Top 15 Mary Burton Quotes

Mary Burton: A heart for South Africa ,MAVERICK CITIZEN retrieved 2025-04-04

You have no right to harden your heart in this country.

I do think about it a lot,’ she says. “It’s intellectually interesting to think about what might be done, to try and find solutions

In the 1960s, this man, then a young photographer, would just walk around the village. The kids in the streets followed him; they all got to know him by name, taking him into their houses, where he was fed by the local mamas and so on. And now these photographs are in this book. Siona went back to the families he got to know, interviewing the next generation on the impact the removal had on them. It’s incredibly powerful. There were not many dry eyes

At the end of my life, they will put on my tombstone: ‘She did not take a government car!

However, I came home at night to a family, most of my days. There were people who worked for the TRC who did not have that kind of support. And I think many of them carry much more trauma from that time than I do. The problem was, hearing so many stories. You might not have paid enough attention to each one, the attention each and every one deserved

The daily hearing of the stories, I think it took everybody on the TRC into some very dark places

To be confronted with the way in which black men had to live their lives. In those terrible cramped quarters, often with families illegally there. Those single-quarter hostels. They were terrible places. Just terrible. It was the 1960s, these were men who worked in factories, at the harbour, on the docks

They were educating us, the older members. So I remember going with Noel Robb, who was such a strong personality, to visit the migrant labour hospitals in Langa.

I gradually came to understand the only way things would change was if voters were educated enough to understand what was happening, and would vote for legislative change

At the time, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I was fortunate in that my husband supported me. But my parents-in-law were very anxious. And that was something that really had to be negotiated. My mother-in-law had known some of the women who first joined the Black Sash, but she said to me, you know, that they left because it was getting very communistic. I mean, there was nothing communistic about the group. But that was the perception – very clever propaganda on the part of the government. And anything communism was just terrifying, people were absolutely terrified.

It was 1961, and so much was happening,” she recalls. “My new parents-in-law were completely oblivious and quite prejudiced in many ways, as so many white South Africans of that generation were. So the removals were beginning to become a reality. And it all seemed so ridiculous to me, to move people out of established neighbourhoods in the interest of a strange policy – when there was no conflict, there was no tension between people living together.

Picking bathroom taps is of little interest to me, but it has to be done

Well, it’s very difficult because socialism hasn’t really made a big difference in many parts of the world. I just think an awareness needs to be instilled in people who have wealth, that it is to their benefit to share some of that wealth. That if they want safety and security, it costs you. It’s all a question of people stealing at the top, their wealth is stolen wealth. It’s taken from the lives of the poor. So whether the wealth comes from mining or natural resources exploitation, agriculture and so on, people make fortunes at the cost of other people’s labour. The discrepancies are too great. It can’t possibly be just.

“I feel more hopeful with the new government,” she says. “What with competent people slowly, terribly slowly, being put into place. But it’s awful how long it takes. Getting rid of people who are – or have been – complicit in corruption seems to be difficult to do. I suppose there has to be proof, and that takes a long time. But there doesn’t seem to be enough urgency about the economic and social conditions of the poor. I think that is the trouble.