Читать книгу Mapping My Way Home - Stephanie Urdang - Страница 15

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 the content was culled from international newspapers, which 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. I was taken aback. Shocked! The grapes were clearly labeled with the country of origin: South Africa. I 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.