Support for people detained without trial under security and emergency legislation and for convicted political prisoners in apartheid South Africa derived from three organisations. Dependents Conference (DC) was a South African Council of Churches initiative that assisted political prisoners, most notably those on Robben Island. With the rash of detentions under security legislation in the early 1980s came the Detainees Parents Support Committee (DPSC), particularly associated with Max and Audrey Coleman in Johannesburg, which sought legal means to challenge detention without trial. And from 1985 with emergency legislation affecting parts and then the whole of South Africa, the more politically partisan Detainee Support Committees (DESCOMs) emerged.
Nowhere was this development entirely clear-cut; least of all in Pietermaritzburg. DC was well-established, but is unclear how the DPSC operated before DESCOM emerged in the mid-1980s. Whatever the detail, what is certain is that the staff of the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness (PACSA, particularly Joan and Peter Kerchhoff and Monika Wittenberg) was fully involved and its offices in Berg (now Hoosen Haffejee) Street were a clearing house for information particularly in the years 1986‒1990. Other major sources of information were the Centre for Adult Education (John Aitchison and Vaughn John), which ran a highly sophisticated repression monitoring operation on the local campus of the University of Natal; and the Progressive Federal Party (Radley Keys) in Harwin’s Arcade. A number of progressive lawyers such as Mehmud Cajee, Ilan Lax, Pat Stilwell, Rishi Thakurdin and Leslie Weinberg were also very helpful.
DESCOM organised regular tea parties to support detainees’ relatives and these were also a source of information. As a result, a database was built up recording the names and experiences of detainees in the belief that a measure of safety lay in information: detainees’ greatest fear was that of disappearing without trace. This information was fed in distilled form through to Amnesty International in London by telex: the internet was yet to be born, although DESCOM’s database was computerised from the outset.
Natal was under emergency regulations (Public Safety Act, 1 of 1953) from 12 June 1986 until 18 October 1990 (they were lifted everywhere else on 11 June). This database for Pietermaritzburg and the Midlands is probably one of few extant records of the time. It must be treated with a certain caution because the information was collected under difficult, sometimes dangerous, conditions and often passed through a variety of hands. There are undoubtedly errors in the spelling of names and the recording of dates and places. This is probably most true of the 1987‒1988 emergency. There were also changes in the formatting of records with the passage of time. However, the recording of prison numbers adds veracity and the overall picture derived from the data has not subsequently been challenged in any significant way. Now it can be searched online.
Analysis of this data is presented in two articles published in Natalia as follows:
‘Emergency of the state: detention without trial in Pietermaritzburg and the Natal Midlands, 1986–90’ Natalia 41 (2011): 10–33
and
https://natalsocietyfoundation.co.za/natalia-no-41-2011/
‘“Sidla ekhaya/we shall eat at home”: the Pietermaritzburg detainees’ hunger strike of 1989’ Natalia 49 (2019): 71–77