

When she told me she belonged to the ANC, I did not believe her because we had been struggling to join the ANC since the forties. Only Africans were admitted at the time. Then she took out her membership card and told me that in Worcester nobody worried about this.”

He was convinced that she must have been the only non-african member of the ANC in the whole country. There were however others in Worcester who were also members. The community was one.

“She was the bravest of us all,” said Worcester treason trialist, Joseph Mphoza.

“We were nervous but not Bibi. Sy het nie gebewe nie.”

The preparatory examination lasted for a year after which Bibi, Joseph Mphoza and a third Worcester leader, Julius Busa were discharged with 62 others; while the rest, including Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, were formally charged with high treason and aquitted after a lengthy trial.

The Worcester leaders returned to their town where a “Stand by our leaders” campaign had been launched in their absence, and where a fight had been carried on against increased but fares and rents.

The newly composed song of the residents, Igama la ba Kwayi malibongwe 9the boycotter’s name should be praised), rose from the streets at four in the morning as worjers wlaked to work in protest against the bus increases.

A nervous Worcester Town Council sat down to consider proposals to prohibit public meetings if it was felt that the “peace may be breached.” Application for permission to hold meetings, they decided, had to be made to the authorities 72 hours in advance.

Bibi was back at her post. Local activists, Jamie Issel, remembers seeing her standing outside her father’s house selling the left newspaper, New Age. He was about 20 at the time and with other youth members used to run to her and John Alwyn for advice and assistance.

“One day they cut off the water in the location. The youth filled barrels of water, loaded then into panel van and took it to the people. But the boere stopped us. They sent us back and we went straight to Bibi and Alwyn. They came with us and gave those boere a bit of their minds and in we went,” said Jamie Issel.

Marchers against rent increases, evictions and the construction of beer hall made their way from Zwelethemba to Bibi’s home in Le Sueur Street where they were joined by residents from the Coloured area. (In just a few years, the rigid separation of the races was coming into effect. The prising apart of the close-knit community had begun.) On some days, they headed for the local municipality. On others to the magistrate’s office or the police station, depending on the matter that required attention.

The rapid momentum of resistance in Worcester and in other parts of the country culminating in the massacre at Sharpeville led to the imposition of the State of Emergency declared in march, 1960.

Arrests followed and Bibi and Mphoza rushed to Cape Town to seek legal assistance for the detainees. When they arrived in Cape Town, their lawyer, sam Kahn had gone into exile and others whom they knew were either arrested or in hiding.

They returned to Worcester after a week and were both arrested.

“I was serving people in our shop when the police car stopped outside and they called me to the car,” writes Bibi.

“I showed them that I was not afraid and went forward.” They said I had to get into the car and go with them to the police station because there was trouble in the country.

“I was locked up in a cell alone for one week. From there I was transferred to Bien Donne jail at Franschoek and held in solitary for three months. Then I was taken to Roeland Street jail in Cape Town where I was held for more than two months before being released.

By the end of that year, the town was gripped in the vice of repression. At least fifteen Worcester African leaders held for up to five months were refused permission to seek work and faced being endorsed out of the area. The strategy was clear: “If you want to kill a snake, you need to get to its head,” sighed old man Sakkie Bitterhout. Hulle het gekom vir ons “groot koppe”.

Systematically, the people of Worcester were deprived of their leaders as some were endorsed out of town. Africans did not qualify for permanent residence in terms of the hated pass laws which they had fought so hard against.

Others had taken fright after their lengthy detentions and “went to sleep” politically as many did throughout the country as the full weight of the banning of the political organisations begun to be felt.

It was to take eight long years before Bibi was “endorsed out”- ripped away from her family and community who loved her so dearly.

The authorities pounced in 1967 and arrested Yusuf mukadam, the handsome Indian young man who had travelled over the seas and “hopped ship” to get to the woman he loved. He had made many unsuccessful efforts as the ship passed South Africans shores to get to Bibi but finally, six years after his first meeting with her, he had reached her in her home town.

Bibi had married Yusuf in June 1961. he worked in her father’s shop alongside her, caring and loving her, sharing with her a daughter and then a son.

The repression did not stop her from quietly continuing to help her community. “Everybody ran to her with their problems,” said David Petersen.

But Yusuf was afraid. He did not want her to attract any attention to them. He was an illegal Indian immigrant wanted by the Royal Navy for abandoning his post.

His fears were to prove well-founded. He was arrested and for six long months Bibi waited for her man. When they were finally reunited, he had been charged with entering South Africa illegally and served with a deportation order.

The Security Police were quick to seize the opportunity. Bibi explains: “It was during that time the police got in touch with me and said my husband will be able to stay in South Africa if I would work for them. I told then that I would rather leave my country and my people than to become an informer, a traitor”.

Her “stubbornness” was to cost her a passport. Instead she was issued with an exit permit and permanently “endorsed out.” 

“She had no choice,” said Cassiem Allie. “She accompanied her husband to a place where he had no stable employment and where she did not know the language.”

“I was in Cape Town at the harbour the day she left.” He stops talking as the tears slowly well up in his eyes. He sets aside the pages of notes he has compiled in bibi’s life: “I hope you and others will try to bring her back to South Africa… it will fulfil my age-old hope. She softened my heart the day she left.

Christine ferrus, popularly known as Aunty Stienie, mother of the late Worcester leader, Hennie Ferrus was at the dawood home when bibi left in 1968. hennie was banned and house arrested at the time, so it was Aunty Stienie who went to say goodbye.

“There were a lot of people, in the house, on the stoep, on the sidewalks. I tell you, it was a sad business. Her father was sick. He could not speak. He was laying on his back. When she greeted him, the tears were running down his cheeks. He could not speak but he knew she was going. That is what the government did to her. That night we were just crying.

“It was very, very tragic. They forced her out, you know. She sis not want to go. She begged them to allow her to stay while her father was still alive but they said no.”

“That girl was really hunted and hounded by them…”

As the ship sailed from Table Bay harbour, she was convinced that it would not be long before she returned to her home shores.

Her exile would be short, a temporary inconvenience. Their plans were to visit Yusuf’s family in India and from there settle in Canada or England. Bibi could not speak her father’s language and she saw no reason to start learning it then, since her stay would be brief.

Indian immigration officials were waiting to receive them when the ship docked at Bombay. They had been informed by their government about the plight of the family and lost no time in granting them full Indian citizenship.

They travelled to the seaside village of Sarwa, a journey which lasted about six hours by road. Dust roads which wound their way through the green Indian country-side through small villages which had no electricity. Coming from a merchant family, Bibi had grown up with comforts far beyond what these villages could offer her. 

After a number of months had passed, Yusuf travelled to Canada to make preparations for his family to settle there. He failed to obtain the necessary work and residential permits and returned to India 1970. By then, the family’s situation had become desperate. They had to come to India without much money and with little prospect of finding work.

Yusuf had no choice but to seek work in Bahrain. There he stayed from 1971 to 1972 but was dissatisfied and returned to the village. By then the children were growing. Bibi was worried about their education. They were living with her mother-in-law and and extended family and it was rough.

Yusuf succumbed to the pressure to join the other men of the village in Kuwait, far from Bibi, and thus started his life as a migrant worker.

It ended in 1988 when he, as so many migrant workers, was taken ill and he returned to the village for good, receiving little compensation for years of hard work.

 His earnings made it possible for Bibi to have a small house of her own where she kept a garden of flowers and vegetables as had been the tradition in Worcester. An usual sight for the local villagers. She wanted to be surrounded with whatever served as a reminder of the country “where her heart belonged.”

“They had just intended passing through this rural village to visit his aged mother, and then they never got away,” says her nephew, Rashaad moosa who is principal of the Worcester Moslem Primary School. He is the son of Bibi’s only sister Amina.

He visited his aunt in 1987 and was strengthened in his resolve to do whatever he could to bring her back home. Rashaad’s obsession started long before this. As early as 1975, he travelled to Botsawna to see what the prospects were of his aunt settling there. He made all the necessary arrangements but by then her children were at school in India, her husband was in Kuwait and a move to a foreign country was not an easy option.

Rashaad never gave up. “it was one of his dreams,” explained his wife yumna, teacher at one of the local high schools in Worcester.

“I could not understand how Rashaad could want to take out a loan to help resettle his aunt when we were livinh in only one room when we got married in 1980,” she said.

But as they settled down, she felt compelled to find a way to help this woman.

With her husband and other members of the family, they set in motion a process to try and bring back Bibi’s children, born in South Africa. By this time, Bibi and her family locally had become very uncertain about the possibility of her being able to return. They then focused all attention on the children.

Gulzar and Shabiera were no longer children. They were in their twenties and still could not understand their mother’s obsession with South Africa. What they did understand very well indeed was their mother’s strength.

She reared them virtually single-handle, fighting against the view of her mother-in-law that girls should not attend high school. Her children matriculated at schools where the teachers “more absent then present”.

They watched as their mother became the centre of the village, giving assistance and advice to all who came to her. The villagers pressed for her to be the chairperson of the local committee of the Congress People’s Party.

She wanted to oblige but Yusuf did not agree. He thought that her inadequate knowledge of the language would limit her.

Believing that her children would return to the country of her birth, she did whatever she could to prevent the arrangement of a marriage for her daughter. She wanted her to have a different life and rejected the proposals that came for her hand in marriage.

By 1990, after nearly four years of hoping that her children would go home, she could no longer resist the pressure of custome. She consented to Shabiera’s marriage. Two weeks after the marriage, her daughter’s husband left for Kuwait. Shabiera was left alone, destined to live through the many lonely hours that her other did.

Shortly after her marriage, her South Africa passport and that of her brother was issued to her family in Worcester.

The “children” could finally come home.

Gulzar Mukadam, now 27 years old, came home on 15 June 1990. His mother enquired whether she could take her daughter’s place as news of developments inside South Africa reached her. Suddenly her return was becoming a possibility. The passports were for Gulzar and his sister, Shabiera. She would have to wait.

With the assistance of relatives and friends, the family raised the money to bring Gulzar home.

This shy young man was obviously overawed with his new surroundings. He was a child of a rural village coming to a new country. Arrangements were made for him to work as shop assistant in a local shop in Worcester enabling him to send money home to his mother every month.

When I met him a few months after his return, I sensed his urgency to help his family back in India. It has been hard for his mother, all those years and was hard still.

“The life did not suit my mother. It was different kind of life,” said Gulzar, speaking in perfect Afrikaans. His mother had ensured that her children spoke the language that she had grown up with. English he could read and write but was hesitant to speak.

“She did not fit in there. It affected her a lot. We were in India a few years when my father went to work in Kuwait. We never saw him. My mother endured it all because she believed that she would go home one day.”

His aunt with whom he stays, interjected: “They did not go to stay there so long. They thought things would come right again soon and they would come home again.”

Why did your father not return home once a year? “He could not afford a return ticket. It was too expensive,” replies Gulzar. He goes into his room and fetches a letter which he received from his mother and presses in into my hand. “Read it,” he said. “She wants to come home as soon as possible.”

She writes urging her son to do all he can to make her return possible. “Nobody is working there now. My father, who was a boarding clerk on the harbour in Kuwait, returned home without a pension. Mummy has been selling her jewellery to keep the family going.”

There is an eternal trust in his mother’s strength and capabilities. “Mummy is baie wakker. Sy spring gou. Su moet net hier wees.”

Do you recall if your mother ever spoke about what was happening in our country? A broad grin lights up his face. “Everyday. There was no work for her in the village. Her work was just listening to the world news until 1.30 a.m. every night. She would get up at five in the morning to catch the news. She listened to the BBC and read the newspapers to get news about South Africa. Everyday. Her heart was here all the years.”

After 22 years of longing to come back home, Bibi is one of thousands of exiles who now have hope of returning.

But, like many of those thousands, coming home means having to have the money to travel back and, even more important, finding the means to maintain themselves back home.

Bibi is now 64 years old. She has been the wife of a migrant worker for 22 years. She has an ailing husband, a daughter- according to the custom- that she has given up to another family, and a son who is doing his best to earn something to keep his family alive.

The sea near her village home falls upon the shore and recedes with a certainty that pervades her mind. Certainty that she would be returning to her country soon. The ANC office in Delhi has sent her repatriation forms which she has filled in. the hope has become all-consuming.

Hope that before this year ends, she would for the last time turn off knob of that radio which had linked “her body India to her life and soul in this country.”

April 1991.