Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons.

• Author: Zentella, Yoly

Naidoo, Shanthini. Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons. Washington, DC: Just World Books, 2021.

Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons honors the women who survived imprisonment during the movement to end South African apartheid. It recognizes women as dedicated freedom fighters playing key roles of leadership in the struggle, and a documentation of herstories from which, in much of the literature, save for narratives on legendary figures like Winnie Madikizela Mandela and Miriam Makeba, women are absent. It also sheds light on prisons as a space for political struggle.

Naidoo's style of writing, easy flowing but penetrating, makes the book suitable for the average reader. It is an invaluable teaching tool at the university level among the disciplines of history, ethnic studies, South African studies, women's studies, and mental health. Readers interested in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the aftermath of apartheid will also find this book an excellent companion to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid (2003) and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (1998). It is also suitable reading for high school classes on social justice and anti-apartheid activists.

The author, Shanthini Naidoo experienced the tail end of apartheid as a youth. Later, while studying for a master's degree in journalism, her reporting on the of death and funeral of Winnie Mandela in 2018 motivated her to seek out the six women incarcerated with Mandela, defendants in the less-well-known Trial of Twenty-Two in 1969. Her first book, Women in Solidarity: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid (2020), which was published in South Africa, was the product of subsequent conversations with the four remaining survivors. That book was subsequently published in the United States, which is the title under review.

Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons is an emotionally difficult journey for the reader, yet the underlying theme of the universal desire for freedom and human rights made possible by activists makes this a necessary read. The book's twelve chapters pivot around chapter 3, "The Trial." In 1969 South Africa's government arrested twenty-two activists--fifteen men and seven women--and accused them of terrorism, and twenty-one charges were levied under the Suppression of Communism Act. The arrests appeared orchestrated to...