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A journalist and her activist friend, once prevented by the color of their skins from socializing openly, savor life without apartheid
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On the surface, it was an ordinary Saturday-night outing to see the hit movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding in the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Hyde Park.
But it had taken my friend and me a lifetime to get there.
So I found myself laughing as we fussed about where to sit, recalling that 40 years earlier, when Amina Cachalia and I first met, the color of her skin would have ensured she never got through the door of the cinema.
For Amina is of Indian descent, and, in the world of apartheid, South African whites and nonwhites never openly socialized. Everything from going to the park -- to the bench you could sit on -- was defined by race
"Can you believe we are doing this?" I asked Amina, who had helped stoke the fires that, in 1994, eventually toppled the white regime. "Who would have thought we would have lived to see this day."
As we bought our $3 tickets to the 8 p.m. show, I was still trying to absorb the heady reality of a South Africa without racial barriers.
It had taken me 36 years to return. And from the moment the plane touched down at Johannesburg International Airport, freedom had assaulted my senses.
What it's like
The South African Airlines Boeing 747 cast a shadow over the red-, green- and gold-checkered landscape as the flight from New York approached the Johannesburg airport on Nov. 13.
While the plane circled the city, I recalled my arrival at the airport in November 1964 after a vacation in England. I had been staying with my parents when the Nationalist Government served notice that it had taken away my right to enter South Africa without a visa -- virtually making me a prohibited immigrant. I had been warned that the security police might arrest me on my return.
So, throughout the 12-hour flight from London, I had been tormented with visions of being hauled off to jail and interrogated. I had been taken in once for questioning by the security police about a story I had written for the Rand Daily Mail and it wasn't an experience I was keen to repeat. Luckily, this time, nothing happened. The fear factor was typical of the white South African government.
Last November, I arrived in Johannesburg filled not with a sense of menace but elation and curiosity. Gone were the despicable signs declaring areas off-limits to blacks -- the same signs that had once branded every building, public place or structure. Now it was blacks, freed by the 1994 elections that swept Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress to power, who checked passports and baggage and manned the airline ticket counters.
As soon as I reached my hotel, I called Amina, and we arranged that I would stay with her before I returned to the United States -- a simple invitation that once would have been fraught with danger.
Friendship begins
Amina and I think we first met at an anti-apartheid demonstration in 1962, a time when the government was almost daily tightening the screws in the name of racial separation. It was a policy enforced with a religious fervor, resulting in a steady stream of oppressive laws.
Social intercourse between the races was frowned upon and likely to draw the attention of the Special Branch, which was dedicated to cracking down on anyone suspected of being an enemy of the government.
Amina was a passionate, articulate and fearless campaigner against apartheid. Barely 5 feet and 100 pounds, she organized protests, led demonstrations and confronted and confounded the enforcers of apartheid at every turn. She was unforgettable, as Mandela wrote in a 1981 letter from his prison cell on Robben Island.
"Throughout these past 18 yrs. [sic] I still think of you as the young maiden I left behind in '62, disturbingly attractive and cute . . . that picture never dies Amina."
The friendship of the young reporter for the Rand Daily Mail and the seasoned activist was, by the very nature of the times, furtive. It involved dodging the police, meeting in secret at each other's homes, hardly ever being seen in public together, and knowing every phone call was likely tapped, and each letter opened.
In the four years we hung out, Amina and I never had a meal together in public, let alone thought of going to a movie. We usually met in the kitchen of the Cachalia home in Fordsburg, an area on the edge of downtown Johannesburg that was reserved by the government for Indians only. We would talk about politics and protests, but freedom was a word we seldom uttered. As hated as the government was, it seemed impossible to imagine that apartheid would be dismantled in our lifetimes.
Amina and her husband, Yusuf, were regular targets of the security police, who almost nightly patrolled the streets outside their home, taking down the license numbers of any cars in the vicinity. They were always under some sort of banning order -- including, in Yusuf's case, 24-hour house arrest. The draconian bans, described by Mandela as a kind of "walking imprisonment," restricted where they could go and who they could see and limited gatherings to no more than three people. So when we had dinner together, one person had to sit in an adjoining room and shout -- just in case there was a police raid.
Like Mandela and other giants of the liberation movement, the Cachalias spent their adult lives being raided, arrested, imprisoned, banned or on trial. But protest was in their blood. Their fathers had been followers of Mahatma Gandhi, who once wrote: "Give me 100 Cachalias and I can free the world."
Yusuf, the secretary general of the South African Indian Congress, had worked with Mandela and other ANC leaders for decades, helping to organize nonviolent demonstrations and plot strategy. Amina was in the forefront of apartheid protests.
The tenor of the opposition changed after government forces gunned down 69 black men, women and children and wounded 180 during a demonstration at Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. The massacre prompted Mandela to form a guerrilla arm of the ANC called Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, and the following year launch attacks against government buildings.
On trial
Mandela went underground only to be betrayed and arrested in 1962. Two years later, he and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela had admitted organizing sabotage attacks, and in an unforgettable speech told why he was prepared to die so all South Africans could live free.
Memories of the trial came flooding back on my third day in South Africa when I went to Pretoria, the country's administrative capital. In the square near the old Supreme Court building where Mandela was tried, a statue of Paul Kruger, the late 19th-century Boer hero, still stands. The new government has been in no hurry to remove the icons of the old.
I covered the trial and on June 12, 1964, was outside the Supreme Court after Mandela and the others were sentenced. For weeks, tensions throughout the country had grown along with fears that the Rivonia defendants, as they were known, would be sentenced to death. But Justice Quartus de Wet, in an amazing turn of events, spared their lives.
With Mandela'ss wife, Winnie, I watched as he was driven away in a police van. Through the window you could see a clenched fist raised in the African Nationalist Congress salute, which was greeted with screams of "Amandla (power)" from the thousands of Africans packing the square. Despite provocation from the police and white thugs imported to stir up trouble, the stunned crowd was amazingly restrained.
"The thought of those eight men serving life sentences, and that means life here, is horrifying," I had written in a letter home that night.
Universally revered
It was impossible in those days to imagine that Mandela would ever be free, let alone that he would become president of South Africa.
Now, universally loved and revered, his stature seems to grow daily and fans still gather outside the four- bedroom house at 8115 Orlando West, in the black township of Soweto that he returned to after his release from prison in 1990. Mandela long ago moved to a walled compound in Houghton, one of Johannesburg's most exclusive suburbs -- driven out by the crowds of admirers who staged round-the-clock vigils outside the house.
Soweto, once called the South-Western Township, was created as part of the apartheid government's plan for separate development. Africans were not allowed to own property, and the houses they could rent were little more than shacks. Today Soweto includes areas of expensive, upper-middle-class homes and has a population of some 4.5 million people.
Back in the 1960s, if you were white, Soweto was off limits. I once had to outrun the police after they spotted me dropping off a friend and gave chase, lights flashing, sirens screaming. Now, I was eating lunch at Wandies, a township restaurant that was started as an illegal bar in a garage 22 years ago. The restaurant was packed with tourists from all corners of the world eager to taste the South African equivalent of soul food and get the black urban experience.
Soweto is one of the cradles of the battle for freedom, as vital a part of South African history as the beaches of Normandy are to World War II. Robben Island, a former leper colony located off the coast of Cape Town, also is indelibly linked with the legend of Mandela.
Robben Island
Ahmed Kathrada, who was sentenced with Mandela and spent 26 years on the island as prisoner number 468/64, wrote the words that greet visitors.
"While we will not forget the brutality of apartheid, we will not want Robben Island to be a monument of our hardship and suffering. We would want it to be a triumph of the human spirit against the forces of evil," Kathrada wrote.
Mandela spent more than 18 years on Robben Island. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, he writes about how he and the other prisoners spent 12 or more hours a day, seven days a week beating rocks in a limestone quarry.
The quarry is one of the main stops on the island tour taken by about 300,000 visitors each year. The guides are ex-political prisoners such as Eugene Mokgoasi, 42, who as a teenager took part in student protests, which earned him a seven-year sentence on Robben Island.
Mokgoasi, a member of the rival Pan-African Congress, doesn't hide his criticism of Mandela and the new South Africa.
"People still live in shacks, and the ghettos are disease-infested," Mokgoasi said. "Anger is simmering. A lot of people are saying that Mandela has been shielding the white people. They say he is not a saint but the right man at the right spot."
As he talked, Mokgoasi pointed out the 6-foot by 10-foot cells where Mandela and the other prisoners were held. Outside, in the barren exercise yard, you could see traces of the small garden Mandela created.
The meeting
It wasn't until I returned to Johannesburg near the end of my trip that I was able to spend time with Amina. She found me in the lobby of the Rosebank Hotel, and, after hugs and tears, we assured each other that we hadn't changed a bit.
Amina, 72, took me back to her spacious apartment in the once white suburb of Killarney, and we talked for hours. We recalled the fight to get her admitted to a whites-only hospital so she could undergo heart surgery. She told me how the government refused to allow her son Ghaleb to return to South Africa after he went to London to visit her sister when he was 14 years old. It took eight years to get the government to relent and allow him to return home.
"Can you imagine? He was stuck in London, a bewildered 14-year-old," Amina said.
From a box in her bedroom, Amina unearthed a pile of letters that Mandela had written to the Cachalias from prison.
"I am more than one thousand kilometers away from you, but I think of you daily," Mandela wrote from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, congratulating Yusuf on his 75th birthday. ". . . Your contribution to the struggle has been enormous."
Mandela phones her often and, after Yusuf died in 1995, offered Amina an ambassadorship. But she said she could never decide on a country.
"He offered me Bangladesh," she said. "But I thought Bangladesh is full of natural disasters, and I'd be one of them. He offered Kuwait and Japan, but in the end we decided I should stay in South Africa."
The next day we went further down memory lane, visiting the MuseumAfrica in downtown Johannesburg. Along several walls are photographs of the accused in the 1950s Treason Trial, a veritable who's who of the liberation movement.
We stopped at Accused No. 13 -- Helen Joseph, the first person to be placed under house arrest in South Africa. I had covered the story and become close friends with Helen, once arranging for her to meet Amina secretly in my home. As I wrote a tribute in the book beneath Helen's name, I sadly noted the dates 1905- 1992. For some, freedom came too late.
Before we headed back to her apartment, we stopped outside Amina's former home in Fordsburg and took a snapshot for old time's sake.
Later, we decided to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which, in its own endearing way, sent the same message that Mandela and others who took part in the struggle against apartheid had spent decades trying to impart to white South Africans.
Near the end of the movie, the Greek father of the bride toasts his daughter and the WASP she has married by noting that their surnames come from the Greek words for apple and orange.
"We're all different," the father says, "but in the end, we're all fruit."
Copyright © 2007 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.