At a Glance
KwaZulu-Natal, the Zulu Political Tradition, and the ANC's Natal Women
Florence Mkhize was born in 1932 in KwaZulu-Natal — a province whose political history was shaped by layers of resistance and accommodation that went back much further than the ANC. The Zulu kingdom's resistance to British colonialism in the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the subsequent annexation of Zululand, the incorporation of the Zulu people into the colonial and then the Union system under conditions that stripped the kingdom of its sovereignty while preserving certain traditional structures as instruments of indirect colonial rule — all of this formed the political background against which the ANC's work in Natal unfolded, and against which Mkhize's political formation took place.
The specific character of Natal ANC politics was shaped by this background: by the proximity of traditional Zulu political institutions that the apartheid government would later attempt to use against the ANC through its support of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the Inkatha Freedom Party; by the large Indian community whose Congress tradition provided organisational models and political alliances; and by the specific conditions of the Durban working class — the dockers, the factory workers, the domestic servants, the small traders who made up the African community's economic life in the port city's hinterland.
The ANC Women's League in Natal drew on all of these traditions. Its membership included women from the African township communities, women from the Indian Congress networks, and women from the rural areas who were connected to the traditional political structures while simultaneously engaging with the modern liberation movement's analysis and programme. Mkhize's own background in the Zulu-speaking communities of the Natal interior placed her in the African majority of this coalition, and her ability to build trust and authority within the Durban township communities reflected the specific cultural knowledge and personal relationships that growing up in those communities provided.
The 1956 Women's March and Its Natal Preparation
The organisation of the 1956 Women's March was one of the most significant logistical achievements of the South African women's movement, and in Natal it required exactly the kind of community organising work that Mkhize and others like her had been building for years. Getting women from across KwaZulu-Natal to Pretoria on 9 August — recruiting them through the Women's League branches and community networks, arranging transportation, preparing the petitions that would be left at the Union Buildings, building the collective consciousness that would allow twenty thousand women to stand in silence for thirty minutes in the face of the apartheid government — required months of preparation at the local level.
Mkhize was part of this preparation in Natal, and her presence at the march was the product of the organising she and others had done in the townships of the Durban area. The march itself — the specific experience of being among twenty thousand women in the Union Buildings amphitheatre, of the silence, of the singing, of the collective statement that this gathering made about what Black women in South Africa were prepared to do — was a political education that deepened the commitments she had brought to Pretoria and that she carried back to the Durban townships to sustain through the years of repression that followed.
The march is commemorated annually on 9 August as Women's Day in South Africa — a public holiday whose existence is the collective legacy of the twenty thousand women who participated. Each of them was an individual with a specific life and a specific story, and the collective memory of the march tends to absorb those individual stories into the general significance of the event. Mkhize's story, like Bertha Gxowa's and the stories of hundreds of other march participants, is part of the march's meaning — a reminder that the collective action of twenty thousand was built from the individual commitments of twenty thousand specific people, each of whom had her own reasons for being there and her own understanding of what the march was for.
The Underground Years and Community Continuity
The banning of the ANC in April 1960 transformed the conditions in which Mkhize and other Natal Women's League activists were working. The formal organisational structures through which the League operated — the registered branches, the published newsletters, the public meetings — were no longer legally possible, and the challenge of maintaining the movement's presence in the communities the League served required a shift from formal to informal organisation.
This shift was something that women activists like Mkhize were, in many ways, particularly well placed to make. The community work that had always been central to the Women's League's activities — the support for families of imprisoned activists, the civic associations, the church groups, the neighbourhood networks — operated largely through personal relationships and informal community ties that were harder for the security police to suppress than formal political organisation. A woman who was known in her community, trusted by her neighbours, connected to the networks of mutual support that township life required — and who used those connections to maintain the political consciousness and the organisational commitments of the liberation movement — was doing political work that left fewer traces for the security police to follow but that was no less effective for its invisibility.
Mkhize maintained this kind of community presence through the 1960s and 1970s, keeping alive the relationships and the political consciousness that would eventually find new formal expression through the UDF. The Durban township communities that the UDF organised in 1983 and subsequent years were not starting from scratch — they were drawing on the community networks and the political traditions that had been maintained through the intervening decades by people like Mkhize, and the rapidity with which the UDF built its Natal structures reflected the organisational infrastructure that this preceding work had created.
The Violent 1980s and the Natal Conflict
The 1980s were particularly difficult years for the Natal liberation movement because the conflict between ANC/UDF supporters and Inkatha Freedom Party supporters added a dimension of intra-community violence to the already intense repression of the apartheid state. The KwaZulu-Natal conflict — which killed thousands of people in the late 1980s and early 1990s — was partly a political conflict about the direction of the liberation struggle and partly a proxy conflict that the apartheid security state was deliberately exacerbating through its covert support of Inkatha. For community organisers like Mkhize who were building ANC structures in the Durban townships, the conflict added a specific threat of violence from other Black South Africans that the apartheid-era organising had not had to deal with in the same direct way.
She navigated this period with the same patient courage that had characterised her entire political career — maintaining her community presence, continuing the Women's League work, and contributing to the ANC's efforts to build structures that could survive the violence and provide the community with the political coherence it needed. The specific challenges of organising in a context of intra-community violence — where the political lines of the conflict did not always correspond to the community boundaries of trust and relationship that made organising possible — required the kind of nuanced community intelligence that her decades of township work had given her.
Legacy
Florence Mkhize's legacy is the legacy of the community organiser who holds the movement together through the years when formal organisation is impossible — the person whose presence in her community, whose personal relationships and trusted authority, sustained the liberation movement's social roots through the decades of banning and repression. Her story is representative of hundreds of Natal Women's League activists whose names do not appear in the standard histories but without whom the movement could not have survived.
She died in 1995 at sixty-three — young enough that her death feels like a loss of years that she had earned through the decades of work she had put in. She had voted in 1994, cast her ballot in the first democratic elections in South Africa's history, and she died knowing that the central commitment of her political life had been honoured. The work she had done to make that moment possible — the decades of community organising, the march to the Union Buildings, the maintenance of networks through the underground years, the navigation of the violent 1980s — was the foundation on which the democratic South Africa rested. That foundation is less visible than the architecture it supports. That is no measure of its importance.