had not bought any South African products since leaving. Here was Mazisi, one of the strongest proponents of the boycott in the UK, who consistently—in the media, at anti-apartheid meetings and rallies—made his “Don’t buy South African” pitch. He saw the look on my face and popped a large juicy grape into his mouth, while offering me the open bag. “I think that the boycott is an extremely important and a brilliant educational tool,” he said. “As for me, I do not need to be educated.”
I giggled and took a bunch from the bag and together we walked down Oxford Street savoring the burst of sweetness as we indulgently bit into one marble-sized globe after another.
In London five years later, February 1973, I went as usual to visit him soon after landing. He seemed particularly depressed. The awful London weather, typical of late winter, bearing down outside his basement flat made the scene even more dismal. He didn’t seem interested in our usually lively catching up. He quickly came to the point. He was engaged to be married, he said. “Given the circumstances,” he continued, “it’s better that we don’t see each other anymore.” Circumstances? There weren’t any “circumstances” as far as I was concerned. A mutual friend had told me earlier that our friendship had made tongues wag. It was so off point that I never took it seriously and valued our friendship all the more because of the lack of sexual tension. I could do nothing but honor his request. It was the last time I saw him. Soon after, he left his work with the ANC to teach at the University of California in Los Angeles, reconnecting full-time with his poet self. He would subsequently influence and be revered by a new generation of African writers.
YEARS LATER, IN AUGUST 2006, I was sitting drinking coffee in a suburban mall in Pretoria, waiting for Kendra, who had gone in quest of a pair of jeans. I idly flipped through the daily paper and then stopped, frozen, as a small black-and-white photo of Mazisi stared at me from the upper left-hand side of the page—an older but oh so familiar face. Beneath it was an obituary.
“Mazisi Kunene was one of the greatest figures of South African and African literature,” I read. “He made significant contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle from his position within the ANC in exile. Mazisi Kunene was a man and a poet of immense humanity.”
Suddenly this affectionate, funny, astute man was there with me again. I recalled how much I had adored this friend, this brother, and how he had influenced my life at a time when I was struggling with self-esteem. He simply acted as if I was already the confident woman I hoped to become. Now he was gone. My regret at never having tried to reconnect with him after the end of apartheid continues to live with me.
8 — We Took Our Cues from the Liberation Movements
Gail Hovey was on a roll. It was the end of April 1970, about a year after I first met Mazisi, and I was learning about a new and quintessential American form of protest: shareholder action. She and other solidarity activists had just come back from a Gulf Oil shareholders meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they were protesting Gulf’s investments in Angolan oil fields. The taxes and royalties that the Portuguese government received from Gulf Oil were significantly bolstering its otherwise failing economy, and thus perpetuating Portuguese colonialism in Angola. Gail sat at the head of a long conference table, occasionally checking her notes, her voice resounding through SAC’s unrenovated loft office on West 27th Street as some fifteen of us sat around the table on assorted chairs, riveted by her account. As she talked, her head moved in emphasis, swinging her long brown hair, hanging in a braid down her back.
A national boycott against Gulf Oil was beginning to gain steam. A divestment movement against banks that loaned money to South Africa had already started in the early 1960s and would accelerate a decade later to include corporations doing business there. As a South African I was used to the tactics of strikes, protests, marches, mass meetings, most of which ended in arrests and convictions. But targeting a corporation’s shareholders meeting was new to me. As Gail explained, fifty demonstrators had gained access to the meeting by purchasing the smallest number of shares needed to attend, adding to the few bona fide shareholders who were sympathetic to the boycott. Some wore T-shirts that boldly proclaimed GULF KILLS on the front. They stood out from the regular shareholders dressed in staid business attire.
When the chair called for nominations for the shareholder board, protestors, one after another, jumped to their feet to nominate heads of liberation movements and then describe their bios in detail and read their poems. Angry shareholders yelled back at them: “Sit down!” “Take them out!” “Out of order!” “Where do you come from—Red China?!” Gail overheard one woman say to another: “They are so dumb, they want communism.” “Yeah,” the other agreed, “they think they can get along without money. Let ’em try!” After two hours of near mayhem, the all-day meeting was adjourned. They had been successful in both disrupting the meeting and bringing the issue to the attention of the shareholders.
Gail and I were slowly getting to know each other as friends, slow because I was intimidated by this poised, self-assured, political, articulate woman who looked with enviable directness at all of us sitting around the table. I met Gail a year after I arrived in the United States when she and her husband, Don, returned from working in South Africa under the umbrella of the Frontier Internship Program of the Presbyterian Church. It was a progressive program designed to engage young people in crucial issues of the day, including race relations, Gail’s main interest. To convince the apartheid government to grant them visas and work permits, they needed a cover, so they made arrangements to work at an African school in the north that had been founded by Swiss missionaries at the turn of the twentieth century. Don worked as chaplain and Gail with women in the community. Before they could complete their two-year contract, they were accused by the Department of Bantu Education of “violating the customs and traditions of the country” and had to leave their work assignment early. Now back in New York, they were living in East Harlem where Don was a pastor at a Baptist church and Gail dedicated herself to being a writer working with the Southern Africa Committee, which she had helped found.
The first time Eric and I invited them for dinner, the men engaged in an earnest discussion about the Vietnam War and Nixon’s escalation in Cambodia, big news at the time, with Gail contributing and making sure she didn’t let the men dominate the conversation. We had just eaten a delicious meal—my skills as a cook had improved—and I found myself nodding off. This was my escape mechanism when the conversation seemed to rise above my head. Later, when we became closer, Gail told me that I had lain down on the floor under the table “like a pet dog!” (She wasn’t the only one of my friends to comment about my sleeping-at-dinner-parties habit. Sally insisted that in South Africa I went to sleep under a grand piano.) “When I first knew you, I thought you were shorter than me,” she said. Only later did she realize that, at five feet, eight and a half inches, I had her beat by two inches. And when we embarked on our friendship-for-life in the months following that dinner she also came to realize that I could be funny and sparkly and assertive in my own way. For my part I discovered that this woman I thought was invincible had her own vulnerabilities—as did most of the women of our generation. Discovering that I was not alone in harboring a fragile self-esteem, particularly when dealing with dominating men, was part of my feminist awakening.
THE TWENTY OR SO MEMBERS Southern Africa Committee were mostly Americans in their twenties, white and black, more women than men. Initially I was the only South African in the collective; in time Jennifer Davis became active as well. Like the other solidarity and activist organizations of the time, the anti-apartheid movement had its share of fracturing, dividing activists along race and ideological lines. As a white South African I was not immune to hostile comments directed at me by African Americans who presupposed that because of my white privilege, I had to be party to the apartheid system at some level, and therefore should not be so bold as to be involved in anti-apartheid work in the United States. Some contended that anything related to Africa belonged to the domain of African Americans. This continued throughout the years of anti-apartheid organizing. At first it offended me; I would feel defensive: South
