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Year of the Great Storm
AS 1993 dawned, South Africa’s future was uncertain. Three years had passed since F. W. de Klerk unbanned liberation organizations and freed Nelson Mandela, yet the white minority government was still in control. Formal negotiations were on hold and no date had been set for democratic elections. But a potential breakthrough came from an unlikely source. In late 1992, the leading white communist in the ANC, Joe Slovo, developed the idea of a “sunset clause” to push negotiations forward. Under this plan, after elections, the majority party would share power with minority parties in a government of national unity, and white civil servants would be guaranteed job security. Discussion of these issues and others at a series of private meetings in December 1992 and January 1993 brought the ANC and the governing National Party closer together.
Formal negotiations resumed in early March when 26 parties attended a planning conference for the Multiparty Negotiating Forum. These were the first formal negotiations since the breakdown of CODESA II in June 1992, and they attracted more participants, including the Conservative Party and the PAC. The stage was set for further negotiations at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, near Johannesburg’s international airport.
In the months ahead, South Africa’s transition to democracy became more turbulent than ever, as black and white extremists on the left and right tried to sabotage negotiations. They nearly succeeded. The year 1993 would be the most violent year of the transition—3,706 people would lose their lives in political violence. Black attacks on whites increased, some of which were perpetrated by the PAC or its affiliates. But despite some well-publicized incidents involving whites, most victims of South Africa’s political violence were black. Some black victims were killed by government security forces or by operatives of a covert “third force” directed by elements in South African intelligence. Others were killed in clashes between the ANC and Inkatha. There were also a disturbing number of racially motivated attacks against blacks perpetrated by white civilians. In January 1993, members of the Wit Wolwe (“White Wolves”) announced that their organization regarded “every black man as an enemy” and that it would begin to attack “soft targets” among the black population unless the government took action against the military wings of the ANC and PAC. The violence was so serious in 1993 that most newspapers referred only to black body counts, not individuals.
Although the ANC and Inkatha were the two largest black South African political parties in the early 1990s, the PAC began to make headlines more than ever before. The PAC had been established in 1959, when a group of activists critical of the ANC launched an organization based on “Africanism,” a militant form of African nationalism. Led by Robert Sobukwe, the PAC opposed the ANC’s partnerships with non-Africans and believed that Africans should lead the liberation struggle in South Africa. It opposed the Freedom Charter, the landmark document endorsed by the Congress Alliance stating that South Africa belonged to all who lived there, black and white. Under the slogan “Africa for the Africans,” the PAC demanded that South Africa’s land be returned to the African majority. It believed that the country’s future should be defined by Africans, not by a coalition of different racial groups. Although its leaders sometimes denied it, antiwhite feeling in the PAC was noticeably stronger than in the ANC.
Partly in an effort to outmaneuver the ANC, the PAC had organized the large anti–pass demonstration at Sharpeville in 1960. After the tragic loss of life there, the government declared a state of emergency and banned both the PAC and the ANC. Leaders of both organizations were jailed, driven underground, or forced into exile. During the next several decades, the PAC would be overshadowed by the ANC, both in South Africa and internationally. It became known more for infighting than fighting apartheid, and its bitter rivalry with the ANC continued.
When sustained protest in South Africa reemerged in 1984, the PAC’s presence in the country was negligible (unlike the ANC’s, which had the high-profile UDF as its unofficial internal wing in South Africa). But after the PAC was unbanned in 1990, its profile in South Africa rose considerably, out of proportion to its actual numerical strength. Many of its members initially opposed negotiations with the government and favored intensifying the armed struggle. These militants regarded the government as illegitimate and insisted that it surrender power immediately. But others in the PAC favored participating in negotiations. Divisions between PAC leaders and the organization’s more militant armed and student wings would continue to fester as the transition unfolded.
As South Africa’s transition dragged on, youths loyal to the PAC became frustrated by their continued powerlessness and the slow pace of negotiations. They remained loyal to the organization, but they sometimes acted independently, without instructions or approval from the PAC itself. The PAC withdrew from formal negotiations in late 1991, just before CODESA, whose format it rejected. When the ANC remained committed to CODESA, the PAC accused it of selling out. Impatient with the slow pace of change, PAC hardliners seemed more interested in toppling the South African government than in the negotiation process. The PAC’s armed wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), launched a series of attacks targeting white civilians. In late November 1992, its operatives attacked whites at a party at the King William’s Town golf club, killing four. Days later APLA bombed a restaurant in Queenstown, killing one and injuring seven. Before these attacks, South Africa’s rising political violence had hardly touched whites at all.
APLA declared 1993 the “Year of the Great Storm.” Despite ongoing negotiations in the country, it planned to intensify the armed struggle. APLA spent much of 1993 operating underground, stockpiling weapons, planning attacks, looking for safe havens, and dodging the police, not always successfully. Although most black South Africans supported the ANC’s strategy of negotiations and not the PAC’s armed struggle, the PAC was popular in some areas, particularly in the Transkei and Cape Town’s black townships. In February 1993, the PAC president Clarence Makwetu said, “The PAC would fight to the bitter end as long as there were vestiges of imperialism and colonialism. It would fight for self-determination and not settle for crumbs from the master’s table.” That month, representatives of the government and the PAC met in Botswana to discuss the suspension of the PAC’s armed struggle, but the PAC refused to lay down its arms, even though it joined the Multiparty Negotiating Forum at the World Trade Centre in March and engaged in negotiations. Tension between the government and the PAC rose in the months ahead.
In late March 1993, the Weekly Mail newspaper reported a growing divide between the PAC leadership and members of the PAC’s student wing, the Pan Africanist Students Organization (PASO). Disillusioned with the leadership’s talks with the government, students were inspired by APLA’s attacks against whites and were sometimes training to undertake such attacks themselves. These young activists believed they were in a war to overthrow the apartheid state. The Weekly Mail identified an ominous new trend: “spontaneous attacks by youth and student groupings which have access to arms and are disillusioned by the negotiations, escalating violence in the townships and the continued education crisis.”
The PAC’s militancy was best captured by its slogan “one settler, one bullet,” which activists began to chant more frequently at PAC rallies. Not all of the organization’s leaders favored the slogan. In March 1990, the returned PAC exile Barney Desai said, “I wish also to caution my brothers and sisters that the slogan of ‘one settler, one bullet’ is inconsistent with our stated aims. No mature liberation movement has ever had as its stated policy an intention to drive the white people into the sea.” But the slogan continued to be popular in the organization, especially among young PAC supporters in the black townships. The rising anger among black youth in general was undeniable. In March 1993, students from the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Students (COSAS), PASO, and the Azanian Students’ Movement chanted “one settler, one bullet” at a demonstration in central Johannesburg. That month, the senior ANC leader Chris Hani criticized the PAC for its “one settler, one bullet” slogan and for continuing the armed struggle, prompting a defiant response from the PAC secretary of political affairs. Despite Hani’s rebuke, the slogan would continue to be a potent rallying cry in the months ahead.
AMY was clearly concerned about the upsurge in violence in South Africa. She read about it, talked about it with friends and colleagues, and thought about it. As Amy pondered the issues she wanted to write about during the rest of her Fulbright period, she considered doing a study of South Africa’s violence. “[It’s] clear that South Africa is caught in a spiral of violence,” she wrote in notes to herself. Although she remarked that political violence received the most attention, violence was “particularly brutal and damaging to women.” Apartheid lay behind much of the violence, because it broke up families and eroded men’s sense of self-worth. For the problem to be eradicated, “drastic measures” would be required, such as “emphasizing women’s human rights in the constitution and favoring women in legal reform; education and counseling; and monitoring the issue.”
As Amy resumed her work after her holiday with Scott, she was brimming with ambitious ideas and plans. She saw 1993 as a key year for women’s efforts to gain equality because negotiations for a new government would lead to democratic elections and a new constitution. Women had demonstrated their determination to achieve equality and participate in negotiations, the election, and a new government, but they were divided by race, class, religion, and custom, which challenged their efforts. Amy planned to analyze women’s contributions to the transition process and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their efforts. She wanted to be both comprehensive—by examining women’s organizations across the social and political spectrum—and impartial. She wanted to reach people all over the country, of all races and languages, in urban and rural areas, at both the leadership level and the grassroots. As part of her research, she would also “observe and play a supporting role” in the Women’s National Coalition and work with groups of progressive lawyers. Amy’s research framework was incredibly broad and could have taken a team of researchers years to complete. But that was Amy—she’d always set a high bar for herself, and now was no exception.
One of the people who helped Amy with her research was Rhoda Kadalie, UWC’s gender equity coordinator. Amy befriended Rhoda in early 1993, when she attended a workshop on gender that Kadalie led at the orientation for the university’s residence assistants. Amy noted that while most students were highly attuned to racism in South Africa and enthusiastically backed the struggle for democracy, they hadn’t spent much time thinking about gender discrimination. “Rhoda did an outstanding job of making students think about sexism in the same way they think about racism,” she wrote. A Capetonian of mixed race, Rhoda was a feminist and a critic of the liberation movement at the time, although she fully supported the transition to democracy. She recalled that when she tried to befriend Amy early on, Amy was cool toward her, perhaps having been warned by ANC women that she was too critical of the liberation movement. Rhoda speculated that like many international students, Amy might have romanticized the antiapartheid struggle at first. Eventually Amy came to Rhoda’s office hoping she would comment on her work. In the months ahead, the two became friends. Rhoda served as a valuable resource for Amy’s work, and Amy kept Rhoda informed on a host of issues relating to her research. Like so many other South Africans who got to know Amy well, Rhoda marveled at Amy’s seemingly inexhaustible energy:
In the short space of time that Amy was here, she had more black friends than I had. She knew where all the clubs were in the townships. She would go and dance and party with her friends. She loved the beach; she ran marathons; she played hard but worked equally hard. She was the model student, researching, following all the leads, taking advice, writing essays, volunteering to organize and help with conferences, writing up notes of conferences, and generally monitoring the debates at CODESA and the negotiations between the political parties prior to 1994.
The more Amy delved into her research, the more conscious she became of the challenges facing her as an outsider. An important discussion she had with Brigitte Mabandla in late January crystallized the issue. Mabandla was pleased with Amy’s work but warned her not to get too involved in the women’s groups she was studying. Her work had to be viewed as impartial to be respected. Mabandla also warned Amy that “the same people who will often encourage my involvement in various projects can also turn around and criticize me for being an American doing South African work. I have taken Brigitte’s advice to heart.” Her self-consciousness as an American scholar-activist became stronger than before. In a fax to a colleague in early February, Amy mentioned that because of her “sensitivity to being an American doing this type of research,” she would wait until her paper drafts were approved by Dullah Omar before distributing them more widely. Amy sensed that Mabandla and Omar—her two supervisors—seemed to have different ideas about her objectivity. “Brigitte thinks it is extremely important that I be viewed as impartial, while you are of the opinion that trying to portray myself as impartial would be false,” Amy wrote in a memo to Omar. “I do think it is important that my research methodology be impartial and sound. When I am interviewing people—particularly outside of the liberation movement—I don’t want them to perceive that I have chosen sides.” Although her view was closer to Mabandla’s, she promised to consult with Omar frequently to ensure that he was comfortable with her activities. As he said later, “She thought as an American, she didn’t want to interfere. She always felt South Africans must decide for themselves.”
Ever since she worked for NDI, Amy had been very conscious of the negative impressions of Americans abroad—that they sometimes came into other countries and dictated solutions, often knowing very little about conditions on the ground. Amy wanted to avoid this and support her South African colleagues from behind the scenes, not in front. Balancing the roles of participant and observer could be difficult. She strongly supported the struggles for liberation and women’s rights but believed that South Africans should take the lead, even when she sometimes wanted African women to be more proactive. She knew that South Africans sometimes resented foreigners who gave them unsolicited advice on how they should conduct their struggle. Amy’s friend Stephen Stedman said, “She understood that solutions to South Africa’s problems would ultimately come from South Africans, not foreign visitors with instant expertise about the country and its conflicts.” To complicate matters, Amy had to be conscious of her status as both an American and a white woman. She wanted to avoid the white paternalism that too often surfaced in multiracial settings. “She seemed to believe that when black and white women were together in the same organizations, the white women tended to dominate,” Kennell Jackson recalled. The problem came later when some South African women urged Amy to be more active than she wanted to be.
Amy attended meetings of different organizations almost daily, sometimes more than one a day, both at UWC and off campus. Her list of contacts among women’s organizations was extensive, but she wasn’t just meeting women’s activists. She attended conferences and workshops featuring prominent speakers such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Neville Alexander, George Bizos, and Alex Boraine. She continued to attend meetings of the Western Cape Women’s Coalition and the gender desk of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers. Meetings did not have to be tedious, however. After Amy attended a workshop on racism and sexism in the student residences at UWC in January 1993, the students invited her to be a judge for their talent show. She agreed and went to the party afterward. “When the music started, everyone got up to dance, and all of a sudden, all eyes were focused on me, the only white girl in a room full of 200 people. ‘Can she dance?’ they were thinking to themselves. Well, I started groovin’, and all of a sudden, everyone was groovin’! I had passed the test!”
Amy was also making headway with her major research projects. By January she had completed a draft of her comparative study of structures for women in decision making and began revising it for publication after receiving comments from Mabandla, Kadalie, Erentzen, and Sachs. She also began work on what she called her “Fulbright paper,” which focused on women’s role in the transition and prospects for women’s rights afterwards. As busy as Amy was, she also found time to continue her advocacy for Malawi’s prodemocracy movement.
Suddenly a wonderful thing happened: Amy got the chance to meet her longtime hero Nelson Mandela. She described the February 1993 encounter to Kennell Jackson at Stanford. “By the way, I met Nelson Mandela the other day. My boss at the Community Law Centre, Dullah Omar, introduced me to him, knowing that it would make my day! I spoke to him in Xhosa and then we talked, in English, about Bill Clinton and the saxophone. We agreed that he should learn some Mbaqanga—township music!” Amy was obviously thrilled to meet her idol.
As Amy met with individuals and groups, she sought to bring people from different backgrounds together. Around the same time she met Mandela, she attended a luncheon organized by the US Information Service (USIS) in Cape Town and met Sheila Camerer (National Party) and Dene Smuts (Democratic Party)—two female members of Parliament—and Mamphela Ramphele, a prominent physician, academic, and one of the cofounders of the Black Consciousness Movement. Although Amy appreciated the work of the USIS, she worried that it was not “meeting enough of the ‘right women’ to network with” when important American speakers came to Cape Town. She encouraged it to support education and leadership training for black South African women and brought along her South African friends to USIS events. In March she organized a meeting between female law students from UWC and their counterparts at the predominantly white University of Cape Town. About a week later she showed two visiting American women around Cape Town’s black townships with two members of the Langa branch of the ANC Women’s League. Amy also reportedly organized at least one meeting between the Women’s League and a group of white women lawyers. In these initiatives and others, she hoped to build bridges between black and white women in a society still thoroughly segregated by race. Women on both sides of the color line appreciated her efforts and told her so.
Several of Amy’s friends and colleagues noticed how integrated Amy had become into the liberation movement despite her nationality. She saw an excellent opportunity to harness her energy on the movement’s behalf when the white minority government released its Bill of Rights in early February 1993. On the day the bill was made public, Omar asked Amy to analyze its provisions for women in two hours, because he was going to debate a government representative on the radio that very evening. In a letter to a friend, Amy called the bill “completely bogus,” but she was pleased that Omar had asked for her analysis. That was a sure sign that he trusted her judgment and analytical skills. The debate between Omar and Camerer was broadcast on Radio Metro on February 4, 1993. The next day, Amy wrote an urgent memo to Omar, congratulating him on his performance. She also drafted a lengthy response that she offered to submit in his name as an op-ed piece for a newspaper. “I know that this type of thing must be consulted fully within the ANC, so I just offer it as an idea. But I know that you are busy and that timing is important if you are to respond quickly.”
Her response, just over two typed pages, was bold and well written, though not strident. She compared the government’s proposals for women unfavorably with those in the ANC’s proposed bill of rights. She criticized the government for trying to dictate women’s rights without consulting women themselves, who needed to be part of the debate on how their rights should be protected. Consultation and consensus building were essential. She also criticized the National Party for putting a small section on women’s rights toward the end of its charter. In her view, women’s rights needed to be integrated into a bill of rights, not “ghettoized” in its own section. She agreed with the government’s statement that religious values needed to be respected but insisted that women’s rights shouldn’t be compromised, even if they clashed with religious values. “The right to free practice of religion and custom must be strongly supported, but a future Bill of Rights should ensure that religious and cultural rights are protected in a manner that does not interfere with the attainment of full equality for women in law and practice,” she wrote. Finally, she insisted that the rights of black women couldn’t be fully protected until they had the right to vote, for which they were still waiting. In her memo to Omar, Amy said that she would understand if he didn’t think publishing her response was appropriate, in which case she would incorporate it into her own research. “I hope you don’t think I’m being too aggressive,” she wrote. She wanted to contribute, if possible, but behind the scenes and anonymously.
Her research on the government’s proposals for women continued in the weeks ahead. In late February, Amy gave Omar a 23-page briefing comparing the ANC’s draft bill of rights and charter for social justice with the government’s proposals on a charter of fundamental rights. Then in early March she traveled to Pretoria to attend a conference titled “Women and a Charter of Fundamental Rights” sponsored by the Ministry of Justice. The conference gave Amy the chance to learn firsthand about the government’s draft legislation on women’s equality. She must have rolled her eyes during Minister of Justice Kobie Coetsee’s opening address. “Minister Coetsee began by joking that if the conference was successful, he would have to declare the male population of South Africa an ‘endangered species,’” she wrote. Despite believing that the government’s draft legislation was “merely an electioneering exercise,” Amy found her trip to Pretoria worthwhile because she learned more about the government’s perspective on women. She wrote a 16-page report of the conference, which she submitted to the Community Law Centre at UWC upon her return to Cape Town.
As she traveled back and forth between the different worlds of black and white women in Cape Town, Amy often reflected on the enormous gulf in culture and experience that divided them. Sometime during March or April 1993, as she contemplated South Africa’s future from Melanie’s apartment in Mowbray, with its view of Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain, Amy wrote a poem she called “Mowbray Morning”:
I wake to the sights and sounds of a Mowbray morning
Cars and trucks rush by below my 2nd story student’s flat
Dark shadows of workers rush by to boldly face another day
The wind whistles as it glides down the shadow of Table Mountain
The ageless mountain sees all
The wind from the mountain whispers a story of two women
The first has scrambled out of a crowded taxi and waits for a bus
Thinking of her children’s future and inspiring hope, she faces the day
She boards the bus to take her around the impenetrable mountain
Where another woman awakes to the soft rhythm of the sea
and the smell of clean salty air
thinking of her children’s future with fear and gnawing guilt
The ageless mountain whispers this story of two different women
two different worlds
An uncertain future
Only the mountain knows
I listen to the tale of the wind
the messenger of the mountain
For some hint of what the future holds
for these two women of different worlds
but the wind and the mountain grow silent
It is not for me to know
As Amy pondered South Africa’s future, she pondered her own. She decided to apply for a Jacob Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education to help pay for graduate school, which she hoped to begin in the fall. She wanted to continue her study of women in democratic transitions by comparing women’s efforts in South Africa, Namibia, and Zambia. “Upon the completion of a PhD, I hope to teach and write in political science and Africa area studies,” she wrote on the Javits application. “As a woman in this field, I feel a special responsibility to encourage young women—both American and African—to pursue careers in political science and to write and teach about the experiences of women in Africa.” Then bad news arrived. Amy received rejection letters from all of the graduate schools she had applied to—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley. She was devastated. A journalist who later interviewed Melanie and Solange reported that Amy was “hurt and incredulous” and “wept for several hours.”
Amy wasn’t about to slow down, but she didn’t let her heavy workload stop her from enjoying herself. In addition to her South African friends, Amy had begun socializing with a handful of Americans who arrived in Cape Town in early 1993. Steve Stedman, whom Amy had befriended at Stanford, was a political science professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. He and his wife Corinne arrived in South Africa in early January 1993 so that Steve could begin his work as a Fulbright scholar at UWC’s Centre for Southern African Studies. To the Stedmans, Amy was fun, not a stuffy intellectual. She had energy, “chutzpah,” a great sense of humor, and frailties just like everyone else. Anna Wang, another American in Cape Town, had first met Amy at NDI in Washington, D.C., in June 1992. She got to know Amy better beginning in February 1993, when NDI sent her to Cape Town to work on voter education projects. Anna would join Amy and others on Friday and Saturday nights to hear music and dance. “All of the boys were in love with Amy,” Anna remembered. “She was vivacious and pretty, from California. She had a very infectious laugh. She was self-confident and really smart. But she was also down to earth.”
Throughout her 10 months in South Africa, Amy called her parents back home on Sunday mornings (California time). “She would talk for 20 minutes nonstop,” Peter later told a reporter. “She was excited with everything. It gave me so much satisfaction just listening to her. I felt really proud of her these mornings. She was so alive, so into it.” Amy told her parents about the amazing people she was meeting, from Mandela to members of parliament to unknown but hardworking women at the grassroots. In one phone call home, Amy half-jokingly told her Republican father, “You know, Dad, some of my best friends are communists.”
Then the sudden death of a communist threatened South Africa’s entire transition. Chris Hani, one of black South Africa’s most revered leaders, was shot and killed outside his home in suburban Boksburg on April 10, 1993. Fifty years old at the time of his death, he was murdered by a Polish immigrant with ties to white extremists. The gunman was arrested shortly after the murder, thanks to Hani’s Afrikaner neighbor, who glimpsed the license plate of the fleeing car and reported the number to the police. It was as if an earthquake had struck South Africa. An opinion poll in November 1992 indicated that Hani was the second-most-popular leader in the country after Nelson Mandela. He was general secretary of the South African Communist Party, a leading member of the ANC’s national executive committee, and formerly head of Umkhonto we Sizwe. He was hugely popular among black South African youth, who regarded him as a courageous fighter for justice. In the words of one South African journalist, Hani stood up for the “poor, oppressed, and dispossessed.” Amy’s friend Steve Stedman called Hani “a crucial link between the leadership of the ANC and its most marginalized constituencies—youth and Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres.” Although he had a reputation for being militant, he had supported the negotiation process and called for the PAC’s military wing, APLA, to lay down its arms. His loss threatened to tear South Africa apart—and perhaps even spark a civil war.
Sensing the gravity of the crisis—and his own limitations—South African president F. W. de Klerk asked Mandela to appear on national television and appeal for calm. Mandela did so the very night of Hani’s death. “A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster,” Mandela said. “But a white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, the assassin.” That Mandela, not De Klerk, addressed the country in its moment of crisis showed how the balance of power in South Africa had fundamentally changed.
Many feared that Hani’s death would set South Africa on fire. After news spread, thousands marched in central Cape Town to protest the killing. In the looting that followed, people smashed car windows, broke store windows, and set fire to vehicles and garbage cans, filling the air with black smoke. Police fired tear gas and then shot into the crowds, killing at least two and injuring 120 more. Protestors put up burning barricades in Cape Town’s black townships. Some crowds chanted, “No more peace, no more peace!” Others shouted, “Where is Hani? Who killed Hani?” A reporter for the Weekly Mail called the mood not just angry, but “maniacal.” As one demonstrator said, “You can’t kill a leader of the people and expect nothing to happen.” Clashes between black activists and police broke out elsewhere in the country, claiming at least 68 more lives. In three days of nationwide protests after Hani’s death, 90 percent of South Africa’s workers went on strike in what was probably the largest stayaway in the country’s history. ANC Youth League leader Peter Mokaba appeared at a rally with Winnie Mandela and told the crowd, “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer! We are tired of endless talking. We have been hit very hard. And we must hit back!”
Amy called home the day of Hani’s death. A longtime admirer of his, she was “heartbroken” over the killing and feared a possible antiwhite backlash. She described the disenfranchised youth to her parents in order to help them comprehend the volatility of the situation. Scott soon realized that Amy’s concerns were justified. With Hani’s absence, the ANC—and other black political organizations—lost some control over the young militants in the townships. Amy was touched when some of her friends from the townships called her to make sure she was all right. But when some family and friends from the United States kept calling her to ask the same thing, she said, “My God, who cares about me?” Peter Biehl had been concerned about Amy’s safety in South Africa ever since he first heard about her Fulbright. Linda shared his concerns. “I was very worried about her, but she would say, ‘Mom, I’m okay. I’m doing this because I want to do this. You can’t live your life in a shell.’” Amy continued venturing into black townships even though the climate was changing. The antiwhite mood in South Africa grew significantly in the aftermath of Hani’s death. But those closest to Amy agree that she wasn’t naïve or irresponsible or unaware of South Africa’s dangers. As Scott later observed, Amy understood the hatred that apartheid created, but not necessarily the chaos that hatred could cause.
In the weeks after Hani’s death, the mood in South Africa darkened considerably. Black anger toward whites grew, particularly among black youth. Antiwhite slogans and sentiments became more common at rallies. Whites reacted angrily to the upsurge in racist slogans, but few fully understood the depths of black rage. The Rev. Frank Retief, pastor at St. James Church in the Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth, felt the rising tension. White welfare workers affiliated with his church stopped going into Khayelitsha because of the perceived antiwhite mood there. Just three days before Hani’s murder, a young white church volunteer from the United Kingdom was shot in Khayelitsha during a youth soccer match he’d organized. He survived the attack but lost sight in one eye. Hani’s assassination days later made even the most experienced white community workers think twice before venturing into South Africa’s black townships.
Negotiations between the government and the ANC quickened after Hani’s death, sparking ominous reactions from both the left and right. In May 1993, the Fort Hare political scientist Sipho Pityana commented on the growing impatience with the negotiation process. The ANC had abandoned the armed struggle but hadn’t achieved enough to satisfy many of its young supporters. “Hani’s murder not only angered the black community,” Pityana wrote, “it also unleashed the previously dormant frustrations with the negotiation process. . . . The anger of the masses is reaching a bursting point. . . . The voice of reason is increasingly losing ground. The theatre of war is becoming more attractive.”
Frustration from the white right was also about to boil over. On June 25, right-wing Afrikaners stormed the World Trade Centre and trashed the facilities to show their disgust with the negotiation process. Many of the rabble-rousers were members of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB/Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging) who came dressed in battle fatigues. They were angry at the impending changes to South Africa and blamed De Klerk for selling them out. Despite the disruption, a date was set for South Africa’s first democratic election: April 27, 1994. Most of the major parties agreed, with some important exceptions—Inkatha, the Conservative Party, and some homeland leaders. Their representatives walked out of negotiations after the election date was set, but the PAC stayed. Negotiations moved forward when the ANC and the National Party discussed forming a transitional executive council to govern the country until elections. Despite such progress, the fight waged by black and white extremists was far from over.
The PAC seemed intent on escalating the armed struggle. On April 28, APLA attacked a white farm in the northern Transvaal and killed the white landowner’s wife. PAC leaders announced that white farmers were legitimate targets because they were allegedly well-armed and often members of “commando units.” On May 1, gunmen attacked the Highgate Hotel in East London, killing five white civilians and injuring several more. Although no APLA members applied for amnesty for the attack, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later suspected that APLA was involved. At the time, APLA was actively recruiting youths into its ranks. Later in May 1993, South African police arrested more than 70 PAC activists in nationwide raids, including many members of the national executive. Then the government threatened to restrict the PAC’s participation in constitutional negotiations. But PAC leaders were defiant. In June, Sabelo Phama, PAC secretary for defense and APLA commander, called for the armed struggle to be intensified. After all, he said, people’s lives in South Africa hadn’t changed after years of struggle, and the enemy was still in control.
The PAC’s militancy needs to be kept in perspective. While the organization was attracting much attention for its highly charged rhetoric, the white right was equally hostile to the negotiation process and was contemplating civil war. Each time negotiations inched forward, extremists from both sides hardened their attitudes. The PAC was becoming more emboldened and planning more attacks against whites, but PAC supporters were still far outnumbered by the ANC, which had suspended its armed struggle in August 1990. The PAC lacked a leader of the stature of Mandela, who was a national icon. But even though the PAC was much smaller than the ANC, radical elements within the organization could still wreak considerable havoc—especially in the Western Cape, where its support base was relatively strong. According to a poll conducted in mid-1993, 10 percent of blacks in South Africa’s largest urban areas supported APLA’s attacks on white civilians. Forty-five percent completely opposed such attacks, and 40 percent said that while they didn’t support the attacks, they understood why they occurred. The highest support for APLA attacks against whites came from young Xhosa-speakers in Cape Town. As it turned out, the poll proved to be chillingly accurate.
Well versed in the politics of the time, Amy was still determined to transcend South Africa’s racial boundaries. She had black friends from the university who lived in the townships and continued to offer them rides home when they asked. She probably felt that the anger there wouldn’t affect her. Anna Wang felt the same way. She and Amy knew about the unrest but saw themselves as part of the liberation movement. “We were aware of the risks, but I didn’t think bad things could happen,” Anna said. She noticed that Amy often dropped students off in the black township of Gugulethu. “She has always said that she doesn’t mind because she has a car and most people don’t.” Others close to Amy agreed that she was fully aware of the dangers of traveling in and out of black areas, but that she overcame her fears in order to challenge herself, much as she always had.
Amy faced other challenges by late April 1993. She felt the first pangs of homesickness after about six months of being away. Her car had been hit twice in three days while parked in front of Melanie’s apartment, and she was also experiencing some cash flow problems—her Fulbright check was late and NDI hadn’t yet sent some money it still owed her. But her positive experiences far outweighed her negative ones. As Amy’s younger sister Molly remarked on Amy’s birthday on April 26, “Remember, you’ve done more in your 26 years than most of us will do in a lifetime!” And Amy wasn’t done yet. She was pleased when an article she and Rhoda coauthored was published in the Weekly Mail on April 30, 1993. In “Women’s Voices Will Be Heard at Last,” Rhoda and Amy praised the eventual inclusion of women at the World Trade Centre talks and called for women to be included in every phase of the upcoming election process. “Negotiators must remember that women are more than 53 percent of the voting population,” they wrote. “A transition process that does not consider their safety, their equality, and their unique experience of racial and gender discrimination will be inherently flawed.” Amy was also earning praise from others in the South African women’s movement. A May 1993 letter from the gender consultant Gill Noero shows that the posthumous praise Amy received wasn’t overblown. After Amy drafted a report for an IDASA conference, Noero wrote, “Well, dear child, you put us all to shame with your extraordinary competence and industry.” She thanked Amy for her “ably objective” report and offered to pass it on to members of parliament and legal scholars at the University of the Witwatersrand.
After months of research, writing, and revisions, one of Amy’s major papers was ready for publication. Her essay “Structures for Women in Political Decision-Making” was published as a booklet in mid-1993 by the Gender Project at UWC’s Community Law Centre. The article was one of the two most substantive articles she wrote during her 10 months as a Fulbright scholar. In it, Amy surveyed the structures different countries had established to ensure women’s participation in government. The subject could hardly have been timelier, because South African women were working to gain access to government decision-making structures at that very moment. Amy’s essay was thorough and well-documented. It demonstrated her ability to write for an academic audience and provided a good resource for women leaders as they strategized about how to gain access to government positions and influence policy. According to Amy, South African negotiators were moving toward a constitutional commitment to “non-sexism,” but problems remained. There were still too few women leaders of political parties and too few women in transitional structures. “The differences among South African women are great,” she concluded. “Apartheid has divided women and resulted in the positioning of black women at the lowest level of the socio-economic ladder with the least access to the very decision-making structures designed to improve their status. Nevertheless, South African women have come together in a debate about what types of decision-making structures for women will empower the broadest spectrum of women in their country. This debate must be fostered and facilitated.” Amy’s article would be a key resource for Brigitte Mabandla, who played an important role in promoting the interests of women during the constitutional negotiations and who would later become a cabinet minister in the new government. She drew on Amy’s report in her own article, “Choices for South African Women,” which was published in the feminist journal Agenda in 1994.
Besides studying how women could be incorporated into governmental structures, Amy became interested in the impact of “customary law” on women. Under “customary law” in South Africa—as it had been interpreted and codified by white authorities—African women were defined as perpetual minors who could neither enter into contracts nor inherit land. This inferior legal status was unacceptable to women’s activists of the 1990s, who saw the opportunity for change during negotiations for a new constitution. In early 1993, Amy and Mabandla decided to organize a major conference on the subject. Here Amy took on an active role, planning, mobilizing, and articulating issues on behalf of South African women. She first drafted a proposal and budget for the conference in February and then wrote letters of invitation on Mabandla’s behalf in April. Women needed to have a dialogue with traditional leaders on “customary law” “in order to promote the full citizenship and democratic participation of African women in a new dispensation.” The conference would mark “the first step of a process by which South African women hope to influence the course of the debate on custom and religion.”
The conference, “Custom and Religion in a Non-Racial, Non-Sexist South Africa,” was held at UWC from May 14 to 16, 1993. The event brought together women from South Africa and abroad not only to exchange ideas on “customary law,” but to develop strategies for how women could actually influence the negotiation process. At the end, women representing the National Association of Democratic Lawyers drafted a resolution to be presented to negotiators. It affirmed that the constitution for a postapartheid South Africa must guarantee women’s right to equality in both the public and private spheres, and that no group of women should have fewer rights than another. South Africa’s future constitution eventually reflected those very principles, but twenty years later, the country’s legislators and activists would still be debating different versions of “customary law.”
Once the conference adjourned, Amy worked to make its proceedings more widely known. She and Mabandla coauthored an article titled “‘God-Given’ Oppression Upheld by Tradition,” which was published in IDASA’s journal Democracy in Action in July 1993. In it, they noted that although some conservative and traditional leaders sought to preserve those aspects of “customary law” that gave men power over women, “more progressive traditional leaders believe that tradition must be brought in line with the democratic principles of a bill of rights.” Women’s rights to own land, to have reproductive choices, to receive support if a husband remarried, and to have access to health and educational services needed to be protected in the future, even in areas governed by traditional leaders. When the conference papers were published by the Community Law Centre in 1994, the booklet was dedicated to Amy and included her executive summary. Her summary was also published in the journal Women against Fundamentalism that year.
Just a week after the custom and religion conference, Amy was scheduled to attend an ANC Women’s League conference in Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape. But her usual enthusiasm was flagging. “I’m supposed to go to an ANC Women’s League conference this weekend and they are paying my way,” she wrote Scott. “But I’m no longer sure I want to go! Can you believe I am saying this about the Women’s League? I think I am sick of conferences.” The conference turned out to be worthwhile. It aimed to help the Women’s League strategize about constitutional negotiations and eventual elections in South Africa. Members of the organization discussed their struggle to be included in the World Trade Centre negotiations and interacted with international women who spoke about democratic transitions in their countries. Women’s League president Gertrude Shope gave the opening address and vice president Albertina Sisulu closed the conference. Both women posed for a photo with Amy, who was designated the official “rapporteur” (reporter) for the conference and who prepared a summary of the proceedings. In taking such detailed notes and compiling conference reports, Amy was not only assisting the sponsors of the events she attended but also documenting women’s efforts to influence South Africa’s transition to democracy. At one point she took time off from her note taking to write a letter to Scott. She wrote that although she sometimes wished Mabandla was more organized, her strengths were on full display at the conference. “She is in her element here and she is able to relate to women’s league people in their own languages about very complicated issues. But she also continues to challenge the old ma’s—the older generation of ANC women—who do not have the modern constitutional ideas that she has . . . Viva, malibongwe igama lam akhosikazi! [Viva, praise to the women!]”
Amid her papers and conferences, Amy undertook one of the greatest physical challenges of her life—the Comrades Marathon. The race, first held in 1921, was legendary for its arduousness. Its route spans 54 miles (89.9 kilometers) from Pietermaritzburg to Durban and tests the endurance of even accomplished marathoners. Those who manage to finish sometimes collapse at the end. Amy was determined to take up the challenge. She wanted to reach and then transcend her “pain barrier,” just as she had during swimming practice at school years earlier. Even though she was in excellent shape and had run standard marathons before, she had never entered a race of this magnitude. “I hope I don’t die!” she joked in a letter to Scott. The Comrades Marathon of May 31, 1993, began at Pietermaritzburg city hall and ended at Kingsmead Stadium in Durban. Amy finished in 10 hours and 25 minutes, at 4:28 p.m., 32 minutes before the race officially ended. A photograph taken as she crossed the finish line shows her exhausted but elated. Marathon organizers and signatories of South Africa’s National Peace Accord had agreed to call the race “the 1993 Comrades Marathon for Peace.” Officials gave runners peace badges and certificates to sign, affirming their support of peace and freedom in South Africa. The statement that Amy signed after finishing the race read, in part, “I pledge myself with integrity of purpose to make this land a prosperous one where we can all live, work and play together in peace and harmony.” Empty words to some, perhaps, but to Amy the pledge undoubtedly had real meaning.
She barely had time to catch her breath before being absorbed in another commitment—the WNC’s Shopping Centre Campaign. Although Amy usually tried to avoid assuming leadership roles in South African women’s organizations, she did play a key role in this effort. Ever since she had arrived in Cape Town in late 1992, she had been attending meetings of the Western Cape branch of the WNC. In early 1993, the group began planning a shopping center–based campaign to educate women about their rights. The campaign would solicit women’s views and raise their awareness of women’s rights. It was part of an effort to collect women’s ideas for a Women’s Charter, which the WNC was drafting for submission to constitutional negotiators. Amy was one of the main organizers for the Shopping Centre Campaign. On June 12, 1993, 15 women—likely including Amy—launched the WNC’s Shopping Centre Campaign at Town Centre in Mitchell’s Plain, a traditionally mixed-race community on the Cape Flats. Volunteers set up a booth at the shopping center and distributed pamphlets on violence against women, women’s legal rights, the WNC, and the campaign itself. They asked women their thoughts about a wide range of gender issues, including the division of household responsibilities, abortion, and women in government. In two and a half hours, 163 women were interviewed.
