Ayesha Bibi Dawood has returned

Ayesha Bibi Dawood

Late last week, Ayesha Bibi Dawood passed away, and was buried on Sunday. Her biographer, Zubeida Jaffer, puts it succinctly, “Ayesha Dawood, one of a few remaining leaders charged with Treason with Madiba in 1956. The funeral leaves her home in Durban Road, Worcester. She leaves behind a daughter and son and six grandchildren.” She leaves behind a story that needs to be told and understood, a story of an Indian woman in a rural town in the Western Cape.

Ayesha Bibi Dawood was born in Worcester, in the Western Cape, on 31 January 1927. Her father was an Indian merchant and her mother a Malay woman from Calvinia. As Dawood tells the story, “It all began like this. I used to read the daily newspaper- Die Burger and the Cape Times- for my father. I started hating the Apartheid laws especially the Group Areas Bill and the Pass Laws. In 1951 came the call from the trade union movement, supported by the left, to stage a one day strike on 7 May. I then decided to throw in my weight against these unjust laws. I went to the trade union office in Russell Street and volunteered to help organise the strike.”

In Worcester, that one-day strike was a raging success, a success many credit to Dawood’s organizational prowess. For one day, just over 16,000 Colored, African and Indian people said a resounding and unified “No!” to the removal of the Colored people from the Common Voters rolls and to the 9000 Whites of Worcester. Bibi Dawood had arrived.

From there, Ayesha Dawood kept on keeping on. In 1952, she co-founded the Worcester United Action Committee, and helped turn Worcester into a center of the Defiance campaign and of regional trade union organizing. In 1953, she represented the Committee of Women in Copenhagen, and then visited and spoke at factories, meeting halls, union halls and elsewhere. She also visited her family in India on that trip. In 1955, she was charged with incitement and spent nine months in jail. In 1956, she was one of the 156 charged, with Mandela, in the Treason Trial.

In 1961, Ayesha Dawood married Yusuf Mukadam, an Indian who had met her during her stay in India. Mukadam was a worker in the Royal Navy. So taken with the young South African woman was he that, six years later and after numerous failed attempts, he jumped ship in Durban, made his way to Cape Town and then on to Worcester.

Soon after, Mukadam was arrested as an undocumented resident, and Dawood was told that she had one choice, to become an informant. She refused, and, in the delicate and discrete language of the day, was “served” with an exit permit that permanently “endorsed” her out of the country.

The young couple and their two children journeyed to Mukadam’s village, Sarwa, where Dawood knew nothing and no one. Mukadam spent much of the rest of his life as migrant worker in Kuwait.

Dawood organized women in the village. At one point, they wanted her to become chairperson of the local committee of the Congress People’s Party. Although she declined, her house remained a local organizing and community center.

And throughout, Ayesha Dawood knew that one day the Apartheid regime would fall and she would return. She prepared. She taught her children Afrikaans as well as English. In 1990, the return began. First her two children, Gulzar and Shabiera, were issued South African passports. In 1991, Ayesha Dawood returned home … in every sense.

Her story is captured in Zubeida Jaffer’s Love in the Time of Treason.

Many have expressed their sadness as well as their gratitude to the 86-year-old committed activist and veteran, one of the million sparks that set and constituted the decades long struggle. Let’s celebrate her version of her own story: “My story is just an ordinary story depicting a particular phase in history.” Imagine the joy of Ayesha Bibi Dawood as she returned home, to her home. Imagine the joy and then remember it really happened, thanks to her struggle combined with that of so many others. Rus in vrede Ayesha Bibi Dawood. Hamba kahle. Rest in peace.

(Photo Credit: South African History Online)

About Dan Moshenberg

Dan Moshenberg is an organizer educator who has worked with various social movements in the United States and South Africa. Find him on Twitter at @danwibg.