Elizabeth Maria Molteno

Elizabeth Maria Molteno

Elizabeth "Betty" Maria Molteno (born September 24, 1852 - † August 25, 1927 ) was an important activist of the early women's and civil rights movement in South Africa . As a progressive pedagogue, she implemented innovations at her girls' school that were just as far ahead of her time as her political conviction of the equality of all people, regardless of gender, origin, ethnicity or race.

Life

Childhood and adolescence

Elizabeth Molteno was born as the eldest daughter of an influential family of Italian descent on a farm near Beaufort West in the British Cape Colony. Her father, John Molteno, was the first prime minister in the Cape, and many of Elizabeth's eighteen siblings later embarked on successful careers in South African politics and business.

As her father's favorite daughter, Elizabeth spent carefree childhood years on her parents' estate Claremont near Cape Town . Together with her siblings, she was often allowed to accompany her father on diplomatic and business trips to Europe. Elizabeth, who shared her father's great interest in politics and current affairs, traveled to London and Italy , among others .

Contemporaries praised Elizabeth's high intelligence and extraordinary memory. However, her unusual preferences and views, which were completely unconventional for a young lady of the Victorian era, caused a stir . So she preferred simple and robust clothing to the elaborate and uncomfortable women's fashion of her time and did not want her role as a woman in society to be limited to being a housewife and mother. She was also non-religious, although she described herself as spiritual. What was remarkable was her advocacy of full equality between sexes and races - a point of view that she would take throughout her life.

After graduating from high school, Elizabeth, unlike her sisters, decided not to marry, but instead began studying at Newnham College, University of Cambridge .

Progressive educator

After graduating, Elizabeth chose one of the few skilled jobs open to women in the 19th century and taught at the Collegiate School, a girls' school in Port Elizabeth . She was later entrusted with the management of this school. Her teaching methods, which were considered modern and liberal in her time, were far ahead of the usual Victorian teaching model, in which the subject matter was practiced almost exclusively by repeating, and also took into account the gender-specific needs of the students by introducing sex education classes and allowing bloomers to be allowed to wear - wide-cut ladies' pants, which gave the girls enough freedom of movement to take part in gymnastics classes. With its courageous and pragmatic decisions, Molteno took on a pioneering role in South Africa.

Molteno assessed the importance of a comprehensive school education for girls as so important that she voluntarily waived a salary for her educational and administrative activities. Thanks to sufficient family income, Molteno was financially independent.

Peace activist

Molteno had a close friendship with the English human rights activist Emily Hobhouse

When the British colonial expansion in South Africa resulted in a military conflict with the Boer republics , Molteno took an active stand against the war and also accepted her dismissal from school service. While the population of British origin in the Cape Province was overwhelmingly gripped by a wave of patriotic feelings and enthusiasm for war, peace activists saw themselves exposed to considerable social pressure and vilified as Boer sympathizers.

After repeatedly refusing to end her anti-war protests, Molteno was fired, although many of her former students, along with the school's teaching staff, began a campaign to support her continued employment.

Molteno was one of the co-founders of the South Africa Conciliation Committee , which advocated a negotiated solution to the Boer War , and moved to Cape Town in 1899 to better support the committee's activities. Here Molteno organized a series of demonstrations at which several thousand participants protested against the war and the ethnic tensions that resulted from it.

Molteno developed a close friendship with Emily Hobhouse and Olive Schreiner . After the war, the three women worked together in humanitarian and peace organizations. She paid special attention to the victims of the British warfare, especially the Boer children, tens of thousands of whom - after the sacking of their farms - were imprisoned in concentration camps with their mothers (and thousands of black servants), in order to save their fathers and husbands who were in the final stages of the war waged a guerrilla war against British troops to demoralize.

Although these concentration camps were not designed as extermination camps, the inadequate organization of the British military leadership resulted in thousands of deaths from malnutrition and disease. On the British side too, the generals 'failure to provide adequate medical care cost more soldiers' lives than the fighting.

Elizabeth Molteno had a very special and lifelong friendship with Alice Matilda Greene (1858–1920), the aunt of the writer Graham Greene . Alice Greene, a talented and well-read educator, came from a respected English family. In 1887 she came to the Eastern Cape Colony as a teacher, where she was soon employed as the assistant director of the Collegiate School and shared Molteno's beliefs. Together with Molteno, Alice Green was involved in the local peace movement and took part in protests against British warfare.

Cooperation with Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi and his wife Kasturba 1914

The British policy of reconciliation after the end of the Boer War accepted an increased exclusion of the black population from the political, economic and cultural life of South Africa. Disappointed with the political developments in her home country, Elizabeth Molteno settled in England, where she made the acquaintance of Mahatma Gandhi in 1909 . The encounter grew into a friendship and an exchange of letters that would last for decades.

In 1912 Molteno decided to return to her homeland, which had enjoyed far-reaching autonomy in the British Empire as the South African Union since 1910 , but continued to limit political participation to the white population. Molteno was involved in the fight for a society without racial prejudice and in the women's suffrage movement . As a gifted speaker and influential figure of high social standing, she was able to play an outstanding political role and appeared at numerous public gatherings.

Molteno also published articles in major South African and British publications until the end of her life. Emily Hobhouse admired her talent for getting to the bottom of things and her masterly use of language, which enabled her to highlight moral and spiritual aspects particularly well. Molteno also attracted attention with her radical, often downright anti-imperialist style of writing.

Her close contact with the Gandhis found expression not only in the numerous visits that she paid the couple to their house in the Indian quarter of Phoenix, but also in their decision to buy a property in nearby Umhlanga Rocks. Here she lived during the Satyagraha campaign organized by Gandhi , which she actively supported. Here, too, her social status and relationships with political dignitaries gave her voice weight. In her public appearances on the side of Gandhi, she called on the Indian-born South Africans to identify with Africa and to see them as part of society in the Cape.

When the Gandhis came to Cape Town in 1914, Molteno made sure that the couple could meet influential and important political dignitaries in South Africa. So she introduced the Gandhis during their stay at the Molteno country estate to Emily Hobhouse and the then South African Prime Minister, General Louis Botha .

Before this meeting in Cape Town, Botha had long rejected all requests from Gandhi for a personal interview. Only through the mediation of Elizabeth Molteno did lively and cordial contact develop. Gandhi later called Molteno a "peace broker" who made his encounters with influential personalities possible in the first place.

Molteno was involved in a series of political campaigns for the political participation of black South Africans and their right to land. She worked alongside well-known black leaders such as John Dube , the first general secretary of the African National Congress , and Sol Plaatje .

Campaign against the mistreatment of prisoners

Another issue that Elizabeth Molteno paid attention to was the mistreatment of detainees by the South African police. After Gandhi was arrested, Molteno visited other inmates of the prison who were victims of assault by police officers and witnessed investigations. One of Gandhi's fellow campaigners, Soorzai, was arrested during a strike he organized and died shortly after of ill-treatment. Molteno played an important role in the criminal trial that was to investigate his death, although no guilty verdict was found.

She also looked after Gandhi's wife, Molteno, who was not adequately cared for while she was in prison.

Women's suffrage

A central concern of Elizabeth Molteno was the introduction of women's suffrage, which she stood for all her life. In order to fight for equal rights for women, Molteno sought to work with women of the same sex regardless of their ethnic or social origin for their passive resistance campaigns. She has been a regular speaker at public meetings of the women's suffrage movement, expressing her hope that women will play an important role in a future multiracial society in South Africa.

After the outbreak of World War I, Molteno and her friends Emily Hobhouse and Olive Schreiner stood by British conscientious objectors in 1914 who, for reasons of conscience, refused to use weapons. However, most of their activities in the UK took up the campaign for women's suffrage and women's political representation.

When the First World War came to an end a few years later and Russia was facing a revolutionary change in its society, not a few contemporaries wanted to see the beginning of a new era of human rights and civil liberties. Elizabeth Molteno shared these great expectations and wrote enthusiastically in 1919 about a future in which "all racial, gender and religious inequalities; all old shibboleths , with which the masses were previously oppressed, must give way to comprehensive concepts of humanity."

Death and legacy

Trevone

Elizabeth Molteno died in 1927 in Trevone, a small coastal town in Cornwall in southern England , which she had chosen as her retirement home. She found her final resting place next to her long-time friend Alice Green in St. Savior's Cemetery. The inscription on her tombstone pays homage to the two peace and human rights activists for their life's work: "They loved and served South Africa" .

South African suffragettes describe Elizabeth Molteno as one of the "most influential women in South Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries" and as "one of the most remarkable South African women of her generation".

Molteno's values ​​and convictions, as well as the political concerns she campaigned for, were so far ahead of their time that they - especially in her native South Africa - were not widely recognized until decades later. The role it played in demanding and enforcing basic human and civil rights had long been forgotten.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jean Moorcroft Wilson: I saac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life . London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2007, p. 228
2. ↑ Marthinus van Bart: Songs of the Veld . Cape Town: Cederberg Publishers 2008
3. ^ South African History Online: Some remarkable European Women who helped Gandhi in South Africa. Page accessed on July 13, 2014 ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ^ H. Hughes: The First President: A Life of John L. Dube, Founding President of the ANC . Jacana Media 2011, p. 153
5. ↑ Phillida Brooke-Simons: Apples of the sun . Vlaeberg: Fernwood Press 1999
6. ↑ Van Bart (2008)
7. ↑ Betty Molteno's profile at Feminists South Africa ( memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Brooke-Simons (1999)