unimaginable; brutality, oppression, and tyranny so loathsome it is almost impossible to conceive.
Yes, indeed, I am home.
Part One
1 — “Such a Show of Power!”
The assembly bell rings unexpectedly after lunch at the beginning of my final year of high school on March 30, 1960. Our class teacher’s slender, athletic body is taut as she enters the classroom. Her normally easy smile is replaced by a grim expression.
“Hurry! Hurry!” Miss Jones urges, using her hands to shoo us out as if we are errant chickens. “We need to get to the auditorium. Now-now!”
My friends and I shoot baffled looks at each other as we clatter down the stairs and enter the hall. What can possibly be going on? The principal, Noel Taylor, stops our chatter with a commanding look from the podium as we drop cross-legged on the wooden floor.
“There is a dangerous situation in the city,” he says, pausing for effect as he casts his eyes over us. I stare up at this man, his graying hair parted precisely down the middle, not one strand out of place. And then at the vice principal at his side, rocking slightly back and forth on his heels. He seems even more tired and drawn than usual as he studies his clasped hands.
“Thousands of natives are marching to the city,” Taylor continues, using the somewhat derogatory word for blacks favored by white South Africans. “We need to be sure you are safe.”
Anxiety ripples through the student body, white to the last. The only blacks present are the custodial staff standing at the back of the hall. I feel my stomach contract in fear, a fear reflected on the faces of my schoolmates.
“You must remain here in the auditorium until an adult can come to take you home.” Taylor’s voice is severe and authoritative. The school is in lockdown. If Africans are marching from farther-out townships, would they not pass through Athlone, an area designated for coloureds—people of mixed race? My father is a lawyer, one of the few whites working in a black area, and his office is in Athlone. I am near panic, terrified for his safety. South Africa was already on edge. Nine days earlier, on March 21, African protestors in Sharpeville, a segregated township forty-five miles from Johannesburg, had participated in the countrywide protest against the pass laws, laws that apply only to the African majority. The police had shot point-blank into the crowd of demonstrators, killing sixty-nine people outright, including eight women and ten children. I had seen photos in the newspaper: bodies of men and women strewn across an open area, contorted into awkward positions, most facing down, shot in the back as they tried to flee. And then, a few days ago, in nearby Langa, five protestors were shot, including a baby tied to his mother’s back, and twenty-nine were wounded. Now this march. Would it too become violent?
A friend’s parent drives me home and I rush through the door, hoping to find my father. Only my worried mother is there. She had called the office, but his administrator knew only that “Mr. Urdang went out.” All we could do is wait. Most days we could set our clocks by the slam of my father’s car door. He’d arrived home at precisely six-thirty and walk heavy-footed across the cement backyard, his worn tan-leather briefcase hanging at his side, wanting only to wash his hands and sit down and eat. We—my mother, my older sister Leonie, and I—knew the rule: dinner had to be ready when he pulled back his chair at the head of the table. Only when the first mouthfuls of food began to have an effect would he ask about our day, and sometimes tell us stories about his. This evening, though, the slam is earlier than usual. My father’s step is quick and light. His broad smile takes me aback.
“I’ve just seen the beginning of the end of apartheid!” he exclaims as he walks through the door. His voice is still enthusiastic when he continues over dinner. “As soon as I heard about the march I drove to a spot overlooking De Waal Drive. What a sight!” he says, looking from Leonie to me. There is awe in his voice. “Thousands upon thousands of Africans walked in a silent, orderly manner.” He is wolfing down his food in his elation. I can hardly eat as I take in what he is saying. “They were dignified and determined. Such a show of power!” The fear that gripped me earlier has dissolved with his upbeat attitude. I am once again on solid ground. Safe.
“The government can’t deny what has just happened. Passes have to go.”
From a young age, I knew that passes were evil. My parents would often talk about them, going off on a general rant against apartheid. “Just so that the capitalists can ensure a cheap source of labor!” my father would declare. Every African from the age of sixteen had to carry a passbook, about the size of a passport. They were the key to the bearer’s life: where he could work, where she could be at that moment, where they could live. When my mother employed an African maid her pass had to be signed regularly by my mother to confirm that she was “legal.” She lived in a room in the backyard. Her children lived in the Transkei. She could visit them once a year.
ONLY LATER WOULD WE LEARN MORE. The protestors had slowly, deliberately woven their way for over eight miles along the main artery from their townships on the Cape Flats toward their destination: the architecturally grand white-pillared parliament building in the center of the city, where its members, elected by South Africa’s small white population, were in session. The march was led by Philip Kgosana, a former student at the University of Cape Town, now in his early twenties, one of the few Africans to be granted permission to attend the virtually all-white university. His scholarship did not cover living expenses, however, so, virtually destitute, he moved to Langa’s substandard single-sex barracks built for male workers. There he received a different education, listening to their stories steeped in suffering. He became a political activist and left university to work for the Pan Africanist Congress. The PAC had recently broken away from the multiracial African National Congress—the party of Nelson Mandela—because they considered the ANC too accommodating of the whites.
When he saw the extent of the military and police presence around Parliament, he changed direction and headed for the police headquarters at Caledon Square. With thirty-thousand protestors jammed into the square and the surrounding streets, the commanding officer refused the minister of justice’s demand to open fire. He negotiated with Kgosana, agreeing to set up a face-to-face meeting between him and the minister of justice later that afternoon, as long as the protestors returned to the townships. Fearing the bloodbath that would result if the police used violence, Kgosana agreed. Led by a police van, with army helicopters whirring overhead, the protestors walked back in an orderly fashion to the townships. When Kgosana returned to Caledon Square at the agreed time, he was arrested. After spending nine months in detention without trial, Kgosana was let out on bail. He fled the country, joining the thousands of activists who fled into exile.
THE MARCH ON CAPE TOWN sent a tremor of fear down the spine of government leaders and every member of the all-white South African Parliament. It was one thing for defiant Africans to protest in their overcrowded, segregated townships such as Sharpeville. It was quite another for over thirty thousand to head to the seat of government in the center of the white city. Late that same afternoon, the government declared a state of emergency. The severe clampdown on the press meant that even to this day, many non-Capetonian friends express surprise when I mention this massive demonstration. Within a week, Parliament passed the Unlawful Organizations Act, under which the ANC headed by Nelson Mandela and the PAC headed by Robert Sobukwe were banned, followed by the mass arrests of leaders, strikers, and protestors. An arsenal of draconian laws designed to crush dissent was passed over the coming weeks. South Africa was turning into a police state. With South Africa once again considered “stable” by international capital, the U.S. and Britain rescinded the threat made soon after the Sharpeville massacre, to withdraw their investments.
Oppressive laws were not new. Many were passed soon after the National Party took
