inevitable. It was a thorn gouging deep into the regime’s flesh. But it helped clinch my decision to leave South Africa.
MY WORRIES THAT THE BANNING of D and A would end its work were unwarranted. Only after the fall of apartheid did I learn how the work of D and A continued despite its banning. With just a handful of people in the know, a South African lawyer’s prestigious law firm in the UK stepped into the breach to instruct and pay lawyers in South Africa to act on behalf of the accused. Funding continued to be provided by the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, based in London. Even the spies that infiltrated the anti-apartheid movements throughout Britain, Europe, and North America could not crack the watertight scheme. As for aid to the dependents, a network of willing Brits, housewives, churchgoers, and regular folk well under the radar of the South African security police committed themselves to secrecy and “adopted” different families. They sent them monthly stipends with funds that were transferred into their bank accounts.
5 — “You Can Make More of a Difference Outside”
We were squeezed around the dinner table at Sally and Michael’s cottage in Constantia, eight young white South Africans, now satiated by delicious food and slightly tipsy on good but cheap South African wine.
Dinner parties were our main form of Saturday night entertainment. Most of the decent restaurants were too expensive. The cinemas were strictly whites-only, and most of the interesting films were either banned or heavily censored. As for television, that was banned in 1960, to protect our morals and out of fear that the “Bantu” would rise up if they beheld the lifestyle of the rich and white.
Our conversation inevitably moved from idle chatter to The Question: should we stay or should we leave? That we were even discussing it reflected our privilege. As white middle-class South Africans, we had the means to make the decision, with good prospects of studying or finding jobs overseas. There was ambivalence on both sides: Eric and I were in the leaving camp. Sally and Michael were as well. Most of the others were committed to staying.
“By staying we would be doing nothing more than applying Band-Aids,” Eric said in a voice full of certainty. It was a favorite line of his. Why waste our lives, making sacrifices that ultimately would lead nowhere? The world out there was beckoning him. He planned to complete a doctorate in physics and enter the world of research not possible at home. He looked forward to escaping South Africa’s confines and grabbing onto a life of intellectual stimulus. Unlike Eric, I had doubts, but being a dutiful wife-to-be, I suppressed them.
“Yes,” Sally ventured, her long blond hair swaying down her back as she moved her head in emphasis. “We are beneficiaries whether we like it or not.”
“I don’t agree.” said Frank. He was a professor at the university who would later contribute important research to the nature of poverty—and hence oppression—in South Africa. “You can’t abandon ship when change is inevitable, and I mean real, transformational change to black-majority rule.” Then picking up on an earlier point that Michael made about not wanting to raise children in this country, he added: “It’s not a question of whether South Africa is a place to raise children. It’s our country. It will be our children’s country, and eventually, they will grow up in a just society and perhaps contribute to ensuring that it remains so.”
We were rehashing conversations, often heated, that we had been having for months as we attended an increasing number of farewell parties. We were caught in a hiatus between the government clamp-down that followed the Sharpeville massacre and the activism and resistance that would pick up again in the 1970s. At the time, though, an eerie political silence seemed to stretch ahead, unbending and uninterrupted. There was no movement to join—it had gone underground. The African Resistance Movement, which was composed mainly of young white men and women my age, had begun a sabotage campaign against government installations and services, explicitly eschewing violence against people. It would turn out that I knew a number of ARM’s members, but I was too far outside this level of activism to be involved. In 1964, about nine months before I joined D and A, many of its members were arrested and tried; others managed to flee the country. Many served long prison sentences.
“But,” Michael intervened, “we are white, English-speaking South Africans. The struggle for majority rule is not ours. It’s between the Afrikaners and the Africans.”
I wasn’t sure about this argument. Why should the English, as South African as anyone else, be considered exempt? I believed it definitely was my struggle. I just didn’t know how to pursue it in the current political climate. But I remained silent. Although I could discuss my ideas with Eric or friends like Sally, I had difficulty asserting myself in groups.
We never convinced each other. Those on the side of leaving left. Those who stayed carried the responsibility for all of us, at the risk of banning, jail, and even assassination.
Many years later, while reminiscing about our youth, Sally and I discovered that we had both harbored the same ambivalence. We couldn’t voice it—it would have created chasms that we feared we would be unable to bridge. And to what purpose? Neither of our men suffered any such qualms. We were women after all, stuck in our anticipated roles as women, expected to follow our men. So Sally and I nursed our emotions in our separate spaces, trying to suppress the feeling we were abandoning our country.
LEONIE, NOW ENSCONCED IN LONDON, was an additional pull. In her letters, she described the joy in finding a big wide world outside of Cape Town and tried hard to convince me that this too could be mine. When I wrote to her about my qualms, she replied, “You need to leave South Africa. There is so much to be part of outside the country. The theater, art, culture of all sorts, it’s just amazing. And there is a lot of anti-apartheid work, if that’s what you want to do. You can probably make more of a difference outside, you know.”
Here in South Africa, the whole system had been rigged to keep whites in a safe cocoon, to ensure that we basked in privilege. How was it possible to contribute to change while we passively and docilely agreed to live, work, travel, shop, and participate in leisure activities reserved for whites alone? Perhaps it was possible to make more of a contribution overseas. I was not contemplating leaving because I had personally suffered the horrors of apartheid. Far from it. I was leaving because I benefited from apartheid. I was leaving because of the privilege that my father had told me never to forget.
WITH THE BANNING OF D AND A, my main avenue to meaningful involvement was gone and the prospect of emigrating became more palatable. One question remained: where to? Both Eric and I had assumed it would be London, where he would enter a physics doctoral program. The link between Britain and English-speaking white South Africa was strong. We had been a colony. At school we learned as much British history as South African. We read English authors—Dickens, Austen, Brontë. It already felt familiar—an extension of our culture. We had a ready-made community of close friends waiting for us who had settled or were planning to settle there. Leonie was married and pregnant. My parents were well advanced in their own plans to emigrate. All that was missing from this happy London-based picture was the addition of me and my husband-to-be. Fate had other ideas.
One evening, Eric and I were waiting for the traffic on Long Street to clear so that we could cross the road to our apartment. My parents were coming for dinner, and I was eager to cook the perfect meal but also apprehensive about having them in our space, where we would continue the charade of separate rooms. Friday evening traffic up Long Street moved in a steady, sluggish stream. A gap appeared and I darted across at a trot. As I stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk, I heard a screech of brakes and the telltale thud of a body being hit by a car. I turned to see Eric flying into the air and then landing on the road, one leg sticking out at a distorted angle. The driver exited from his Mini Minor, his face blanched. The next moments were a blur. A whites-only ambulance appeared, its siren blaring. “We’re taking him to Woodstock
