“You Must Go Forward”: Dora Tamana’s Radical Vision
Web page header image: WIDF World Congress of Mothers, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 1955. World Congress of Mothers – Documents. Lausanne, July 7th to 10th, 1955’ (WIDF, 1955).
Sechaba, October 1983
World Congress of Mothers Emblem. (World Congress of Mothers – Documents. Lausanne, July 7th to 10th, 1955’ (WIDF, 1955))
On Saturday 4th April 1981, around three hundred people assembled in the St Francis Cultural Centre in Langa on the Cape Flats. Traveling by minibus, car and train from all over the Western Cape, they descended on Cape Town for the first conference of the United Women’s Organisation (UWO).
Dora Tamana, an 80-year-old veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle had played a leading role in the formation of the UWO. A former Communist Party member who had travelled illegally across continents in the 1950s and built schools in Cape Town’s townships, she demanded that the assembled crowd speak out loudly against apartheid and the hardships they endured:
”“You who have no work, speak. You who have no homes, speak. You who have no schools, speak. You who have to run like chickens from the vultures, speak. We must share the problems so we can solve them together. We must free ourselves...
I opened the road for you. You must go forward!" she declared, adding,
"Women, stand together, build the organisation, make it strong!"
Today, in South Africa, Dora Tamana is often referred to as a “mother of the nation” – a towering figure whose sacrifice helped make multiracial democracy in South Africa a reality. While this gendered celebration acknowledges the importance of her activism, it rarely does justice to the scope, complexity and urgency of her contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. While she was denied much of a formal education, Tamana was an incisive thinker who mined her lived experiences to theorize and expose oppression. Hers was an intersectional politics that foregrounded the experiences of African women to expose and challenge settler colonialism and apartheid.
From the Transkei to Cape Town
Born in 1901 in the Transkei, Tamana’s early years were shattered by the Bulhoek Massacre of 1921 – where government forces murdered nearly 200 African members of the Israelite Church including her father and two uncles. After losing her mother months after the Massacre, she and her sisters moved to Queenstown to live with their aunt. Here, in 1923, she married John Tamana. The couple had four children, but three died from starvation and tuberculosis. By 1930, exhausted by these desperate conditions, they fled to Cape Town, driven by “the hope that our children might have a chance to survive” in the city
The shattering personal losses Dora suffered in the Eastern Cape were the material consequences of a “logic of elimination” that ripped Africans from their ancestral lands. These horrific experiences made clear the devastating consequences of settler colonialism, and would inform Tamana’s anticolonial politics in the years to come.
Political Awakening and Building Community Power
It was in Cape Town where Tamana would first encounter and engage with more formal forms of political organising. By the late 1930s, she was becoming more involved with the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), who held public meetings at Cape Town’s Grand Parade every Thursday. For Tamana, the communist speakers and organisers she encountered seemed to be working to change the desperate conditions that she and thousands of Africans faced as they struggled for survival in the city.
In 1939, after John left the family, Dora moved to Blouvlei – an informal settlement on the Cape Flats. Characteristically, she saw the move as an opportunity to claim space and for community building. “We are going to do something for ourselves here,” she asserted, “The air is fresh. We have a tap to share with our neighbours. We could even grow something. It was at a CPSA demonstration in 1948, where she first heard about how the state sponsored creches and provided free childcare in the Soviet Union. This proved revelatory. As Tamana recalled, “I spoke to the women that we must form a creche, that the women who are working, their children can be cared for in the crèche.” She started a nursery in her own home, using soap boxes as makeshift cots. Through persistent lobbying, she eventually established the Blouvlei Nursery School for forty children. Later, she led the effort to build a school in the community – constructing classrooms out of ironed out petrol drums.
The construction of a creche and school at Blouvlei was deeply political work. It was a defiant response to the processes that had separated Africans from their land, decimating both family and community structures in order to exert control over Black labor. Tamana reclaimed space in Blouvlei, building institutions designed to protect families from the precariousness nature of life in a settler colonial society.
FEDSAW and Militant Motherhood
Dora Tamana (bottom left) and other founders depicted on a poster produced to celebrate the 1987 relaunch of FEDSAW. (UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives).
By the early 1950s, Tamana was deeply involved in multiple liberation organizations. She had officially joined the CPSA in 1942 and served as secretary of the local ANC branch, going door-to-door encouraging people to attend demonstrations and defy apartheid laws. This work across both movements led her to become involved in the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) when it was founded in April 1954 as a multiracial organization aimed “to bring the women of South Africa together, to secure full equality of opportunity for all women, regardless of race, colour or creed.”
FEDSAW was crucial in developing an intersectional politics that insisted women needed to be at the heart of the struggle for African liberation. Working alongside Ray Alexander, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph and others, Tamana helped craft a militant politics of motherhood that used women’s experiences to expose apartheid as a gendered system of racial control. This wasn’t sentimental maternalism—it was a political weapon used to challenge white supremacy.
At FEDSAW’s inaugural conference, Tamana described how government policies deliberately destroyed African families. Organizing a women’s conference in December 1954, she insisted that housing “must be made to understand that the housing schemes were built to provide homes for the people and not profits,” concluding that “they can find their money elsewhere, but not by taking the food out of our babies’ mouths.” Significantly, FEDSAW also had a global outlook, working with the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) to forge transnational solidarities with women overseas.
Crossing Borders: Tasting the New World
Dora Tamana (fourth from the left) and Lilian Ngoyi (second from the right) in Berlin. Women’s International Democratic Federation, ‘Lausanne…At The World Congress of Mothers’ (WIDF, 1955).
FEDSAW’s desire to challenge racism and sexism internationally was most vividly demonstrated by their decision to send Tamana and Lilian Ngoyi to the WIDF’s World Congress of Mothers held in Lausanne, Switzerland in July 1955. Their travels were audacious and illegal – stowing away under “white names,” defying segregated seating, and entering Britain claiming to study the Bible.
FEDSAW’s ties with the WIDF placed Tamana and Ngoyi at the heart of a transnational network of socialist and pro-communist organizations committed to anti-fascist, feminist and anticolonial politics. These connections, and specifically the WIDF’s ties with Moscow, provided the opportunity for further travel. A plan was hatched for Tamana and Ngoyi to spend time in China, Mongolia and Russia before returning to Switzerland for the World Congress of Mothers. After visiting East Berlin, they flew to Peking where Tamana fell ill. This proved transformative as she witnessed communist medical care firsthand: “Wherever we went, a doctor was there to meet us. They could not have looked after me better…It was preventative treatment.” Touring a maternity ward, she marveled: “One woman told us she felt no pain at all. In no time her baby was born… We women usually suffer for a day, a day and a half.” Throughout her travels, Tamana emphasized the physical consequences of white supremacist rule, constructing the care she witnessed as revolutionary possibility. As she commented after return home, “My experience of hospitals and doctors overseas gave me a clearer picture of what we are working for. I saw for myself how it should be.”
WIDF World Congress of Mothers, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 1955. World Congress of Mothers – Documents. Lausanne, July 7th to 10th, 1955’ (WIDF, 1955).
WIDF World Congress of Mothers, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 1955. World Congress of Mothers – Documents. Lausanne, July 7th to 10th, 1955’ (WIDF, 1955).
Tamana’s travels reinforced her view that families and communities were both the drivers for and markers of revolutionary change. Speaking directly with women of color overseas and witnessing firsthand the transformation of social structures and networks of care made it seem possible that political liberation could happen at home. As she asserted when thinking back on her time overseas, “When I saw all these things, different nations together, my eyes were opened and I said, I have tasted the new world and won the confidence of our future, wonderful, great experiences of my life; came back to my birth country.”
Tamana’s global political vision represented a threat to the apartheid state. Upon return, she was harassed by police and issued a banning order. After Sharpeville, she spent over four months in prison, then was forcibly removed from Blouvlei to Nyanga – moving from “one jail to another jail.” Despite the persecution she faced, Tamana continued her political in Cape Town.
The Road She Opened
Standing before that crowd in 1981, Tamana’s declaration that she had “opened the road” was more than metaphor. Through her institution-building in Blouvlei, her illegal travels that connected South African struggles to global liberation movements, and her unbending insistence that African mothers lead the struggle for national liberation, she had created pathways that new generations could follow.
Tamana’s militant vision of African motherhood was felt, it was both corporeal and deeply personal, but it was also expansive. She connected the stresses and strains that had been placed on her own body – that had decimated her own family and the families of countless Africans – to both the struggle against apartheid as well as the global politics of the cold war and decolonisation. In the process, she forged a maternalist critique of both racial capitalism and settler colonialism that is still deeply relevant in post-apartheid South Africa today.
Author Bio
Nicholas Grant is Associate Professor of International History at the University of East Anglia and a member of the Project Advisory Group of the Anti-Apartheid Legacy: Centre of Memory and Learning. The research for this blog can be found in this open access article published in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
