Q&A with Mignonne Breier, author of ‘Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa's Secret Massacre’

Non-fiction Award criteria: The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

Mignonne Breier answers some questions about her book shortlisted for the non-fiction award — Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa's Secret Massacre (Tafelberg)  

“On 9 November 1952, in Duncan Village, East London, police broke up an ANC Youth League meeting by shooting and killing at least eight people and injuring many more. Enraged mobs retaliated by murdering two white people: an insurance salesman and an Irish nun, Sister Aidan Quinlan. She was a medical doctor who lived and worked in Duncan Village. Thereafter the police shot and killed more than 200 people, according to various sources.”  This was the Bloody Sunday that few people know about which you describe in your book. We apologise for the error we made in our summary of the book  in our shortlist coverage last week where we wrote “police killed 10 people and an Irish nun and medical doctor”. Could you explain what led to this massacre?

The massacre occurred at the height of the ANC’s Defiance Campaign which began on 26 June 1952. Groups of ANC members defied discriminatory laws, inviting arrest and flooding the jails. By 9 November 1952 more than 8,000 people had been arrested, mainly in the Eastern Cape. Court appearances attracted large crowds and the police were heavy handed. Clashes between police and protesters had led to riots in Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg and Kimberley. Scores of black people were shot and killed by police and four white people were murdered in retaliation.

On 8 November, the government banned all meetings in the Eastern Cape. But the leader of the ANC in East London, Alcott Gwentshe, sought and gained police permission for a “prayer meeting” on Bantu Square in Duncan Village on the afternoon of 9 November. Shortly after gaining this permission, he and other local leaders were served with banning orders. So they did not attend the meeting at Bantu Square. Instead they were in North End, East London, meeting Walter Sisulu who had come from Johannesburg to settle a leadership dispute.

The Bantu Square meeting opened with a prayer but heavily armed police declared it was not a religious meeting and proceeded to disperse the crowd with bayonets and gunfire. After the police withdrew, angry mobs marched through the location burning and looting symbols of white control. Barend Vorster was beaten to death with sticks and Sister Aidan Quinlan, who had driven to the area to help the wounded, was hit, stabbed and burnt to death in her car. Then her charred body was grossly mutilated.  Police retaliated by rampaging through the location in troop carriers shooting into and between shacks and houses for several hours.

What brought you to Sister Aidan’s story?

I grew up in the Eastern Cape and my parents lived and taught at various rural mission schools. My mother warned me about the dangers of such work and told me about a nun who was burnt to death in the location that she served. Decades later I found the name of the nun and started to research her life, which is at the heart of my book.  

As you wrote in your preface, when you were researching the massacre, you were investigating claims that police killed more people in Duncan Village than in the notorious massacre at Sharpeville and wanted to know how this massacre could go unrecorded. What were your conclusions? 

It is impossible to give an exact number  of people killed in Duncan Village but I am certain there were more deaths than at Sharpeville when 69 were killed. The EP Herald put the immediate death toll at 80 with hundreds injured. Local people say “hundreds” were killed. The policeman who investigated Sister Aidan’s murder has consistently claimed that police kept an informal record and over 200 were killed. The entire event was covered up from the start. My book details how this was done.

Your research is exhaustive and you say the project “consumed your spare time for nearly seven years”. What drove you and how did you research an event which was not fully researched. 

It was just something I felt I had to do. I felt it was wrong that few people know of this event.  The story was suppressed because both sides committed atrocities they were afraid to acknowledge. The local press supported the police in their suppression of information lest it inflame further unrest. The ANC at national level denied responsibility for any of the riots and ignored or underplayed the events of Bloody Sunday because they were embarrassed by the murder of Sister Aidan and wanted to maintain the image of a peaceful, passive resistance campaign. In the process they neglected the massacre. There are exceptions, however. The Eastern Cape ANC did commemorate the 50th anniversary of Sister Aidan’s death in an elaborate ceremony and local residents have apologised for her death. I know of no such apology for the police’s role from white people.

How did you maintain your own emotional equilibrium while being so immersed in such a tragic story?

The book has taken its  toll but I met some really wonderful people in the course of my research and was inspired by the work of Dominican sisters and the Sister Aidan Quinlan Memorial Centre which is at St Peter Claver parish in Duncan Village where she used to live and work.

When did you know that the book was ready to be sent out into the world?

Two findings convinced me that the massacre allegations that I had heard over and over again were entirely possible. In the Pretoria archives I found the documents detailing the change of rules governing the registration of African deaths from July 1952. And I found a handwritten text by a Dominican nun confirming there had been a massacre and mentioning two major burial sites.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

I believe in searching for the truth even if it is impossible to attain. And I believe one needs to acknowledge the mistakes of one’s past to avoid repeating them in future. For me, this meant pursuing multiple sources of information to write as balanced a book as possible. I consulted available literature; I travelled again and again to East London to interview survivors; I searched for documents in archives in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria and in the national library; and I scoured the Quinlan family collection of photos and documents in Ireland. So my book deals with uncomfortable truths that both sides have found it difficult to acknowledge.

What impression do you want readers to take away after reading this?

I want readers to acknowledge the complexity of the story and to see in what happened that day the potential for history to repeat itself.

Click here to buy a copy of Bloody Sunday.