I was never active politically as a student or in my early working years in South Africa. Like my parents, I was respectful of servants and black helpers generally, but any commitment to anti-apartheid stopped there.<\/p>\n
After working as a librarian for a few years, I saved up enough money for a one-way trip to London, I was not politically motivated, as were so many white South Africans at that time, who could not live with the inequalities of a society divided along racial lines. My reasons for leaving were mixed. Yes, I was aware of the government policies towards blacks and to those fighting apartheid and I was restless and dissatisfied without knowing why. I was unhappy in my personal relationships and I somehow knew there was another world out there, though not what it was and why I wanted to experience it. So off I went on a one-way charter flight. My female co-passengers put their hair in curlers and dressed up for arrival.\u00a0 Plane travel still seemed glamorous to us in those days, those early 1960s. We grew up so far away from anywhere and were so limited in our experience of the world.<\/p>\n
Always responsible and conscientious, I soon had a job and a place to stay \u2013 several different places for a while \u2013 until I settled into sharing a house with three South African girls. Through work, through newly found relatives and new friends, life in London slowly offered up new experiences, personal, cultural and political, though the last not in any radical sense. A variety of young people passed through our house for meals or parties, many were ex-South Africans with strong political beliefs. London was a hotbed of anti-apartheid activity at that time, with so many South Africans \u2013 exiled or choosing exile \u2013 living there. The government\u2019s secret service was also active in keeping an eye on them.<\/p>\n
Someone \u2013 he was Irish \u2013 was introduced to our house and became a friend. He ended up in South Africa and we often wondered if he had been one of the government\u2019s spies. That question was always with us as we looked over our shoulders in those apartheid days. My room-mate, Judy, stuffed envelopes for an anti-apartheid organization run by a fellow ex-Capetonian, but that was about as close as I ever came to actual commitment. We were just liberal in our attitudes and our views. In any event, during those two years abroad, I experienced television for the first time, travelled within Europe and left London to return to South Africa just as Beatlemania was taking over the world.<\/p>\n
Why did I go back? Partly because I was tired of the somewhat \u2018grotty\u2019 UK existence, partly because my parents wanted me to, and perhaps to compare and contrast and decide where I wanted to end up.\u00a0 Like my reasons for leaving South Africa in the first place, my reasons for returning were not clear cut. But I returned \u2013 not a different person \u2013 but certainly one with a broader view of the world. After spending a few days with my parents in our small town, I left for the city to find work and a place to stay. It was hard being back after the freedom of movement London offered. Women did not go out at night on their own in South Africa. It wasn\u2019t a safety issue as much as one of perception. One went out on a date or did not go out.\u00a0 My friend Pam\u2019s mother would lock Pam in her room on a Saturday night, so that visitors would not know she was home.<\/p>\n
As for finding work, I became an editorial researcher for a news magazine. It saw its place as being centrist, bridging the far right \u201cvolk and vaderland\u201d and the far left liberal\/ communists. It was an interesting place to work, it utilized black reporters and photographers on a freelance basis, it exposed me to world affairs, the small staff felt like family and I had the opportunity to write the occasional article on subjects like the opening of a new resort or the significance of tattooing. I made good friends with members of the staff: Robert the film critic, with whom I went to the movies, sometimes two a night, Harald, a political journalist and\u00a0 Ronnie, another journalist. I played bridge with Ronnie and his girlfriend regularly. Our fourth companion\u00a0 at bridge was Paul.<\/p>\n
It was a period of great paranoia. There were many detentions, raids.\u00a0 People disappeared, there were dubious suicides, the government had its spies everywhere and one was unsure of whom to trust. My apartment was burgled one Sunday afternoon. The policeman who came to interview me about it seemed more interested in the books on my shelf than in the incident. Later, in a new apartment, I sensed that some of my things had been disturbed, namely an audio tape, though it was just a personal message from an old boyfriend. I was friendly with a journalist on one of the local newspapers who later became a self-confessed agent for the apartheid government, spying on dissidents and their supporters both in South Africa and in the UK. During my news magazine stint, I took a few weeks off to work as a researcher on a film being made about South Africa for a US public television broadcaster. The filming was quite overt, but all the time we felt we were being watched. The film\u2019s release (it later won a Peabody Award) and my involvement in it caused a flurry of anger in South Africa \u2013 as did any criticism \u2013 but by then I had left the country.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One day Paul did not come to work. He had been detained in police custody. None of us knew about his double life as a political activist. He spent several years in prison as a communist (communism was the synonym for any anti-government activity), later leaving the country for exile in England where he continued to pursue his political beliefs. We never got back in touch. Robert and I had a little fantasy going, that one day if we were both alone, we would move in together into a little rose-covered cottage. That never happened.<\/p>\n
I left South Africa again in 1965 – for the US this time, and it was several years before I went back. I always returned feeling some sort of anxiety, though my political involvement had been almost non-existent. On one trip I was invited to Robert\u2019s home for dinner.\u00a0 By then he had given up journalism for painting. I was looking forward to the company of an old friend and his usual good cooking, but we ended up sitting in a row in front of the television set watching old black-and-white series. South Africa finally got television in 1976 and it became the focus of people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n
I had reconnected with Harald, who was now enjoying a successful post-news magazine career.\u00a0 Some years before, I read in The New York Times that he had won a 1969 Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and was in the USA. It was an opportunity for him to devote a year to learning and exploration before returning to his country to provide critical leadership to the press. I contacted him \u2013 I was living in New York by this time \u2013 and Harald, his wife and baby spent a weekend with me.\u00a0 Ironically, a friend who had planned to go to an anti-apartheid rally ended up babysitting for them. Robert died in 2010, having become a very well-known painter, both in South Africa and in the UK. I don\u2019t know what happened to Ronnie; he left the old country I should think.<\/p>\n
It is hard to convey what that news magazine era was like. It is so different these days when I go back, back to the new South Africa. There is fear of crime and violence, there is political corruption, huge unemployment, but no longer the kind of political persecution of the apartheid years. And wherever I go, I encounter black South Africans as my fellow shoppers and diners, taking care of much of the country\u2019s day-to-day business. I think back to my first day in London, the first day so many years ago of my very first trip abroad. I was on a crowded London bus, and the black conductor shouted for us to move back. My hackles rose, an instinctive reaction from years of the white South African way of life. Who did he think he was?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moving On I was never active politically as a student or in my early working years in South Africa. Like my parents, I was respectful of servants and black helpers generally, but any commitment to anti-apartheid stopped there. After working as a librarian for a few years, I saved up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1888,"parent":193,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-957","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1986,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/957\/revisions\/1986"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}