“For heaven’s sake,” my father said, seeing me off at1
the airport, “don’t get drunk, don’t get pregnant — and don’t
get involved in politics.” He was right to be concerned.
Rhodes University in the late 1970s, with its Sir Herbert4
Baker-designed campus and lush green lawns, looked
prosperous and sedate. But the Sunday newspapers had been
full of the escapades of its notorious drinking clubs and loose7
morals; the Eastern Cape was, after the riots of 1976, a place
of turmoil and desperate poverty; and the campus was thought
by most conservative parents to be a hotbed of political10
activity.
The Nationalist policy of forced removals meant
thousands of black people had been moved from the cities13
into the nearby black “homelands” of Transkei and Ciskei,
and dumped there with only a standpipe and a couple of huts
for company; two out of three children died of malnutrition16
before the age of three. I arrived in 1977, the year after the
Soweto riots, to study journalism. Months later, Steve Biko
was murdered in custody. The campus tipped over into19
turmoil. There were demonstrations and hunger strikes.
For most of us, Rhodes was a revelation. We had been
brought up to respect authority. Here, we could forge a whole22
new identity, personally and politically. Out of that class of
1979 came two women whose identities merge with the
painful birth of the new South Africa: two journalism students25
whose journey was to take them through defiance,
imprisonment and torture during the apartheid years.
One of the quietest girls in the class, Marion Sparg,28
joined the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK),
and was eventually convicted of bombing two police stations.
An Asian journalist, Zubeida Jaffer, was imprisoned and31
tortured, yet ultimately chose not to prosecute her torturers.
Today you can trace the footprints of my classmates
across the opposition press in South Africa and the liberal34
press in the UK — The Guardian, the Observer and the
Financial Times. Even the Spectator (that’s me). Because
journalism was not a course offered at “black” universities,37
we had a scattering of black students. It was the first time
many of us would ever have met anyone who was black and
not a servant. I went to hear Pik Botha, the foreign minister,40
a Hitlerian figure with a narrow moustache, an imposing bulk
and a posse of security men. His reception was suitably
stormy, even mocking — students flapping their arms and43
saying, “Pik-pik-pik-P-I-I-I-K!’, like chattering hens.
But students who asked questions had to identify
themselves first. There were spies in every class. We never46
worked out who they were, although some of us suspected the
friendly Afrikaans guy with the shark’s tooth necklace.
Janice Warman. South Africa’s Rebel Whites.
In: The Guardian Weekly, 20/11/2009 (adapted).