Martha Dhlamini.

Nomzamo Winnie Mandela.

Nondwe Mankahla.

Thokozile Mngoma.

Shanthie Naidoo.

Rita Ndzanga.

Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin.

I’m resisting the urge to write, “Say their names.” I don’t want to force the stories of these seven South African women into a U.S. narrative. I am an American reporter who for seven years was based in Johannesburg. I know South Africans have their own stories of walking what author Shanthini Naidoo calls their “sweet, flawed path of democracy.”

Shanthini Naidoo reported for South Africa’s Sunday Times on the death in 2018 of Winnie Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist who went on to serve in parliament and in the Cabinet of post-apartheid South Africa. As Naidoo wrote about Mandela’s funeral, she learned of the brave, long forgotten role that Mandela and six other women had played a half century earlier during a crucial confrontation between South Africa’s white supremacist government and the country’s multiracial anti-apartheid movement. Naidoo set out to hear the stories of those still living before it was too late. The result is Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons.

Seven women and 15 men – 22 in all -- were arrested in April and May of 1969 and accused of terrorism for their work exposing the brutality of apartheid and supporting the oppressed with funds, medical help and solidarity.

Rita Ndzanga, who was among those accused in what became known as the Trial of the 22, told Naidoo: “We wanted our dignity back.” Ndzanga, like Mandela, would later serve in South Africa’s post-apartheid parliament.

In 1964, another high-profile case had ended with top leaders of the anti-apartheid African National Congress being convicted and sent to Robben Island. Among those imprisoned were Nelson Mandela (then married to Winnie Mandela), Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki. The Trial of the 22 five years later was an attempt to break the ANC once and for all. Instead, prosecutors had to surrender, admitting they had no evidence. The 22 were released in September of 1970.

During the months they were held, jailers used physical and mental torture to try to force the accused to give evidence against one another. Activist and daughter and granddaughter of activists Shanthie Naidoo (no relation to the author) was the first to be called to the stand and asked to testify. When she refused, she was told that her defiance would mean more months in a cell. “I am prepared to accept it,” she said.

Nearly a generation earlier, Nondwe Mankahla had helped organize the 1955 Congress of the People, at which South Africans of all races had declared their country belonged to “all who live in it.” When it was her turn before the judge during the Trial of the 22, Nondwe Mankahla said simply: “I do not wish to give evidence against my people.”

The defendants had been beaten, starved, deprived of sleep, denied medical attention, threatened at gun point. The torturers’ special techniques for women included rape. Other women had left apartheid’s jails pregnant.

Another of the 22, journalist and author Joyce Sikhakhane-Rankin described the impact on her of being denied sanitary supplies and made to stand as punishment while menstruating, “the feel and the smell of the sticky blood as a reminder of imminent slaughter at the hands of your torturers.”

Many would later say that the solitary confinement that they endured for months was the worst of the tortures.

Picture Winnie Mandela alone in a cell, shredding a blanket and then weaving the shreds into a version of a traditional mat that her grandmother had taught her to make. Mankahla told Naidoo of sitting in her own 5-by-13-foot cell and finding two pins. She used the pins to crochet with a piece of thread, undoing her handiwork and redoing it, again and again. Women’s work -- superpower skills handed down from generation to generation -- providing solace that would never be understood by torturers who may have believed women had special weaknesses.

Several of the women went into exile after they were released, escaping continued harassment from the government. In 1971, a crowd sang We Shall Overcome at the Johannesburg airport to bid farewell to Shanthie Naidoo. Once in London, Shanthie Naidoo remembers seeing protests of the Vietnam War and of a coup in Greece, “and of course we campaigned for South Africa.” She saw that South Africa’s struggle was part of movements worldwide for peace and justice.

Others’ stories should not be reduced to echoes of our own. But we can recognize the universal human desire for freedom. I was especially moved by author Shanthini Naidoo’s contemplation in Women Surviving Apartheid's Prisons of the terrible toll on mental health that the trauma of apartheid had visited not only on the subjects of her book, but on whole communities, generation after generation. Her book should draw the attention of Americans to what racism has wrought in our country, and to the need for healing through knowledge of one another and of ourselves.

And so, in solidarity and humility, I will urge you to say their names: