The first time Eric and I invited them for dinner, the men engaged in an earnest discussion about the Vietnam War and Nixon’s escalation in Cambodia, big news at the time, with Gail contributing and making sure she didn’t let the men dominate the conversation. We had just eaten a delicious meal—my skills as a cook had improved—and I found myself nodding off. This was my escape mechanism when the conversation seemed to rise above my head. Later, when we became closer, Gail told me that I had lain down on the floor under the table “like a pet dog!” (She wasn’t the only one of my friends to comment about my sleeping-at-dinner-parties habit. Sally insisted that in South Africa I went to sleep under a grand piano.) “When I first knew you, I thought you were shorter than me,” she said. Only later did she realize that, at five feet, eight and a half inches, I had her beat by two inches. And when we embarked on our friendship-for-life in the months following that dinner she also came to realize that I could be funny and sparkly and assertive in my own way. For my part I discovered that this woman I thought was invincible had her own vulnerabilities—as did most of the women of our generation. Discovering that I was not alone in harboring a fragile self-esteem, particularly when dealing with dominating men, was part of my feminist awakening.
THE TWENTY OR SO MEMBERS Southern Africa Committee were mostly Americans in their twenties, white and black, more women than men. Initially I was the only South African in the collective; in time Jennifer Davis became active as well. Like the other solidarity and activist organizations of the time, the anti-apartheid movement had its share of fracturing, dividing activists along race and ideological lines. As a white South African I was not immune to hostile comments directed at me by African Americans who presupposed that because of my white privilege, I had to be party to the apartheid system at some level, and therefore should not be so bold as to be involved in anti-apartheid work in the United States. Some contended that anything related to Africa belonged to the domain of African Americans. This continued throughout the years of anti-apartheid organizing. At first it offended me; I would feel defensive: South Africa is my country. How ignorant! But as I learned more about the complexity of American history—the legacy of slavery on the generations that followed, the strength of the civil rights movement, the growth of the Black Power movement—I appreciated how racism penetrated the fabric of American society and cut deep into the culture and history of the country. As in South Africa, white privilege was as taken for granted as breathing air. The struggle for equality and justice was as valid here, even if the context was different, as it was in Africa. In some ways, it was a tougher struggle, both because of the need to challenge the underlying mythology of a democratic America—a just nation where everyone is free and equal—and because, unlike in Africa, blacks in America were in the minority.
I met a number of young black South Africans; most were on scholarships to study in the United States. When they discovered that I was from “home” there were delighted whoops of Sister! Back slaps. Hugs. I would be eagerly questioned about where I grew up, what I did, what I was doing here. They were as eager to answer my questions about how they came to be in this country. Many had been underground members of the ANC and PAC and had had to flee into exile when their activism meant certain arrest. Some had done stints in prison. They longed for home, and all they needed to know to consider me a sister was that I was South African and I hated apartheid. At parties we danced ourselves numb with exhaustion to the beat of South African music. I listened to tales of being hounded by the Special Branch and of time in prison. There were hair-raising stories of demonic wardens—“Remember so-and-so when he would do such-and-such?”—withdrawal of food, bouts of solitary confinement for not complying with the strict rules, withdrawal of privileges such as receiving or sending letters. They bent back and laughed raucously, slapping their thighs with the memories they found hilarious. It was the first of many times that I would encounter the way in which impossibly painful circumstances were turned into comedy.
Their laughter was also reserved for their fellow students’ ignorance about Africa. “They ask us if we speak Swahili!” believing that Swahili was a lingua franca of Africa, not a language restricted to the east coast. We exchanged other stories: how Americans often asked us, “But what country in South Africa are you from?” There were different countries in South America, why not South Africa? For me, this would often be followed by: “But where are you really from?” “South Africa.” Trying to make sense of my whiteness, they would persevere: “Then where are you grandparents from?” “Lithuania.” “Aha!” they would exclaim. I was finally making sense. “So you’re Lithuanian.” I gave up.
African American friends and activists had their own battles to fight. One afternoon I was walking to the SAC office with a fellow member of the committee who was black, talking animatedly, when another young black man hissed as he passed: “Have some self-respect, brother. Get your head straight!” We continued walking, now in silence, my friend’s seething fury enveloping us. A few days earlier we had been visiting a friend on the Upper West Side. He was standing in front of me when the elevator door opened and a young girl holding a kitten was about to step out. She froze, clutched the kitten tightly to her chest, her face blanched. Then she spied me and relaxed. A young black man with a white woman companion was either a traitor to his race or rendered nonthreatening.
As activists supporting the liberation struggles we believed we did have our “heads straight.” We took our cues from the African liberation movements and their leaders. We avidly read their texts, speeches, and other writings which helped shape our thinking and analysis. When I left South Africa in 1967 I was unaware that wars of liberation were being waged so close to home. Three years earlier, on my trip up the east coast on my way to Europe, the ship had anchored overnight in Lourenço Marques, the capital of Mozambique. To South Africans, “LM” seemed like such a cosmopolitan city, with its Portuguese flair. The beaches were integrated, the cafés were integrated, and South Africans, particularly those from landlocked Johannesburg, used it as their personal playground. Men, bent on the thrill of forbidden sex with African women, snuck across the border to indulge their pleasures without fear of arrest. When I arrived in the United States, I knew nothing about the armed struggles being waged against Portuguese colonial oppression by Frelimo, the Mozambique Liberation Front, or the MPLA, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.
All this became more real in February 1969, when I literally sat at the feet of Amilcar Cabral, a personal hero and founder of PAIGC. One of the benefits of living in the city was the regular visits by leaders of the liberation movements, who had observer status at the UN, to address the United Nations, so we in the movement often got to meet them. Now activists and supporters packed into Jennifer Davis’s living room. Jennifer, a full-time research director with ACOA, had become one of my closest friends, one of those friendships that became family in the absence of blood relatives. Her apartment on Riverside Drive and West 86th Street, with its view of the Hudson River, served as a hub for revolutionary traffic passing through New York, providing a meeting space and often a bed for representatives of the movements as well as the South African Trade Unions, and other anti-apartheid organizations and activists. Seated on folding chairs and on the floor, we listened keenly as we learned face-to-face about the progress of their work and the importance to them of our own solidarity work, and we would leave reinvigorated.
Amilcar Cabral’s profound analytical prowess and vision of revolution made him the doyen of the liberation movement’s leaders. With seeming ease, he could turn complex ideology and political analysis into simple words that gave us the wherewithal to argue, reasonably eloquently and cogently, the importance of supporting their struggle. My copy of Cabral’s Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts was held together with rubber bands, the spine cracked and the binding unglued, the pages grown yellow with use and the margins filled with my scribbling. His words slipped into our language, to be retrieved when we spoke about African revolutions. Though I longed for a democratic South Africa, I heeded his caution that people were not fighting simply for ideas: “They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives