paid more attention to the region than the U.S. papers. My father clipped articles from the press in the UK and sent them to me each month in a large manila envelope.
I had arrived in the States believing that if average, peace-loving Americans could only understand the repressive and brutal nature of apartheid, this would spark sufficient sympathy and outrage to pressure their own government, which in turn would pressure the South African government to end apartheid. I was quickly disabused of my naïveté by the other members of the Southern Africa Committee, who viewed U.S. complicity with apartheid as self-evident. This came as a bit of a jolt. Back home I had taken U.S. products for granted: Coca-Cola, Lever Brothers, American gas for my car—it was all just part of trade. But now I was learning that trade wasn’t simply trade. I was opening my mind to the fact that United States corporate investment played an important role in expanding the South African economy and bolstering the apartheid system. U.S. and other foreign investment brought increasing capital and, even more significantly, technical expertise that enabled the growth of an efficient modern economy, all the better to invest in. U.S.-manufactured computers were used for the pass system; Polaroid cameras were used to take the photos of the holder of the pass; GM engines were often found in police trucks that arrested anti-apartheid protestors. This support by the U.S. government meant that U.S. corporations were reaping huge profits by investing in South Africa, while South Africa grew stronger and ever more oppressive.
At the same time, I was learning that ongoing wars in countries along South Africa’s borders had been launched three years before I left.
I was becoming part of a movement that was global, one bent on isolating the apartheid regime, not just condemning it. In the process, I gained an identity, a mantle I donned comfortably: I was an antiapartheid activist.
ONE OF THE FIRST PURCHASES ERIC and I had made after moving into our new apartment in Hoboken was a twelve-inch TV set. It cost a week’s salary. We turned on the news as soon as we got home (Walter Cronkite vied for our attention with The Huntley-Brinkley Report) and checked the pocket-sized TV guide for other programs worth watching. After a lifetime without TV it was easy to become addicts. Blasted out of inward-lookng, local politics into a vast world without parameters, I was slowly learning to absorb and analyze the news from the vantage point of the most powerful nation in the world. Arriving in the United States when we did, at the end of 1967, meant being inducted into the cascading events of 1968, a year that would shape and color the politics, history, and culture of the country for decades to come. I watched, astounded, debates between Black Panthers and white liberals on Channel 13, New York’s public media channel, thinking, “Oh my God! What freedom!” These people would be jailed or at least banned back home. It did not take me long to appreciate that “freedom” was not meted out in equal portions. It was a fast-track education and I was sucked right in.
In October 1967, I marched with a hundred thousand others against the Vietnam War. The protestors represented every age, every race, every ethnicity, every economic class—another eye-opener, another mind-extender. Just five months later, President Lyndon Johnson came on the television, his fleshy, solemn face filling our small screen. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President,” he said. His popularity was at an all-time low because of the war. Protest worked!
Four days later, on April 4, 1968, I turned on the news to hear Walter Cronkite announce the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. All hell broke loose. Black ghettos in cities across the nation exploded with anger; looting and burning expressed the sense of helplessness and futility provoked not only by the violent death of a widely revered man committed to nonviolence but by pervasive racism in America. Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 left me angry and apprehensive. I was beginning to adjust to this country, to drive in my first tentative stake, acknowledging that this land could be mine.
Yet there was something missing. The anti-apartheid activism was essentially a movement of activist Americans to which I added my voice. It did not connect me with the struggle back home.
I SIT HIP TO HIP WITH ANC representative Mazisi Kunene, a senior member of the movement, squashed in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle. We are returning to New York in February 1969 after a weekend away at a conference on apartheid. For much of the five-hour journey I am a willing listener to the stories he spins about his work, his frequent trips to New York, his mission to raise funds for the ANC through the sale of art. His gentle way, his humor, his roundness, and the growing affection between us as the car speeds south gives me the feeling of finding home. It is known territory. It appears reciprocal, the home connection piquing his interest in me, as someone young enough to mold and draw into the movement. A sister in struggle.
By the time we drive into Manhattan my heart is racing and I feel slightly lightheaded, charged with adrenalin—as if I had just met the man of my dreams. But this isn’t about love. It is about having discovered something out there in the world that I can grasp, a new sense of possibility, a connection to home. As I exit the car, Mazisi writes down his number on a scrap of paper and hands it to me.
“Call me,” he says. “We have more to discuss. I have work for you to do.” I nod and say thank you. We shake hands through the rolled-down window. I pull my bag out of the trunk and head toward the subway. The crisp spring evening air is as inviting as any open veld in South Africa. It is sweet. Life is sweet.
MAZISI BECAME A REGULAR HOUSEGUEST on his visits to New York from London, where he was based, sleeping on the living room couch in our cramped Upper West Side apartment on 104th Street and Central Park West where we had recently moved from Hoboken. Mazisi would invariably walk to the supermarket nearby and return carrying a veritable mountain of food—two chickens, pounds of potatoes, sweet and regular, vegetables of every kind. For the next few hours he would roll up his sleeves and prepare a massive meal fit for twenty. “You never know who might come by,” he would say and I would remember the generosity of Africans whose hospitality usually involved offers of food. “We have to have food to offer.” And often people would drop by—members of the movement or sympathetic Americans he had befriended with his charm and allure. Mostly though he was working day and night and wouldn’t be home for dinner at all. By the time he left several days later, I had to throw out the leftovers.
I BECAME A WILLING WORKER FOR the movement through my association with him, doing typing and dogsbody labor, but also helping with fundraising, locating African crafts and art for him to sell in the United States, an effort that failed to catch on. He had more success in Europe, where he launched a campaign to sell works donated by known artists.
Our friendship progressed with his visits to New York and with my annual visits to my parents in London. Mazisi introduced me to ANC cadres in both cities as the efforts to raise money continued. I never joined the ANC and he never suggested it. I was comfortable in my unaffiliated status, though I sometimes wonder why. Was I already imaging myself as a journalist, when lack of affiliation would make sense? Was I worried that I, as an obedient girl, would get swallowed up?
I loved his disregard for protocol, his irreverence, and the way he made me laugh. He was already gaining recognition as a poet. His inspiration was his Zulu heritage and he wrote in Zulu. For him African literature held its true essence when written in the original language, whatever it might be. His passion was the epic poem he was writing, Emperor Shaka the Great. It would be published in English—his translation—in 1979. This work and the others that followed established him as a great African poet.
On my visits to London we would meet at the ANC office or at his flat near Baker Street or go for walks through the city. On one such walk along Oxford Street, he stopped at a sidewalk cart selling fruit and nuts and pointed to a mound of deep purple grapes. “Two pounds, please,” he said, digging into his pocket and bringing out a handful of crumpled notes. The vendor picked three bunches from the pile, weighed them, and placed them in a paper bag. Mazisi took it from him, grinning with expectation.
