Acknowledgments
THIS MEMOIR WAS CONCEIVED and reconceived over many years. During that time I have benefited from the support of friends. I can’t express my gratitude enough for the input of Gloria Jacobs and Jane Rosenman, whose superior editing skills were critical to the reshaping of Mapping My Way Home. Special thanks, too, to Jennifer Davis, Alcinda Honwana, Gail Hovey, Karen Judd, and Teresa Smart, who read the manuscript at different stages and whose insights and comments were invaluable. I am also grateful to the many others who encouraged and supported me through the long process of bringing this memoir to fruition, among whom are my women’s group of forty-five years—Suzette Abbott, Jennifer Davis, Janet Hoope,r and Gail Hovey—as well as Michelle Fine, Pippa Green, Hanaa Hamdi, Hermione Harris, Richard Knight, Judith Marshall, Ann McClintock, Margaret Marshall, Barbara Reisman, and Janis Zadel.
And most especially, there are my stalwart cheerleaders, husband John Woodburn and daughter Kendra Urdang, who lived with this book through good times and bad, with my moods to match. Their support means the world to me.
Martha Cameron, through her scrupulous editing, spotted a number of inaccuracies that saved me embarrassment. On that note, I am the only one responsible for all remaining errors and inaccuracies. Thanks as well go to Martin Paddio and Michael Yates at Monthly Review Press for their enthusiasm for the project. It was a pleasure to work with all three.
There are those who I need to thank posthumously. A number of my friends and family who were part of my story, even if not included in my book, died while I was writing it. Some, like my parents and my sister Leonie, feature in my memoir, as do Becky Reiss and Lina Magaia. Others, even though an important part of my story, were not included. Among the latter are Danish anthropologist Jette Bukh, with whom I stayed in Guinea-Bissau after independence and who became a close friend; David Emanuel, fellow southern African, whose wisdom and support saw me through my cancer and Kendra’s birth; and Anthony Lewis, whose friendship, humor, and generosity meant a lot to me. Particular memories are for Eve and Tony Hall. The fleeting idea for a memoir became grounded through discussions with Tony at Matumi, their home outside of Nelspruit, after they returned to South Africa. His enthusiasm for my book was infectious. I first met Eve and Tony in Nairobi in 1973 on my travels in Africa. Introduced through a mutual friend, I arrived at their house for tea one Saturday afternoon and stayed for six weeks. They had gone into exile in the early 1960s with their three young sons, after Eve had served a six-month sentence for promoting the banned ANC with a leaflet and poster campaign, and Tony, a journalist, was no longer allowed to practice his craft. I slipped into their lives and we remained close friends until their untimely deaths: Eve from breast cancer in 2007 at age seventy; Tony at age seventy-one from a heart attack a few months later, in 2008. All are sorely missed.
Friends provided beautiful writing retreats. I returned often to idyllic Matumi, my computer on a small table in front of “my” bedroom, a view of the stunning valley below; Margaret Marshall and Anthony Lewis’s house overlooking a pond on Martha’s Vineyard was a yearly treat; Pippa Green’s house in Cape Town gave me a magnificent view of Table Mountain as I worked; Hermione Harris’s house in London was home from home after my parents died. In addition, I had the opportunity to spend time at the indescribably wonderful Blue Mountain Center for writers, artists, and activists on a lake in the Adirondacks.
My grateful thanks to Alice Brown, director of the Ford Foundation regional office in southern Africa, which provided a grant for research and travel to South Africa and Mozambique in 2011.
Note: A few of the names of people who appear in this book have been changed.
PROLOGUE
Mother Mountain
Table Mountain shimmers in the heat this late summer’s day in March 1991. Even from the distance of the Cape Town airport, the magnificence of the flat-topped mountain takes hold of me. Its image, a constant symbol of my city and of the country I left behind in 1967, continued to occupy a corner of my being throughout the decades of my absence, sometimes in hibernation, sometimes vigorously alive as I succumbed to bouts of yearning and nostalgia.
By twenty-three, I could no longer tolerate apartheid’s tyranny. Neither could my parents, who emigrated that same year. While their destination was London, mine was New York. My decision to return to South Africa for a visit took hold when, a year earlier, I celebrated my now widowed mother’s eightieth birthday. On February 11, 1990, my family sat glued to the small TV in the living room of her cozy semidetached house in north London, awaiting Nelson Mandela’s release after twenty-seven years in prison. Outside the windows the weather was listless and bleak, a typical winter’s day where perpetually gray skies appear to hover just above one’s head. In South Africa it was summer, the colors bright, the African sky high and blue.
There was a limit to how much a camera could show crowds waiting. To build tension for the viewers, reporters prattled on with endless commentary on what might be expected from the release of the world’s most prominent and revered political prisoner, while cameras scanned the scene. Pundits and commentators speculated and analyzed and then re-speculated and re-analyzed. Artists’ sketches projected what he might look like. It had been illegal to publish any photos of him while he was in prison.
Kendra, my four-year-old daughter, couldn’t fathom why we were staring at a TV screen for so many hours. We played games with her, her grandmother read her book after book, but the time dragged on along with her boredom. Then the moment arrived and Mandela walked into view. Dignified, thin, tall, graceful: nothing like the artists’ sketches. I could hardly see him through the blur of my tears. The bond with my past stretched taut as I delved into a hidden space where I am still the child of Africa, of South Africa, of Cape Town.
I looked at John, my husband, who had never been to Africa—John, forever the good listener, who had heard my tales of growing up South African and tolerated my passion for my country beyond endurance, had tears running down his face as freely as mine, while my mother quietly wept. At that moment, I vowed to take him to my South Africa, and soon.
Kendra looked at one parent, then the other, puzzled. I explained again, a simpler task now that I could point to Mandela before us on the screen, that this was a truly great man that bad people had put in prison many, many years ago, long before she was born.
“We’re crying because we’re happy that he is free,” I explained.
“Will they put the bad people in jail now, Mummy?” she asked. Oh, that it were so simple.
AND SO HERE WE ARE at the airport, waiting in limbo between landing and being met by our friend Pippa. She and her husband, Alan, had returned to South Africa two years earlier after studying at Columbia University. Pippa Green was working as a journalist and Alan was teaching at the University of Cape Town. We had become close during their time in New York, Kendra having adopted Pippa, full of affection and fun, as a special aunt.
John surveys the surroundings with a somewhat bemused expression, watching scenes still cast in apartheid play out around him: black service workers swish brooms back and forth in wide swaths, garbage bags are pulled from bins and tied up, bowed heads are focused on the tasks at hand, ignoring the affluent travelers who in turn are oblivious to their presence. Typical flat white South African accents that he had often heard me and my South African friends mimic, fill the hall, obscuring the Afrikaans he does not understand and the sounds of Xhosa with its distinctive clicks that he has only heard when listening to the songs of Miriam Makeba.
While we wait, I replay the returning-home scenario I have envisioned. We will drive from the airport along the highway that goes straight as an arrow toward the heart of Table Mountain. The mountain will grow steadily larger as all the familiar folds and crevices and crannies, the browns and grays and dull greens of rainless summer months, come sharply into focus. Once the road merges with De Waal Drive, which hugs the mountain like a low-slung belt heading toward the city center, its slopes will tower over us and Table Bay, the docks of my childhood, will stretch out below. And as its grandeur overwhelms us both, John will at last understand why the mountain—and this city and my country—continue to exert such a hold over me.