I BECAME A WILLING WORKER FOR the movement through my association with him, doing typing and dogsbody labor, but also helping with fundraising, locating African crafts and art for him to sell in the United States, an effort that failed to catch on. He had more success in Europe, where he launched a campaign to sell works donated by known artists.
Our friendship progressed with his visits to New York and with my annual visits to my parents in London. Mazisi introduced me to ANC cadres in both cities as the efforts to raise money continued. I never joined the ANC and he never suggested it. I was comfortable in my unaffiliated status, though I sometimes wonder why. Was I already imaging myself as a journalist, when lack of affiliation would make sense? Was I worried that I, as an obedient girl, would get swallowed up?
I loved his disregard for protocol, his irreverence, and the way he made me laugh. He was already gaining recognition as a poet. His inspiration was his Zulu heritage and he wrote in Zulu. For him African literature held its true essence when written in the original language, whatever it might be. His passion was the epic poem he was writing, Emperor Shaka the Great. It would be published in English—his translation—in 1979. This work and the others that followed established him as a great African poet.
On my visits to London we would meet at the ANC office or at his flat near Baker Street or go for walks through the city. On one such walk along Oxford Street, he stopped at a sidewalk cart selling fruit and nuts and pointed to a mound of deep purple grapes. “Two pounds, please,” he said, digging into his pocket and bringing out a handful of crumpled notes. The vendor picked three bunches from the pile, weighed them, and placed them in a paper bag. Mazisi took it from him, grinning with expectation. I was taken aback. Shocked! The grapes were clearly labeled with the country of origin: South Africa. I had not bought any South African products since leaving. Here was Mazisi, one of the strongest proponents of the boycott in the UK, who consistently—in the media, at anti-apartheid meetings and rallies—made his “Don’t buy South African” pitch. He saw the look on my face and popped a large juicy grape into his mouth, while offering me the open bag. “I think that the boycott is an extremely important and a brilliant educational tool,” he said. “As for me, I do not need to be educated.”
I giggled and took a bunch from the bag and together we walked down Oxford Street savoring the burst of sweetness as we indulgently bit into one marble-sized globe after another.
In London five years later, February 1973, I went as usual to visit him soon after landing. He seemed particularly depressed. The awful London weather, typical of late winter, bearing down outside his basement flat made the scene even more dismal. He didn’t seem interested in our usually lively catching up. He quickly came to the point. He was engaged to be married, he said. “Given the circumstances,” he continued, “it’s better that we don’t see each other anymore.” Circumstances? There weren’t any “circumstances” as far as I was concerned. A mutual friend had told me earlier that our friendship had made tongues wag. It was so off point that I never took it seriously and valued our friendship all the more because of the lack of sexual tension. I could do nothing but honor his request. It was the last time I saw him. Soon after, he left his work with the ANC to teach at the University of California in Los Angeles, reconnecting full-time with his poet self. He would subsequently influence and be revered by a new generation of African writers.
YEARS LATER, IN AUGUST 2006, I was sitting drinking coffee in a suburban mall in Pretoria, waiting for Kendra, who had gone in quest of a pair of jeans. I idly flipped through the daily paper and then stopped, frozen, as a small black-and-white photo of Mazisi stared at me from the upper left-hand side of the page—an older but oh so familiar face. Beneath it was an obituary.
“Mazisi Kunene was one of the greatest figures of South African and African literature,” I read. “He made significant contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle from his position within the ANC in exile. Mazisi Kunene was a man and a poet of immense humanity.”
Suddenly this affectionate, funny, astute man was there with me again. I recalled how much I had adored this friend, this brother, and how he had influenced my life at a time when I was struggling with self-esteem. He simply acted as if I was already the confident woman I hoped to become. Now he was gone. My regret at never having tried to reconnect with him after the end of apartheid continues to live with me.
8 — We Took Our Cues from the Liberation Movements
Gail Hovey was on a roll. It was the end of April 1970, about a year after I first met Mazisi, and I was learning about a new and quintessential American form of protest: shareholder action. She and other solidarity activists had just come back from a Gulf Oil shareholders meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they were protesting Gulf’s investments in Angolan oil fields. The taxes and royalties that the Portuguese government received from Gulf Oil were significantly bolstering its otherwise failing economy, and thus perpetuating Portuguese colonialism in Angola. Gail sat at the head of a long conference table, occasionally checking her notes, her voice resounding through SAC’s unrenovated loft office on West 27th Street as some fifteen of us sat around the table on assorted chairs, riveted by her account. As she talked, her head moved in emphasis, swinging her long brown hair, hanging in a braid down her back.
A national boycott against Gulf Oil was beginning to gain steam. A divestment movement against banks that loaned money to South Africa had already started in the early 1960s and would accelerate a decade later to include corporations doing business there. As a South African I was used to the tactics of strikes, protests, marches, mass meetings, most of which ended in arrests and convictions. But targeting a corporation’s shareholders meeting was new to me. As Gail explained, fifty demonstrators had gained access to the meeting by purchasing the smallest number of shares needed to attend, adding to the few bona fide shareholders who were sympathetic to the boycott. Some wore T-shirts that boldly proclaimed GULF KILLS on the front. They stood out from the regular shareholders dressed in staid business attire.
When the chair called for nominations for the shareholder board, protestors, one after another, jumped to their feet to nominate heads of liberation movements and then describe their bios in detail and read their poems. Angry shareholders yelled back at them: “Sit down!” “Take them out!” “Out of order!” “Where do you come from—Red China?!” Gail overheard one woman say to another: “They are so dumb, they want communism.” “Yeah,” the other agreed, “they think they can get along without money. Let ’em try!” After two hours of near mayhem, the all-day meeting was adjourned. They had been successful in both disrupting the meeting and bringing the issue to the attention of the shareholders.
Gail and I were slowly getting to know each other as friends, slow because I was intimidated by this poised, self-assured, political, articulate woman who looked with enviable directness at all of us sitting around the table. I met Gail a year after I arrived in the United States when she and her husband, Don, returned from working in South Africa under the umbrella of the Frontier Internship Program of the Presbyterian Church. It was a progressive program designed to engage young people in crucial issues of the day, including race relations, Gail’s main interest. To convince the apartheid government to grant them visas and work permits, they needed a cover, so they made arrangements to work at an African school in the north that had been founded by Swiss missionaries at the turn of the twentieth century. Don worked as chaplain and Gail with women in the community. Before they could complete