ALONE AT HOME FOR ANOTHER 5 YEARS

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31519, 6 November 1967, Page 10

ALONE AT HOME FOR ANOTHER 5 YEARS

(N .Z.R.A.-Reuter—Copyright) JOHANNESBURG, November 1. Five years of loneliness and isolation of house arrest ended at midnight last night for a grey-haired, 62-year-old woman—and five more started all over again.

i For Mrs Helen Joseph, a sociologist born in Midhurst, Sussex, who came to South Africa in 1930, it meant a continuation of an existence so restricted that she cannot leave her home at night or week-ends. She cannot have friends visit her, cannot attend church on Sunday, and cannot leave Johannesburg even for a holiday. “Five years of civil death,” the Opposition leader, Sir de Villiers Graaff, has called it. Mrs Joseph, a divorcee living alone, was the first person to be banned and put under house arrest without trial five years ago because she was alleged to have been furthering the aims of Communism. She planned to have friends in at midnight to celebrate what she hoped would be the end of her long isolation. But she had to cancel them after learning her house arrest had been reimposed. Holiday Cancelled She had also booked a holiday on the Natal coast next month—her first holiday in

more than five years. She had to cancel it, too. Mrs Joseph was a founder member of the now-outlawed South African Congress of Democrats and was among the accused in the country’s marathon treason trial in the late 19505. Her plight has raised voices of protest in the Anglican Church and the synod of the Johannesburg Diocese has condemned her arrest. The Johannesburg “Star” declared in an editorial “punishment without end is now joining punishment without trial as a feature of life in Nationalist South Africa.” Alone at Home Mrs Joseph will live again under a tightly-ordered curfew. Under it she must hurry home from the bookshop where she works to be indoors by the curfew hour of 6.30 p.m. and may not leave her house again until 6.30 a.m.

At week-ends she must stay at home from 2 p.m. on Saturday until 6.30 a.m. on Monday. She may not leave home on week-ends or public holidays —which means house arrest over Christmas and Easter. Except for a doctor, no-one may visit her—not even a priest She must report to the police each weekday and remain within the magisterial area of Johannesburg.