---
title: "Shanthie Naidoo: Anti-apartheid campaigner who chose 371 days in solitary confinement over betrayal"
description: "Naidoo spent a year in solitary confinement rather than testify against her friend Winnie Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists. Her defiance helped bring about the collapse of the apartheid state’s Trial of 22."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "OBITUARY"
author: "Herman Lategan"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/herman_lategan/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-07-28-shanthie-naidoo-anti-apartheid-campaigner-who-chose-371-days-in-solitary-confinement-over-betrayal/"
published: "2026-07-28T22:16:43"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 3064
---

# Shanthie Naidoo: Anti-apartheid campaigner who chose 371 days in solitary confinement over betrayal

> Naidoo spent a year in solitary confinement rather than testify against her friend Winnie Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists. Her defiance helped bring about the collapse of the apartheid state’s Trial of 22.

By Herman Lategan · Published 29 July 2026, 00:16 SAST

## Key points
- Shanthivathie Naidoo, a prominent anti-apartheid campaigner, chose 371 days in solitary confinement over betraying her comrades, including Winnie Mandela, during a politically charged trial.
- Birthed into a politically engaged family, Naidoo’s commitment to resistance began in her youth, defining her life through activism, imprisonment and resilience against apartheid injustices.
- Her refusal to testify in court not only highlighted her moral fortitude but also contributed to the eventual collapse of the apartheid state's Trial of 22.
- Naidoo's legacy lives on through her extensive work in human rights and as a testament to enduring courage in the face of systemic oppression, leaving a profound impact on South African society.

## Content

On a winter Friday in 1969, the security police walked into a bedroom in Johannesburg and told Shanthivathie Naidoo to pack a bag. She was dressing for another ordinary day at Vanguard Books, the small shop off Market Street that had become a meeting place for the city’s dissident writers and trade unionists.

Her mother stood watching. “Pack your bags,” the men said, “we are detaining you under the Terrorism Act.” Naidoo was given no reason and no warning. She would not sleep in her own bed again for 371 days.

Shanthivathie “Shanthie” Naidoo, who has died at the age of 91, spent a year in solitary confinement rather than testify against her friend Winnie Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists. After five days of interrogation without sleep, during which she was forced to stand until she hallucinated, she was sentenced to prison for refusing, in open court, to betray her friends.

Her defiance helped bring about the collapse of the apartheid state’s Trial of 22, in which Winnie Mandela and 21 others stood accused of furthering the aims of the banned ANC, and made her name known in newspapers from Johannesburg to London. She herself resisted the word “activist”, preferring to describe her decades of underground work, banning orders and imprisonment simply as what her family had always done.

She was born on 6 March 1935 in Pretoria, the eldest of five children of Thambi “Naran” Naidoo, known also as Nariansamy, and his wife Ama, sometimes recorded as Monomoney. Politics ran through the household; it was part of their DNA. Her grandfather, also named Thambi Naidoo, had marched alongside Mahatma Gandhi in the early satyagraha campaigns of the 1900s, the nonviolent civil resistance campaigns against discriminatory laws targeting South Africa’s Indian community, and later received a peace award for his efforts.

Her father died in 1953 still committed to the cause of freedom, and her mother was jailed during the 1949 Defiance Campaign in Durban. According to South African History Online, which holds an extensive record of her testimony, Naidoo spent much of her early childhood with her maternal grandmother in Pretoria before returning to a home in Doornfontein that was, by her brother Indres’s account, raided so often by the security branch that the family grew used to fists on the door at two or three in the morning.

![Herman-Naidoo-Obit](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/hXx0kqLi9Jli8OX9o39A3wJ0bb0=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/753647319_1525057732691897_9097174533703747891_n_399908.jpg)

*Above: Shanthie Naidoo at a demonstration in London, flanked by Fred Carneson (left) and Hugh Lewin. (Photo: Naidoo Family Collection / Liliesleaf)*

Political theatre was ordinary at the family dinner table. Her brother Prema recalled that their sibling Murthie was giving speeches at the age of five or six about how “white people brought us to work on sugar plantations and now they won’t let us taste it”.

Naidoo herself was drawn into organised resistance while still at school, distributing leaflets and helping to organise boycotts, and she attended the mass meetings once held at Red Square in Fordsburg, on the ground where the Oriental Plaza shopping centre now stands. By her teens she was active in the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress, and in 1954 she joined the newly formed Federation of South African Women.

Her father’s death ended her schooling and put her to work, first at a company that made theatrical costumes, then, from 1955, as a clerk at the national office of the Congress of Democrats, the organisation of progressive white South Africans allied to the African and Indian congresses and established at Oliver Tambo’s suggestion. She was there throughout the 1956 Treason Trial, when many of the movement’s leaders were arrested and charged with high treason.

After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Congress of Democrats was banned under the state of emergency, and she moved to the South African Congress of Trade Unions, where she worked for 11 months before a five-year banning order, imposed in December 1963, forced her out.

With her brother Indres by then imprisoned on Robben Island, Naidoo became the family’s principal breadwinner, taking a job at Vanguard Books alongside fellow activist Helen Joseph and the writer Todd Matshikiza, while quietly continuing her work as a trade unionist and courier of banned material.

The banning order made even accidental contact dangerous. In February 1965 Naidoo went to the trial of the lawyer Bram Fischer, chairperson of the outlawed South African Communist Party, and was greeted there by another banned acquaintance, Bhana Mohamed.

![Herman-Naidoo-Obit](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/C2c4rIKP04_pCdpjKB2kvGLrSCY=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/753904821_1010014058518321_5484850144937811922_n_787336.jpg)

*Shanthie Naidoo was profiled in Women in Solitary: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid by Shanthini Naidoo (2021). (Cover: Wikipedia)*

She raised a finger to her lips to warn him off, and was arrested regardless, charged with communicating with a banned person and held overnight before she was acquitted. On another occasion, taken ill and admitted to hospital, she was confronted at her bedside by security police demanding to know why she had not reported her change of address, as her restrictions required. When her first banning order lapsed in December 1968 she was served with a second, more severe than the first.

The security branch returned for her on 13 June 1969. In an interview for the journalist Shanthini Naidoo’s 2021 book, *Women in Solitary: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid*, she recalled the morning clearly. “I was in bed, at home in Rockey Street (Doornfontein),” she said. “It was a normal day; I was going to go to work at Vanguard. It was Friday the 13th, if I remember.”

She was held at The Fort, the women’s section of the Johannesburg prison, in solitary confinement, denied a bath or a shower, and not even permitted to empty her own sanitation bucket. “I didn’t feel as isolated at the Fort,” she told the author. “There were lots of women; fruit sellers, people in for pass laws; you could hear voices.” Two weeks on, she was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison, behind a high rock wall and a single metal door, to a cold cell with a bare concrete floor that would be her home for more than a year.

![Herman-Naidoo-Obit](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/8ygA0Wa2fEZlATPOqEc3sPwp19Q=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/pic13_295728.jpg)

*Ama bidding farewell to her daughter, Shanthie, at the time of her departure for London in 1972, with Kamala, Prema’s wife, and their son, Kuben, looking on. (Photo: Naidoo Family Collection / Liliesleaf)*

There she was questioned for five days and nights by the security police officer Johannes “Rooi Rus” Swanepoel, the same man who had shot her brother Indres. Made to stand throughout the interrogation, deprived of sleep, she began to lose her hold on reality. “I was forced to stand for five days and nights, while they fired questions at me,” she later told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

“I lost all sense of time. I also began to lose hold on reality towards the end of the interrogation. I had terrifying hallucinations, like nightmares, in which the questions became all mixed up with broken dreams. I didn’t know what was happening.” At one point she spoke, in her confused state, of flying and of gold; the police seized on the fragment as evidence of a plot, though she had never in her life left South Africa.

In December 1969 she was brought to court as a witness in the Trial of 22, in which Winnie Mandela, the journalist Joyce Sikhakhane and 20 others were accused of furthering the aims of the banned African National Congress. It was the first time her family had seen her since her arrest. Only then did they discover that she had been detained to testify for the state.

Six months later, called again to give evidence, she refused. “I have two friends among the accused,” she told the court. “I don’t want to give evidence because I will not be able to live with my conscience if I do.” She meant Mandela and Sikhakhane.

“Shantie was always a very quiet, unassuming person,” her brother Prema says. “At the trial of the 22 she responded by saying that she could never live with herself if she betrayed her comrades.”

Mr Justice Bekker was unmoved. “It is obviously unpleasant to be called upon to give evidence against friends,” he said. “Your excuse is a moral one but, in my opinion, is not a just one.” He sentenced her to two months’ imprisonment and warned that a further refusal would cost her a year.

Privately, by her account, the judge pitied her frail state and asked her family to persuade her to change her mind; her mother’s answer, relayed through her brother Murthie, was that “whatever Shanthie does we will stand by and support her”.

On 16 February 1970 the State abandoned the prosecution for lack of evidence, removing any need for her testimony. Rather than release her, the police simply re-detained her under the Terrorism Act. She was finally freed in June 1970, after 371 days, nearly all of it in solitary confinement, without ever having been convicted of an offence. “When they sent me home, I couldn’t sleep for two nights,” she said. “And then I couldn’t stop talking. That was the first and only time I took something to help me sleep.”

Freedom remained partial. Still banned and confined to the magisterial district of Johannesburg, she could not attend Prema’s wedding or the funeral of a close relative, could not visit Indres on Robben Island, and could speak to only one person at a time. South African History Online preserves the Rand Daily Mail’s account of her that year, written by Anthony Holiday: she went on with her work in a city bookshop, reported weekly to the police, avoided gatherings and banned friends, and could publish nothing of what she felt, though, he wrote, “the look in her eyes says clearly enough: ‘I am not afraid.’”

![Herman-Naidoo-Obit](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/uV27zKCL5-mv6Ub8t54zW1Cf9iQ=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/ED_174740_679763.jpg)

*Shanthie Naidoo in Johannesburg on 16 August 2019. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Alaister Russell)*

![Herman-Naidoo-Obit](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/Su1cAFvKuNUjnzG-HRkIraJUCRA=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/ae211f60f605f0042769e71c41f2e49f6e26a8b0w700_402644.jpg)

*In 1981, Shanthie Naidoo-Tweedie handed over a special award on behalf of the ANC in Lenasia to veteran diplomat and activist Enuga Reddy, who played a huge role in helping take the struggle across the globe, especially during his tenure as an Indian diplomat at the UN. (Photo: Facebook)*

Granted an exit permit by the minister of the interior in March 1971, she then discovered she needed separate permission from the minister of justice simply to reach the airport, which lay outside her permitted district.

Permission was refused. She became, with the Pan Africanist Congress leader Robert Sobukwe, one of only two South Africans confined in this particular bureaucratic trap. Two court challenges failed. Only after sustained international pressure, and the intervention of the Progressive Party parliamentarian Helen Suzman, did the government relent, granting her permission to leave in September 1972 and, for the first time, to visit Indres in prison.

More than 200 friends and family of every racial background gathered at Jan Smuts Airport to see her off, singing “We Shall Overcome” while she said goodbye, under the terms of her own banning order, to one person at a time. She flew to London to join her sister Ramnie, already in exile there, and worked first for the Soviet Weekly before settling into a long career at the International Defence and Aid Fund, documenting human rights abuses and channelling money to the families of political prisoners at home.

She joined the ANC Women’s Section and the campaign group SATIS, which organised vigils and petitions for detained and tortured activists outside South Africa House, among them an unsuccessful effort to save the young uMkhonto weSizwe soldier Solomon Mahlangu from the gallows. “What a waste of life that was,” she said.

It was on a communist newspaper day trip across the Channel, organised by the Morning Star, that she met Dominic Tweedie, a British anti-apartheid campaigner who worked for the same paper and lodged with a family of South African exiles in East Finchley, not far from where Naidoo was staying with her sister. “So we met in France,” Tweedie says.

In 1980 the couple went together to work at the ANC’s school for exiled children at Mazimbu in Morogoro, Tanzania, the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, built to educate the young people who had fled the country after the 1976 Soweto uprising. Naidoo worked in the principal’s office; Tweedie, a talented woodworker, helped build the settlement itself. They married there during that first year.

Naidoo returned home to South Africa in April 1991, with Tweedie following soon after. She found the reunion harder than she had expected. “When I left, our family was living in Doornfontein,” she said. “When we returned, they were in Lenasia.

“There were brothers getting married, and new sisters-in-law, nephews and nieces who were grown up. To build relationships again was difficult.” She took work at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Education Policy Unit and helped re-establish the ANC Women’s League.

In 1997 she gave evidence to the TRC, describing in public for the first time the standing interrogations, the hallucinations, the threats against her family, closing a circle that had opened in a Pretoria courtroom nearly three decades earlier.

She was later profiled at length, alongside other women who had endured South Africa’s political prisons, in Shanthini Naidoo’s *Women in Solitary: Inside the Female Resistance to Apartheid*, which drew on hours of interviews to set down her account in her own words, and which remains among the fullest records of what she lived through.

She had by then also earned a claim, among the last of her generation, to being a founding member of the reconstituted South African Communist Party, banned in its earlier form in 1950. Politics for her never softened into nostalgia. Asked, decades on, how she viewed South African democracy, her husband said:

“Democracy obviously has not worked out well. As ‘democracy’ proceeded, Shanthie became less interested in it.” She had joined a neighbourhood pottery class in her later years and found herself disappointed by how little her fellow potters, women her own age, knew of the struggle she had lived through.

Those who knew her outside politics describe someone who resisted being reduced to her file at the security branch. Tweedie, asked what she was like away from the movement as an activist, bridled slightly at the question itself. “Shanthie was not an ‘activist’, whatever that is supposed to mean,” he says. “There are not two kinds of people, activists and others. Such an idea is foreign to us.”

Pressed further, he allowed that she loved good food and was an accomplished cook, that she was an observant Hindu fluent in Tamil culture and language, that she loved music, and that she kept a sharp sense of humour. Asked what he would remember most, he did not reach for sentiment: “Her heart of gold.” Asked whether the torture had left lasting scars, he would say only: “I don’t know. All I can say is that Shanthie was a strong human being.”

Others who encountered her in later life describe a quiet persona that was easy to mistake for reticence. Mandla Radebe, a professor of strategic communication at Wits, met her as a young Communist Party activist in the late 1990s and recalled how “you could easily forget she was even in the room because she never sought attention”, until he learnt, gradually, that he was in the presence of a struggle stalwart from a family of distinguished revolutionaries.

“Even when she made an important contribution, she did so gently and without seeking recognition,” he says, adding that Naidoo and Tweedie complemented one another, his intellect combative and hers measured, in a partnership he watched deepen into old age, when Tweedie nursed her with what Radebe called patience and tenderness.

Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, founding member of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, remembers a woman who “endured immense cruelty, beatings, starvation, denied water and endless interrogations, yet her courage never broke”, choosing, in her words, “pain over betrayal to protect her comrades”.

The former political prisoner and politician Barbara Hogan called her steadfastness under persecution “an example of what to do when the odds are so powerfully stacked against one”.

Her brother Prema adds: “Both our parents were ardent followers of Gandhi, and all five of their children were influenced by his philosophy (which emphasised nonviolence, truth, justice, simplicity and the pursuit of social change through peaceful resistance).

“Shanthie was the eldest sibling and accompanied our parents to many demonstrations and protests against the apartheid government.

“These included the 1956 Women’s March, the 1957 Alexandra Bus Boycott and the 1959-60 potato boycott (a nationwide consumer campaign that sought to pressure farmers and the apartheid government by encouraging consumers to refuse to buy potatoes produced through the exploitation and forced labour of Black farmworkers).

“She was also actively involved in the Transvaal Indian Congress.”

![Herman-Naidoo-Obit](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/zVzxvz0GuRK4I7iPkLZ8gBOuOU0=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/ED_174731_767995.jpg)

*Shanthie Naidoo on 16 August 2019. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sunday Times / Alaister Russell)*

She had no children of her own, saying she had married too late in life, but doted on grand-nieces and grand-nephews whose photographs filled the polished wood furniture of the house she shared with Tweedie. Sleep, even decades later, was not entirely reclaimed from the year in solitary confinement.

“Even now, I don’t like to be alone if Dominic has to be somewhere,” she admitted. Tweedie, for his part, resisted any suggestion that his own role in the marriage deserved much notice, calling himself “inconsequential in this story”, a modesty Naidoo, by his account, firmly rejected.

Shanthivathie Naidoo died on 23 July 2026 at Linksfield Clinic in Johannesburg, from complications following admission for a minor ailment. She is survived by her husband, Dominic Tweedie; her sister, Ramnie Dinat; her brother, Prema Naidoo; her sister-in-law Mogie Naidoo, widow of her late brother Murthie; and by numerous nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews, along with a wide network of cousins concentrated in Pretoria.

Her brother Indres, whose imprisonment first pushed her into the role of breadwinner and whose shooting by her own interrogator haunted her detention, died in 2016.

Before she died, Shanthie had a good claim to being one of the few surviving founding members of the South African Communist Party, when it was reformed some years after the CPSA was banned in 1950.

In the end, the policemen who came for her that winter morning are long dead. The laws under which they acted have been swept away. What remains is the silence she kept, and the life she built after it. **DM**