Mary Burton and Betty Davenport interviewed by Ruendree Govinder May 23, 2005 Cape Town, South Africa.
Betty Davenport joined the Black Sash in Cape Town in 1955, where she participated in silent protests such as “stands” and “hauntings” of cabinet ministers. She moved to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in 1965, where worked with the organization to monitor and publicize the many removals to remote, poverty-stricken areas of the Ciskei and to monitor detentions and provide support to detainees’ families. She and her husband Rodney Davenport, a historian of South Africa, provided a “safe house” for a number of people in the 1980s.
