Helen Joseph, from King's College to the Anti-Apartheid Frontlines

Seamus Branch is graduated from a BA in Culture, Media and Creative Industries

After growing up in a suburb of London, Helen Joseph began an English degree at King’s College in 1923. In her memoir she remembers in 1926 relocating to a relative’s in South London so that she could walk to the University in solidarity with the striking transportation workers, and with a retrospective shame that while she would drink coffee with her classmates of colour, ‘I had been amongst those who thought we ought not to go as far as dancing with our few fellow Black students’.¹ In 1927 she graduated with what she described as ‘a not very distinguished second class honours degree,’ and after leaving King’s decided to pursue teaching abroad as she could do so without receiving a teacher’s training certificate.² At twenty two she secured a teaching post in India, a country which she knew little about, and boarded an ocean liner to Bombay. Joseph wrote about her time in India with fondness for its people and the ways in which it transformed her understanding of the world outside of England. While remaining relatively apolitical during the three years she spent teaching in Hyderabad, she seems to have operated within mostly Indian social circles, expressing concern that the teaching position she had accepted in Durban, South Africa would limit her ability to socialise with non-white South Africans: ‘Just prior to leaving I had been staying in Bombay with Indian friends, a most natural thing for me, not fully comprehending that this would be forbidden in South Africa’.³

In Durban Joseph quickly married and fell into a routine of working, socialising, and only interacting with Black South Africans who were domestic workers. Serving with the South African Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at the outbreak of the Second World War in Pretoria would break Joseph from her Durban bubble and force her to come to terms with the segregation that plagued the nation she had grown to call home, inspiring her to pivot careers and pursue social work. After being offered a position as the director of a community health centre Joseph relocated to Johannesburg, and then Elsie’s River, a suburb of Cape Town, Joseph concluded that ‘all our social services were only alleviating the existing evils, not eradicating themm’.⁴ Seeking a more political post, Joseph became the Secretary Director of the Medical Aid Society of the Transvaal Clothing Industry, worked closely with the Garment Workers Union, and in 1953 became a committee member of the Congress of Democrats, a political party comprising White South Africans who opposed Apartheid. Dedicating her life to anti-apartheid organising, in 1956 she was charged by the government for treason. The trial, which accused 156 opposition party members of high treason and temporarily imprisoned Joseph with other activists, lasted until 1962, at which point Joseph was placed under house arrest for an initial sentence of five years.

Back in London Helen Hudson, a tutor to women students at King’s who became Dean of students in 1972, heard of the plight of a former King’s student, and began to write to her. In 1968 Hudson, inspired by Joseph’s activism, organised a petition to the South African Embassy of 112 signatures including over 40 professors, 6 labour MPs, 2 conservative MPs, and even 2 academy award nominated actors when Joseph’s house arrest was up for renewal, notably all of the signatories were women.⁵ The King’s Union Society also became sympathetic to Joseph, voting unanimously to endorse the same petition advocating for Joseph’s release from house arrest.⁶ In 1967 Joseph was dealt a blow when her house arrest was renewed for another 5 years. In her first house arrest Joseph had written an autobiography, but this time the government had banned her from writing any criticisms of the state. She had also found faith in house arrest, rejoining the Anglican Church. Hoping to make something of her second term of house arrest, and encouraged by the outreach from her former university, Joseph registered as an external student in Theology under the supervision of Rev. Gordon Heuling at King’s College London from her house arrest.⁷ In 1969, under pressure from King’s faculty, the school’s principal made available £50 for Joseph to purchase the books necessary for her to study theology at King’s in absentia.⁸

Joseph’s illnesses would prevent her from completing the course, but in 1975 Hudson, now Dean of Students nominated Joseph to a fellowship in honour of her time at King’s and service in South Africa. This honour reached Joseph, who wrote to a student magazine: ‘I value most highly the great honour which King’s College bestowed on me in 1975 when I was elected a Fellow- for those very values which I hold so dear and for which I have tried to stand’.⁹ Hudson noted in a letter to the Union Society, ‘Though our petition had no political result, it has helped this lady to achieve a liberation of the spirit’. ¹⁰

In some ways Joseph was the perfect revolutionary for a historically conservative institution like King’s. While she gave her life to fighting apartheid, she never viewed the segregation she was fighting as an evolution of imperialist ideology and law. Nelson Mandela remarked of Joseph at her 1993 funeral: ‘When Helen was cross examined and asked what she thought about British Imperialism, she answered that there was no such thing, because the British had spread out to bring civilisation to all the countries they went to. Helen was a South African Revolutionary, but a Lady of the British Empire. A contradiction in the eyes of many, but to Helen her own reality’.¹¹ While fights for divestment and boycotts dominated student protest, the support, and fellowship of Helen Joseph presents a powerful instance of academic and intellectual solidarity, a protest which not only encouraged one of the University’s alumni, but allowed its staff to join in political action without the risk of overt disruption to the status quo.

Sources

Kings College London Archives, Helen Hudson Papers, K/PP12.

King’s College London Archives, Eric Mottram Papers, K/PP106/7/678, Viewpoint, 1976 ‘A Letter From South Africa’, 1979.

Caine, Barbara, ‘A South African Revolutionary, but a Lady of the British Empire: Helen Joseph and the Anti-Apartheid Movement’, Journal of South African Studies, 34,3 (2008), 575-590.

Joseph, Helen, Side by Side (London, 1986).