The Women Who Gathered in the Shadows: Nokuthula Simelane and the ANC Underground

Episode 2 of The Great Gathering Series

Mar 29, 2025

⚠️This episode discusses violence, including violence against women, in the context of apartheid-era South Africa. Some readers may find the content distressing. Please take care while reading.

In the fall of 1983, Nokuthula Simelane stood at a bus stop in the dusty mining town of Carltonville, South Africa. She was 23 years old, a university graduate, and an underground courier for the African National Congress (ANC). She had spent the last few years weaving in and out of apartheid South Africa, carrying messages, intelligence, and directives between ANC operatives and exiled leaders in neighboring Swaziland.

This time, she was set to meet a trusted comrade—one of many discreet gatherings that fueled the underground movement. But something felt different. The air was heavy with tension. Across the street, eyes lingered too long. Before she could react, a van screeched to a stop, and armed men grabbed her.

She would never be seen alive again.

The Women Who Moved in Silence

The fight against apartheid is often remembered through the figures of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Steve Biko. Yet, the underground network that sustained the ANC’s resistance was filled with women whose names were rarely spoken but whose contributions were invaluable. Women like Nokuthula Simelane risked everything, operating in a world of coded letters, secret handshakes, and silent disappearances.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the ANC had been driven underground. The apartheid government’s feared security branch, trained in counterinsurgency warfare, worked ruthlessly to infiltrate and dismantle the resistance. Women became crucial to the underground movement—not just as couriers but as intelligence officers, bomb-makers, recruiters, and strategists. Their gender often afforded them cover; security forces underestimated them, assuming they were only peripheral players in a man's war.

Nokuthula Simelane was part of this shadow network. Born in 1960 in Mpumalanga, she was a bright student who attended the University of Swaziland. Like many young Black South Africans of her time, she was radicalized by the 1976 Soweto Uprising, where students protesting against Afrikaans-language education were gunned down by police. She joined the ANC’s armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), serving as a courier between Swaziland and Johannesburg.

Her work was dangerous. She traveled under assumed identities, smuggled sensitive documents, and carried out reconnaissance missions to aid in acts of sabotage against the apartheid state. She knew the risks. But she also believed in the cause.

A Brutal Betrayal

Her final mission in September 1983 was supposed to be routine. She was to meet an ANC operative, receive new instructions, and return to Swaziland. Instead, she was met by members of the South African Police Security Branch, who had intercepted her plans.

For weeks, they tortured her. Witnesses later testified that she was kept in a government safe house in Pretoria, beaten, electrocuted, and suffocated with plastic bags over her head. Officers demanded names, locations, and details of ANC operations. But she never broke.

At some point, she was taken away. Her body was never found.

The apartheid government denied everything. Her family searched for answers, but for years, they were met with silence.

The Struggle for Truth

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to expose the crimes of the past. In 1996, former security police officers applied for amnesty, admitting that they had abducted and tortured Nokuthula. However, they claimed she was later released—a claim widely dismissed by human rights groups and her family.

Despite partial confessions, justice was elusive. In 2016, the South African government finally charged four former apartheid police officers with Simelane’s murder. Yet, legal battles dragged on. Her remains were never recovered, leaving her family in a limbo of unresolved grief.

Nokuthula Simelane became a symbol—not just of those who vanished under apartheid but of the women whose contributions were erased even in history’s retelling. She was one of many:

Dulcie September, the ANC’s representative in France, was assassinated in 1988.
Ruth First, journalist and anti-apartheid activist, was killed by a letter bomb in 1982.
Victoria Mxenge, a lawyer, was gunned down in her driveway in 1985.

Each was part of the underground. Each was a woman who gathered in secrecy, who organized in the shadows, who carried messages that would bring apartheid to its knees.

The Lessons of the Underground

Every resistance movement begins with a gathering. It may not be grand or public, but it is deliberate—conversations whispered in kitchens, maps sketched on napkins, plans exchanged under the cover of night. The ANC’s underground movement relied on such gatherings. Women like Nokuthula Simelane sat in quiet corners of safe houses, passing intelligence that fueled acts of defiance. They met in markets, blending into the crowds while delivering messages that shaped South Africa’s liberation.

The women of the underground understood that survival depended on secrecy. Their meetings were not just moments of strategy but acts of courage. They remind us that even in the most repressive regimes, people find ways to come together—because gathering is an act of resistance in itself.

Nokuthula’s story is not just about the price of freedom; it is about the power of those who dare to meet, plan, and act, even when the world is watching and perhaps waiting for them to disappear.

This is so beautiful and informative. I'm embarrassed, as a South African, to admit that I've barely seen the names of these incredible women. So, thank you. Because my uncle was exiled across Africa for a few decades after being forced out of the country by the Apartheid government. These stories of the underground resistance always hit a little close to home ❤️.

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