Culture was instrumental in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Built from the African National Congress’s (ANC) Angola military base, the Amandla Cultural Ensemble was formed in 1978. Via the medium of music, dance and culture, the group aimed to promote the struggle for freedom and incite international mobilisation by showcasing South Africa’s cultural heritage. The anti-apartheid movement had indistinct and sometimes conflicting conceptions of what culture’s role should be in external propaganda work, as opposed to the internally focused work of nation building. Very little is known, however, about the women who were at the forefront of this movement, bringing culture into the mainstream of the anti-apartheid movement through sonic activism.
Daisy Nompumelelo Tshiloane spent most of her life in exile and played a significant role in the anti-apartheid struggle under the nom de guerre ‘Fortune Nala’. Today, many exiles from the South African liberation movement remain unnameable and untraceable. During two phone calls in 2024 and 2025, Daisy and I had a lengthy conversation about her time in the struggle. At the time of our phone calls, Daisy was in her mid-sixties and was living in Springs in the city of Ekurhuleni with her children. Two things struck me the most about our conversation: firstly, Daisy told me that she knew my late father, who was her comrade in Angola. Secondly, she was centrally involved in the Amandla Cultural Ensemble. Daisy’s story is important because naming her contribution works against the erasure of women in histories of the struggle for the liberation of South Africa. Amandla’s enormous international success relied on the autonomous participation of women like Daisy.
Women who served in the liberation movement of South Africa were called the “flowers of our revolution” by the ANC President Oliver Reginald Kaizana (OR) Tambo. Daisy was a young militant from the township of KwaThema in Ekurhuleni when she joined the struggle following the June 16 uprisings in Soweto, sparked when students protested against the adoption of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Daisy was just 17 when she went into exile in 1977, first arriving in Swaziland before heading to Angola. In a retrospective letter to OR Tambo – published as part of a collection of ‘childhood memories in exile’ in 2017 – Daisy reflected on her childhood home:
“Yes Sir, I know the townships are not places that we chose, but they are the ones that created many good and bad memories about who we are, where we come from, and where we wanted to go. That to me was the beautiful township because I knew every corner, and I have my lasting memories of my childhood there.”
During our conversation, Daisy explained that she missed out on a lot because she spent her teenage years in exile.
‘I spent my childhood in exile, fighting for the country. For instance, Sundays were a special day for youngsters back home in South Africa. During that time, my family home in KwaThema worked as a bioscope, a cinema. After church, young people would change into casual clothes and would pay money to watch the bioscope at my house. I missed out on all of that.’
In 1978, Daisy joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC. She recalls that:
‘I chose MK when I was in Swaziland, attending a school for fugitives. It was a fugi camp and we were expected to go to school. Organisations such as the Pan African Congress (PAC), ANC, Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) would visit this refugee school and would recruit members.’
Life was difficult in the Angolan MK camps and meals were limited: ‘my first meal/breakfast included oats which expired two years ago. When pouring milk, worms would come out.’ Daisy sometimes didn’t eat breakfast for three days: ‘The breakfast with worms was unsettling but after training, you would close your eyes and eat.’ Daisy was subsequently sent to train in the Soviet Union and Ukraine as a nurse.
On her return from Russia in 1979, Daisy was recruited to the Amandla Cultural Ensemble. The Amandla Cultural Ensemble was first established at International Festival of Youth and Students in Havana, Cuba in 1978. Daisy explained the founding of Amandla as follows:
‘The ANC sent a big group of performers from Katende, south of Angola, to Cuba. These performers were sent to represent the ANC. Upon their return, OR Tambo decided to have a group like this on a permanent basis.’
The ANC leadership went into the MK camps in Angola in search of people who could sing, dance and perform, initially hoping to scout about 30 people. Amandla was orchestrated by cultural worker and Chief Representative of the ANC in Nordic countries, Lindiwe Mabuza. In her book So Far, So Close (2022), Mabuza asserted that ‘Amandla had from the start been organised as a mobilising tool’, which relied on identifying MK members who ‘were most disciplined and passionate about their special role as cultural ambassadors and very patriotic’. Daisy remembers Mabuza as one of her mothers in exile: ‘she treated me like her own daughter’.
Cultural activities already existed in the camps as both a formal and informal part of the MK programme. For instance, Daisy was a member of the Spearhead group, made up of performers in Camp 13 in Quibaxe. During our conversation, Daisy expressed how lucky she felt to have been selected to join Amandla. Once performers were selected, rehearsals began in Luanda. Daisy recalled that she and other performers stayed in Res-2, but would rehearse in Res-1 where the ANC headquarters were located in Angola, so that the leadership could observe what performers were doing. Initially, Amandla performed American songs and song genres which replicated voices such as Barry White, performing for audiences in Angola who were fond of American music. However, Mzwandile ‘Mzwai’ Piliso – one of the ANC leaders in exile – was surprised that Amandla wanted to sing American songs and instructed them to sing South African songs and genres instead. Daisy remembered Amandla being advised to sing the traditional South African genre Mbaqanga, while performing gumboot and other traditional dances. Led by South African jazz giant Jonas Gwangwa, who joined the group in 1980, Amandla consisted of guerillas and combatants who took cultural work seriously. According to Daisy, performers were required to be multifaceted: acting, singing, dancing and reciting poetry: ‘Everybody did everything, that’s just how Gwangwa worked’.
The talent nurtured in ANC camps in Angola was taken to Europe with Amandla’s first international tour in autumn 1980, performing in Holland, West Germany, Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Finland and Norway. Amandla tours were planned with passion, collective care and a desire for freedom. Lindiwe Mabuza recalled that: ‘we engaged Anti-Apartheid groups in other Scandinavian countries and they all accepted our proposal to jointly bring Amandla to Scandinavia’. In preparation, ‘we went to different countries to ensure that accommodation, local transport and theatres were all up to par’. Due to their exiled status, Amandla members would not disclose that they were soldiers, but instead told international audiences that they were students from Tanzania. The first tour involved between 10 to 13 women, including Daisy. From this tour until South Africa’s freedom in 1994, Amandla toured over 60 countries across the world, performing in countries as far flung as Brazil, Japan and Libya. They used sonic activism to mobilise against apartheid. Amandla’s first album was recorded in Angola in 1980, with later albums made in Scandinavia. Of an album titled Amandla (1982), Daisy recalled that it was recorded in Russia, taking two weeks at a USSR studio called Melodiya.
The Amandla collective filled venues to capacity and would sometimes perform for over 7,000 people. For Daisy, however, size did not matter: one show ‘had an audience of less than 50 people and it was one of the best shows we have ever done. The atmosphere was amazing and people were charging/jumping up and down chanting “we want more”’. During tour, rest was limited as the collective performed every day.
‘We would rest during the day. There was no time for sleep but members still maximised on sightseeing. In Eastern Europe, they would visit museums and learn about the history of countries. In Ghana they learnt about the slave trade and visited areas where trading had taken place’.
These experiences expanded Daisy’s understanding of the world and heightened her position as a transnational exiled performer.
‘Between 1980 and 1983, every time we went to Sweden, we would marvel at the infrastructure. We would go to Sweden then Finland then back to Sweden. The infrastructure was amazing. We travelled by train and the train would go with us to the ship. It was nice’.
According to Daisy, everything changed after Amandla toured in Europe, in stark contrast to the scarcity that she experienced in the MK camps. With the efforts of Lindiwe Mabuza, countries started sending food, clothing and other necessities to Tanzania and Angola. This aid was organised via international solidarity groups such as the Africa Group of Sweden (AGIS) and the Isolate South Africa Committee (ISAK).
Daisy spent most of her exiled life in Amandla, and was also married and had children in exile. Her first child was born in 1981 in Tanzania, and she had another baby in 1987. Daisy explained that mothering in exile was hard. She had to leave her first child in Tanzania as Angola was a warzone and not a safe place for children. The ANC appointed caretakers to take care of children in Tanzania, but the pain of separation felt strenuous when her child was hospitalized due to malaria and she could not leave Angola to see her. ‘Struggle is not something to play with. The pain of separation is still the same, you can’t come with your own rules,’ Daisy remembered. She was also separated from her second child in 1988, to begin rehearsals with Amandla.
In 1992, Daisy returned to South Africa, where it was comforting that her children were going to see and be with her family. But although Amandla ‘toured with Nelson Mandela when he was campaigning for the ANC in 1993’, Daisy experienced erasure after South Africa attained freedom in 1994: ‘Nobody cared whether Amandla existed or not’. Amandla’s influence disintegrated over time and its history remains understudied today. After freedom in 1994, Daisy was integrated into the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). Within the SANDF, she was instructed to assist with the integration of musicians, and also represented the SA military in the UK from 2013-2018. She retired in 2020.
As a transnational subject, Daisy’s exile experiences are vital in undoing the erasure of women’s contribution to the South African liberation movement. Her memories carry the stories of women – as combatants and cultural workers – whose archives remain difficult to trace in South Africa’s history of liberation. Others include the women of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), formerly known as Poqo; the women of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM); the women of the Medu Art Ensemble, a cultural collective based in Gaborone, Botswana in the 70s/80s; and countless other women who worked to liberate South Africa. My conversations with Daisy reveal how women were autonomous agents within freedom struggles and had affective lives, experiencing both difficult and transformative times in exile.