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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 Africa is my country. How ignorant! But as I learned more about the complexity of American 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. Over twenty thousand women, mostly African, marched on the seat of the government in Pretoria. There they assembled in front of the pillared edifice of the Union Buildings to protest the extension of the pass laws to women. They carried thousands of petitions to be handed to the then prime minister, J. G. Strijdom, and stood for thirty minutes in total silence to emphasize their message. I was twelve at the time.

“I can’t believe I knew nothing about this march until recently,” I admitted. “Tell me about it.”

He remembered it well, he said. “My wife was one of the organizers. She and the other organizers were totally consumed by it. Us men, we got nervous. We weren’t sure they realized how dangerous it could be. We wanted to provide security. But when I asked her what we could do to help, you know what she told me?” An annoyed edge crept into his voice. “She told me that if the men wanted to help we could look after the children!” Fifteen years later the memory still rankled. Then repeating the ANC line, he added, “Women’s equality is of course important. But first we have to overthrow apartheid so that it is not divisive. Then we can work toward equality for all.”

How different an approach from Cabral’s insistence that PAIGC involve women as equals in the struggle from the very beginning. After leaving Jen’s apartment, a group of us crammed into the backseat of a friend’s car and drove through the cold and snowy streets of New York City. The car buzzed with exhilaration as we recapped the evening.

“We must admit he is a good politician,” a voice, tinged with skepticism, pronounced from the front seat. “He said just what we wanted to hear about women! No doubt he knows that this is a big issue in America at the moment.” Her tone made it clear that she, at least, had not been fooled. I didn’t doubt what he was saying. The question for me was how? How to achieve what we in the United States were only beginning to challenge. Her comment irked me for the rest of the ride home.

I regarded myself as both a feminist and a socialist. While I adopted the term “Marxist,” I would have had a problem offering a sound Marxist analysis of the world around me. The principles, though, made sense. I was attracted by the notion that workers should own the means of production and benefit from their labor, rather than all the wealth go to their employers, the corporations, the capitalists. Since leaving South Africa I had tried to place the question of justice at the center of my choices and actions, and Marxist principles embodied justice. It extended to my feminism that was becoming an intrinsic part of my worldview. It was not about piecemeal change but about changing the whole political, economic, and social system which was threaded with gender inequality and discrimination.

My new awareness seemed to constantly place me on the edge of fury. My body would stiffen when men hissed or shouted comments as I walked past; I would shout back or give them the middle finger and walk on. Walking the streets of Manhattan could feel like running a gauntlet of male invective and aggressive invasions of my space, my body: The man who jammed himself up against me in the crowded subway, so that even when I realized it wasn’t his umbrella against my thigh, I was unable to move. The young man showing off to a handful of ten- and eleven-year-old boys in his charge, who came up behind me and pushed up against me. I shouted at him to get away while the kids laughed, and one of them retorted: “It was only through your coat!”

Walking near Columbia University in a Latino neighborhood where a group of young men hung out in front of a bodega, I felt the usual sense of invasion when offensive mouth-sucking noises and comments followed me. One of the young men called out in a more inquiring tone: “Why are you so unfriendly to us?” I snarled back, “I’ll be friendly when you don’t single women out and treat us like sex objects.” I looked back at him. His face fell as if I had slapped it. What I hadn’t noticed was that he was in a wheelchair. I walked on mortified, tears in my eyes, feeling as if I had overstepped a mark although not clear about what that mark was. I began to wonder about the patriarchy that gives rise to machismo. Something more was needed than shouting back. It would take some years for feminists to integrate the new concept of gender into our thinking. We needed gender equality, and to get it, men had to be included in the equation and take on the responsibility of identifying and challenging a culture that gave rise not just to their machismo but to violence against women and girls.

IT IS THE SPRING OF 1972 and I am on my lunch break, sitting with Suzette Abbott on a grassy verge near Columbia University. Suzette is South African; she has been in the United States for about six months. She came to New York as part of the same two-year Frontier Internship program that sent Gail and Don to South Africa. Later I would learn that she had grown up in a family that resolutely bought the apartheid line, but through her own innate sense of injustice began to see the reality of South Africa. One of the moments that changed her life was a talk she attended by the Reverend Beyers Naudé, an Afrikaner cleric and theologian renowned for his strong anti-apartheid views and activism. She felt challenged to reconcile two incompatible interpretations of apartheid and, as a result, began to reject the warped version of South Africa that had been her reality since childhood. She was horrified by the truth and became radicalized. Hers was a different path than mine to anti-apartheid activism, one that required the courage to denounce all that she had been taught to believe and risk alienation from her family and isolation from the only community she had known. When we met soon after she arrived in New York I instantly felt that tingle of connection I often had with women I sensed were like-minded.

Now, warmed by the sun, we talked about the women’s movement. “It’s the first time as a white South African that I feel I can legitimately be part of a movement that is important to me,” she said.