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Into South Africa

BY THE late twentieth century, South Africa was among the world’s most racially divided societies. Its population is not just black and white, but every shade in between, a mixture of different ethnicities, races, languages, and traditions. In the early 1990s, the African majority—commonly referred to as “black South Africans”—constituted about 76 percent of the population, while the white minority, descendants of European settlers, who speak primarily Afrikaans (a derivative of Dutch) or English, numbered about 13 percent. The remaining 11 percent included South Africa’s mixed-race population, traditionally known as “Coloureds,” and a smaller number of Indians, many of whose ancestors came to South Africa as indentured laborers in the nineteenth century.

Observers frequently note that South Africa encompasses elements of both the developed and the developing world, the North and the South, the rich and the poor. White South Africans have historically enjoyed one of the highest living standards in the world. Many lived in spacious homes in leafy neighborhoods, employed gardeners and domestic workers, had access to excellent schools and services, and enjoyed a wide array of recreational and entertainment opportunities. Black South Africans usually lived in overcrowded, poorly serviced townships or in barren, unproductive rural reserves known as “homelands.” Neither domain had adequate schools, healthcare facilities, services, or recreational areas. The contradiction of apartheid was that despite its being a policy to keep the races apart, the economy continually drew them together. Blacks often worked in white neighborhoods as groundskeepers or maids, or commuted to “white” areas to work in mines or factories, and so were constantly reminded of whites’ privileges and comfortable lifestyles. But few whites ever entered black townships or rural “homelands,” so they rarely saw how the majority of their black fellow citizens lived.

The origins of South Africa’s racial conflict stretch back hundreds of years, much like that of the United States. Both societies experienced European colonial conquest, slavery, miscegenation, and racial segregation, both formal and informal. The black freedom struggles in both countries shared key ideas and approaches, and black South Africans often drew inspiration from black American leaders and the American civil rights movement. In his trip to South Africa in 1966, Robert F. Kennedy acknowledged the two countries’ striking historical similarities. As he told an audience at the University of Cape Town on June 6, 1966,

I come here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; and land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage.

I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

But the two countries’ differences were equally striking. In the United States, whites were an overwhelming majority of the population, whereas white South Africans were a small minority. The cultural divide separating black and white South Africans was considerably larger than that between white and black Americans. The two countries’ legal systems were vastly different as well. In the United States, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights suggested that all of its citizens had equal rights, and although this principle was not always observed, victims of discrimination could eventually seek legal recourse through the nation’s courts. South Africa had no such constitution proclaiming equal citizenship for all. A sign once carried at a political demonstration in the United States said it best: “Negroes in American fight for their rights, Negroes in South Africa have no rights.”

Although slavery, European colonial rule, and racial segregation had existed in other parts of the world, the history of South Africa and other racially divided societies began to diverge after the Second World War. The United States slowly began dismantling legalized racial segregation, and European colonial rulers gradually began transferring power to Asians and Africans. But in South Africa, white rule became harsher. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party came to power promising to implement apartheid (“apartness”), an all-encompassing system of legalized racial discrimination, so as to advance and defend white South Africa. By playing on fears of “swart gevaar” (black peril), the National Party would remain in power for the next 46 years. During that time, its policy of apartheid would become the most notorious system of racial segregation in the modern world.

Not surprisingly, South African politics became increasingly confrontational after 1948. Soon after the National Party’s accession to power, the leading vehicle of black politics, the African National Congress (ANC), was revitalized by a new generation of younger members, including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. They were determined to transform the ANC into a more radical, militant, mass-based movement. But the incident that led to the white regime’s first major crisis was precipitated not by the ANC but by a breakaway group of hardline African nationalists, who called themselves the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). On March 21, 1960, they urged their followers to protest against the law that required Africans to carry a pass book entitling them to reside and work in the “white” cities. At a protest in Sharpeville, a black township south of Johannesburg, police fired into an unarmed crowd, killing 69 and wounding more than 100. The massacre made headlines all over the world and led to unprecedented international condemnation of apartheid. Just days after the tragedy, the government banned the ANC and the PAC. Now forced to operate in secret, the ANC established an armed wing known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and launched a sabotage campaign. Mandela, then a young lawyer and a leader of Umkhonto, was arrested in 1962 after 18 months of clandestine activity. He and other key leaders of the sabotage campaign were sentenced to life in prison two years later. After the PAC was banned, some of its sympathizers in the western Cape established Poqo (Africans alone), a resistance movement that promoted violence against white South Africans. Poqo killed a handful of whites and African chiefs before it was crushed by the government’s security forces in 1963. Both the ANC and the PAC would be virtually wiped out internally, creating a significant void in black protest politics.

In the 1960s, opposition to apartheid arose from a new quarter—black South African students. Drawing inspiration partly from the Black Power movement in the United States, the black medical student Steve Biko and his peers developed a potent new political ideology stressing the need for black pride and self-reliance. Proponents of this ideology, which became known as Black Consciousness, believed that black South Africans could liberate themselves politically only once they shed their inferiority complex and distanced themselves from white liberals, whose commitment to genuine racial equality they questioned. The Black Consciousness Movement greatly reenergized black protest. A bold new generation of activists stepped forward, eager to challenge the perceived timidity of the older generation and confront “the system” as never before. Their ideas soon spread to black high schools, where they had explosive results.

The most serious student uprising took place in Soweto, the huge black township south of Johannesburg. Sparking the protest was a new government edict requiring black high schools to conduct some classes in Afrikaans, which many students viewed as “the language of the oppressor.” Students boycotted classes by the thousands, expressing their anger not just at the new language policy, but at their inferior education and apartheid in general. On June 16, 1976, police opened fire on a mass march in Soweto, killing young student demonstrators and sparking a wave of unrest that would spread throughout the country. When protests finally subsided six months later, almost 600 people had been killed, the majority of whom were black South African students. In the aftermath of the crisis, many student activists fled South Africa to join the ANC in exile in Tanzania and elsewhere. Black South African youth would play a key role in resisting apartheid from then onward. The government’s brutal response to the Soweto protests, plus the murder of Steve Biko in police custody a year later, sparked international outrage, and sustained efforts to isolate South Africa began to gain momentum.

In response to rising internal and international pressure, the white minority government began a pattern of reform and repression that would last more than a decade. But as the unrest sparked by Soweto turned into endemic civil strife and instability, the movement of popular resistance spread faster than the government could crush it. The upsurge in unrest led to a massive security crackdown. President P. W. Botha declared a partial state of emergency in 1985 and extended it to the whole country the next year. By the late 1980s, South Africa was under siege. The government was still in control, but it faced a grim future of economic decline, international isolation, and fierce internal resistance. Seemingly crushed in one area of the country, unrest would break out in another. In the words of the American journalist Steven Mufson, the white minority government faced a “half-extinguished fire.” Neither side could defeat the other.

Ever since the mid-1980s, groups of South Africans had begun exploring ways of resolving the country’s crisis diplomatically. Between 1985 and 1989, delegations of prominent white businessmen, Afrikaner intellectuals, and students met with ANC representatives in exile. Although the South African government publicly condemned these meetings, its own officials began meeting secretly with ANC exiles in Europe and with Nelson Mandela, who had initiated a dialogue with the government from prison. Eventually several factors combined to break South Africa’s stalemate. The end of the Cold War eased the government’s longstanding fears of a communist takeover. F. W. de Klerk succeeded the ailing and intransigent P. W. Botha in late 1989 and proved ready to take risks and change direction. Mandela’s rare combination of grace and gravitas convinced the government that its most famous political prisoner was not bent on revenge. Internal opposition could not be fully contained, and international pressure was seriously damaging the South African economy.

In early 1990, De Klerk announced that he was ready to end apartheid and build a new South Africa through negotiations. He lifted the bans on the ANC and the PAC, repealed apartheid laws, and released Mandela, catching even his own closest colleagues by surprise. The country’s political landscape had changed in an instant. Just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, apartheid seemed to be crumbling in South Africa, and Mandela strode free after spending more than 27 years in prison.

Mutual suspicions on both sides were not easily dissipated. Decades of antagonism had built up, not just between the government and the ANC, but among rival liberation movements, political organizations, and homeland leaders. Initially there was little consensus on the way forward. Negotiating teams disagreed on the formula for writing a new constitution, the structure of a new government, and future economic policy. Complicating matters further, black and white extremists frequently boycotted the negotiations and even tried to sabotage the negotiation process itself. Tragically, violence intensified during the transition period. Random attacks on black commuters and township residents claimed dozens, then hundreds, of lives. Fighting broke out between the ANC and Inkatha, a Zulu organization led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland. The government and the ANC blamed each other for the violence and often seemed more like bitter enemies than negotiating partners. After almost two years of violence and sporadic peace talks, most of South Africa’s major political parties converged at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in December 1991. But problems persisted. At CODESA II in May 1992, delegates became deadlocked over how decisions would be made in a proposed constituent assembly. When no agreement could be reached, CODESA permanently collapsed.

Violence and instability worsened in 1992. On June 17, 1992, 39 people were killed in Boipatong, a black township south of Johannesburg, during a nighttime attack. The ANC charged that much of the country’s violence was being orchestrated by a government-backed “third force” to weaken the ANC and derail the transition to majority rule. After the killings in Boipatong, the ANC pulled out of negotiations. More violence was yet to come. On September 7, 1992, between 70,000 and 80,000 ANC supporters marched in Bisho, the capital of the Ciskei homeland, hoping to spark a popular revolt against the homeland government. During the march, troops loyal to Ciskei’s leader opened fire, killing 28 of the marchers and wounding 200 more. Relations between the South African government and the ANC seemed headed toward a new low. But then both sides drew back from the edge of the abyss and, three weeks later, signed a Record of Understanding recommitting themselves to talks, though formal negotiations would not resume for another six months. In the meantime, white-minority rule continued.

HAVING traveled to South Africa several times between 1989 and 1992, Amy was well aware of the country’s uncertain prospects. “Although there are no guarantees that South Africa will successfully complete its transition to a multi-party democracy based on individual rights and majority rule,” she had written in her Fulbright proposal, “it is currently moving in this direction.” Amy was entering an unstable, volatile atmosphere. Expectation was in the air, but negotiations had yet not resumed and violence was worsening. Democracy still seemed a long way off. Although many black South Africans were dying, whites were still largely shielded from the violence. They were not being targeted—at least not yet.

As Amy prepared to leave the United States, Linda and Peter Biehl worried about their daughter’s safety, “but we would never have tried to stop her from going to South Africa,” Linda said later. “Peter and I raised our children to be independent, free-thinking, and strong. This was Amy’s chosen path, and we supported it.” Amy left for South Africa from Los Angeles International Airport on October 14, 1992. Linda dropped her off at the airport. As they hugged each other and said goodbye, Amy said, “Don’t cry, Mom,” never suspecting that she would not see her mother or any of her family again. After traveling via London and Johannesburg, she eventually landed in Cape Town on October 17.

To the first-time visitor, Cape Town can seem like a different country from the rest of South Africa. Its stunning location on the tip of Africa, unique flowers and plants, Mediterranean climate, and colonial architecture are not all that set it apart. Its ethnic mixture is also unique. Whereas black South Africans are the majority in the rest of the country, in Cape Town people of mixed race predominate, giving the area a distinct historical, cultural, and linguistic flavor. If South Africa has sometimes been referred to as a beautiful, cruel land, Cape Town is even more so. With its rare combination of the mountains and the sea, it is breathtakingly beautiful, but this lovely city was also the setting for extraordinarily harsh government policies that caused years of suffering and tragedy.

One of Cape Town’s central tragedies during the apartheid era was that the majority of its people—its mixed-race inhabitants—were turned into outcasts in their own city. Before 1948, Cape Town was “one of the least segregated cities in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to the geographer John Western. But during the apartheid era, white government officials remade the city, with dire consequences for Cape Town’s Coloured population. In an effort to make the most centrally located areas of Cape Town all white, the government forcibly moved mixed-race citizens from neighborhoods where their families had lived for generations and dumped them on the Cape Flats, a vast, sandy plain far to the southeast of the city center.

Conditions facing black South Africans in Cape Town were even worse. The government declared the city a “Coloured labor preference area” during apartheid, and so relatively few Africans were given official permission to live and work there. Those who tried to find work in Cape Town without official government permission were denied government housing and often survived by building tin shacks wherever they could, without water, electricity, and city services. Crossroads became the most infamous of the black squatter camps in Cape Town. Its residents lived under constant threat of eviction and often narrowly escaped as their shacks were demolished by government bulldozers. Cape Town’s complexion became more African beginning in the 1980s. By then, government policies limiting the black influx into the city had been abolished—first, the labor policy favoring Coloureds (1984) and then, the pass laws (1986). With such controls lifted, the city’s African population rose dramatically, more than tripling between 1982 and 1992. Xhosa-speaking families from the Transkei, Ciskei, and the Eastern Cape flowed in daily in search of a better life, but the urban influx into Cape Town far outpaced the number of available jobs and homes. Unable to find formal housing, the new African residents built a vast sea of shanties on the sand dunes southeast of Cape Town. The area’s growing African population was most apparent in Khayelitsha (“Our new home”), which became Cape Town’s largest black settlement. Nonexistent in 1980, Khayelitsha had approximately half a million inhabitants by the mid-1990s.

The gap between the haves and the have-nots in Cape Town is arguably the starkest in the country. The contrast between lush suburbs like Constantia and Bishopscourt and the sprawling shanties of Khayelitsha defies description. The scenic beach enclave of Camps Bay seems a world away from the townships of the barren Cape Flats. The situation parallels the contrast between the wealthy seaside community of La Jolla, California, and densely populated Tijuana, Mexico, except that, instead of being separated by an international border approximately 26 miles (42 kilometers) away, no such barrier divides Cape Town’s rich and poor. The manicured gardens in central Cape Town are less than 6 miles (9 kilometers) from the Cape Flats.

Amy had been to Cape Town before and was well acquainted with conditions in South Africa. In fact, because of her academic work and experience with NDI, she was probably much more knowledgeable about South African history and society than many other foreigners living in the country. She wasn’t the only American in South Africa at the time. Several thousand Americans lived and worked there for extended periods, just as they had for decades. After 1990, more arrived as apartheid crumbled. Some worked for businesses or NGOs, others were students, teachers, researchers, missionaries, humanitarian workers, or journalists. South Africa was still a major international news story, especially after the release of Mandela and the country’s uncertain path to freedom. Many white visitors stayed within the boundaries of white South Africa, not venturing far from the places where local whites lived, worked, and played, but Amy consciously shunned such confinements. She was “determined not to live within a white prison,” recalled Larry Diamond, one of her mentors from Stanford. She wanted to understand the area’s majority mixed-race and black population and to live and socialize with them.

Amy rented a room from Melanie Jacobs, a mixed-race woman who lived in Mowbray, a neighborhood about three and a half miles (six kilometers) from downtown Cape Town. Melanie lived with her 13-year-old daughter, Solange, and worked for Randi Erentzen at the Centre for Development Studies at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Erentzen had met Amy when she worked for NDI, and it was his idea that she live with Melanie. At first Melanie was decidedly unenthusiastic. She had also been asked to share her office with Amy, and the prospect of living and working with a stranger was unsettling, especially when the stranger was a white American. Like many black South Africans, Melanie regarded whites cautiously and believed that Americans tended to be loud and overbearing. She first said no, but then changed her mind as a favor to her boss. At first, the two “agreed to keep out of each other’s way,” but they soon warmed to each other. Melanie hadn’t had an easy life. Twenty-nine when Amy moved in, she was 15 when she had given birth to Solange and had raised her daughter as a single parent. Her place in Mowbray was an apartment she rented above a small grocery store on Main Road. She charged Amy the equivalent of about $100 per month in rent, which Amy recognized as being quite a bargain.

Mowbray was an old, somewhat bohemian neighborhood near the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital, where Dr. Christiaan Barnard had conducted the world’s first human heart transplant 25 years earlier. In the early twentieth century, Mowbray had been home to a sizeable community of middle-class Coloureds, but it was declared a whites-only suburb during the height of apartheid. Its mixed-race inhabitants were forced out beginning in 1966, just as the more famous mixed-race community of District Six in central Cape Town was being evicted. By the early 1990s, some Coloureds had trickled back to Mowbray. The Group Areas Act hadn’t been strictly enforced everywhere for years, and it was repealed in 1991, a year before Amy arrived. Mowbray was in a good location, relatively near the city center, shops, the railway line, and major motorways.

It wasn’t near UWC, however, where Amy would be working. The campus was located in Bellville, a town about 9 miles (15 kilometers) east of Mowbray. Because public transportation between Mowbray and Bellville was limited, Amy decided to get a car within days of her arrival in Cape Town. She bought a used Mazda, intentionally getting a “crappy car” so she wouldn’t stand out. Sometimes Amy would forget to drive on the left, Melanie remembered, narrowly missing other cars. On the rear bumper was a sticker that read “Our Land Needs Peace.”

Amy’s next order of business was getting established on campus. The University of the Western Cape was a product of apartheid but over the years had developed a strong antiapartheid character. Founded in 1960 as an institution of higher learning for Coloureds when the government was creating separate universities for racial and linguistic groups, it eventually became a highly politicized “university of the left.” By the time Amy arrived, it was home to many ANC supporters among both students and faculty. A leaflet from the Centre for Development Studies described UWC as “absolutely committed to the post-apartheid ideal in its teaching, research and service activities.” Almost all of its students were mixed-race or black.

Contrary to later news reports, Amy wasn’t an “exchange student” in South Africa and wasn’t enrolled in a degree program. As a Fulbright scholar, she was a research fellow affiliated to UWC’s Community Law Centre, where she worked under the supervision of Brigitte Mabandla and Dullah Omar. Also contrary to later news reports, Amy wasn’t in South Africa to conduct voter education but to study the role of women in South Africa’s transition. Omar, the director of the Community Law Centre, was a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee. He had spent much of his career as a human rights lawyer and had represented Nelson Mandela when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. As a leading member of the United Democratic Front in the 1980s, Omar had been targeted by a secret government hit squad—the notorious Civil Cooperation Bureau—which twice tried to assassinate him. It nearly succeeded when its agents replaced his heart medication with poison. One of the ANC’s most prominent leaders by 1992, he would work closely with Amy during the next 10 months. Another of Amy’s close contacts at the university was Randi Erentzen at the Centre for Development Studies, which coordinated research on South Africa’s future policy options. Erentzen had recommended Amy for the Fulbright, arranged her accommodation, and introduced her to his colleagues. Later he admitted that he was not generally fond of Americans, but Amy broke down his stereotypes.

Several of Amy’s colleagues at UWC were destined to become even more important once apartheid finally ended. In 1994, Mandela appointed Omar to become minister of justice in South Africa’s first democratic government. Mabandla became deputy minister of arts, culture, science, and technology and eventually minister of justice herself. Bulelani Ngcuka, deputy director of the Community Law Centre during Amy’s tenure there, became head of the National Prosecuting Authority under Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki. UWC was clearly a training ground for some of South Africa’s future leaders. It was a workshop where ideas about the new constitution were researched, proposed, and debated. By being there, Amy could witness, analyze, and even contribute to the constitutional process all at once.

Mabandla was Amy’s most important colleague at UWC early on. The two had first met in Namibia in 1991, and it was Mabandla who had initially encouraged Amy to come to UWC. Mabandla had long been on the frontlines of the struggle for democracy and women’s rights in South Africa. Born in 1948, she became active in the South African student movement as the Black Consciousness Movement spread in the late 1960s. She was expelled from the University of the North in 1971 because of her political activism, detained for five months, and then banned in 1974–75. Once her banning order expired, she went into exile and became active in the ANC, earning a law degree from the University of Zambia in 1979. While in exile, she represented the ANC at United Nations forums and joined the ANC’s legal and constitutional affairs department. When she returned from exile in 1990, she had been a member of the ANC’s constitutional committee for two years and was appointed coordinator of the Gender Research Project at UWC’s Community Law Centre. She was one of the ANC’s legal advisors at CODESA and had become a leading figure in South Africa’s Women’s National Coalition. She was impressed with Amy’s command of human rights issues and found the young American well organized and hardworking. Besides sharing a good personal chemistry, the two were committed to ensuring that women’s rights were part of the political settlement in South Africa. They would work closely together in the months ahead.

Amy decided to study three aspects of women’s roles: women’s participation in the negotiation process, the efforts to enshrine women’s rights in the constitutional proposals, and women’s activism at the grassroots. She worked in a systematic way from the outset and made a list of things to do that could occupy a team of researchers for years. Amy’s research agenda was too broad and inchoate at first, but she had always set ambitious goals for herself. She was eager to assist Omar, Mabandla, and Ngcuka as they drafted policies for a postapartheid South Africa. She and Mabandla began working on several articles on women in South Africa for which Amy did a significant amount of research and writing. Brigitte “seems to have a lot for me to do,” Amy wrote shortly after arriving at the university.

Within a week of her arrival in Cape Town, Amy began attending a wide array of women’s meetings and conferences. She developed a modus operandi at these events that she would stick with for the next 10 months: she would take notes on the proceedings, type up reports, and then distribute them to the meeting sponsors and the Community Law Centre, thus building up a resource base for the center’s Gender Research Project and the women’s organizations themselves. On October 23, 1992, she attended a seminar at UWC titled “Exploding Myths about Gender, Race and Class Development.” The men at the seminar expressed support for cultural traditions that preserved their dominant status in South Africa, Amy reported, while the women argued that some traditions needed to be changed. The men supported race-based affirmative action but not gender-based affirmative action. Clearly South African women had a long way to travel on the road to equality. Amy also began meeting women in other organizations, including the ANC Women’s League and the Women’s National Coalition.

As eager as she was to meet academics and leaders of women’s organizations, Amy was particularly interested in making contact with ordinary black women at the grassroots. This was easier said than done. Although black women in the townships realized that they had some white support, they didn’t necessarily trust whites, given the legacy of apartheid. But women began inviting Amy to attend their meetings in townships and assented when Amy asked if she could take minutes. She would find a place in the back to set up her laptop and would quietly type notes as the meetings proceeded, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. She wanted to stay in the background, observing and listening, rather than being the vocal American out front. Although she believed passionately in the women’s efforts to achieve equality, she didn’t believe it was her role to impose solutions. She was also careful how she dressed. Abandoning the more stylish clothing she wore in Washington, D.C., she often came to meetings in South Africa in jeans so that people would be comfortable with her, although she couldn’t resist wearing her cowboy boots occasionally. She also stopped wearing makeup.

Part of establishing a rapport with black women was speaking their language. At some of the early meetings she attended, the women spoke a combination of English and Xhosa and likely helped Amy translate when necessary. She began studying Xhosa shortly after her arrival in Cape Town. Her UWC classmates remember how much she enjoyed learning the language and how uninhibited she was about practicing conversation, even though she found the pronunciation difficult at times. In her postcards to Scott, she would often write a few sentences in Xhosa and then print the English translation in tiny letters below. She clearly viewed learning an African language as a great adventure.

Amy’s efforts seemed to pay off. She soon built a sizeable network of contacts in the women’s movement, first in Cape Town and then beyond. One of Amy’s early contacts was Sandra Liebenberg, an active member of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers. Sandra briefed her on the legal status of women in South Africa and the efforts to address women’s issues in the legal profession. Another contact was Hloni Maboe, a staff member at the Institute of Child Guidance at UWC. She told Amy about the formation of a women’s support group on campus to address sexual harassment and rape and invited Amy to attend meetings of the Western Cape branch of the Women’s National Coalition. Around the same time, Amy introduced her to someone at the local ANC Women’s League office and learned about the league’s plans to mobilize women for the upcoming elections.

Both her research and her living situation began to work out even better than she had hoped. At first her housemate Melanie had been worried that Amy might be “the proverbial pushy American,” but, ironically, Amy seemed reserved and even “boring” at first. The pair quickly warmed to each other, especially after they began going to bars and clubs together. In a postcard written just days after her arrival, Amy described her housemates as “very cool” and their house “very funky.” The easy familiarity went both ways. Eventually Melanie came to regard Amy as a combination friend, sister, and even coparent for her daughter.

Not everything was perfect. Melanie’s mother had committed suicide years earlier, and Melanie sometimes had dramatic mood swings. Linda Biehl later learned that Melanie was bipolar and sometimes took medication to ease her symptoms. Melanie also smoked, which couldn’t have been pleasant to someone as health-conscious as Amy. Of course, Amy had her quirks as well. “She wouldn’t clean up,” Melanie later told a British journalist. “She didn’t know how to. She couldn’t cook, apart from Mexican food. She’d stay in the bath forever and there’d be no hot water left.” Sometimes Amy would intervene during Melanie and Solange’s “catfights,” although she soon realized that the two loved each other very much. The Jacobses had “very little money,” Amy observed, “but they both have very expensive taste!” Amy would sometimes help Melanie pay her bills and would buy her dinner when she was broke.

Amy was the partner Melanie needed and the second parent Solange needed, Linda Biehl came to believe. Melanie and Amy indeed began to share the responsibility of parenting Solange. Solange attended high school at Zonnebloem College in the old District Six, and Amy would often accompany her mother to school meetings and programs. Melanie and Amy took Solange on her first trip to a nightclub as well, and Amy would sometimes pick Solange up from parties. The three began to joke that Amy was becoming Solange’s “dad.” When the trio went out to eat and the waiter arrived, Amy would sometimes even ask, “And so what will our daughter have?”

“Amy quickly became part of our lives,” Solange recalled. “She became my father.” The two would leave each other notes occasionally, testifying to their close relationship. In one, Solange thanked Amy for money; in another, Amy reminded Solange to get food for herself. Amy’s habit of giving money to Solange did not always please Melanie, who sometimes confronted Amy about it. “She didn’t have much, but she did have pride,” Solange remembered. “My Mom didn’t want Amy to pay me.” Solange trusted Amy and talked with her about her skin, clothes, and school issues. In fact, Solange confided in Amy so much that Melanie sometimes got angry. As Melanie later admitted, “I remember snapping at her [Solange] that I am her mother, and that report cards should be seen by me first. Of course we all laughed at my petty jealousy later.” Amy and Melanie had a lot of fun together. They hosted parties at their apartment in Mowbray and went out dancing on Thursday nights, often staying out until well past midnight. They frequently went to clubs without a male escort. Men sometimes made advances toward Amy, but, according to Melanie, she “just told them that she had a great big boyfriend back in the States and he wouldn’t like it.” Even if they didn’t return home until 4 a.m., Amy would be up by 7:30 a.m. typing her research papers. Her friends from Stanford and Washington would not have been surprised.

Because interracial friendships were still the exception rather than the rule in South Africa, Amy and Melanie would often be regarded as curiosities when they were out in public together. But instead of taking offense, the two reveled in the attention. “We went into a shop,” Melanie recalled later. “I said, ‘My sister will have a medium and I will have a large.’ And people looked at us and stared.” Amy found living with Melanie and Solange to be liberating. “I’m so glad not to be living with white people,” she wrote a friend. “It really changes one’s experience. For instance, I can move around better with my black and ‘coloured’ friends—so I go to black and coloured clubs, visit people in black and coloured areas, etc. and I’m accepted because I’m with them. When I go to white people places, I’m appalled! Melanie and I are always getting strange looks from people no matter where we go because nobody can believe we hang out together. We even dance together and stuff.”

Amy found plenty of opportunities to enjoy herself in Cape Town. Within a month of her arrival, she began taking dance classes at the city’s Jazzart dance studio so that she could learn the “pantsula,” a unique style of South African street dancing. “Quick, athletic, it fit Amy’s style completely,” one of her classmates commented. “Capped with her effervescent smile, she bounced to its crisp cadences with grace and verve.” Amy and her friends began frequenting clubs where the Johannesburg-based band Loading Zone performed. Listening to them perform with a Windhoek Lager in her hand, Amy couldn’t have been happier. Often the two were joined on their nights out by Gregory Williams, nicknamed “Bucks,” a close friend of Melanie’s and an architect in the city.

As much as Amy enjoyed frequenting Cape Town’s night spots, she loved the peninsula’s natural beauty and felt exhilarated being there. She liked going to Cape Town’s beaches, especially Camps Bay on the Atlantic side. She also ran regularly to stay in shape and find an outlet for her competitive spirit. In November 1992, she finished 111th out of 873 women in a race sponsored by the retailer Truworths and ran a women’s 10-kilometer race in early December. The night before that race, she and some friends had listened to their favorite band, Loading Zone, and didn’t arrive home until 3 a.m. Amy had befriended the band’s drummer, Paco from Mozambique, and the two had begun running on the beach together. “You should see the looks we get from whites,” Amy wrote to her friend Miruni. “Apartheid is not dead!”

As full as Amy’s life was in Cape Town, she made sure that she kept in touch with family and friends back home. She regularly wrote her friends by hand, and because email had not yet fully taken over, some of her letters and postcards were saved. She often sent her friends postcards at the same time, writing in small, cursive letters that curled around the cards to fill up every millimeter of space. Amy didn’t tend to write her family in California, but she would call home on most Sunday afternoons (morning in California), filling her parents in on all she was seeing and doing. Several of Amy’s friends worried about her safety and warned her to be careful. On October 20, 1992, shortly after Amy arrived in Cape Town, one of her friends wrote, “Take care of yourself, as you know it’s a very shaky situation there—lots of people get caught under it.” Another friend, writing six weeks later, mentioned the State Department’s travel advisory for South Africa and its warnings about violence against whites in the Cape. How and if Amy responded to the concerns of her friends remains a mystery.

What is clear is that Amy refused to be constrained by the racial boundaries that limited the lives of most whites in South Africa. She wanted to transcend the country’s racial barriers, which was not easy in such a segregated society. The American author William Finnegan called such attempts “crossing the line,” the title of his account of teaching in a Coloured school in Cape Town in 1980. Amy “wouldn’t accept that as a white woman she couldn’t have African friends,” her Stanford friend Michael McFaul observed. She began offering to take students home to Gugulethu, a poverty-stricken black township between Bellville and Mowbray. She attended political gatherings of the ANC and even went to some political funerals. One friend remembered that even the vagrants in Mowbray knew Amy because she sometimes gave them money. While reaching out or “crossing the line” in these ways, Amy didn’t usually sense hostility from blacks. In fact, she once told a friend that racial tension in Cape Town seemed milder than in the United States.

The many photographs Amy took show that she didn’t stay in safe white suburbs—or at UWC for that matter. She traveled extensively and spent as much time as she could with blacks, Indians, Coloureds, youth, and women. She frequently joined predominantly black crowds, whether at schools, parks, performances, or gatherings. Both political and social events attracted her attention. She attended many rallies, marches, and demonstrations in South Africa. One photo she took in late 1992 shows a black marcher in a crowd wearing a “Boipatong” T-shirt, in honor of the victims of the massacre earlier that year. She photographed mixed-race demonstrators carrying the banner “Hands off our teachers.” Another photo shows South African police cordoning off a street where blacks and Coloureds were marching. She never reported feeling threatened at any of these events. Many photos show Amy at social occasions, drinking and dancing with men and women of all races. Those who posed for Amy invariably had warm expressions. She often trained her lens on black children and youth and produced some striking images. In one, a small black child of one or one and a half is shown with Amy’s white arm reaching out to hold the child’s hand. Another photo shows Amy with Melanie, probably at home in Mowbray, beneath a poster showing black and white faces, with the caption “Human rights for all.”

In a society where the relationship between white and black women was usually that of “maids” and “madams” (employers), Amy befriended many black South African women, both at the university and through the women’s organizations she became involved in. As several of Amy’s closest friends observed, she began to forget she was white. Brigitte Mabandla described Amy as “one of those people you forget is white.” They both transcended the typical stereotypes whites had about blacks and blacks had about whites. In a country still divided by race, not only did Amy forget she was white, but so did many of her South African friends.

Amy made a particularly strong impression on Maletsatsi Maceba, a first-year law student at UWC. The two met shortly after Amy arrived at UWC and became better acquainted through their involvement in women’s organizations. In a country where history, geography, and politics conspired against interracial friendships, the two young women quickly bonded, and Amy became Maletsatsi’s first white friend. Maletsatsi had not had an easy life. She grew up in the Eastern Cape and moved to Cape Town with her mother and siblings when she was about 11. Because no formal housing was available when they arrived, they settled in Crossroads, a vast squatter camp of metal shacks on the Cape Flats. The family had barely enough to live on. Maletsatsi’s father died when she and her siblings were in primary school, and her mother supported the family by working as a domestic servant in a white suburb. Maletsatsi didn’t graduate from high school until she was 25. Her education was delayed not only by her late start, but also by school boycotts and stints of work to help support the family. When Amy met her, she lived in New Crossroads; much of old Crossroads had been destroyed during police-supported vigilante violence in 1986. Maletsatsi had an on-campus job to help pay her way through law school, and she was an active member of the ANC Women’s League

When Amy discovered that she and Maletsatsi were interested in attending many of the same meetings, she offered to give Maletsatsi rides. As they went back and forth between UWC, meeting venues, and black townships, the two talked about politics, the women’s movement, and each other’s future plans. Instead of keeping them apart, their two very different backgrounds seemed to draw them together. Amy believed Maletsatsi had a bright future and wanted to do what she could to boost her friend’s prospects. Amy spent time at Maletsatsi’s home in New Crossroads and encouraged her to get even more involved in women’s organizations. She introduced her to other women activists and two white women in parliament, Sheila Camerer and Dene Smuts. Although Amy usually tried to keep a low profile at the meetings she attended, she did speak out during one meeting of the Women’s National Coalition. When white women there were nominating only other white women to a steering committee, Amy’s natural outspokenness got the better of her. She nominated Maletsatsi to the steering committee, and her friend was duly appointed.

Like Melanie’s daughter, Solange, Maletsatsi admired and trusted Amy. “She related to me as if there were no differences,” she remembered. Amy was not just a student, working on her own project, she said, but a person who went into the community to help improve women’s lives. Maletsatsi also noted that Amy didn’t want just to associate with famous people, but to work with everyday people, and, by doing so, she gained a true picture of conditions at the grassroots. She particularly admired how Amy would go into the black townships alone. Few white South Africans ever ventured into black townships, except policemen; it was virtually unheard of for lone white women to do so. Amy’s forays into black townships enabled her to know more about conditions there than most white South Africans. And unlike many whites, Amy was learning to speak Xhosa. She would frequently implore Maletsatsi to “teach me one word in Xhosa today.”

Amy’s ability to make friends across the color line enabled her to become more deeply involved in women’s organizations. One day she would attend a meeting of women lawyers seeking to draft a “women’s charter”; the next she would attend the launch of a new branch of the ANC Women’s League. She became particularly involved in the Women’s National Coalition. Established in April 1992, the coalition was designed to bring women together across racial and party lines so they could draft a charter of women’s rights and ensure that South Africa’s new constitution would guarantee equality for women. Amy joined discussions about how women’s rights could be protected and participated in two key conferences during her first few months in South Africa that focused her thinking and paved the way for much of her future research.

The first was a workshop on a women’s charter sponsored by the Western Cape branch of the Women’s National Coalition. Held in the mostly mixed-race suburb of Athlone in late November 1992, the conference was designed to produce a document outlining women’s demands. Local women of all races came to discuss the barriers they faced in South African society and how these barriers could be addressed. Amy attended along with Maletsatsi, Sandra Liebenberg, and 23 other women who represented organizations as diverse as Call of Islam, the ruling National Party, the ANC Women’s League, the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa (IDASA), and a women’s group from the University of Cape Town. Amy took notes and photos and decided to write two reports: a formal one “for the record” and a shorter “popular” report with photos, hoping that the latter would encourage participating women to stay involved. By attending such meetings, taking notes, and writing and distributing reports, she was doing more than just giving the participants a tangible record of their proceedings, important though that was. She was also spreading an awareness of women’s issues and concerns to a broader audience, particularly to men like Dullah Omar on the ANC’s constitutional committee.

The campaign for a women’s charter would gain momentum and have real historical significance. As the political scientist Hannah Britton has observed, “The WNC’s [Women’s National Coalition] Women’s Charter ensured that women’s interests would be recognized in the constitution. South Africa’s constitution has one of the broadest and most inclusive antidiscrimination clauses in the world. Its equality clause establishes that neither the state nor a person may ‘unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.’” After generations of legalized discrimination, South Africa would eventually ban discrimination in all its forms.

Amy recognized that she was participating in a historic transition that might ban discrimination on the basis of both race and gender. After the workshop on the women’s charter, she made plans to attend a workshop in Durban on “Empowering Women in a Democratic Government.” At the December 1992 conference, 80 South African women met to discuss ways of ensuring that women played a role in the future government. They talked about the possible establishment of a “women’s ministry” to address their concerns and listened to international delegates discuss the role of women in their respective governments. The delegates represented an even wider array of perspectives than had those at the workshop in Athlone two weeks earlier. Besides the Women’s National Coalition, IDASA, the National Party, and the ANC Women’s League, women attended from the Pan Africanist Congress, the Democratic Party, the Inkatha Freedom Party, the Azanian People’s Organization, and the South African Communist Party. Among those attending were Frene Ginwala and Nkosazana Zuma, two of the most influential women in the ANC (and thus South Africa). Ginwala would become Speaker of the National Assembly after the 1994 election and Zuma minister of health and then foreign affairs. Amy introduced herself to many of the women whom Mabandla had encouraged her to meet and found the meeting extremely useful. “I did my best to keep a low profile and I took lots of notes,” she wrote Omar, “which is the reason my report is not finished yet—too many notes!”

Before taking a break for Christmas and New Year—summer holidays in the southern hemisphere—Amy began making plans for her future, both in South Africa and back in the United States. She developed proposals for several research projects, which she gave to Omar and Mabandla for comment. She termed her most important prospective topic as “Towards a Women’s Package—An Examination of Options for South African Women.” Motivated in part by the conference in Durban she had just attended, Amy wanted to analyze structures that other governments had used to address women’s issues, particularly those in Canada, Brazil, and a yet-to-be-determined African country. As she was plotting her research strategy for the New Year, she was also applying to graduate schools so that she could enter a doctoral program in political science once she returned to the United States in the fall of 1993. Setting her sights high as usual, she applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of California, Berkeley, intending to study southern Africa, international and comparative politics, and women in democratic transitions in Africa.

After only two months in South Africa, Amy had established herself as a serious researcher at UWC, made substantive connections with a wide variety of women’s organizations, and earned the respect of leading academics and women’s activists. She had developed a huge range of contacts across the political spectrum in an environment with a fair amount of anti-American stereotypes. Part of her success was due to the persona she had consciously adopted. As outspoken as she was back home, in South Africa she didn’t want to be perceived as being the dominant white person or the overbearing American. Mabandla and Omar found her useful to have on their staff because she was efficient and hardworking and wasn’t seeking the spotlight. Even Kader Asmal, a professor of human rights at UWC who didn’t know Amy as well as Mabandla and Omar, noticed that Amy was developing unusually good relationships with her South African colleagues. He remembered Amy as being outgoing but humble. Even granting the fact that most future descriptions of Amy would be eulogistic in tone, the respect she earned was undeniable. Far from being “the ugly American,” she was eager to learn from South Africans and wasn’t foisting herself or imposing her values on South Africa. That, plus her “spirit, warmth, and commitment,” won her many friends.

Before year’s end, Amy’s boyfriend came to visit. Scott was now in law school at Willamette University in Oregon, and he flew to Cape Town to spend the holidays with Amy. When he arrived at the airport, it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius). On his first day in Cape Town, he and Amy had beers with Randi Erentzen, Dullah Omar, and Albie Sachs, a top ANC legal scholar who had barely survived an assassination attempt four years earlier. Secret agents of the South African government had rigged his car with a bomb when he was in exile in Mozambique. Although he survived the blast, the bomb tore off one of his arms and blinded him in one eye. As the group talked, the famed jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim performed; Allan Boesak even stopped by to chat. Scott could hardly believe he was in such august company. He marveled at Amy’s ability to connect with leading people inside the struggle, but, knowing Amy as well as he did, he wasn’t surprised. Nor was he surprised when, during his visit, opposition leader Aleke Banda telephoned Amy from hiding in Malawi. Banda was hoping someone from NDI could advise his movement as Malawi’s upcoming referendum on multiparty democracy approached, and Amy promised to contact her former colleagues at NDI on his behalf. But Amy happily put her work aside to show Scott the city she loved. They toured the Cape Peninsula, drove to Cape Point, went hiking on Table Mountain, attended musical performances, and spent time in at least one black township where Amy had friends.

Just after the New Year, Amy and Scott took a trip along the Indian Ocean coast to the Transkei. The drive, known as the “Garden Route,” is one of the most scenic in South Africa. It skirts beautiful beaches, dramatic mountains, rocky coves, and magnificent, sparkling lagoons. They left Cape Town on January 2 and headed east toward the Transkei’s “Wild Coast.” Scott remembered that as soon as they entered the Transkei, the telephone poles and the power lines disappeared, a sure sign of the underdevelopment plaguing South Africa’s homelands. They would barrel down the deserted highways and then suddenly “300 cattle would be in the road.” The Transkei had a distinctly different feel to it from South Africa proper, and Amy and Scott welcomed the chance to “get in the middle of nowhere.” Once they stopped at a resort at Mbotyi, just inland from the Transkei coast, beyond Port St. John’s. When they saw a group of young African children playing in a lagoon, Amy went right up to them, spoke to them in Xhosa, and proceeded to give them swimming lessons. Much as Amy delighted in speaking in Xhosa, the kids spoke to her in English.

During their time on the road, Amy and Scott saw another South Africa, a quieter, rural side. They also saw the “white” parts of each town they passed and then the ubiquitous black townships that adjoined them, which Amy called “a real political education.” Of course, Amy’s “real political education” had only just begun.