Norma Kitson

On the streets of London, and in the townships of South Africa, they fought and won the struggle against apartheid

A very dodgy obituary by Denis Herbstein [Reproduced without permission from The Guardian — Friday July 12, 2002]

The passing of Norma Kitson, who has died of emphysema aged 68, recalls a time when the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was brought to the heart of central London. Kitson was the inspiration behind the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group, which, for several years, mounted a continuous picket on the pavement outside South Africa House, in Trafalgar Square.
Protestors, demanding the release of Nelson Mandela and his fellow political prisoners, became a regular tourist attraction. On the day that the African National Congress leader was released from Robben Island in 1990, Londoners converged on the embassy to join the celebrations, and the siege was lifted.
Yet throughout those years, Kitson, and her husband Dave, were under suspension by the ANC. They were reinstated, at the prompting of Mandela himself, but the fact that Norma ended her days in Zimbabwe, and not South Africa, showed that the reconciliation was never complete.
Born into a well-to-do Durban family, mostly Jewish but part Afrikaner — the choreographer John Cranko was a first cousin — Kitson was educated at a Johannesburg boarding school. Naturally rebellious, at 14, when her parents divorced, she went to work as a secretary in a gold mine. In 1950s Johannesburg, the heartland of resistance to apartheid, she joined the outlawed South African Communist party (SACP) and acquired the skills of a printer.
Marriage to the much older Dave Kitson, a Durban mechanical engineer who had also studied politics at Ruskin College, Oxford, changed the course of her life. He was calm, where she was volatile. More pertinently, he had been trained as a military engineer in the South African army.
These skills were put to use when the ANC launched the armed struggle in 1961, via its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. In 1964, Dave, by then a member of Umkhonto’s four-strong high command, was captured and jailed for 20 years, leaving Norma with their two young children, Steven and Amandla. Following a month’s detention by the security forces, she was driven out of the country; even in London, her early years were punctuated by menacing phone calls.
Ever resourceful, Norma set up the Red Lion typesetters, an all-women cooperative off the Gray’s Inn Road, that did the typesetting for the Anti-Apartheid News and the London Review of Books.
In 1982, Steven was allowed to return to South Africa to visit his father, but was detained when discovered drawing sketches outside the prison in Pretoria. Norma, good-looking and streetwise, turned the arrest into a cause celebre. After her son’s release, she started picketing South Africa House in an attempt to get Dave freed. (She had, by this time, divorced him in order to marry a South African fashion designer, but was by now again divorced.)
The bust-up with the ANC had several interrelated causes. Norma was not a team person, unless she could run the show; this individualism was anathema to the exiled SACP members scattered across north London. There was also a feeling that when a white person was arrested, their case was easily aired in the media; black victims of apartheid were harder to sell.
Dave Kitson was released in 1984, perhaps as a sop by the South African prime minister, PW Botha, for being allowed to call on Margaret Thatcher while in London. Back in England — and back with Norma — Dave was pressurised to side with the ANC and the SACP against the City of London anti-apartheid group, but refused. As a result, he was sidelined by his trade union, Tass, and by Ruskin College, which had supported him and his family financially during his prison years. The bitterness was great.
The City of London group was run by the Revolutionary Communist Group, a tiny organisation on the far reaches of the left. Its mouthpiece, Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism, poured vitriol on the Labour party, whose members were influential in the mainstream Anti-Apartheid Movement. Matters came to a head at the A-AM annual meeting in 1984, when a “City” slate of 13 — including the four Kitsons and three Labour MPs — stood for the national executive. All were defeated. Unavailingly, the A-AM warned “City” to stick to its own patch.
In the event, the City of London group, with Norma and family often jollying passers-by, spent the final years of the struggle against apartheid in Trafalgar Square. A-AM was irked by what it saw as an irritating diversion, especially since the 1984 uprising in South Africa’s townships had given its cause a mass following in Britain.
But the picket was the icing on the cake, rather like Emily Davidson throwing herself at the feet of the Derby horses in the cause of women’s suffrage, a gesture dramatising profound currents below. I can testify, from journalistic visits to the embassy at this time, to the state of siege within. How comforting it was, when interviewing some unyielding bureaucrat, to hear the chants outside.
The ANC — though probably not the SACP — forgave the Kitsons, and honoured them as “veterans of the struggle”, but, by then, they had settled in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. Their unhappiness was compounded by Steven’s death from cancer. Norma became secretary of the Zimbabwe Women’s Writers group. Though an atheist, she was buried in a Jewish cemetery — a strange end for a rebel within a revolution.
She is survived by Dave and Amandla.
· Norma Kitson, anti-apartheid activist, born August 18 1933; died June 12 2002
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Letter: Norma Kitson
The Guardian — Saturday July 20, 2002
Lynne Reid Banks writes: Norma Kitson (obituary, July 12) was a writer of considerable talent. I first met her when I went to her home in 1987 to interview her following the publication of her autobiography Where Sixpence Lives, one of the most vivid and exciting contemporary life stories I’d ever read.
It told of her many-sibling’d childhood in Durban — she claimed to have African blood, having found Crankos in the “coloured” cemetery; “Where do you think we got our kinky hair?” — the origins of her anti-apartheid commitment, and the many, almost incredible, incidents in her struggle, including the murder of her sister by the South African police, about which Norma wrote with great power.
The moment I set eyes on her I knew she was “one of mine”. Our friendship lasted until her death, despite her fundamental disapproval of my Zionism, and mine of her communism — proving that one can bridge even the widest ideological gulfs if affection and mutual admiration are strong enough

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RELATED LINKS:

David Kitson and me
David Kitson's obituary
Steven Kitson: photo
Steven Kitson
Pie in the sky
Norma’s Obituary [FRFI]
Norma Kitson [Photo]
Where Sixpence Lives