Al-Qalam 
By Imraan Buccus
Fatima Seedat took off her earrings. The diamond pair was handed to the Passive Resistance Fund as its first contribution. The modest jewels were from her husband, Dawood, on their wedding a year earlier.
That was the sum total of her worldly possessions, and it was to go straight into funding the campaign against racialized residential segregation that targeted the Indian community in the main. The year was 1946, straight after the Second World War and colonial repression at its most rampant yet still two years before the Nationalist Party swept to power on the apartheid ticket.
She was a firebrand revolutionary who could match her activist husband pound for pound in courage and oratory. Born in the year of the historically significant 1922 Rand Revolt when white miners seized Johannesburg and some eventually met their fate at the gallows, Fatima was fearless in confronting injustice. Unlike the miners campaigning to defend white labour against both unfettered capitalism and competition from black mineworkers, she worked relentlessly for a non-racial democracy. Fatima was sent to prison twice for her activism, first in 1946 and then again in the 1952 Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws which had a youthful Nelson Mandela of the ANC Youth League as Volunteer-In-Chief.
When she was first jailed, her child was just four months old. Iconic black and white images from meetings at Red Square in the heart of Durban – now Pine Parkade – show thousands of Indian people congregating to hear the likes of trade unionist JB Marks and Natal Indian Congress leader Dr Monty Naicker speak. One defining image shows Fatima standing right in the middle of the crowd, heavily pregnant, clutching a batch of the communist newspaper, The New Age.
Nothing seemed to deter her. In fact, imprisonment with hard labour hardened her. In 1956, Dawood joined 155 others including Chief Albert Luthuli and Madiba in the dock for the marathon Treason Trial, which eventually collapsed after five disruptive years. Fatima was not deterred by the absence of her husband or the fact that they had a young family. The struggle was her life.
This past week marked the centenary of her birth. Her identical twin, Rahima Moosa, is more recognizable in the annals of the struggle for South African freedom as one of the women at the head of the 1956 Women’s March on the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Fatima was in that march too along Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, and Sophie Williams and 20 000 others demanding that Prime Minister JG Strijdom come out of the Union Buildings.
Fatima had been politically active from a young age, joining the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in her Cape Town birthplace. From its inception, the CPSA maintained a non-racial and gender inclusive profile in spite of there being no real non-racial political narrative as we might understand it today. The radical posture of the CPSA tempered Fatima and Rahima into giving no quarter all of their political lives. There was to be no rest until freedom was won. State repression proved a formidable foe however.
The CPSA was effectively banned by the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act forcing it to go underground. The Seedats’ activism never took a break despite the intense repression. The couple sought out the grave of the country’s first communist martyr, Johannes Nkosi who was murdered on 16 December 1930 during protest action organised by the CPSA at Cartwright Flats, just a short distance from the Durban City Hall. They found the long-forgotten grave in the Stellawood Cemetery and erected a tombstone from their own meagre resources. They arranged for Nkosi’s mother to travel from Johannesburg for the unveiling and then dinner at their home on Hampson Grove which now falls within the precincts of the Durban University of Technology. They were active in whatever space they could find.
The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre spurred a flurry of further repression notably the banning of the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress of Azania. With so many of their comrades leaving for exile, Fatima and Dawood spurned that option. Both were listed communists and were therefore banned in 1964 as the space for political activity hemmed in. Dawood passed on in 1976. Fatima was to witness the advent of democracy, passing on in 2003 at her township home in Phoenix.
Fatima’s lasting legacy is fresh generation of children and grandchildren who have embraced their grandparents’ revolutionary fervour in their own activism as the imperative for a second great struggle confronts us.
**Dr Buccus is editor of Al-Qalam.
