ACCLIMATIZED. For the first time in my life I did not routinely glance over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I no longer needed to head for the bottom of the garden to be out of earshot of bugs—the electronic kind—or monitor what I said on the telephone while listening for telltale clicks.
I wasn’t always careful. After D and A was banned and my parents had left South Africa, there was the immediate problem of covering legal fees, so I came up with a great solution—or so I thought. My parents still had money in South Africa. If my father transferred money from his account to the law firm in South Africa that was working on behalf of political activists, he could be reimbursed in London. But how could I explain this scheme to him? Mail sent overseas was regularly opened. So I naively asked an Afrikaner journalist friend who was traveling to London to take my letter and mail it when he got there. It didn’t occur to me that, given his strong criticism of the government, he might not be the ideal courier. Perhaps I thought that he was immune because he was an Afrikaner. Had he been searched we would all have landed in jail and my father’s money would have been confiscated. Luckily, he read my letter and then burned it—and never spoke to me again.
But now, in New York, I had never known such personal freedom—freedom aided by the nature of the city itself. A city of strangers. A city where strangers found other strangers and so the strange became the familiar.
At the same time my longing for home was still raw. Many a weekend Eric and I drove to Boston, Washington, or Montreal to connect with other South African exiles and émigrés. It was bliss to be able to cook together and recreate our Cape Town dinner parties, drinking California wine (naturally we were boycotting the South African varieties), catching up on our lives, and obsessing about South Africa. Oh, how superior we felt in our little South African enclave. I regaled our friends with stories about the foibles of Americans and the brashness of New York City.
For example, the guy unloading a truck on West 86th Street, who rested his dolly and, shaking his head in mock wonder, blew a five-fingered kiss into the air—mwah!—calling out, “Mama mia! For you I’d leave my wife, my nine children, and my mother-in-law!”
Or the time when I was coming out of the subway at Grand Street and I encountered a man standing at the top of the stairs, his fly open, peeing against the wall. Not wanting to miss the opportunity presented by the arrival of a stream of subway riders, he half-turned his torso and stretched out his free hand, calling out: “Anyone have some spare change?”
Or boarding the F train one morning at West 57th Street together with a posse of policemen in their dark blue uniforms, batons gripped in their hands, hips bulging with guns, walkie-talkies, and other paraphernalia so important to the image of a policeman. They stood looking down at a man stretched out asleep on the bench, his head resting on his hands, his shoes neatly arranged on the floor. I braced myself for an inevitable bullying, a physical shakedown, even handcuffs and a frog march off the train. Instead one of the policemen leaned forward and gently shook the man’s shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” he said in a strong Brooklyn accent. “Breakfast is being soived.” Another policeman held the door open while the napper sleepily put on his shoes and shuffled off the train. Only later did it occur to me that the man was white and so were all the policemen.
Ah, New York, New York. Collecting stories helped me settle into my new life. Yet something was missing from this new life. Leonie’s words kept playing in my head: “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.” I still had to find that “outside.”
7 — Anti-Apartheid Activist
I was getting ready to meet Janet McLaughlin at the American Committee on Africa, the stellar, internationally respected antiapartheid organization. Clothes still boosted my confidence, so I chose carefully from my limited wardrobe: thick black stockings, a short burnt-orange corduroy skirt that I had sewn myself, and a soft black woolen sweater. I made sure my naturally frizzy shoulder-length hair was sleek. I put on my “new” coat, a raccoon fur that I had bought for $35 at a secondhand store on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. It gave me just the right beat-hippy look I favored and kept me warm as I headed out that frigid winter morning in January 1968 to ACOA’s office near the UN.
As I waited for Janet in the front reception area, I looked around. Prestigious address notwithstanding, the place looked just like any anti-apartheid office in South Africa. It had the same feel: mismatched furniture, posters on the walls, a sense of busyness amidst the clutter, books and papers scattered over desks and tables, a typewriter clacking in the background. I found this comforting. Janet was an American, as were all the staff members except one, Jennifer Davis, the part-time researcher, who was a South African exile. She had left with her husband and young children about a year before I did. Not that many exiles were able to come to the United States, unless they were studying or had offers of specific jobs. Britain was bound to South Africa by its colonial past; in the United States, anti-apartheid work was jump-started by a few dedicated Americans—both African American and white—who had been active in the civil rights movement. They came from various political persuasions—pacifism, nonviolent civil disobedience, communism, anticolonialism, the radical black movements of the 1950s and 1960s—but they saw the parallels between racism in the United States and South Africa, parallels that I was only just beginning to grasp.
Janet’s workspace off the long, narrow passage was small. She sat behind her desk, her shoulder-length straight light brown hair pulled back, blue eyes focused on me. Just a few years older than I, she radiated confidence and efficiency and with a direct, querying gaze that was taking me in. I was awestruck.
“What can I do for you?” she asked in her deep voice. I took a breath and launched in. “I’m from South Africa,” I said, smiling a bit sheepishly, knowing my accent was a giveaway. “I’ve been here a few months. And I am wondering whether there is anything I could offer to ACOA.”
Janet asked a few questions about my background, why I came, what I was doing here. After sizing me up, she said, “There is though something you might be interested in,” and went on to tell me about the Southern Africa Committee, which was about to expand its newsletter into a monthly magazine to provide news about a region that was conspicuously absent from the regular media.
“Protest needs to be supplemented by sound information,” Janet continued. “Information about the wider struggle against apartheid and the wars of liberation in the Portuguese colonies. Would you like to join us? Your knowledge of South Africa could really help.”
Would I indeed? I took down the information for the next meeting two weeks hence and left the office, elated.
I became integrated into the Southern Africa Committee and its dedicated, hardworking volunteers, all with a single purpose of helping to end colonialism in Africa and apartheid. As we planned the new format for the Southern Africa magazine, I was asked to be its editor. “Editor” was a loose term. It was a collective effort by a committee operating on a shoestring, barely able to pay its bills—we were forever one small hop ahead of the printing costs, relying on grants from faith-based organizations and small foundations. Subscriptions added little. My role was to see the process through from start to finish—nagging writers who were invariably tardy with their copy, editing for language and grammar, sending copy to the typesetters, working with a core group late into the night to lay out the magazine—pasting the long strips into columns and using Letraset letters for the headings—and finally sending it off to the printers to be turned into a black-and-white newsprint magazine. At its height we had about five thousand subscribers, mostly academics and activists in the solidarity movement, with some newsstand sales. We sent copies to the offices of the liberation movements of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau in Africa, Europe, and New York, where they had observer status in the United Nations. Much of
