the draconian censorship laws in South Africa. In order not to be caught, he would include photocopies of, for example, Donald Woods’s book Biko, about the life of Steve Biko, or Mandela’s speech from the dock, between copies of philosophy articles. These books gradually opened my mind and broke down the intellectual walls my apartheid education had put up.
After a few months apart, we agreed that we would get married a year later, in December 1987. We were still very young, but adored one another. We shared a powerful intellectual connection and value system, and above all we wanted to contribute to positive change in South Africa. We did not want to spend another two years on different continents, but believing that sex before marriage was wrong, we felt that we had to get married before I could move to England and we could live together. With the wisdom of hindsight, this was not very smart. We barely knew each other, having spent so much time apart. We were both rapidly becoming disillusioned with religion, so we should have overcome our no-sex-before-marriage belief. To make matters worse, I would be only twenty years old and would need permission from both my parents to get married.
I was concerned about how my dad would respond to our decision. Since the disastrous holiday when I was thirteen, I had not seen him, apart from a brief visit to get him to sign a passport application the year before. Yet he would cause endless problems for me over the years, frequently phoning the residence at university in a drunken rage. One night towards the end of 1986, he called again, this time about money. He wanted me to agree that he could stop paying for a life insurance policy, with me as the beneficiary, that he was legally obliged to maintain. He rarely paid any maintenance, but now that he was in financial difficulty he wanted the life insurance to be paid out to him. On the spur of the moment, I said: ‘I’ll sign that, if you agree to sign your parental rights over to Philip and don’t hassle me any more.’
There was a moment of silence before he said: ‘Okay!’ No questions, no fight, just: ‘Okay!’
A few days later, my father phoned to say he was in Stellenbosch. We met for tea and he told me that we had to go to court the next day, where he would sign me off and I would be formally adopted by my stepfather. My mum offered to come with me, but as always when I have to face something very difficult, I preferred to do it on my own, going deep inside myself for strength. The judge asked a few questions before agreeing to the order. I then asked if he could tell my dad not to bother me any more. The judge looked at my dad and said: ‘Mr Van Niekerk, I have never dealt with something like this before, and I don’t like it at all. I’m not sure what is going on here, but you’d better behave and do what is right.’ He then signed the order. It was all over in ten minutes.
How could it be this easy to get rid of your child? I wondered, as he dismissed us. My dad (who was legally not my dad any more) and I left the courtroom together. We walked down the rose-lined path outside the magistrates’ court in silence. At the end of the path, we paused.
‘Bye,’ I said softly. My dad did not respond. He turned to his right and walked away. I watched him, hoping he would look back and give me a little wave or even just a final look. He didn’t, and as he disappeared around the corner I turned to my left to go to the car park, in tears.
That evening, my dad called. He had clearly had too much to drink and he screamed at me. He raged about what a failure I was and would always be. He assured me over and over that I would never succeed at anything I did. Instead of seeing this as drunken meanness stemming from his own sense of failure, I desperately tried to convince him otherwise. At some point he threw down the phone, after which I went to find my mum. I rarely involved her in my troubles with my dad, but it had become too much for me. She was furious, and I overheard her calling my father, and then his sister, to ensure that he would leave me alone in future.
This awful conversation at the end of an awful day was the last time I spoke to him. I have no doubt that the legal signing-off was the right thing to do for me to have some normality in my life. Yet it left me with deep emotional scars for a long time, particularly when it came to developing trusting relationships, especially with men. I also became more driven to be successful. I had always worked hard, and these increased efforts brought further results, but at a high emotional and physical price.
In 1992, I got a call from my dad’s wife saying that he had died suddenly from cancer. I was too far pregnant with my second baby, Wian, to attend the funeral. Even though I did not shed a tear, I will forever regret that I did not have a relationship with him and that he never saw my children or experienced my entering parliament. Irrespective of all the pain he had caused me, he was still my dad.
3
Wilhelm and I were married on 29 December 1987. We rented a beautiful little Presbyterian church and invited about a hundred guests. By now, we had many friends from across the racial spectrum. Wilhelm’s mother did the flowers, and we used Wilhelm’s father’s antique German DKW as the wedding car. Wilhelm had arrived only a few days earlier from Oxford, so I made almost all the arrangements on my own.
Two days before the wedding, a crisis erupted. We had asked Anton van Niekerk, one of our philosophy professors who was also a theologian, to lead the service, but since he was no longer a practising minister, he could not conduct the legal part of the ceremony. So we asked a friend, Sydney Davis, a minister in the nearby coloured area, to officiate. He said he was honoured, and to our delight agreed. When Wilhelm’s father found out that a ‘coloured man’ was to be part of a Verwoerd wedding, he exploded. He said that he would not attend, and would not allow Wilhelm’s mother to attend either. I was livid! I felt that, out of principle, we should not cave in. Yet, for his mother’s sake, Wilhelm convinced me otherwise. Sydney immediately understood, and graciously still came to the wedding. It was an early-morning wedding, and afterwards we had tea for the guests on a veranda on the Neethlingshof wine farm. It was a glorious summer day and thankfully everything went smoothly.
After the wedding, we moved into a flat the local council provided for low-income white families – for which we qualified, being students with almost no income. We were due to return to Oxford, but Wilhelm had agreed to take a break for a year and do some part-time teaching, so that I could complete my Honours degree in philosophy. (I had graduated a few days before the wedding.) Even though a recent synod of the DRC church had finally agreed to the ordination of women, I had no interest any more in going to the seminary school to study for another three years. I was deeply disillusioned with the church on political and gender grounds. I had lost all respect for its leaders and was seriously questioning my faith. Instead of taking the safer route of studying for a postgraduate degree in clinical psychology, which I had also considered, I decided to follow my heart and study philosophy.
In between studies, Wilhelm and I were settling into married life. In the middle of the year, Wilhelm was invited to join a group on a clandestine trip to meet the ANC in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Similar trips had previously resulted in the participants’ passports being withdrawn and them being held up to public ridicule, so the trip was to happen quietly. Originally I was also going, but then it was decided that women could not attend. When I asked why, I was told that they were not sure what living conditions would be like, and that women might not cope. I felt patronised and insulted, and vowed never to be excluded from political discussions again.
On his return, Wilhelm became increasingly withdrawn, and the arguments with his family increased. Even though our political activities were very limited at this stage, it became apparent that the government was aware of us. In 1987 Wilhelm and I dropped Wilhelm’s grandmother, Betsie, at the airport in Cape Town. As the wife of a previous prime minister, she was entitled to use the VIP lounge for life. While we were waiting for her flight to depart, the door of the lounge opened and FW de Klerk, who was at the time the minister of National Education and Planning, walked in with a few staff members. He spotted Ouma Betsie and came over to greet her. She in turn introduced us to De Klerk. His eyes narrowed slightly when he heard our names.
‘Yeees,’
