The Verwoerd who Toyi-Toyied. Melanie Verwoerd
Despite – or perhaps because of – the centuries-old conflict there, no one seemed particularly interested in the country. A good friend of ours, Edward Peters, who worked for a Christian organisation called Moral Re-Armament (MRA), with which Wilhelm was very involved, joined us.
We drove to Stranraer in Scotland, from where we took the ferry to Belfast. We stayed with two other lovely MRA people, Peter and Fiona Hannon, in Coleraine. Lady Fiona is the daughter of the Duke of Montrose, a title her brother inherited. She and Peter had spent many years in South Africa, and I was good friends with their daughter Catherine. Peter and Fiona were well connected in Northern Ireland and arranged various political meetings for us.
One of the most memorable of these events (for all the wrong reasons) was a lunch with the Reverend Ian Paisley in his home. After passing through security, we were asked to wait in a sitting room. Shortly afterwards, Ian Paisley arrived, greeting us warmly. He asked Wilhelm and Edward what they did, and he then turned to me. He clearly assumed that I was a housewife, but I corrected him, saying that I was also studying.
‘Oh? And what do you study?’ he wanted to know.
‘Theology,’ I responded.
‘Oh good!’ he smiled. ‘What type of theology?’
Now I was getting a bit nervous. ‘Well,’ I started hesitantly, ‘feminist theology.’
Ian Paisley locked a stern gaze on me. He snorted slightly. ‘In my church, that will not be allowed. In fact, women still wear hats!’ he said, while spitting slightly as he emphasised the ‘ts’ of hats. He clearly had no interest in continuing the conversation with me, and his wife invited us to the dining room. It was not a good start.
After saying a lengthy grace, Ian Paisley engaged Wilhelm and Edward in political discussions. I was listening with interest and was struck by the similarities between his arguments and those of conservative whites in South Africa. After our earlier interaction, I kept quiet. However, when Ian Paisley laughingly told us that he always knew when there were Catholics on a plane, as he could smell them, I was shocked. As I have never been good at keeping a poker face, it showed. He wanted to know why I looked so shocked.
‘Well, with respect, Reverend Paisley, I think it’s deeply offensive – and exactly what racist whites would say about blacks in South Africa,’ I responded.
A silence fell around the table. Again he looked at me with a stern gaze. There was a tense pause before he said: ‘No, no. We Protestants associate ourselves with the cause of black South Africans.’
‘How is that?’ I wanted to know.
‘We are a majority, who could soon be oppressed by a minority,’ he responded, much to my surprise.
A far happier meeting, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, was with a wonderful Catholic community worker called Paddy Doherty from the Bogside in Derry. He did extraordinary, inspiring work developing cross-community links between young people.
So many aspects of Northern Ireland were similar to what we were going through in South Africa. The restrictions on the media and on political activities, prejudice and suspicion between people, security concerns – even the metal detectors at shopping malls were familiar. Yet people in Northern Ireland looked basically the same, and spoke the same language; the conflict clearly was not really about religion any more. Why can this conflict not be resolved? I wondered, once we had left Northern Ireland and were driving through the green hills of Connemara.
Thankfully, the rest of the trip was more relaxed. I was seduced by the peaceful charm and beauty of the west of Ireland. We stayed at B&Bs and loved the charm and humour of our Irish hosts. We crossed the country and drove east to Dublin, where we visited the tourist sites and strolled around Trinity College, before taking a ferry back to the UK.
During our first year back in Oxford we also made a trip back to South Africa. We wanted to see our families, but also had something special to do. We had kept in contact with Tshepiso Mashinini (the younger brother of Tsietsi Mashinini), whom I had met during my first trip to Oxford in 1986. Over a cup of coffee one day, Tshepiso remarked how sad he was about the complete lack of contact with his parents. Knowing that any communication might be picked up by the South African security police, he did not want to expose his parents to any possible harassment or put his own life at risk. However, this meant that his parents did not even know for certain that he was alive. Wilhelm and I offered to visit his parents in Soweto, when we were in South Africa. On our suggestion Tshepiso made a tape recording which we took with us.
Given that there was still a state of emergency, we knew it would attract attention if we just drove into Soweto, and since we did not know the area we asked a friend to take us there. He asked us to hide under blankets as we drove past the military presence at the entrance. Feeling tense, but also exhilarated, we were very happy to meet Tshepiso’s parents and to bring them greetings from their son. They were overwhelmed with joy to hear that he was not only alive and well, but had succeeded in getting a scholarship to study at the Oxford Polytechnic. Their relief and pride was visible. Over refreshments one of Tshepiso’s younger brothers, who was sitting quietly next to Wilhelm, suddenly asked loudly: ‘So what do you think of your grandfather?’
A shocked silence followed before his parents berated him in Zulu. But Wilhelm did not mind and took some time to engage with this young man, who was clearly very politicised. After an hour of intense discussion and being fed endless cups of tea, we left, leaving the little tape recorder and tape with them to listen later.
It was our first visit to Soweto. We were deeply moved by what we saw and by the time we spent with this remarkable family that had sacrificed so much in the struggle. Years later Tshepiso and I would work together on the White Paper on Local Government, before he died of a heart attack at the very young age of 32.
Back at Oxford, Wilhelm and I decided to start a family. It seemed like a good idea, since I had a lot of free time. We felt it would be good to have the children young, so we would still be relatively young when they were teenagers and young adults. We planned things carefully, since we did not want the birth to happen before or during Wilhelm’s final exams, but our visas ran out at the end of July 1990 and I would not have been able to fly back to South Africa if I was too far pregnant. This gave us a window of three weeks in which everything had to happen. Fortunately, I became pregnant easily, and we quietly congratulated ourselves. Little did we know what was about to happen.
I have a condition called porphyria variegate, which runs in certain Afrikaner families. I inherited it from my dad. The condition results in a faulty liver enzyme which can, in some cases, cause great difficulties with certain medication, dramatic hormonal changes, and sensitivity to sunlight. You can live with porphyria without ever showing any symptoms, and the only reason I was tested was because my dad had the condition. I had never had any difficulty with it before (or since) the pregnancy, although I am always extremely careful with medication.
In October 1989, I developed kidney infections, and after weeks on antibiotics I woke up one morning in agony. The doctor diagnosed a kidney stone and I was taken to hospital by ambulance. There I warned all the doctors that I had porphyria – and told them that I might be pregnant. Since porphyria is extremely rare outside South Africa and Scandinavia, the British doctors knew very little about the condition and, as I realised afterwards, paid little attention to it for the first few days. An ultrasound showed a kidney stone in my right kidney, and a little white flicker confirmed that I was indeed about six weeks pregnant. I was delighted – with the pregnancy, if not the kidney stone! Of course, my pregnancy meant that the doctors could do nothing apart from pain management for the kidney stone. I was also vomiting frequently, which was put down to morning sickness, and I was becoming dehydrated.
On the night of 8 November, I started to get severe stomach aches and my urine turned dark brown. Within hours I was fighting a losing battle to remain conscious and was having breathing difficulties. I was afterwards told that doctors had no idea what was happening to me. Then a doctor from South Africa overheard them discussing the case and suggested that it might be a severe porphyria attack. He was right: the moment they treated the condition correctly, I improved, but I was semi-comatose