HELEN JOSEPH

I shall never forget what I saw on 9 August 1956---thousands of women standing in silence for a full thirty minutes, arms raised high in the clenched fist of the Congress salute. Twenty thousand women of all races, from all parts of South Africa, were massed together in the huge stone amphitheatre of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the administrative seat of the Union government, high on a hill. The brilliant colours of African headscarves, the brightness of Indian saris and the emerald green of the blouses worn by Congress women merged into an unstructured design, woven together by the very darkness of those thousands of faces.

-Helen Joseph, Side by Side: An Autobiography (1986).