The women in the IDASA delegation formed a disparate group, including community workers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, social workers, nursing sisters and housewives, all from a wide spectrum of political persuasions. There was a feisty academic from UWC (“University of the Wild Coloureds”, she called it); a mother of an awaiting-trial prisoner on a treason charge; a cabaret artist whose songs brought tears to our eyes and who would later become an ANC MP; and a Democratic Party enthusiast who rather crassly urged everyone to vote DP, when many in her audience did not even have the vote. We were a mixed bunch indeed and judging by the conversation of some of the delegates, the Black Sashers sometimes felt way out on the far left wing.
The ANC women came as a surprise. We had known that they would be politically sophisticated, and the firebrands were certainly present. Some were young, glamorous and fashionably dressed, and highly articulate. They had been to the ANC school in Tanzania or to universities in the Eastern bloc or the States. The white women among them seemed to me to have a sneering tone, looking down on us as naïve, middle-class
amalungu
who came nowhere near matching their commitment to the cause. But most of us were surprised to find older women of enormous warmth and generosity, including three members of the ANC hierarchy. Many of them had been in exile for a very long time, some having left behind small children whom they would next meet as teenagers or adults. There was a grandmotherly communist with her East European accent and her braided hair, who defended Stalin with tears coursing down her cheeks; an erudite cultural attaché, graduate of Rutgers University, in jangling earrings and bracelets; and a razor-sharp barrister from London in a colourful, flowing sari.
It was apparent that the ANC women had planned very carefully for the conference and were strategic in their arguments and responses. By contrast, our group was too disparate for any cohesive thinking. As there were several of us from the Black Sash, we were at least able to caucus and present a united front. There were times of empty rhetoric and gross overstatement, when we seemed merely a gathering of Lenin's “useful idiots”, and I wondered whether the whole conference was really just an ANC public relations exercise. At other times the divisions between the delegations seemed just too deep to cross. Discussions on conflict and violence threatened to degenerate into bitter recrimination, while thorny issues such as sanctions, majority rule, affirmative action and the economy gave rise to sharp differences too. Even the final plenary session was in danger of ending inconclusively, until Frene Ginwala, the barrister from London who would later become the first Speaker of the National Parliament, pulled together the many loose strands and highlighted our unity of purpose.
Several Zimbabwean women addressed the conference with lessons from their liberation experience. They lauded the vision of the gathering, regretting that Zimbabweans had not had a similar chance to meet and discuss their situation. Too many Rhodesians had tried to prevent the future instead of preparing for it. They pointed out that although Zimbabwean women had made major contributions to the liberation struggle, few received any political rewards. Many a story was told of how Comrade Freedom, who had fought alongside the men and commanded units during the war, had been relegated to tea girl during peacetime. “National liberation does not necessarily square up with female liberation,” we were warned. Years later, reading about Mugabe's infamous Matabeleland massacres in Peter Godwin's book
Mukiwa
, I did also wonder why events like that were airbrushed out of the conference.
In the documentary,
Chain of Tears
, directed by Toni Strasburg, we saw the effects on children of covert raids by the South African Defence Force, aimed at destabilising and flushing out opposition forces in Mozambique, Botswana and Angola. The full personal horror of it came home to us when we heard stories about some of the bombings suffered by those in exile. A young woman told of how her student husband was killed by a car bomb in Gaborone. She was late for work and he went outside to start the car. She heard a bang and a neighbour came running to tell her what had happened. “It is hard to tell what I saw,” said Jackie through her tears. “Just pieces of his body." A young girl from Grahamstown who had fed the country at the time of the upheavals in the schools, wept one night as she told Ina Roux, a therapist and keen member of the Sash in Grahamstown and me, about her living conditions in exile, first in an ANC camp and then in Lusaka. She had left Grahamstown in a blaze of adventure but the reality of exile proved far from romantic. She earned 14 qwashas a month, plus a housing subsidy and food rations; 12 qwashas paid for a beer. The official word was that in Lusaka everyone was paid the same, from the leaders down to the lowliest messenger. Presumably exiles living in first-world cities enjoyed a much better lifestyle.
On the whole we were all careful not to fracture the conference's fragile unity, and sincere efforts were made to find ways of acknowledging a shared, if unequal, experience of oppression. The message that came through most clearly from all the ANC women was their longing to come home and be full human beings in the country of their birth. In summing up the conference, Frene Ginwala stressed that a chink had been opened in the barriers between us and that our mutual understanding had been enhanced through the exchange of personal experiences. In the end there was hardly a dry eye in the hall when we linked arms and sang
We Shall Overcome
and
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
. Even in spite of some troubling signs, there seemed to be so much hope for a bright future.
In January 1990, less than a year after Harare, a Cape Town colleague and I were invited to represent the Black Sash at another conference, this time in Amsterdam, which would again bring together delegations from inside South Africa and out. Organised by the Women's Committee of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Malibongwe conference, aimed to highlight the women's struggle. More than 150 South African women met to consider their role in the liberation movement and in a free and democratic South African future. FW de Klerk had just taken over from PW Botha as State President and of course he had earth-shaking surprises up his sleeve. But at least to us in the home delegation, his imminent announcement of the unbanning of the ANC was entirely unknown. Who knows how much the exile delegates knew?
We were due to fy to Amsterdam on New Year's Eve. Just after Christmas, Malvern, Charlotte, Lucy and I went to Nature's Valley for a few days of relaxation by the lagoon, meals out of doors and convivial conversations with friends. The forests encircling the valley were cool in the summer heat, and in the sea we spotted schools of dolphins. It was with some reluctance that I packed my suitcase with winter clothes and headed for the airport. Did I really want to be in Europe in January? My hesitation only increased when we got to the Port Elizabeth airport to find the concourse deserted and my name not on the passenger list. Time ticked by and the fight was about to be called when there was a sudden outbreak of hooting and screeching of brakes. A feet of taxis disgorged the Port Elizabeth delegates and their supporters into the departures hall, several of them wearing the banned ANC colours and one of them waving our air tickets. “Grab your ticket!” shouted Malvern as I was swept up in the crowd, through the check-in gates and onto the plane without saying a proper goodbye. Lucy told me later how thrilling she'd found it to be surrounded by that crowd, feeling that the hopes and fears of South Africa went with our plane.
It was clear from the start that Malibongwe would be very different from the meeting in Harare. I soon realised that there were hidden agendas and complex intrigues that I in my naïve idealism had not anticipated. This time I was also more outspoken, and my criticisms did not go unmarked. “Are you for or against the ANC, Rosie?” a bemused Ruth Mpathi, one of the leaders of the ANC Women's League in exile would ask at the end. In Harare the ANC had addressed itself in fairly careful tones to the largely white contingent from South Africa. At Malibongwe the tone was different. The 150 women who travelled from South Africa came mostly from backgrounds of cruel and ongoing suffering and struggle, while those in exile in Africa, Europe and America seemed, by comparison, to be viewing the country through somewhat distant and analytical eyes. Karin Chubb, a fellow Sasher from Cape Town and I found the predominant focus on militarism and armed resistance quite disturbing. After hearing addresses by women from the Philippines struggle and the Cuban Women's Movement, and a female Palestinian soldier, we felt it would have been good to hear from women who had resisted oppression in non-violent ways, such as Argentinians or Indians. I became friendly with a young girl in our delegation who did development work in a small fishing community on the west coast of South Africa, where sand, sea and sky made up her horizon. She told me in horrified tones that two people at the conference were actively trying to recruit her for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC. Becoming a soldier was the last thing on her mind.
As with the Harare conference, the most important thing to come out of Malibongwe was the human contact, and this began even on the journey to Amsterdam. What should have been an overnight fight turned into a three-day excursion when our plane was diverted from a fog-engulfed Paris, to Toulouse and then Lyons. Travellers on South African passports were not allowed out of the transit lounge, which gave us plenty of time for bonding. I still had a British passport and had the added bonus of being able to make myself understood in French, thus I soon became the chief negotiator with airline representatives, airport officials and police. I was just beginning to enjoy myself when my enthusiasm was firmly reined in by one of our party, a born again radical with the immortal words, “Rosemary, before you do anything further we must workshop this!” My family was delighted with this story and the phrase passed indelibly into Smith family parlance, to be used to subdue me whenever I became over-enthusiastic.
In the course of the long journey people began to swap life stories. I met the widow of one of the Cradock Four, Sicelo Mhlauli, who was a classmate of Lucy's at UCT. I made the acquaintance of Thandi Modise, the “knitting needles guerrilla”, an MK operative whose cover was to carry a handbag with protruding knitting needles. Her two children had been brought up by her mother while she was in training camps in Botswana, Tanzania and Angola. As in Harare, I again met women who had forfeited their mothering for exile and the fight for liberation. It's a sacrifice I wholeheartedly respected, but not one I felt I could have made.
Amsterdam was grey and cold, brightened, thankfully, by the group of Dutch women who greeted us at the airport bearing bunches of flowers. And yet, just as I had begun to think that I was a South African after all, I fell in love with Europe all over again. I loved the tall, narrow houses, the bridges, canals and fleets of bicycles, and when darkness fell, the lighted windows revealing warm interiors which beckoned, often with Christmas trees still on show. One evening all the delegates had supper on board barges on the canals, before taking part in a torchlight procession accompanied by a jazz band and led by police on horseback. At night Karin and I would go to the American hotel adjacent to the conference centre and drink gluwein at midnight. It was great to be in a city again, and we felt enveloped in warm Dutch hospitality.
On our first day in Amsterdam we attended an ecumenical service entitled “Children and Peace” in the Dominicuskerk. Brass chandeliers lit the soaring ceiling and windows of the old church, and part of the service involved the lighting of candles. It was an afternoon of juxtapositions as the warmth and light inside the church held back the icy darkness outside, and the melodic harmonies of singing contrasted with the harrowing stories told by South African women from the pulpit. It was a powerful start to our time together. Later that week, sitting in the Amsterdam City Hall, gilt mirrors sparkling, redolent of the grandeur of a golden age, I again had to pinch myself. Was I really sitting in Europe, amongst women from the ANC?
The first week was spent visiting small towns and meeting various women's and civil rights organisations, which had given money towards the conference. My party visited the city of Heerlen, two hours by train from Amsterdam. There, we spoke about ourselves and the organisations we represented. It was clear that most people thought of the South African struggle as a purely black one, so it gave me pleasure to talk about the work of the Black Sash. At the end of the day we were each given an album with photos and messages. One of the messages said, “Dear Rosemary. For me it was very surprising to see a white woman who fights active against apartheid."
One day we saw the film of Andre Brink's novel,
A Dry
White Season
. Portraying detention and police brutality on township streets, the film had been banned in South Africa. Except for a fine performance by Marlon Brando, it was not a great artistic achievement, but its impact on the audience of Malibongwe delegates affected me deeply. For many it was a painful experience seeing a mirror of their own tragedies on screen. Women began to keen and some had to leave the cinema. I had never experienced such identification with a film and I was extremely moved.
I made friends with fellow delegates and began to feel at home in the Malibongwe milieu. But once the closed sessions commenced and we began to tackle issues in smaller groups, the mood changed. The ANC delegates now seemed harder and I sensed that it became necessary for them to toe the party line. There was little genuine exploration of world-views or searching analysis of power structures. Dissension was not easily brooked, but Karin and I were impressed by a woman who worked for the ANC in East Germany. She was open in her disillusionment with communism and the ANC. Exile, for her, had become a bitter experience. Karin visited her in Berlin afterwards and said that she was wondering where her place in the new South Africa would be.