• Black Sash

In 1958 the Black Sash opened its first advice office in Cape Town to provide legal aid services for the victims of pass laws. Spink explained that the ‘philosophy behind the advice offices was to enable people to understand what the law was, to enable them to make choices about how they wished to act and to support them in their chosen action’(Spink,75). The advice offices sought to aid victims of apartheid legislation within lawful means. Though because the Black Sash women were not very keen on the legislation that effected African people they looked for help from other African women’s anti-apartheid organisations/ supporters. These include the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) and Cape Association to Abolish Passes for African Women (CATAPAW), among other organisations and townships. The opening of the first office in cooperation with other anti-apartheid organisations/ supporters became a major milestone in the Black Sash organisational development. For it would ‘open up a second dimension to what was fundamentally a political pressure group, [to] a ‘service’ aspect’ (Spink, 64). The women were now not only talking, protesting, and writing of change but making an effort to understand and help the people who would mostly be effected by any change in an apartheid society. For a White individual to reach out beyond a barrier of society and work side by side with Black individual or vice versa was a statement in itself. For this was the beginning for Black Sash members to learn what life was really like for African citizens.

Following the opening of the first Black Sash advice office, other members started to follow pursuit by opening up offices throughout country. Between the 1960s and 1970s the offices were packed with thousands of people seeking help from unjust laws regarding forced removals of communities, segregation, discrimination in education and workplace, and health care. These were only some of the issues among many that effected the African population. The women in the offices were constantly learning of laws that came against Africans, their effect, and how to fight them. A productive strategy that many members undertook were sit-ins in the commission courts. Well throughout the 1980s this exercise provided an insight into the political reality for South African nonwhite citizens during the century. The sit-ins were said to be useful because ‘the information the organization gained by this means became the starting point for various strategies employed to force the government to act, strategies in which the essential ingredient was public knowledge’ (Spink, 79). The knowledge gained from watching the court systems helped give insight into the reality of African citizen’s hearings and the injustice they faced. This unfortunate fact gave the Black Sash women the information they needed to strategize and protest against such unlawful acts. One of the main strategies from the beginning was applying pressure to the government by educating the wider public by means of media via documented protests, pamphlets, Black Sash newspapers, and informational meetings.
http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/black-sash-organisation-history-transformation-ashley-schumacher