Читать книгу Amy Biehl’s Last Home - Steven D. Gish - Страница 15

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To Washington and Beyond

DURING AMY’S last year at Stanford, Margaret Jones, one of her best friends from Santa Fe, came up to the Bay Area for a visit. The two had known each other since seventh grade, and now, on the verge of college graduation, both were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. Over margaritas in San Francisco, Amy and Margaret decided to move to Washington, D.C., after they graduated, find a place to live together, and look for work. Neither one had a job lined up, but that was all part of the adventure. After spending time with her family in Newport Beach following her trip to southern Africa, Amy flew to Santa Fe, helped Margaret load her car, and set out for Washington with a few suitcases, a road atlas, and her childhood friend.

The pair arrived in Washington in early October 1989. Eager to shake off the confinement of their cross-country drive, Amy and Margaret participated in a 10-kilometer run in Georgetown the next day. The run would be an apt metaphor for Amy’s years in Washington—she was constantly on the go. Amy was ready to “dive in and live in the city,” according to Margaret. She wanted to live in an interesting, eclectic area, close to the action, not a dull suburb in an outlying part. She and Margaret found an apartment on the 1700 block of U Street in the capital’s Adams-Morgan district, an ethnically diverse neighborhood populated by a mixture of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. In Margaret’s words, it was a “pretty fringy” area that some D.C. residents considered unsafe, but Amy was attracted to its diversity and nightlife. The neighborhood was home to inexpensive Ethiopian, Caribbean, and Salvadorean restaurants and to bars and stores that stayed open late. The blue townhouse that Amy and Margaret moved into was near the center of the action. The pair would share the two-bedroom apartment for the next three years.

Hoping to find work in international relations, Amy contacted think tanks and foundations but was unable to land a job in her field. As a stopgap measure she got a job as a waitress at the Brickskeller, a legendary bar in Washington that served beers from all over the world. That Amy could find a job only as a waitress was hard on her ego at first, but at least she enjoyed the atmosphere at the Brickskeller and earned good tips on weekends. Amy and Margaret managed to have fun together, despite the fact that neither had much money. They ran, went to sporting events, and partied together. Amy especially liked going to Kilimanjaro, an African-themed dance club near her apartment. “It reminds me so much of the discos in the African townships that I went to—everyone gets all decked out and everyone is a hot dancer!” she wrote to a friend. Amy “was very interested in getting to know people who weren’t entitled Caucasian, wealthy people,” Margaret recalled. She marveled at her friend’s spirit. “[Amy] wasn’t necessarily interested in going to the trendy, expensive places. She wanted to go to places with character and fun people that might be a little more edgy,” she said.

Margaret wasn’t Amy’s only friend in D.C.—her boyfriend Scott moved to the city around the same time she did. His job at the national office of the Republican Party provided plenty of opportunities for good-natured debate, since Amy was a committed Democrat. The two continued their relationship in Washington, although their future plans were still uncertain. Miruni Soosaipillai, another Stanford friend, was also in D.C., having started law school at Georgetown just when Amy arrived in town. The group was very social, going out to eat, drink, and dance, sometimes formally, sometimes informally. Amy had a wardrobe to suit every occasion, thanks in part to her mother Linda, who worked as a couture manager at Neiman Marcus. As Amy’s friend Gina Giere remembered,

She was very pretty and she knew it. She loved to look good. She loved clothes. She wasn’t a frumpy do-gooder. She was a really fun, fun, beautiful, interesting person. She wasn’t perfect. She could be a little too focused sometimes. She was definitely a leader and a motivator. She liked to plan fun stuff. She would have great parties. . . . She took us places that no white women would ever go. But she was just like, “They have great blues, we gotta go there!” So we’d go to lounges in the worst parts of town and we’d be there dancin’ and singin’ and laughin.’ She just felt at home everywhere.

Amy was determined to stay in shape while in Washington and turned to running now that her collegiate diving career was over. She ran in the city’s Marine Corps Marathon in November 1990 and finished 478th out of almost 11,000 runners, despite the fact that this was her first full marathon. She would continue to enter other races in the years ahead.

Sometimes Linda Biehl worried about Amy’s safety as she ran through the streets of Washington, but when she questioned her daughter, Amy would say, “Well, Mom, the crack dealers all know who I am. They protect me as I go.” Scott remembers this as well. He also worried about Amy, but once while he and Amy were walking through her neighborhood, a homeless person told him, “We’re watching out for her, brother, we’re watching out for her.” There was no denying that crime was a problem in Washington. Amy and Margaret’s apartment was broken into in 1992, and Amy’s bike was stolen at a local YMCA. But Amy wanted to engage with the less fortunate in D.C., not shun them. On Sundays, she and Margaret volunteered at Mount Carmel House, a shelter for homeless women, bringing popcorn and candy to the women, playing bingo, or bringing a movie to watch. She and Margaret volunteered at the shelter for eight or nine months, until Amy starting traveling more frequently.

Amy hadn’t given up the search for more satisfying work. In late 1989, she was hired as a paid intern for Bart Gordon, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. She continued to work at the Brickskeller at night while interning on Capitol Hill during the day. Her hours were punishing—often she would arrive at the office at 7:30 a.m. after working until 2 a.m. waitressing—but she considered it a worthwhile challenge. As she pondered her future, she thought about getting a master’s degree in international relations or business. She took the Graduate Management Admission Test in 1990 and requested that her scores be sent to the Harvard Institute for International Development, the American Graduate School of International Management, and the business schools at Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA. As of February 1990, she still didn’t have what she considered a “real” job. But she was convinced that greater things lay ahead. “She always told me she was going to be famous,” Margaret later recalled. “It wasn’t until we moved to D.C. that I realized it could happen.” Amy did find short-term work with “Democrats 2000,” a political action committee, but she still wanted a job in international relations, particularly one that involved Africa. She also talked about Africa-related job opportunities with Chester Crocker, then retired from government service and based at Georgetown, and she interviewed at the Brookings Institution.

Finally the job Amy wanted materialized. In September 1990, she was hired as a program assistant at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). NDI was a nonprofit organization established in the mid-1980s to promote democracy in the world. Funded by Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy and affiliated with the Democratic Party, it was particularly dedicated to encouraging democratic transitions and strengthening young democracies. Its work involved election monitoring, training for political parties and legislators, and civic education. When Amy came on board, NDI was expanding rapidly. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 triggered a wave of democratization in the world, which some analysts called “a new world order.” Political commentators hoped that democracy would not only spread but become dominant in the world, replacing tyrannical regimes and one-party states in quick succession. As communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, fears of nuclear conflict lessened and Cold War tensions eased. As these changes reshaped the world’s political landscape, NDI grew dramatically in terms of both staff and funding. It developed programs to promote democracy in Eastern Europe and the independent states of the former Soviet Union and expanded its work in Africa.

The fall of 1990 was a perfect time for Amy to join NDI. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the movement toward multiparty democracy was steadily gaining momentum in Africa. Namibia held its first free elections in 1989; formal negotiations to end apartheid began in South Africa in 1990 with the unbanning of liberation movements and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison; Benin held multiparty elections in 1990; Zambia would do so the following year; and pressure for multiparty elections surfaced in other parts of Africa around the same time. NDI was well placed to contribute to these trends.

Amy started working at NDI on the same day as another recent college graduate, Gina Giere. The pair moved into an office together and joined an organization that was hiring more young interns and program assistants than ever before. “It was all these young, idealistic, totally committed smart kids,” Gina said, “and it was really fun at the same time. We were all there because we believed in what we were doing. None of us was making a nickel. We were making next to nothing. You bonded very quickly in that kind of environment.”

Amy fit the bill perfectly. She quickly made friends among her new coworkers, many of whom were drawn to her sense of humor, energy, and commitment to Africa. Gina found Amy “fun, super enthusiastic about everything, [and] confident. She was a little idealistic, so passionate about what she believed in and what she struggled for.” Even though Amy had apparently found her dream job, she did become frustrated at times. Not content to be merely a “gofer,” she wanted to be actively engaged in NDI’s programs. But she found that some people on the job didn’t take her seriously at first, partly because she was an attractive young woman. One senior NDI official who did take Amy seriously was Sean Carroll, but even he recognized the qualities in her that sometimes misled others. “It’s hard to put into words,” he said, “but there aren’t too many academics who have the personality and appearance she does. She’s bright, attractive, exuberant, friendly, and at the same time she is a serious academic who has done a lot of work.” Sometimes Amy had problems getting African men to take her seriously. As her roommate Margaret observed, “People would regularly underestimate Amy, because she’s so gorgeous and so sporty and blonde and blue-eyed. She’s tiny, she’s very petite. And easy to underestimate in a way. She was fighting those impressions as well. She was very eager to convince people what a cool white person she was. That she knew what they were talking about and that she knew the politics and that she loved the food and the language and the people and the country. . . . She wasn’t shy.”

Patricia Keefer was NDI’s senior associate for southern African programs in the early 1990s and thus supervised many of the projects on which Amy worked. She was not an Africanist by training but had years of experience as a political organizer, much of it with Common Cause. She immediately recognized Amy’s potential to contribute to NDI: “She was very bright, she was very together, she was very self-confident. Her trip through Africa on kombi buses was amazing to me. It said to me here’s a young woman with spirit and adventure and she doesn’t have boundaries. She really wanted to work in South Africa and Namibia and she knew a lot about it. She probably knew more than I did in terms of all the policy and background. . . . I saw this as, ‘My God, how could I be so fortunate to have somebody who knows all this?’”

But Pat had a reputation for being a tough boss, admitting years later that she pushed her team to their limits. “When you went to work on my team at NDI, you did things in a way that was pretty extraordinary,” she said. Pat realized that some Africans viewed Americans with suspicion, and so she wanted to earn their trust by putting together exceptionally well-planned programs that ran without a hitch. She would sometimes ask her staff to work weekends and over holidays to prepare for upcoming conferences. Pat’s demands didn’t always sit well with Amy, and tension eventually developed between the two. “She was brilliant and the more brilliant she was, I think the more I asked of her, and I think she didn’t want to acknowledge her limits,” Pat remembered. One friend noticed that Amy had become far more confident and outspoken after having graduated from Stanford, and perhaps the tension she felt with Pat was the inevitable result of two strong-willed people working on the same team. Despite the personality clash, Amy admired Pat’s abilities and commitment to democracy in Africa. As her friend and coworker Gina observed, “[Amy] came in really wide-eyed and idealistic and ready to do amazing things in the world. She always knew she was going to be an amazing person—I don’t think she ever doubted that for one second. She just knew she was going to be someone to reckon with and she would tell you. But at NDI she met reality a little bit. It wasn’t all a bed of roses. It was really hard at times. And she worked for some really strong personalities and she had a really strong personality.” Amy was given more responsibility at NDI as time progressed, and eventually she became a key player in running the organization’s programs in Africa. In her two years at the Institute, she traveled to Namibia, Zambia, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Ethiopia, returning to some locations multiple times.

Amy’s greatest wish was to return to Namibia, and in March 1991 she got her chance. NDI planned a conference titled “Namibia: The Parliament and Democracy Symposium” for March 18–20, 1991. The Institute had been interested in Namibia for several years, and when the country became independent in 1990, NDI hoped to assist its young democracy. “Namibia wasn’t just one more country for NDI,” Pat Keefer explained. “It was the first country to welcome NDI to be part of its democratic development.” She and Amy agreed that Namibia could be a showcase for what NDI stood for and how it could work with liberation movements. For Amy, her March 1991 trip to Namibia was the first in a series of trips she would take with NDI to organize seminars for Namibia’s new legislators. The March 1991 conference enabled her to return to a country she had written about and visited in 1989, just before independence, and observe Namibia’s new democracy in action.

The symposium, held in Windhoek and cosponsored by the National Assembly of Namibia, featured a series of seminars on parliamentary procedures for Namibian legislators. The Namibian cochairman of the conference was the Speaker of the National Assembly, Mosé Tjitendero, who had developed close ties to the United States as a student at the University of Massachusetts. He admired NDI and welcomed the international delegation it brought from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. The visitors discussed the inner workings of their own parliaments, interactions between various branches of government, the role of party leaders, and ways of holding government ministers accountable. Most of the members of Namibia’s National Assembly attended the seminars, including the prime minister and foreign minister, and the conference was full of optimism, encouragement, and stirring words about Namibia’s young new democracy.

Amy was excited to return to Namibia as a professional. The atmosphere had clearly changed since her last visit, when the talk was all about the country’s upcoming elections. Now it was the first anniversary of independence. “The funny thing is that the personalities are all the same, just switched around in the power structure. I guess that includes me too!” she wrote Scott. She worked with Pat and Sean on the logistics of the conference and was part of the NDI delegation that met President Sam Nujoma at the statehouse. She and the president smiled broadly while their photograph was taken as they stood next to the Namibian flag. Amy also met Speaker Tjitendero and two South African delegates: Brigitte Mabandla of the African National Congress’s constitutional committee and Bushy Molefe of the ANC’s working group on international relations. After the conference ended, Amy spoke at greater length with Molefe, who had been a prisoner on Robben Island. “Amy was impressed that this victim of apartheid could be so willing to forgive his oppressors,” the NDI president, Brian Attwood, remembered. “He wanted to vote, she said, but he didn’t want to exclude the people who had excluded him. He wanted to see South Africa become a full-fledged democracy. This experience left a deep impression on Amy; she wanted to sign up for the cause.” Amy also developed a friendship with Brigitte Mabandla at the conference. Mabandla, a lawyer who had worked for years at the ANC’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, encouraged NDI to come to South Africa and work with the ANC. NDI’s work in Namibia thus paved the way for its later engagement with South Africa. Before they returned to the United States, Pat and Amy stopped briefly in Cape Town, where Mabandla introduced them to Zola Skweyiya, chairman of the ANC’s constitutional committee. They discussed the possibility of NDI sponsoring a series of seminars on electoral systems later that year in South Africa. The door to South Africa had been opened—both for NDI and for Amy.

Amy’s next trip with NDI took her to Zambia. NDI and the Carter Center in Atlanta had formed the Zambian Voter Observation Project—known as “Z-Vote” for short—in order to develop a monitoring plan for upcoming Zambian elections. Zambia had been a one-party state since independence in 1964, and President Kenneth Kaunda had not allowed opposition parties to form until December 1990. Even though he had bowed to pressure and agreed to hold national elections in 1991, he initially rejected calls for international observers to monitor the voting. He then changed his mind and joined with opposition leaders in inviting former US president Jimmy Carter to observe the elections. Carter and NDI officials organized a voting observation team in order to support free and fair elections in Zambia and to encourage the consolidation of multiparty democracy there. The program involved sending three preelection missions to Zambia between August and October 1991, plus a delegation of election observers to monitor the voting.

Amy was asked to staff NDI’s September mission and headed toward a country on the cusp of major political change. She arrived in Lusaka on September 19, a few days before the preelection mission officially began. “The weather in Lusaka is gorgeous,” Amy wrote her roommate Margaret. “I got to ride around in a motorcade with President Carter and carry a walkie talkie. I also went running with the secret service men who promised me I could run with Pres. Carter if I slowed down! He only went one time, but I missed it!” The program assistants’ main responsibility was to make sure that everything ran smoothly; they could sit in on policy sessions as long as they had taken care of the logistics first. NDI didn’t escape controversy in Zambia. The media and the ruling party occasionally criticized the organization for allegedly favoring the opposition or meddling in Zambia’s internal affairs, but President Kaunda urged Zambians to respect the mission. All this gave Amy a taste of working in an uncertain, high-stakes political environment. Just two years out of college, she was doing substantive preelection work in southern Africa, clearly on the fast-track to a high-level career in diplomacy and African studies.

On October 31, 1991, Zambians voted in the first multiparty elections in more than two decades. Despite noticing some irregularities, international monitors deemed the election free and fair and certified that Frederick Chiluba’s Movement for Multi-Party Democracy had won 75 percent of the vote. Kaunda stepped aside after 27 years in power. NDI’s final report reflected a sense of optimism over prospects for democracy in Africa. Zambia’s election was hailed as evidence of a great wave of democracy washing across Africa at the time. Amy was thrilled not just to witness this tide, but to have supported it. It was a heady time for Amy and her colleagues to work on the continent, when openness and democracy seemed to be gaining the upper hand after years of tyranny and struggle.

Amy’s commitment to Africa continued to grow. In the fall of 1991, she decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research on the role of women in South Africa’s transition to democracy. Her interest in women in Africa was relatively new and stemmed in part from her own experiences. In her Fulbright proposal, she wrote, “As a young woman in Washington I have recently been made aware of gender discrimination with men at work—both in Washington and in other countries. I have also observed women from around the world strive to eliminate gender discrimination in the new democratic societies they have helped fight for, most recently in South Africa.” She observed that in the transitions to majority rule in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, women’s rights were not sufficiently enshrined in the new legal frameworks in those countries. Because African women played an important role in the struggle against white domination, they wanted to be liberated from gender discrimination as well. She was encouraged that the ANC’s constitutional committee was discussing the need to protect women’s rights, but she believed the prospects for success depended on women’s role in the negotiation process.

Amy’s proposal to study the role of women in South Africa’s transition came at an opportune time, as South Africa’s constitutional negotiations were just getting under way. Amy proposed to spend a year at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) near Cape Town because its Centre for Development Studies was affiliated with the ANC’s constitutional committee, and she believed that the ANC had the most progressive agenda on gender of South Africa’s political parties. She had made connections with key people at UWC, such as Brigitte Mabandla, who was based at the University’s Community Law Centre and was the only woman on the ANC’s constitutional committee. She had also gained the backing of Randi Erentzen at UWC’s Centre for Development Studies, whom she met during a short stay in South Africa in early 1991. He wrote her a letter of recommendation for the proposal, as did NDI senior program officer Lionel Johnson and NDI president Brian Attwood. Amy hoped to interview women from all over South Africa, at all levels, from as many different parties and organizations as possible. The timeliness of her topic, combined with her academic background, relevant work experience in Africa, and links with ANC scholar-activists, made for a strong proposal, but she would have to wait until spring for the Fulbright committee’s verdict.

Around the time Amy was preparing her Fulbright application, she headed to South Africa again—this time for her longest stay to date. She was going to participate in a series of voter education workshops cosponsored by NDI and UWC’s Centre for Development Studies (CDS). The planning for the workshops took months, involving Pat and Amy from NDI, Mabandla and Skweyiya of the ANC, and Erentzen at CDS, who would become the South African coordinator of the project. As in NDI’s past workshops, an international delegation would be flown into the country to lead the seminars. Amy wrote the briefing paper for the delegation, which was scheduled to arrive in South Africa in November 1991. Her 44-page paper was authoritative, comprehensive, and well written. She provided political background on South Africa, reviewed the main issues and political organizations, provided a chronological overview of negotiations, and discussed the violence racking the country. In her view, many obstacles still hindered the transition to democracy in South Africa, and she correctly predicted that tensions would grow until a settlement was reached. “The scenario of chaos which threatens to occur should the talks fail and the violence continue serves as a continual reminder to the majority of South Africans that a peaceful, democratic solution is the most desirable outcome for all,” she wrote.

NDI’s series of seminars, called “Towards a National Election,” took place over 10 days in six different locations in South Africa. Instead of focusing on the major urban centers, the program based itself in less densely populated regions and was designed for people representing “disenfranchised political organizations” such as the ANC, PAC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), and Inkatha.

Amy arrived in South Africa with NDI coworker Mary Hill on October 27, 1991, to lay the groundwork for the program. “It’s an interesting time to be here,” Amy wrote Margaret back in D.C. “Negotiations are getting closer, violence is increasing. I think the program will be very useful.” She marveled at the beauty of Cape Town and wrote on a postcard to Scott, “This is really what Cape Town looks like—it’s gorgeous! Unfortunately the view from the townships isn’t this nice! We’ll fix that!” Amy was assigned to be Randi Erentzen’s “teammate” during the voter education seminars, beginning what was to become a warm friendship. They and their colleagues traveled together throughout South Africa, eager to prepare the people for the country’s first democratic elections. Amy’s colleague Mary likened their work to “a traveling road show on elections and how to vote.” They both realized how meaningful the seminars were to South Africans who had never voted before. “We witnessed black South Africans vote for the first time in a mock polling station. Their gratitude was overwhelming,” Mary observed. Some of the participants even wept as they cast their sample ballots, moving Amy and Mary deeply. As Amy recorded in her journal,

The things I will remember most are the singing of liberation songs and the toyi-toyi dance that happened at each workshop. It was absolutely chilling to hear these beautiful songs which mean so much to the people and see their passion as they toyi-toyi.

I will also remember the close attention paid by each participant, from the 14-year old die-hard communist to the 71-year old local chief who “voted” in a mock election for the first time.

I will remember the personal relationships I established with some of the top level people of the ANC. . . . I will remember going to a tavern in a township and receiving the warmest response from everyone. I will remember staying out all night at the Cotton Pub in Jo’burg and having my picture taken with Hugh Masekela.

But as uplifting as many of Amy’s experiences were, she was troubled that apartheid attitudes still existed in South Africa. Her journal continues,

Then I will remember the [illegible] of apartheid who treat violence and the loss of family as an everyday occurrence. I will remember the Afrikaner woman who refused to give a key to the bathroom to one of our faculty from Zimbabwe. I will remember the racist hotels and the uncomfortable looks we received from hotel managers and restaurant owners when we were accompanied by the ANC.

Out of these troubling incidents I have developed the greatest appreciation for the discipline, patience and tolerance exhibited by the anti-apartheid organizations in the country. Where I grew angry, they were patient and where I was intolerant, they were tolerant. It gives me a great deal of confidence in the eventual outcome of the transfer of power.

Soon it was time to return to Namibia. Foreign Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab invited NDI to convene a conference titled “Advancing and Strengthening Democracy in Southern Africa” in mid-January 1992. The conference would be held at Mount Etjo, 150 miles north of Windhoek, at one of Namibia’s most famous game lodges. From January 18 to 22, 1992, approximately 60 delegates from nine countries in southern Africa converged on the resort to discuss multiparty democracy with an international delegation of political and labor leaders, legal experts, and scholars. Washington Post reporter David Ottaway was impressed with what he saw and aptly called the conference “a long-distance reverberation from the democratic earthquake that has struck the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Third World countries.” As proof that the recent elections in Zambia had energized prodemocracy movements in southern Africa, elections were scheduled in Angola, Mozambique, Lesotho, Namibia, and Botswana over the next two years, and South Africa was moving toward majority rule as well. Several African delegates noted that despite having elections, their countries were not yet fully democratic. But in Namibia, the atmosphere was still positive as the second anniversary of independence approached. Multiparty democracy was intact, though Speaker Tjitendero admitted that his country still had a long way to go: “After you have acquired a constitution, which may be praised worldwide, and achieved the goal of political independence and liberty, we have learned that votes in the ballot box are not edible.” Governments like his still faced the overwhelming challenge of alleviating poverty and meeting the needs of their people.

As she hinted on her postcards to her friends back home, Amy’s trips for NDI were exhilarating, but they could be stressful at times. Even NDI president Brian Attwood recognized the pressure that Amy was under. Years later, he described Amy as “young and eager to take on the most difficult jobs. So we gave them to her. She had the energy to work all night or to party all night—whatever was needed! She was also very idealistic. She knew she could make a difference and it showed. She didn’t have the most glamorous of jobs. She planned training conferences. She helped out with logistics. But she made more African friends than anyone else. She was fascinated to learn about their lives, their hardships, their pleasures, and their dreams for the future.”

Not all of Amy’s projects with NDI involved southern Africa. Her work also took her to west and central Africa. In mid-1992, she traveled to the Ivory Coast and the Republic of Congo, giving her the opportunity to see new parts of Africa and practice her French. But Amy’s real interest had shifted to South Africa by this point. As she awaited word on her Fulbright application, she sharpened her focus on that country’s shifting political landscape. Nelson Mandela had been free for more than two years, but negotiations for a new government seemed stalled. All the while, political violence there was about to intensify. Shortly after returning from Brazzaville (Republic of Congo), Amy attended a conference on South Africa’s transition sponsored by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. There she heard the latest perspectives from some of the world’s leading South Africa experts, including Steven Mufson (Wall Street Journal correspondent and author), Bill Gould (Stanford law professor), Jacklyn Cock (South African feminist scholar), Colin Bundy (prominent South African historian), Robert Price (Berkeley political scientist), Anthony Marx (Columbia political scientist), and Lindiwe Mabuza (the ANC’s representative to the United States). Even Chester Crocker was there, the former assistant secretary of state and subject of Amy’s honors thesis.

After having worked extensively in South Africa herself during the transition process, Amy had become an astute and perceptive observer in her own right. She had long admired Mandela, but her perspectives had become much more sophisticated than ever before. She shared her insights with her 15-year-old younger brother Zach, who was writing a school report on Mandela in the spring of 1992 and had asked for his older sister’s help. Although she was about to leave for another trip—this time to Burundi—she sent Zach her thoughts.

I think that Nelson Mandela is uniquely qualified to lead black South Africans during this critical time of transition in South Africa.

Many former prisoners from Robben Island and elsewhere whom I have talked to tell me that prison was the best education they could have ever received in South Africa. At a time when most South Africans were refusing to attend school because they didn’t want to learn in Afrikaans, etc., those who were in prison read every book and newspaper they could get their hands on. They developed codes in order to get information from outside. They gained a sense of purpose in terms of what they had to do when they were released from prison. They developed a better understanding of those who were keeping them in prison, as well as a special compassion that often causes former prisoners to be more conciliatory with the white government than those ANC members who had been in exile or working with the UDF.

Nelson Mandela never lost his sense of purpose while he was in prison. In fact he came out with a very clear understanding of what he had to do. He did everything he could to learn what was behind the motives of the white government. He began a dialogue with former President Botha and de Klerk while he was still in prison to lay the groundwork for his release and establish a working relationship. During all those years in prison he was preparing himself to lead.

Nearly everyone I have met in South Africa has a favorable opinion of Mandela. The old white people still think he is a communist. The radical black youth in the townships believe he has “sold out” by negotiating with the current government, but nearly all of them respect him. My impression is that this massive responsibility weighs heavily on Mandela, but that he knows that he is the one who must see the transition through. However, I do not believe that he is self-aggrandizing, or that he plans to consolidate his personal power if and when the ANC comes to power. Instead I believe that he is old and tired. He actively seeks new young leaders.

Amy’s judgments proved to be remarkably accurate. Her reflections are all the more significant when one considers that she wrote them well before such perspectives were widely known, before the publication of Mandela’s autobiography and before the publication of other insiders’ accounts of Robben Island, the secret negotiations that preceded Mandela’s release, and the transition process in general. When it came to writing reports about South Africa, younger brother Zach was a fortunate student indeed.

As if to confirm Amy’s potential as a scholar of South Africa, she received some good news that spring—she would be a Fulbright scholar in the fall. But her work at NDI was far from over. In fact, her last few months at the Institute were among her busiest yet. For several of her remaining projects, she worked with Lionel Johnson, a senior program officer who managed NDI programs in Haiti, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and East and Central Africa. Amy worked with Johnson on programs for Burundi, Rwanda, and Kenya. Johnson was impressed with Amy’s energy and skill at networking, noting that “she interacted at a pretty young age with a lot of senior people.” Many of these senior people were drawn to Amy’s magnetic personality, including Johnson himself.

As a program assistant for NDI’s Central Africa division, Amy monitored developments in the region, recruited individuals to participate in NDI conferences, managed the logistical aspects of these conferences, wrote briefing materials for participants, and helped develop the program for the conferences. Amy also accompanied her NDI colleagues to Burundi in mid-May 1992 on a mission to promote multiparty democracy.

Back home in the United States, Amy spent part of the summer hosting South African visitors for NDI. The Institute organized a study tour for South African legal experts, and among the delegates were Brigitte Mabandla, Kader Asmal, and Albie Sachs, all members of the ANC’s constitutional committee. They spent three weeks traveling in the United States to study the American government. “Amy did a lot to set up that study tour,” Pat Keefer recalled. “It’s about moving people, it’s about scheduling, and she was very proficient and efficient at it. Great briefing book, materials they could take. And it gave her an opportunity to meet people like Dullah Omar and Albie Sachs and Kader Asmal.” NDI also sent Amy and Gina to the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York to assist with the Institute’s international visitors program. Every four years, NDI brought people from all over the world to see American political conventions, and the program assistants set up panels on American elections, political parties, and US foreign policy and invited American speakers to address the guests. Amy and Gina took their visitors onto the floor of the convention so that they could hear the speeches and see the voting. To Amy’s delight, one of those visitors was Namibian president Sam Nujoma. Stepping into the spectacle of the political convention was exciting work for the program assistants, Amy included. One of the people Amy befriended in New York was Gill Noero, who was part of a South African delegation to the United Nations at the time. Amy would later work with Noero on women’s projects in South Africa in 1992–93.

Amy’s last overseas trip for NDI took her to Ethiopia between September 8 and 19, 1992. She participated in a training seminar on election monitoring for the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, an event NDI cosponsored with the African-American Institute. Few of Amy’s experiences there were documented, other than the fact that she enjoyed being in Addis Ababa despite the “freezing” temperatures (although in the tropics, the city is approximately 8,000 feet above sea level).

Another country in Africa increasingly interested Amy, one that she never visited—Malawi. Hastings Kamuzu Banda had led the small southern African nation since its independence in 1964 and declared himself “life president” in 1971. But a prodemocracy movement began to gain support in the early 1990s, partly the result of multiparty elections in neighboring countries. Amy took an interest in these developments and began to push NDI to “do something about Malawi,” as Sean Carroll remembered. She met some Malawian opposition figures in Washington and invited them to her office to talk to her. She befriended Thoko Banda, the son of the important opposition figure Aleke Banda (no relation to President Hastings Banda), who appreciated her help in publicizing human rights abuses in Malawi. The two discussed how Malawi could become part of the democratic change that was happening in other parts of Africa. Thoko viewed Amy as a key ally in the struggle for multiparty democracy in Malawi and later told a journalist that she was “the only American I trusted.” He put Amy in touch with his father Aleke, who spoke to Amy twice by telephone. In September 1992, just before Amy left Washington, NDI held a forum on Malawi, thanks largely to Amy’s and Thoko’s initiatives.

Change came to Malawi in 1993–94. In June 1993, Malawian voters approved a referendum calling for multiparty elections, and in the May 1994 vote Hastings Banda and his party lost power. After the old regime’s ouster, Aleke Banda was appointed to the cabinet in the new government. Tim Johnston, a contact of Amy’s at the Washington-based Overseas Development Council, appreciated Amy’s efforts on behalf of Malawi’s prodemocracy movement and later made a worthwhile point. “Amy proved to be an important ally to those of us concerned with the fate of that country,” he wrote. “Although she was clearly dedicated to the freedom struggle in South Africa, she believed in freeing all Africans from oppression, not just that perpetrated by whites.”

Probably the most significant initiative that Amy launched during her last few months at NDI involved gender. Both Margaret and Scott noticed that Amy’s interests had shifted since her arrival in Washington three years earlier. When she first moved to D.C., she was interested in promoting democracy in Africa, but she then began to focus on promoting women’s rights in Africa’s prodemocracy movements. Her growing interest in women’s rights manifested itself not only in her Fulbright proposal, but in her work at NDI as well.

She was motivated by both her personal and her professional experiences. While representing NDI, she sometimes felt that men regarded her more as a pretty young blonde than as a professional colleague. She noticed that men in dance clubs started making advances toward her, both in Africa and the United States. Her friend and coworker Gina told a revealing story about one of Amy’s trips to southern Africa. She was staffing a conference at which one of the attendees was a former freedom fighter. Everyone had a couple of drinks with dinner, the activist got tipsy, and when they were dancing and having fun, “he hits on her.” Amy’s illusions were suddenly shattered. As Gina remembers it, Amy told colleagues, “‘I’ve admired this man my whole academic life, but I can’t kiss him!’ That was the first time she saw the messy side of people, of men. That was harder for her to process than other people. She was so pure and convinced in her motives and ideas and beliefs and she never wavered from it.”

Amy also observed that in Namibia, although women had fought for liberation alongside men, they didn’t play a prominent role in Namibia’s new government. She once told Thoko Banda that women had a great deal to contribute to Africa’s emerging democracies, but they weren’t given enough opportunities to do so. She wanted to help women get involved. Impressed by the role women played at the 1992 Democratic convention in New York, Amy concluded that the rights of women needed to be promoted more vigorously in emerging democracies. Having just been awarded a Fulbright to study the role of women in South Africa, Amy was ready to speak out.

In August 1992, Amy wrote a detailed memorandum on gender issues to the NDI staff. “I would like to initiate a discussion on how we can institutionalize a policy of gender equality,” she wrote. She recognized that NDI had sought to increase women’s participation in its programs, but she wanted the organization to go further. She believed NDI should actively promote women’s rights in societies that were making the transition to democracy, and she drafted a set of gender guidelines that she wanted coworkers to consider and discuss at a meeting. In her words, NDI needed to “make gender equality an institutional priority.”

Around the same time that Amy circulated her memo on gender, she drafted a statement discussing how election monitors should address gender issues. She noted that in countries undergoing democratic transitions, women’s issues tended to be downplayed or ignored, even though women had also struggled to achieve democracy. Amy was careful not to advocate a single model for gender equality; she believed that how gender issues were addressed should depend on the country involved. Following Amy’s initiative, NDI developed a program to strengthen the participation of women in politics. The program was directly inspired by Amy’s work. In October 1993, NDI brought an international delegation of women to Nairobi, Kenya, to support the newly established Education Centre for Women in Democracy. The center had been established a few months earlier to help women increase their role in Kenyan politics. In the four-day conference, international delegates from Germany, Uganda, Ireland, Namibia, Botswana, and the United States met with Kenyan women to discuss assisting female candidates, conducting campaigns, organizing, and educating voters. That NDI received funding for the Nairobi program was a tribute to Amy’s “commitment and energy,” according to Lionel Johnson. The Institute’s support of the Education Centre for Women in Democracy became “one of NDI’s more successful programs.” Johnson maintains that the issues Amy worked on, such as democracy in Africa, women’s rights, and women’s participation in politics, are still important to NDI today.

By late summer 1992, Amy brought her work at NDI to a close. Despite the challenges she had faced, she derived a real satisfaction from having worked there. She was proud of the Institute’s role in promoting democracy in Africa. She believed that a new era of freedom was dawning on the continent after years of one-party states. “African people from grassroots societies to heads of governments are beginning to recognize democracy as the key to achieving political tolerance, social justice, and economic growth,” she wrote just before she left. Although she recognized that democracy on the continent had been assisted by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, and the encouragement of donor countries, she believed that Africans themselves deserved much of the credit. “The most significant changes have come from the persistence and resilience of African citizens who are demanding popular participation and accountable government,” she wrote. Amy correctly predicted that Africa’s path to democracy would not be easy, especially in countries emerging from civil wars. In an essay published in the July 1992 issue of the newsletter Liberal Times, she wrote,

On a continent where population rates spiral out of control and civil conflict is more common than good government, liberal democracy is not just an option. Africans across the continent insist that democracy is necessary to ensure that the growing needs of their societies are met. Africa, and the world, cannot afford another Somalia, where war, famine and political anarchy have claimed millions of lives. Instead, we must strive to achieve more Benins, Botswanas, Namibias and Senegals—democratic societies where Africans are beginning to live up to their continent’s vast human potential.

After saying goodbye to her roommate Margaret, Amy left Washington in September 1992 and headed back to southern California to spend time with her family and prepare for her Fulbright trip to South Africa. While on the west coast, she visited Scott in Oregon and friends in the San Francisco Bay area, including her former advisor at Stanford, Kennell Jackson. She told Jackson about her adventures in Africa over the past few years. “She regaled me with all these stories of people and their interests, of a beer she had with this person, of a tea at another African’s home, of a woman leader I had to pay attention to in the future in Zimbabwe.” She also showed him some of the dance moves she had learned in Africa.

Three years after having graduated from Stanford, some of her college friends were starting families, but Amy was still paving the way for her career. She sensed that adventures still lay ahead of her. “She was so driven and really moving toward some amazing things,” Margaret remembered. During the last two years, she had converted her previous academic experience into professional, hands-on work, shuttling back and forth to Africa, helping run workshops and conferences, observing conditions, meeting African leaders and activists, and developing ideas and initiatives of her own. Amy had not only observed prodemocracy movements in Africa, she had actively assisted them. Her next stop was South Africa, home to the continent’s most highly anticipated transition of all.