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

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

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.