March 30, 1988

fraid to come out with the news, I timidly announce it to my family over dinner: “They want us to go to the one place we’ve always said we would never go.” My wife, Alena, knows instantly: “Not Pretoria — no!” Our children Katherine and Peter, for their part, claim to have no stomach for leaving a happy high school life in Ottawa to live in a pariah state. Our eldest, Elizabeth, insists she will stay home for university. She has been convinced by the newspapers that we’ll be caught up in grinding police brutality in the black townships. Just then, as in a cheap novel, the lights in our neighbourhood go out. We all sit in darkness, considering our fate.

South Africa, a land of lambent beauty, has been poisoned by racial confrontation since the Dutch first settled the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-seventeenth century. But the situation took a distinct turn for the worse some 300 years later, when the largely Afrikaner National Party formalized racial separation via legislated apartheid, then banned the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s resistance party. Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, becoming an international symbol for the fight against apartheid. Today grassroots resistance is more fervent than ever — even as it is violently suppressed, at arm’s length, by a minority elite.

I joined the Department of External Affairs to build a career in the real Africa, not to hobnob with white diplomats in the segregated halls of Pretoria and Cape Town. The day before we leave in August, John Schioler, the amiable head of the department’s Southern African Task Force, assures me this is a good career move — both Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark are viscerally committed to getting rid of apartheid — but I’m not so sure. Unlike with the refined negotiation of most diplomatic postings, I’m meant to be “in the thick of things,” as Schioler puts it, actively pushing for change, which is not only dangerous, but probably futile.

September 16, 1988

Having more or less settled in, we take our first trip to Soweto, a neat trade-off: our tidy all-white neighbourhood in Pretoria for the teeming chaos of Johannesburg’s townships. Instead of jacaranda-lined avenues of white Cape-style homes, with BMWs in the drive and glistening swimming pools in back, we wend our way through a vast, treeless community of matchbox houses, depressingly uniform in their layout, bathed in twenty-four-hour light from the kind of pylons usually seen towering above prison yards. People, buses, and ramshackle cars jostle for space in the streets. And not a white face in sight.

We are here to visit a Canadian-supported career centre, a scene of hopeless despair: unemployed and unemployable young people grasping at empty straws, left behind by the ravages of second-class Bantu education. I can see now what an insidiously clever invention apartheid is. By legally classifying people as white, black, coloured, and Indian, and then creating separate and inferior schools for the latter three, the former maintain a pool of cheap labour for mining, for domestic work, for the hard-slog shovelling needed to keep them in luxury. Then, at the end of the day, they can force the non-whites to take segregated transport into police-controlled townships, far from their own well-protected bastions.

Apparently, these career centre applicants do not share my dismay or discouragement. They are dancing and singing, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (“God Bless Africa”). Really?

September 24, 1988

A colleague at the embassy, Lucie Edwards, hauls us away from the joys of our swimming pool to attend a detainees’ tea party at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg. The guests are the wives (and sometimes husbands), children, and parents of anti-apartheid workers who have been arrested and tossed into jail, often for indefinite terms. These families are left with no breadwinner, and thus little food and no school fees. Worse, they have no money to retain lawyers for their imprisoned spouses. I feel apprehensive, and for good reason. Instead of tea, we find a resolute crowd chanting struggle songs and marching threateningly around the church hall. We had better get used to it, Edwards says; this toyi-toyi dance will emerge as a fixture wherever we go in the townships; it is the scourge of the police, the nightmare of whites, and the joy of protesting crowds across South Africa.

Taking subtle charge from the corner of the stage is David Webster, from all appearances a white professional with the money to be out golfing. Yet here he is, hosting illicit tea parties for relatives of the country’s cast-offs. Alena and I have already come to marvel at the willingness of a small group of liberal whites like Webster, who it turns out is an anthropologist (but no golfer), to risk an affluence and a sense of security few in Canada could imagine, all in the name of human rights. There is little reason for them to suppose their sacrifices will change anything in the next decade. And there is no reason to expect gratitude for their efforts.

November 1, 1988

In the diplomacy business, you never know what you’re getting into when you accept a social invitation. At a dinner party hosted by activist neighbours in Waterkloof, the issue of sports sanctions is raised over the soup course. Canada has convinced all Commonwealth countries except Britain to impose largely voluntary restrictions on business dealings with South Africa (as external affairs minister Joe Clark says, these sanctions are “to bring South Africa to its senses, not to its knees”), but the ones that seem to hurt the most are those that prevent white South African rugby and cricket teams from competing with New Zealand and Australia. By the time dessert is served, one guest, a well-known orthopaedic surgeon who has been glowering at Alena and me throughout the meal, suddenly bursts out. (Good whisky and wine may have helped.)

“What I’d like to know is why you Canadians can participate in the Olympics and we South Africans can’t!” he demands in flattened Joburg vowels.

“Because we run people like Ben Johnson!’” Alena shoots back.