“But,” Michael intervened, “we are white, English-speaking South Africans. The struggle for majority rule is not ours. It’s between the Afrikaners and the Africans.”
I wasn’t sure about this argument. Why should the English, as South African as anyone else, be considered exempt? I believed it definitely was my struggle. I just didn’t know how to pursue it in the current political climate. But I remained silent. Although I could discuss my ideas with Eric or friends like Sally, I had difficulty asserting myself in groups.
We never convinced each other. Those on the side of leaving left. Those who stayed carried the responsibility for all of us, at the risk of banning, jail, and even assassination.
Many years later, while reminiscing about our youth, Sally and I discovered that we had both harbored the same ambivalence. We couldn’t voice it—it would have created chasms that we feared we would be unable to bridge. And to what purpose? Neither of our men suffered any such qualms. We were women after all, stuck in our anticipated roles as women, expected to follow our men. So Sally and I nursed our emotions in our separate spaces, trying to suppress the feeling we were abandoning our country.
LEONIE, NOW ENSCONCED IN LONDON, was an additional pull. In her letters, she described the joy in finding a big wide world outside of Cape Town and tried hard to convince me that this too could be mine. When I wrote to her about my qualms, she replied, “You need to leave South Africa. There is so much to be part of outside the country. The theater, art, culture of all sorts, it’s just amazing. And there is a lot of anti-apartheid work, if that’s what you want to do. You can probably make more of a difference outside, you know.”
Here in South Africa, the whole system had been rigged to keep whites in a safe cocoon, to ensure that we basked in privilege. How was it possible to contribute to change while we passively and docilely agreed to live, work, travel, shop, and participate in leisure activities reserved for whites alone? Perhaps it was possible to make more of a contribution overseas. I was not contemplating leaving because I had personally suffered the horrors of apartheid. Far from it. I was leaving because I benefited from apartheid. I was leaving because of the privilege that my father had told me never to forget.
WITH THE BANNING OF D AND A, my main avenue to meaningful involvement was gone and the prospect of emigrating became more palatable. One question remained: where to? Both Eric and I had assumed it would be London, where he would enter a physics doctoral program. The link between Britain and English-speaking white South Africa was strong. We had been a colony. At school we learned as much British history as South African. We read English authors—Dickens, Austen, Brontë. It already felt familiar—an extension of our culture. We had a ready-made community of close friends waiting for us who had settled or were planning to settle there. Leonie was married and pregnant. My parents were well advanced in their own plans to emigrate. All that was missing from this happy London-based picture was the addition of me and my husband-to-be. Fate had other ideas.
One evening, Eric and I were waiting for the traffic on Long Street to clear so that we could cross the road to our apartment. My parents were coming for dinner, and I was eager to cook the perfect meal but also apprehensive about having them in our space, where we would continue the charade of separate rooms. Friday evening traffic up Long Street moved in a steady, sluggish stream. A gap appeared and I darted across at a trot. As I stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk, I heard a screech of brakes and the telltale thud of a body being hit by a car. I turned to see Eric flying into the air and then landing on the road, one leg sticking out at a distorted angle. The driver exited from his Mini Minor, his face blanched. The next moments were a blur. A whites-only ambulance appeared, its siren blaring. “We’re taking him to Woodstock Hospital,” the medic told me as he clanked shut the ambulance doors, barricading off Eric’s pain-contorted face and moans of agony. As I rushed to my car to drive to the hospital, the siren reverberated through the streets and grew fainter, rapidly putting distance between Eric and me. I was numb, barely able to focus on the road. I tried to conjure up comforting thoughts. It’s just a broken leg! Nothing life-threatening. He’ll be out in no time, in a white plaster of paris cast, learning to maneuver around with crutches, back at his studies, back at home.
At the hospital I was told to wait. Finally, a white-coated doctor came through the doors to tell me that the fracture was especially tricky, that he would have to operate to set it and put in a pin, and that Eric would remain in hospital, his leg up in traction to promote healing. I caught a glimpse of him on a stretcher through the door, white and still groaning. I made a move to go to him. The door was shut in my face. I was not family.
Eric remained in hospital for six weeks with his leg suspended in traction at a 45-degree angle. His fracture healed, but his leg was wasted. After another six weeks of physical therapy, first on crutches, then with a walking stick, he was finally able to walk as he did before and return to his nine-month postgraduate program in physics, a prerequisite for entering a British university. Before the accident, no one doubted that Eric would get a first-class pass, virtually guaranteeing a full scholarship at a top scientific institution in the UK. But having missed half of the program, he didn’t get his first and the full scholarship was off the cards. Instead, Eric turned his attention to the United States, where he was accepted at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The offer of a stipend and a grant to cover his fees settled it.
I had to face the fact that I would be living in a truly foreign land. I turned to books. One in particular, displayed on a table in Stuttafords, caught my eye: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I was pulled in by the opening words.
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”
South Africa’s white women—Friedan was talking to me as a white woman—did not make the beds. Nor did we eat peanut butter sandwiches. Whether I remained in South Africa or went to the United States, could I avoid the fate described by Friedan? I read the book at a fast clip. When I reached the last pages, I was relieved to read there could be a remedy.
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? … Who knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share … the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the human future and the full human knowledge of who they are? It has barely begun, the search of women for themselves. But the time is at hand when the voices of the feminine mystique can no longer drown out the inner voice that is driving women on to become complete.
I closed the book, my heart pounding. Friedan’s writing had lit up thoughts hidden in my subconscious mind. Her words unsettled and unmoored me. At the same time, they excited, they inspired. At this point, I did not know much about the United States. I was not thinking race or class. Nor did I recognize the turning point this moment was for me. All I knew was that her writing had carved a space ready to be filled once I got to America.
AT THE END OF MAY 1967, the day before we left Cape Town, Eric and I were married at the magistrate’s court. It was rather seedy, not geared for ceremony and celebration, but a place couples scuttled to for a shotgun wedding or a marriage that defied parents and community. Sally and Michael, soon to leave for Montreal, were our witnesses. We celebrated with a champagne lunch at the smartest restaurant in town and then, slightly tipsy, drove to the top of Signal Hill to look out over Cape Town for the last time and take some wedding pictures, the last photos I took in South Africa: me smiling in a green wool-knit dress, my black hair shoulder length and sleek with the help of careful drying so it wouldn’t frizz up; my new husband and I with our arms around each other; Sally, leaning over in a goofy position, her long blond hair flowing behind her. I was happy. I was in love. I was about to start a new life.
That night,