The natural response to learning that Helena Bonham-Carter is playing a leading role in a film about the suffragettes is a momentary panic that it's going to be a Downton Abbey version of women's history, made to fit the Cameronian zeitgeist of this being a posh people's world. Instead, director Nicky Gavron and writer Abi Morgan have made their film Suffragette as an assertion of working class feminism. It sets out its stall in the opening scene in a Bethnal Green laundry in 1912. Girls began working in places like that from as young as seven and could expect to be physical wrecks by their mid-twenties due to accidents or illness caused by the conditions. That area of east London was a ferment of industrial action and political militancy at the time and much of the film was shot in streets very close to where the action happened. Carey Mulligan plays Maud Watts who has been working in the laundry since childhood where, in common with many of the other women, she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by the boss. On one level it's the story of her personal radicalisation - she helps another woman avoid sexual harassment, she attends Suffragette events, but it's the realisation that she has no legal rights when her husband gives their child away for adoption which is what really makes her understand that political change is necessary. The official sanitised version of Suffragette history has seriously underplayed both the level of the state's repression against them and their use of violence. Special Branch cops with experience of dealing with Irish revolutionaries kept tabs on them and used the same range of tactics. The Suffragettes cut phone and telegram wires and used incendiary devices to attack opponents' homes. They even left a bomb at the Edinburgh observatory, while Theresa Garnett attacked Winston Churchill with a horse whip. In the years before World War One more than a thousand women appeared in court because of their activities in support of their fight for the vote. Some even went on hunger strike and were force fed. Predictably enough, some contemporary socialists? saw the demand for their right to vote as a distraction from the main struggle. They argued that the liberation of the oppressed has to be subordinated to the bigger fight: "Sex-equality cannot be the fruit of the Suffragette humbug, it can only come through economic equality -and economic equality is impossible except through Socialism." Variants of this argument resurface every time an oppressed group starts acting on its own behalf. A recurring theme in the film is the way the state could rely on the men in the women's lives to police them on its behalf. An MP's wife is bailed out by her husband, but he refuses to help the working class women avoid time in prison by writing a cheque that would see them released. It's his way of disciplining and punishing his wife on the court's behalf. Brendan Gleeson's cop uses the same technique by sending women home to "let their husbands sort them out". It really helps emphasise the film's point that the winning of even the initial restricted franchise was the result of women fighting for it by themselves, with men as only occasional and marginal helpers. It's a shocking fact that this aspect of women's history has never really been dealt with in film - if we discount the Suffragette Song in Mary Poppins. For east Londoners the imbalance in the film record between this history and the amount of screen time devoted to two third-rate gangsters is shameful. Suffragette goes some way to righting this wrong. It's a powerful, moving and inspirational film which should encourage everyone who sees it to have another look at the history of the movement it describes and to appreciate the value of the self-organisation of the oppressed. Oh, and in one of those ironies of history, Bonham-Carter's great-grandfather was the anti-suffragette Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. It's that Cameronian zeitgeist again. 1 www.historytoday.com/fern-riddell/weaker-sexviolence and suffragette movement 2 www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialiststandard/1900s/1908/no-46-june-1908/suffragettehumbug
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Long Road To Liberation An Exiled Namibian Activist's Perspective by Hans Beukes published in 2014 by Porcupine Press Johannesburg Reviewed by Norman Traub
Hans Beukes, a political activist and Namibian exile, deals in his memoirs with the liberation struggle of the people of his country against • the South African occupation As a 'coloured' from the Baster community of Rehoboth, he places their resistance together with the other ethnic groups, Hereros, Ovambos and Nanas against the racist laws of the South African regime, within the context of the struggle against dispossession of their land by colonial invaders. As a student, whose passport was confiscated by the racist South African regime, he became the focus of a campaign to convince the Trusteeship Council of the UN to refer South Africa to the International Criminal Court for violating its mandate. Instead of preparing the indigenous people of South West Africa for self-government as per its mandate, South Africa treated it as a colony. This gripping account of the life of a participant in the Namibian liberation struggle spans a crucial period in its history. There are a few factual errors in the book, one of which is that this reviewer has three sons, I can only claim two Hans describes growing up as a black man in what was then South West Africa. The misery suffered by the indigenous people intensified as the apartheid regime replicated its own apartheid system with its notorious Bantustans. Hitherto, the Basters as a community had been shielded from some of the iniquitous laws of the South African regime. It did not take long for Hans to become politically aware. As there were no higher schools in South West Africa for Africans, he completed his school education in South Africa, at the top of his class. Hans applied to the University of Cape Town before a Separate Universities Bill segregating Blacks and Whites became law. He was admitted to the university as staff and students were agitating against the Bill. In his second year he was awarded a bursary offered to Black students by the students of Norway for three years study at the University of Hans's life was thrown into turmoil when having been granted a passport, the South African special branch apprehended him and confiscated it without giving any reason. This led to a storm of protest by students, the media and white liberal He was introduced to Allard Lowenstein, a former president of the US Students Association who had been asked to visit South West Africa by two Namibians in exile, M. Kerina and F. Kozonguizi (Kozo), and also Reverend Michael Scott. Lowenstein planned to submit a report to the UN about the conditions under which indigenous people lived and propelled Hans into joining his mission against the apartheid regime with these words "Unless some of you are prepared to leave the comfort of your homes to go and fight them on the world stage, where you can hurt them, you can forget about ever Without a passport, Hans had to hide behind the back seat of the Volkswagen Beetle Lowenstein hired as they crossed the border from South Africa to Botswana. After Lowenstein and the other members of his party of Americans completed the journey to South West Africa, they planned to meet up with Hans in New York. Thirteen shot dead Together with Reverend Michael Scott, Kerina and Kozonguizi, they lobbied the UN. Hans and the Americans were allowed to petition the South West Africa Committee of the UN, which responded by calling for South Africa to be referred to the International Court of Justice ICJ for failing to fulfil its mandate. Following this, the focus of the struggle shifted dramatically to the home front. Thirteen people were shot dead and forty-two others wounded by the police in Windhoek. They were protesting at being moved from the location in Windhoek to a township several kilometres distant, where each ethnic group were to be separated in accordance with the apartheid laws. The three Namibian exiles were granted a hearing by the Trusteeship Committee of the UN to condemn this outrage. Time and again in the future, the leadership of the resistance to the South African occupation would turn to this world body for support. Kozo, who had been instructed by the Herero chief, Kutako, to petition the UN, had also been involved in the formation of the first non-racist political party, the South West African Union(SWANU). He had the support back home of Sam Nujoma, who had launched an organisation of Ovambo contract workers in Windhoek, the Ovambo People's Organisation(OPO) and recruited 37