DEAR CRYSTAL
……the ‘mad’ woman who dared to invent the future!
It was a shock to learn of your passing. Speaking of you in the past tense still feels strange. I never imagined you'd be gone.
Today I write to you from a place of gratitude – to remember you and honour the lasting imprint you left on my life. Our paths first intersected in 2010: you were thirty-seven, I was twenty-four.
I have never told you this, but even then there were small moments that made me certain I needed to draw closer to you. Our first real encounter came during my first COSATU CEC, where Nthabiseng, twenty-three at the time, and I were introduced.
The General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, invited us to stand and proudly announced our young ages, prompting applause from a room filled almost entirely with men. At teatime, you approached me with concern.
You leaned in and asked, “Did that not make you uncomfortable, the way they paraded you like that?” As a young feminist, fresh from the ranks of the student movement, I knew immediately that there was something special about you.
From that day onwards, you held my hand and quietly guided me through many parts of my life. You edited my three-hundred-page master’s thesis without asking for a cent. You opened your home to me – all your homes. I was such a frequent guest that I became part of your bedtime routine with Hanin.
As a mother now, I often caution my children about the Greedy Goose – the rapacious character from Hanin’s favourite bedtime story when she was two or three. I often recall when we, as young women, discussed how the politics of respectability curtailed our autonomy.
You listened and quipped: “Eish comrades, Beijing 1995 liberated me from those chains. An orgasm is a human right, comrades. Beijing was clear on this!” Then you gave that magnificent cackle. People give me strange looks when I tell this story, but it shows your humour, radicalism, and fearlessness.
You gave me so many firsts. My first trip to Swaziland was with you in 2013. You asked me to drive so we could fetch Hanin after her holiday with Mama Khethiwe in Ka Khoza. I jumped at the chance, addicted as I was to your storytelling.
You packed sandwiches made of chicken liver pâté, sourdough bread, and black pepper – somehow turning simple ingredients into a small feast. Your creativity and work ethic always shone through – in the kitchen, in your craft as an educator and your discipline as a thinker.
You also walked beside me through my first experience of motherhood. You shared books about healthy meals for children and the importance of breastfeeding for as long as possible. Today, my children refuse to eat any meal without vegetables.
Between you and Themba, I am not sure who to thank for that. My bookshelf is a display of your influence – from Arundhati Roy to Barbara Kingsolver, Hanif Kureishi to Émile Zola. Many of those titles are still waiting to be read. Almost every work contract I have signed, including the most recent, was done with your counsel.
I leaned heavily on your wisdom but sometimes worried it was too one-sided. I am grateful that we found friendship despite the age gap between us. I remember you scolding me after the Fallists introduced a term you had not heard before – “patriarchal princess” – women who participate in the oppression of other women and are rewarded with power and positions.
You said, “Phindile, you are supposed to be my young, cool friend who teaches me these new terms. How come you never told me about patriarchal princesses?” I replied from Cape Town, “I have only just learnt it myself, from the black feminists, the Fallists.”
“Sjoe! You are getting old, hey,” you said, laughing. “You are not young anymore.” Thank you for not discarding me after I passed my youth sell-by date. Thank you for growing with me. It was this year, I think, that you first heard someone call me Mama Phindile – an eighteen-year-old feminist from one of our circles.
You smiled. It felt like a circle had closed. Crystal, I want to now reflect on what defined you most, your fierce defiance and moral clarity. You were always furious about what you called the distance between rhetoric and reality, about how comrades could stand on grand stages and speak of women’s liberation yet reproduce the same old oppressions in the unions and in their homes: the undermining of women’s ideas, the policing of our voices and bodies, the silencing through respectability politics, the harassment, the hypocrisy.
The late Crystal Dicks
When I think of your life and politics, I see what feminists call the arc of your politics of refusal: three forms of resistance that defined who you were. First, as a young activist on the Cape Flats, you refused to quietly obey an unjust system. You threw yourself into the struggle against apartheid, body and soul.
Second, you refused to conform to gendered expectations or to know your place in any space you occupied. You spoke up even when it meant isolation. And indeed, you were isolated – by the power structure in the union, at Wits, and in other spaces where honesty was treated as disloyalty, passion as insubordination.
Third, you refused to capitulate to the dominant political culture, to the lure of patronage, corruption, and corporate feminism. You refused to trade integrity for access, or principle for expedience. Your refusal was never just a “no” – it was always accompanied by a search for ways to transform the organisations you devoted your life to, for collective alternatives, and for the joy that comes from camaraderie and sisterhood.
Many people describe you as brave and stoic. But you were also soft and empathetic. I often witnessed tears gathering on your long lashes when you spoke about the violence and trauma visited on children in Swaziland, Palestine, South Africa and beyond. You had an inexplicable capacity to empathise even with those who had wounded you, reminding us that they too were shaped by the same oppressive systems they sought to resist.
Let me pivot to a less cheerful story. Do you remember the gathering we were invited to somewhere in the Free State in 2017? You were meant to attend, too, but your flight details never arrived. When I asked about it, someone said, quite bluntly, that you had been left out because you were “mad” – even making a gesture to prove their point.
I was disturbed. Out of loyalty, I called to let you know. You were deeply wounded. Yet when I reflect on it now, that story captures your essence: your truth, integrity, and refusal to conform made people uncomfortable. You spoke with conviction when others preferred silence. You were labelled mad not because you lacked reason, but because you dared to reason differently.
Thomas Sankara – whom you adored for his uncompromising support for women’s liberation – once said: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. …It comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the mad people of yesterday for us to act with clarity today. … We must dare to invent the future.” You embodied that kind of madness – the kind born of courage, imagination, and faith in ordinary people.
You were mad enough to believe that freedom was within reach and that ordinary people could change the course of history. I remember you for your radiant madness, and I think, quite frankly, we should all be mad. Sanity, under these conditions, is overrated. And in our madness, we should insist on a better tomorrow.
As Rebecca Solnit, whose work you loved, reminds, “To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” You gave yourself to the future, Crystal. You carried hope not as an idea, but as practice. For that, we will never forget you. With love and gratitude, Phindi
NB: Phindile a life long friend, co worker and comrade of the late Crystal Dicks