They began to search through the file drawers and then proceeded to move the cabinets toward the door, to be carted off to their Cape Town headquarters. The one in charge said curtly, pointing to two police: “Tell them where you live. They will take you to search your house.” He continued to flip through papers on my desk. I was escorted out of the building at a brisk pace and onto the street between the two men, right into the path of my father, who was walking toward us. He looked at me aghast, his face draining of color as mine had earlier. He gave a slight nod in nonverbal acknowledgment as we passed. “At least he knows that I am being arrested,” I thought. If, that is, I am.
There was silence in the black sedan as I was driven the five and a half miles around the mountain to the cottage in Newlands that I shared with my boyfriend, Eric, and another male friend. I had met Eric at university when I was nineteen. He had startling blue eyes and pitch black straight hair that hung to his shoulders. He was a physics student who wrote fairy tales, liked poetry, and matched my love of classical music. His professors predicted a bright future for him. Like my father, he tended to dominate conversations. I did not protest. It was familiar territory. He was my first serious love and I knew that this was the man I would marry.
We began living together when I was twenty-two, first in a flat in Long Street, on the edge of the city, then in this cottage near the university. The expectation that young Jewish women only left home when they married was being challenged by my generation. It did not sit comfortably with my parents, but I was an adult and they couldn’t stop me. So not wanting to set up a conflict, and fearing that I would reject them altogether, they agreed. There was an unspoken charade that made it easier for them: we were not actually having sex. We were simply living communally with other friends. We each had our own room to maintain this subterfuge. It could not have been easy for my parents, who were always conscious of what others might think and feared judgment by their community. For me it was part of my rebellion against my father, and I took some pleasure out of it.
Now, standing in the living room were the two bulky men, whose large presence made the room seem even smaller than it was. They were polite—I was white after all—but they felt menacing. I sat on the edge of a chair in the living room as they searched, watching warily. Each book was perused, each drawer opened and rummaged through, each bed peered under. A few books were set aside. I doubted any were banned, but the list of banned books, plays, and even music was long and not easy to keep track of. Books that criticized apartheid were invariably on the list. Newspapers from England, such as the Sunday Observer, regularly had sentences blacked out by zealous workers in the censor’s office. Not only political books caught the attention of the state censor: those deemed too sexually explicit or morally reprehensible got the axe as well. A dog-eared copy of Peyton Place had made the rounds from one high school friend to another, its jacket covered with brown paper. One of my all-time favorite books as a child, Black Beauty, was temporarily on the list until someone realized that the title referred to a horse. More recently, it had been a recording of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which we had listened to in Ann’s apartment, curtains drawn, shortly before she herself was banned. Halfway through, the security police strode into her apartment, took down the names of the ten or so of us there, and confiscated the LPs.
Finding nothing more of interest, the leader, tucking the few books he found questionable under his arm, pointed to the door. “Laat ons gaan,” he said. Let’s go. They were gone. I was left standing in the middle of the room, both relieved and horrified. Relieved because I had not been arrested. Horrified at the implications of the banning: what would happen to the accused now awaiting trial? Or the hundreds of families suddenly deprived of funds to buy food for their families? I immediately called the chairman of the board, but he already knew. I later heard that two board members had also been raided. I then called my father to let him know that I was safe. His voice cracked in his effort to hide his relief.
The banning of the D and A was, in the scheme of apartheid things, inevitable. It was a thorn gouging deep into the regime’s flesh. But it helped clinch my decision to leave South Africa.
MY WORRIES THAT THE BANNING of D and A would end its work were unwarranted. Only after the fall of apartheid did I learn how the work of D and A continued despite its banning. With just a handful of people in the know, a South African lawyer’s prestigious law firm in the UK stepped into the breach to instruct and pay lawyers in South Africa to act on behalf of the accused. Funding continued to be provided by the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, based in London. Even the spies that infiltrated the anti-apartheid movements throughout Britain, Europe, and North America could not crack the watertight scheme. As for aid to the dependents, a network of willing Brits, housewives, churchgoers, and regular folk well under the radar of the South African security police committed themselves to secrecy and “adopted” different families. They sent them monthly stipends with funds that were transferred into their bank accounts.
5 — “You Can Make More of a Difference Outside”
We were squeezed around the dinner table at Sally and Michael’s cottage in Constantia, eight young white South Africans, now satiated by delicious food and slightly tipsy on good but cheap South African wine.
Dinner parties were our main form of Saturday night entertainment. Most of the decent restaurants were too expensive. The cinemas were strictly whites-only, and most of the interesting films were either banned or heavily censored. As for television, that was banned in 1960, to protect our morals and out of fear that the “Bantu” would rise up if they beheld the lifestyle of the rich and white.
Our conversation inevitably moved from idle chatter to The Question: should we stay or should we leave? That we were even discussing it reflected our privilege. As white middle-class South Africans, we had the means to make the decision, with good prospects of studying or finding jobs overseas. There was ambivalence on both sides: Eric and I were in the leaving camp. Sally and Michael were as well. Most of the others were committed to staying.
“By staying we would be doing nothing more than applying Band-Aids,” Eric said in a voice full of certainty. It was a favorite line of his. Why waste our lives, making sacrifices that ultimately would lead nowhere? The world out there was beckoning him. He planned to complete a doctorate in physics and enter the world of research not possible at home. He looked forward to escaping South Africa’s confines and grabbing onto a life of intellectual stimulus. Unlike Eric, I had doubts, but being a dutiful wife-to-be, I suppressed them.
“Yes,” Sally ventured, her long blond hair swaying down her back as she moved her head in emphasis. “We are beneficiaries whether we like it or not.”
“I don’t agree.” said Frank. He was a professor at the university who would later contribute important research to the nature of poverty—and hence oppression—in South Africa. “You can’t abandon ship when change is inevitable, and I mean real, transformational change to black-majority rule.” Then picking up on an earlier point that Michael made about not wanting to raise children in this country, he added: “It’s not a question of whether South Africa is a place to raise children. It’s our country. It will be our children’s country, and eventually, they will grow up in a just society and perhaps contribute to ensuring that it remains so.”
We were rehashing conversations, often heated, that we had been having for months as we attended an increasing number of farewell parties. We were caught in a hiatus between the government clamp-down that followed the Sharpeville massacre and the activism and resistance that would pick up again in the 1970s. At the time, though, an eerie political silence seemed to stretch ahead, unbending and uninterrupted. There was no movement to join—it had gone underground. The African Resistance Movement, which was composed mainly of young white men and women my age, had begun a sabotage campaign against government installations and services, explicitly eschewing violence against people. It would turn out that I knew a number of ARM’s members, but I was too far outside this level of activism to be