history—the legacy of slavery on the generations that followed, the strength of the civil rights movement, the growth of the Black Power movement—I appreciated how racism penetrated the fabric of American society and cut deep into the culture and history of the country. As in South Africa, white privilege was as taken for granted as breathing air. The struggle for equality and justice was as valid here, even if the context was different, as it was in Africa. In some ways, it was a tougher struggle, both because of the need to challenge the underlying mythology of a democratic America—a just nation where everyone is free and equal—and because, unlike in Africa, blacks in America were in the minority.
I met a number of young black South Africans; most were on scholarships to study in the United States. When they discovered that I was from “home” there were delighted whoops of Sister! Back slaps. Hugs. I would be eagerly questioned about where I grew up, what I did, what I was doing here. They were as eager to answer my questions about how they came to be in this country. Many had been underground members of the ANC and PAC and had had to flee into exile when their activism meant certain arrest. Some had done stints in prison. They longed for home, and all they needed to know to consider me a sister was that I was South African and I hated apartheid. At parties we danced ourselves numb with exhaustion to the beat of South African music. I listened to tales of being hounded by the Special Branch and of time in prison. There were hair-raising stories of demonic wardens—“Remember so-and-so when he would do such-and-such?”—withdrawal of food, bouts of solitary confinement for not complying with the strict rules, withdrawal of privileges such as receiving or sending letters. They bent back and laughed raucously, slapping their thighs with the memories they found hilarious. It was the first of many times that I would encounter the way in which impossibly painful circumstances were turned into comedy.
Their laughter was also reserved for their fellow students’ ignorance about Africa. “They ask us if we speak Swahili!” believing that Swahili was a lingua franca of Africa, not a language restricted to the east coast. We exchanged other stories: how Americans often asked us, “But what country in South Africa are you from?” There were different countries in South America, why not South Africa? For me, this would often be followed by: “But where are you really from?” “South Africa.” Trying to make sense of my whiteness, they would persevere: “Then where are you grandparents from?” “Lithuania.” “Aha!” they would exclaim. I was finally making sense. “So you’re Lithuanian.” I gave up.
African American friends and activists had their own battles to fight. One afternoon I was walking to the SAC office with a fellow member of the committee who was black, talking animatedly, when another young black man hissed as he passed: “Have some self-respect, brother. Get your head straight!” We continued walking, now in silence, my friend’s seething fury enveloping us. A few days earlier we had been visiting a friend on the Upper West Side. He was standing in front of me when the elevator door opened and a young girl holding a kitten was about to step out. She froze, clutched the kitten tightly to her chest, her face blanched. Then she spied me and relaxed. A young black man with a white woman companion was either a traitor to his race or rendered nonthreatening.
As activists supporting the liberation struggles we believed we did have our “heads straight.” We took our cues from the African liberation movements and their leaders. We avidly read their texts, speeches, and other writings which helped shape our thinking and analysis. When I left South Africa in 1967 I was unaware that wars of liberation were being waged so close to home. Three years earlier, on my trip up the east coast on my way to Europe, the ship had anchored overnight in Lourenço Marques, the capital of Mozambique. To South Africans, “LM” seemed like such a cosmopolitan city, with its Portuguese flair. The beaches were integrated, the cafés were integrated, and South Africans, particularly those from landlocked Johannesburg, used it as their personal playground. Men, bent on the thrill of forbidden sex with African women, snuck across the border to indulge their pleasures without fear of arrest. When I arrived in the United States, I knew nothing about the armed struggles being waged against Portuguese colonial oppression by Frelimo, the Mozambique Liberation Front, or the MPLA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.
All this became more real in February 1969, when I literally sat at the feet of Amilcar Cabral, a personal hero and founder of PAIGC. One of the benefits of living in the city was the regular visits by leaders of the liberation movements, who had observer status at the UN, to address the United Nations, so we in the movement often got to meet them. Now activists and supporters packed into Jennifer Davis’s living room. Jennifer, a full-time research director with ACOA, had become one of my closest friends, one of those friendships that became family in the absence of blood relatives. Her apartment on Riverside Drive and West 86th Street, with its view of the Hudson River, served as a hub for revolutionary traffic passing through New York, providing a meeting space and often a bed for representatives of the movements as well as the South African Trade Unions, and other anti-apartheid organizations and activists. Seated on folding chairs and on the floor, we listened keenly as we learned face-to-face about the progress of their work and the importance to them of our own solidarity work, and we would leave reinvigorated.
Amilcar Cabral’s profound analytical prowess and vision of revolution made him the doyen of the liberation movement’s leaders. With seeming ease, he could turn complex ideology and political analysis into simple words that gave us the wherewithal to argue, reasonably eloquently and cogently, the importance of supporting their struggle. My copy of Cabral’s Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts was held together with rubber bands, the spine cracked and the binding unglued, the pages grown yellow with use and the margins filled with my scribbling. His words slipped into our language, to be retrieved when we spoke about African revolutions. Though I longed for a democratic South Africa, I heeded his caution that people were not fighting simply for ideas: “They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” It was for this that they waged an armed struggle, he said.
Listening to Cabral was one of those few moments in my life when I knew I was in the presence of a great human being. He talked about the reluctance of his movement to resort to armed struggle, but that the brutality, violence, and destruction of the Portuguese regime left them no choice; he talked about the importance of our solidarity with his revolution and the strength the people took from it; he talked about the new nation that was emerging in the liberated zones, the areas of the country that were under PAIGC control, where schools and health care were being provided to the peasants for the first time. Progress, he told us, was built on a deliberate and careful process of winning over the people. A revolution without the total support of the people, one that was top-down and dictatorial, could never succeed.
Then he turned to a subject that I was hoping for: women’s participation. Women were fully engaged, he said. They had needed little encouragement. It was they who insisted on an equal role with men in the movement. The seed of feminism that had been sowed within me when I first read Betty Friedan in Cape Town was taking root. Conversations and heated debates were becoming commonplace among American women drawn to feminism. And here was a man articulating what we were grappling with, but in a revolution in a tiny African country. I wanted to know more. How was it possible to change the patriarchy of African society? Did the fight against colonialism mean that it would be easier to establish a new society that was able to counter deep-seated cultural attitudes? It was hard enough to dislodge patriarchy in the United States. Could this small African country achieve what we could only dream of?
Fresh in my mind was a conversation I had recently had over a drink with a high-level ANC leader, introduced to me by Mazisi, who was attending a session of the United Nations. I had just finished reading a memoir by Helen Joseph, a British woman who, after immigrating to South Africa, had thrown her energies into the struggle against apartheid and been hounded by the security police as a result. She described the women’s march on Pretoria on August 9, 1956, which she had co-led with Lilian Ngoyi, Sophie Williams, and Rahima Moosa—four women, White, African, coloured, and Indian.
