Mapping My Way Home. Stephanie Urdang
in the civil rights movement. They came from various political persuasions—pacifism, nonviolent civil disobedience, communism, anticolonialism, the radical black movements of the 1950s and 1960s—but they saw the parallels between racism in the United States and South Africa, parallels that I was only just beginning to grasp.
Janet’s workspace off the long, narrow passage was small. She sat behind her desk, her shoulder-length straight light brown hair pulled back, blue eyes focused on me. Just a few years older than I, she radiated confidence and efficiency and with a direct, querying gaze that was taking me in. I was awestruck.
“What can I do for you?” she asked in her deep voice. I took a breath and launched in. “I’m from South Africa,” I said, smiling a bit sheepishly, knowing my accent was a giveaway. “I’ve been here a few months. And I am wondering whether there is anything I could offer to ACOA.”
Janet asked a few questions about my background, why I came, what I was doing here. After sizing me up, she said, “There is though something you might be interested in,” and went on to tell me about the Southern Africa Committee, which was about to expand its newsletter into a monthly magazine to provide news about a region that was conspicuously absent from the regular media.
“Protest needs to be supplemented by sound information,” Janet continued. “Information about the wider struggle against apartheid and the wars of liberation in the Portuguese colonies. Would you like to join us? Your knowledge of South Africa could really help.”
Would I indeed? I took down the information for the next meeting two weeks hence and left the office, elated.
I became integrated into the Southern Africa Committee and its dedicated, hardworking volunteers, all with a single purpose of helping to end colonialism in Africa and apartheid. As we planned the new format for the Southern Africa magazine, I was asked to be its editor. “Editor” was a loose term. It was a collective effort by a committee operating on a shoestring, barely able to pay its bills—we were forever one small hop ahead of the printing costs, relying on grants from faith-based organizations and small foundations. Subscriptions added little. My role was to see the process through from start to finish—nagging writers who were invariably tardy with their copy, editing for language and grammar, sending copy to the typesetters, working with a core group late into the night to lay out the magazine—pasting the long strips into columns and using Letraset letters for the headings—and finally sending it off to the printers to be turned into a black-and-white newsprint magazine. At its height we had about five thousand subscribers, mostly academics and activists in the solidarity movement, with some newsstand sales. We sent copies to the offices of the liberation movements of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau in Africa, Europe, and New York, where they had observer status in the United Nations. Much of the content was culled from international newspapers, which paid more attention to the region than the U.S. papers. My father clipped articles from the press in the UK and sent them to me each month in a large manila envelope.
I had arrived in the States believing that if average, peace-loving Americans could only understand the repressive and brutal nature of apartheid, this would spark sufficient sympathy and outrage to pressure their own government, which in turn would pressure the South African government to end apartheid. I was quickly disabused of my naïveté by the other members of the Southern Africa Committee, who viewed U.S. complicity with apartheid as self-evident. This came as a bit of a jolt. Back home I had taken U.S. products for granted: Coca-Cola, Lever Brothers, American gas for my car—it was all just part of trade. But now I was learning that trade wasn’t simply trade. I was opening my mind to the fact that United States corporate investment played an important role in expanding the South African economy and bolstering the apartheid system. U.S. and other foreign investment brought increasing capital and, even more significantly, technical expertise that enabled the growth of an efficient modern economy, all the better to invest in. U.S.-manufactured computers were used for the pass system; Polaroid cameras were used to take the photos of the holder of the pass; GM engines were often found in police trucks that arrested anti-apartheid protestors. This support by the U.S. government meant that U.S. corporations were reaping huge profits by investing in South Africa, while South Africa grew stronger and ever more oppressive.
At the same time, I was learning that ongoing wars in countries along South Africa’s borders had been launched three years before I left.
I was becoming part of a movement that was global, one bent on isolating the apartheid regime, not just condemning it. In the process, I gained an identity, a mantle I donned comfortably: I was an antiapartheid activist.
ONE OF THE FIRST PURCHASES ERIC and I had made after moving into our new apartment in Hoboken was a twelve-inch TV set. It cost a week’s salary. We turned on the news as soon as we got home (Walter Cronkite vied for our attention with The Huntley-Brinkley Report) and checked the pocket-sized TV guide for other programs worth watching. After a lifetime without TV it was easy to become addicts. Blasted out of inward-lookng, local politics into a vast world without parameters, I was slowly learning to absorb and analyze the news from the vantage point of the most powerful nation in the world. Arriving in the United States when we did, at the end of 1967, meant being inducted into the cascading events of 1968, a year that would shape and color the politics, history, and culture of the country for decades to come. I watched, astounded, debates between Black Panthers and white liberals on Channel 13, New York’s public media channel, thinking, “Oh my God! What freedom!” These people would be jailed or at least banned back home. It did not take me long to appreciate that “freedom” was not meted out in equal portions. It was a fast-track education and I was sucked right in.
In October 1967, I marched with a hundred thousand others against the Vietnam War. The protestors represented every age, every race, every ethnicity, every economic class—another eye-opener, another mind-extender. Just five months later, President Lyndon Johnson came on the television, his fleshy, solemn face filling our small screen. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President,” he said. His popularity was at an all-time low because of the war. Protest worked!
Four days later, on April 4, 1968, I turned on the news to hear Walter Cronkite announce the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. All hell broke loose. Black ghettos in cities across the nation exploded with anger; looting and burning expressed the sense of helplessness and futility provoked not only by the violent death of a widely revered man committed to nonviolence but by pervasive racism in America. Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 left me angry and apprehensive. I was beginning to adjust to this country, to drive in my first tentative stake, acknowledging that this land could be mine.
Yet there was something missing. The anti-apartheid activism was essentially a movement of activist Americans to which I added my voice. It did not connect me with the struggle back home.
I SIT HIP TO HIP WITH ANC representative Mazisi Kunene, a senior member of the movement, squashed in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle. We are returning to New York in February 1969 after a weekend away at a conference on apartheid. For much of the five-hour journey I am a willing listener to the stories he spins about his work, his frequent trips to New York, his mission to raise funds for the ANC through the sale of art. His gentle way, his humor, his roundness, and the growing affection between us as the car speeds south gives me the feeling of finding home. It is known territory. It appears reciprocal, the home connection piquing his interest in me, as someone young enough to mold and draw into the movement. A sister in struggle.
By the time we drive into Manhattan my heart is racing and I feel slightly lightheaded, charged with adrenalin—as if I had just met the man of my dreams. But this isn’t about love. It is about having discovered something out there in the world that I can grasp, a new sense of possibility, a connection to home. As I exit the car, Mazisi writes down his number on a scrap of paper and hands it to me.
“Call me,” he says. “We have more to discuss. I have work for you to do.” I nod and say thank you. We shake hands through the rolled-down window. I pull my bag out of the trunk and head toward the subway. The crisp spring evening air is as inviting as any open veld in South Africa. It is sweet. Life is sweet.