From afar

The times were angry. Things were going from bad to worse at home during the middle to late 1980s. We were mobilising against the regime on both sides of the Atlantic. And I was delighted to see how students on American campuses were responding to the disinvestment campaign, forcing universities in that country to withdraw their financial holdings in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.

Despite our political work as South African students on foreign campuses there was the guilt of distance, the feeling of not being able to be with my high school students as stories of torture, killings, detentions and disappearances kept coming through to my place of study and activism in California.

I had recently returned from a large conference of angry black South Africans in Tennessee, in the south of the United States, where I was elected secretary of the Student Representative Council leading this group of students studying in the USA. There, the ANC representative at the United Nations, the brilliant medical student David Ndaba (his exile name), lifted our spirits with his closing remarks: ‘Let's march, right now, to Pretoria.’ There, G M Nkondo fortified our commitment with his thunderous admonition: ‘black man, you are on your own!’. With those words, of course, the need for another Steve Biko surfaced in all night discussion among all of us, including some of those comrades loyal to congress politics. The times were very angry.

At about this time Richard Attenborough released his film Cry Freedom, and a whole contingent of South African comrades and anti-apartheid American activists descended on a cinema in San Francisco to watch the movie on opening night. For the South Africans it was a rare but powerful opportunity to make a connection, any connection, to what was happening back at home; it did not matter that this was a Hollywood depiction of a distant struggle. The theatre was packed to capacity, mainly with black people, all activists. It was the first time I had sat in a movie and felt an audience constantly speaking back at the criminals masquerading as police; but for the most part, the audience was relaxed.