Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (37 page)

Nan fell deeply in love with Tsepo, one of her defendants. She was delighted when she learned she was expecting a child, but a month before her due date, Tsepo was sentenced during a major treason trial and sent to prison on Robben Island. The baby was born while Tsepo was in prison. Nan brought the baby to the prison, but Tsepo was not allowed a contact visit. He could see his child only through a glass window. He yearned to hold her.

Nan’s family disowned her when they learned of the interracial relationship. After Tsepo’s release from prison, he and Nan were married in 1990 in Johannesburg. They now live with their child in Mayfair, a Johannesburg community that was once white Afrikaner and is now predominantly Indian. Quite a few mixed couples live there as well.

Johannesburg, South Africa’s New York City, has slowly changed from a predominantly white city to a largely black one, in the same manner in which American inner cities evolved. In Hillbrow, a downtown section of Johannesburg, there are now sixty to eighty thousand blacks.

Mixed couples are a common sight in Countrvview, South Africa’s first truly integrated community of about 150 families, located halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Andrew and Mary Moorosi-he’s a black South African and she’s a white Canadian-moved to Countrvview after a landlord evicted them from their apartment in Hillbrow. One time when Mary was sick and had to lean on Andrew as they walked down the street, an irate white man ran up to them and shouted at Andrew, “What the hell’s going on here?” They’ve had no such problems in Countryvlew, which they believe is leading the way in showing that South Africans can live together as people with no racial strings attached.

“White hostility against mixed couples iA based on protecting our women,’” Susan said. “A white woman and black man walking down the street are subjected to verbal, and sometimes physical, attacks by white men. It’s happened to me lots of times, even when I’m just walking with one of my defendants and discussing preparations for a trial. I’ve been called a if boetie [“nigger lover”] many times. But now that so many blacks live in Johannesburg, it doesn’t happen that much. It still happens in the dorps’ [small Afrikaner towns].”

Susan says that some liberal whites in South Africa are so eager to appear free of prejudice that they prefer to date black people. “It’s suddenly trendy in antiapartheid circles to be with a black person. I think it’s even becoming a problem. A lot of whites seem to think having a black lover proves they’re not racist. Realizing this, some of the more sexist African men use it to their advantage. They may say, Prove your nonracism to me, baby.” You see more and more white women with biracial children, and they’re usually not married.”

At the memorial service for David Webster-a white antiapartheid activist and lecturer at the liberal University of Witwatersrand who was assassinatedusan saw more than half a dozen biracial babies with their white mothers.

While some mixed couples choose to live in Coloured neighborhoods or in integrated areas like downtown Johannesburg, the black townships were legally off-limits for mixed couples until the Group Areas Act was repealed in 1991.

“If you two were to live in Alexandra,” Susan told us, 0it would be the white system that would create problems for you, not blacks.”

Unlike the United States, where the black power movement has caused many blacks to oppose interracial relationships, South African blacks are usually very accepting of them.

“There is no doubt the black community in Alex would accept you,” Susan said. “But there would be legal issues and questions of safety. With the increasing violence in the townships, nothing’s predictable. I’ve driven through Alex at night hundreds of times. People know me, they recognize my car. But I drove through Alex in a rental car one night and they saw me as just a white woman in a car. They smashed my back and side windows with bricks. A girlfriend from Los Angeles was with me and she was scared to death. She wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. If she hadn’t been with me I probably would have stopped to Fend out who threw the bricks and let them realize they’d attacked a friend. But the violence is starting to scare even me.”

The more polarized blacks and whites become, the more dangerous it is for interracial couples to be seen together.

“It’s the instability and uncertainty of lile here that makes life stressful, maybe even lifethreatening, for mixed couples these Idays,” Susan said.

Though the instability and violence of the ghettos has made life 1hard and dangerous for the few white women living with black men in South Africa’s townships, circumstances are much better for white men who marry or live with black or Coloured women. The reasons are obvious.

White men hold the best jobs and receive the highest incomes in South Africa. In South Africa a white man earns roughly ten times more than a black man. And white men who marry across racial lines are usually not rejected by white society or forced to relocate.

It is interesting that two of South Africa’s leaders who for years had regarded each other as enemies have interracial relationships within their families. Tembi, the daughter of President Oliver Tambo of the African National Congress, is married to a white London banker.

Willem, the younger son of President F. W. de Klerk, is married to Erica Adams, the daughter of a mixed-race Cape politician.

Only five years ago such a marriage would have been more than illegal; it could have destroyed de Klerk’s political career.

Interracial love, while not new in South Africa, is just coming to the surface now that the last apartheid laws have been scrapped. As a result, it still enjoys a sort of vogue with the media and the public.

Yet mixed couples across the country, once their relationships are made public, face the same problems with families, friends, and employers as in America. There is also the constant threat of violence from white right-wing groups, and most decline to be named in the press because of fear for their safety. In the liberal northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where racism is still widespread, mixed couples are frequently invited to parties, where they are exhibited by hosts eager to show how “progressive” they are.

Another much-publicized Johannesburg interracial marriage has been that between black South African singer Mara Louw and her Scottish husband, William Thomson. The couple shares a three-bedroom home in Johannesburg’s all-white northern suburbs, where Mara is often mistaken for a hired gardener by whites and black domestic workers when she tends her flower garden.

“That’s because they don’t expect a black housewife in a white suburb,” Mara said, laughing.

“0 senya makgowa, one Tswana-speaking elderly domestic told her repeatedly. “You’re spoiling those white people.”

Despite the occasional awkwardness of having a white husband and living in the white suburbs of a country rigidly divided along racial lines for decades under apartheid, Mara believes that the fact that she and her husband come from different cultural backgrounds and have different skin colors is “no big deal.”

“Life gets simple when we don’t look at the color and culture of a person,” Mara says. “The more we regard ourselves as people, live together and aim for harmony, the quicker we’ll build a peaceful South Africa.”

William, who emigrated to South Africa ten years ago, praises South Africa’s blacks. “They are warm and friendly with an interesting view about life. There is a strong indication from their part that there is a possibility South Africans can live together in peace if apartheid is scrapped.”

William has been to Mara’s home in Soweto many times, and the neighborhood seems proud of him. “They find me interesting,” he said, “especially when I start juggling Zulu words in an attempt to Impress them.” He laughs about the time he tried to excuse himself by saying “I’m tired” in Zulu, but accidentally said “I’ve soiled myself.”

Mara and William met at Club 58 in 1985 in the Hillbrow section of Johannesburg, an area that has shifted from all-white to racially mixed. By then Mara had released her first single, “Good Love,” and an album titled Ipi Ndela and was also working as an actress. Mara, who was then appearing in My Name Is Alice, went to the club for a drink.

It happened that both she and William had just ended their respective relationships.

Their friendship blossomed into a relationship, though it would have been illegal for them to marry. Shortly after the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was repealed, the couple married at the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court in March 1987.

As often happens when a mixed couple lives in a hostile environment, the couple leads a rather isolated existence. They seldom socialize.

Mara hardly knows her neighbors in the wealthy northern suburb and remains locked in her house much of the day for security reasons. The only welcome gift she received from her neighbors was an anonymous letter in which a neighbor complained about their dog.

When the couple goes out in public, William says, most whites assume that Mara is his maid, not his wife.

Mixed marriages are even occurring in conservative parts of South Africa, strongholds of right-wing and Fascist parties where residents are known for their vehement opposition to even the slightest changes in apartheid and the status quo. Robert Beyi, a white businessman, and his black bride, a Soweto taxi owner named Stella Nkhethoa, were the first interracial couple to marry in Orange Free State, a vast territory settled in the mid-1880s by trek-Boers, the forerunners of today’s Afrikaners. Orange Free State is one of the areas white opponents of integration and democracy in a unified South Africa want to turn into a whites-only homeland.

Stella met Robert in 1983 when she first brought her taxi to his service garage for repairs. After a two-year friendship, they fell in love but kept their relationship secret. Once they decided to marry, the couple ran into a number of difficulties-for instance, the Group Areas Act made it dlflicult for them to find a suitable place to live.

They eventually bought a house in 1889 in the Coloured township of Bronville, halfway between Welkom and Virginia in the northern Free State, but this was possible only after the couple was legally married.

Despite the obstacles, Stella is confident the union will last. “If you love each other you never have to worry about problems or what people will say,” she said. “Your love will be strong enough to get you through.”

In another rigidly conservative area, in the East Rand town of Boksburg, a thirty-two-year-old, Afrikaans-speaking white man named Percy Button married a Zulu woman, Mabel Tshoko Zwane, in magistrate’s court. The mayor of Boksburg, Beyers de Klerk, and one of his councillors were present to “observe President de Klerk’s five-year plan in action.” It was the third mixed marriage to take place in Boksburg in the two years since the Mixed Marriages Act was abolished.

Though the numbers are small, these marriages are significant.

They represent a change in the way whites and blacks in South Africa view each other, pushing them to see each other as human beings with needs and emotions, rather than as enemies in an impending race war.

Some of the pressures on these couples are different from those felt by mixed couples in America. For instance, among South African blacks there is very little opposition to interracial marriages. On the contrary, such marriages are joyously celebrated, with great fanfare and tradition. The white partner in the marriage is made to feel welcomed and a member of the family and community. Despite the color differences of the partners, their marriage is seen as a celebration of love between two human beings, seldom complicated by questions of racial politics and power.

One ;nterracially married couple, Tahirih Senne and Bill Linton, talked about the differences between the way they are treated in South Africa, Tahirih’s homeland, and in America, where they live.

Bill, an architect and Yale graduate from Boston, and Tahirih, a programmer analyst for the U.S. Congress, have helped start an interracial marriage support group in Washington, D.C to create a forum where couples can share common concerns and experiences.

When the couple arrived at Jan Smuts International Alrport in Johannesburg in December 1989, on their way to get married in Mmabatho, Bill was overwhelmed by the warmth and affection showered on him by Tahirih’s family and friends.

“I was kissed, I was embraced, I immediately felt I was part of the family,” Bill said. trvery place we visited I found myself treated with kindness and respect. I was frequently introduced to neighbors.

My love for Tahirih was being reciprocated by everyone who knew her. I was made to feel at home and accepted without doubt or suspicion. It’s different in America. When you live in the United States you 1 breathe in racism every day. It’s so deeply ingrained that most whites can’t even recognize the extent to which it affects their lives. The racially charged atmosphere in America still generates irrational fears that tell me I’d be in danger in a place like Soweto, especially during an upheaval, but I’d probably have nothing to fear. As a white you really stand out in a black township, you’re watched closely at first.

But once people find out who you are and why you’re there, once you treat them as equals, you’re accepted without hesitation.

Blacks would even want to protect you.”

“We walked hand in hand around Johannesburg,” Tahirih said.

“We got a lot of stares, but people were polite enough not to say anything. The white community is slowly changing. While we were there I heard of another mixed couple, a white lecturer and his black wife, who applied to the city council to move to a white suburb. The council granted them permission. I think that, eventually, whites in South Africa will deal with mixed marriages better than many whites in America. Afrikaners don’t deny their prejudices. In the United States overt bigotry isn’t socially acceptable anymore, so there’s a big gap of denial.”

One of Tahirih’s black girlfriends from South Africa said, “It’s řhř inn and Rill are eettme married, but that’s not for me.” An