Every morning, when I awake, I push my way through a smog of dread. I reach for my phone, fumble for my glasses, open my email. Headlines filled with doom bombard me. I read on until I can't anymore: the ongoing U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, the destruction of the West Bank by the Israeli government and colonial settlers, the wars against Iran and Lebanon, the attacks on undocumented immigrants as criminals, the mass deportation, the separation of families and the fear they feel every moment of their day.
Undeniably fortunate, I have not lived that fear. But I recognize it.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, a racist totalitarian police state. My parents were activists in their youth and stayed committed to their socialist principles throughout their lives. Refrains from my childhood echo today: "Apartheid is evil"; "The vast majority of South Africans are oppressed"; "Only an uprising of the down-trodden will bring an end to apartheid." My parents saw the United States, which backed the South African government, as "the belly of the beast."
As I grew older the impact of apartheid on the majority of South Africans became clearer. My parents stressed to me my privilege as a white child, but I had to learn what that meant. I had to peel away the propaganda and lies of the apartheid regime to expose my distress and anger at what most South Africans endure daily. African children knew - as did their parents - what it meant to be black or brown in a land of repressive laws that exploited their labor and kept them subjugated, uneducated and impoverished.
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Living now in the United States, these realities resonate with me daily. Fewer than 14 percent of the 400,000 undocumented people seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the past year have a criminal history. Trump announced he would deport criminals, the "worst of the worst", first.
The administration claims that undocumented workers cost the U.S. economy 'billions.' In fact, mass deportation is costing about $88 billion per year, while undocumented immigrants contribute over $2.2 trillion to the economy through taxes, economic value to their employers, and as consumers. Most of these non-citizens work many hours at poorly paid jobs that American citizens decline to take. The construction, industrial, agricultural and hospitality sectors are under stress for lack of workers.
South Africa's apartheid rulers 'deported' black Africans to barren 'homelands.' They were set up and, through the pernicious system of passes, made sure that only those who had work could legally remain in the white urban areas. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and deported for pass offenses to the so-called 'homelands' reducing labor shortages affecting the white minority and impoverishing everyone else. Whites felt entitled to the labor of domestic workers, gardeners and other underpaid workers. Those who abhorred the system, like my parents, were few and far between. My father would go on a rant about the pass laws. Africans had to carry these demeaning permits at all times. They contained information about the bearer, such as whether he/she had permission to be in a white area, whether he/she had permission to work, and other personal information. Passes controlled every moment and every movement of their day.
My father, an activist in his youth, opened his law practice in Athlone, a residential area in Cape Town whose residents were mostly by Coloureds – a distinct ethnic and cultural population of mixed-race heritage. He used to say that he never wanted to handle the wills and divorces of privileged white clients. He would rather practice law that mattered.
When I was seven, the Group Areas Act of 1950 was passed. Its purpose was to segregate the races as defined by law – Bantu (African), white, Coloured and Indian (south Asian). Each group was assigned to their own section near the urban areas. Whites occupied the cities and the most developed areas. Athlone was declared a Coloured area. All others were forced to move, most losing everything.
As a white working in a Coloured area, my father was issued permits to work for five years at a time. Then, in 1966, a one-year permit. He knew it would be his last.
In the early 1980s I met an exile from Athlone at an anti-apartheid conference in Montreal. "Are you Joe's daughter?" she asked. Yes, I replied. "I remember you!" she exclaimed, laughing with joy. "When you were a little kid you would stand outside your father's office, your hair in bunches, smiling and saying hullo to every skollie (hoodlum) that walked past!" We hugged and I laughed with her. "A good man", she said. He had died five years earlier.
Long buried memories surfaced. When I was in elementary school, I spent many afternoons at my father's store-front office. My favorite pastime was to stand on the sidewalk watching the world spinning around me. Athlone was a thriving and vibrant community, so different from my white suburb with its large houses and green lawns and flower gardens, where neighbors nodded to each other, but rarely interacted. The only function for black and brown people there was to serve their white baas (boss) and madam.
The "beginning of the end of apartheid"
Protests were inevitable. On March 21st1960, over 5,000 peaceful protestors gathered in the black township of Sharpeville. Police shot into the crowd, killing 69 people, including 29 children, most shot in the back. It made global headlines and became known as the Sharpeville Massacre.
On the same day, in the Black township of Langa, just outside of Cape Town, protestors gathered and refused to disperse. Once again Police officers shot into the crowd, killing three and wounding many others.
Ten days later, in my last year of high school, the students were instructed to gather in the auditorium. The principal looked down from the stage. "A large number of natives are heading to the city," he announced, using a pejorative word for Africans. His tone inferred an unruly, out of control mob. We were not to leave the auditorium, he said, until an adult came to pick us up. A wave of fear spread like an electric current through the 500 white students sitting cross legged on the floor. My first thought was whether my father was safe. Was Athlone in their path? It was hard not to succumb to the fears of my schoolmates.
Within an hour of my arriving home, my father entered the house, his face jubilant. "I've just seen the beginning of the end of apartheid!" he exclaimed. As soon as he heard news of the march, he told us, he drove from Athlone towards Table Mountain and parked just above the city center where he had a clear view of many thousands - later estimated at 30,000 - of Africans from the townships walking peacefully and in total silence towards Parliament. "They were dignified and determined! The passes have to go. The government has no choice."
My earlier fears dissolved with his upbeat attitude. "Such a show of power!" he said. I had never seen him this ecstatic.
Seeing the daily horrors as an adult
In 1965 I left university and needed a job. I was hired by the Defence and Aid Fund which raised funds internationally to cover the legal fees for those who were charged under laws crafted to crush resistance, such as the Suppression of Communism Act and the Terrorism Act.
Day after day I learned more about the personal suffering of Africans living under apartheid and how the tentacles of the law had caught them in its grasp. Their families wrote me letters or spent hours in my office, telling their heart-rending stories. They had relied on life-saving remittances from their men who were laboring in the mines or in the white urban areas. They felt helpless and angry. They worried about their children. Getting jobs in the urban areas was almost impossible. I understood the impact of the system with new immediacy. The most satisfying part of my work was setting up support for families – the "Aid" part of Defence and Aid.
Running the Cape Town office of one – myself - with the support of a committed board of directors, was the job of my dreams. But it was short-lived. I had been working at D and A a little over a year when, in March 1966, security police barged into my office, took away the filing cabinets, escorted me to my residence, which they thoroughly searched, and announced that D and A had been banned under the Suppression of Communism Act.
The sudden shutting down of D and A left me reeling. Nelson Mandela was in prison for life, jailed under the Suppression of Communism Act and the Terrorism Act. Militants had gone underground or left to join Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. Many had gone into exile to escape arrest.
I was in no personal danger but I could no longer tolerate apartheid and the repression that came with it. I was white and privileged and had a passport. I could leave. A year later I emigrated into self-imposed exile in the United States. In time – due to my anti-apartheid and disinvestment activities, designed to economically strangle the apartheid government – exile would become more of a reality.
My father had no heart to set up a new law practice in a white area. To live their last years in a democratic country became appealing. Local lawyers took over my father's practice, and my parents emigrated to London in 1967.
My arrival in the U.S. felt like stepping into democracy heaven. I no longer had to glance over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being followed. I no longer needed to head to the bottom of a garden to avoid bugs – the electronic kind - or presume that my phone was being tapped. The scales of apartheid fell slowly from my skin.
Basking in this glow of freedom, I set out to find the anti-apartheid movement. I joined the Southern Africa Committee, editing our monthly magazine, which covered the struggles against apartheid and Portuguese colonialism in southern and west Africa, trying to fill the gap in the mainstream media coverage. I found a community. I found lifelong friends, women and men, black, brown and white, who shared my political perspective. The atmosphere was easy and supportive. A mix of young folk working together was exhilarating, absent of the male dominance and sexism found in many other political organizations.
At the same time, I was learning that American democracy has serious flaws; that racism has deep roots, that white privilege and white supremacy are the warp and weave of American society; that there were historical and actual barriers to voting; that inequality and profound discrimination are the bedrock of a nation built on the backs of slaves.
The novelty of television
One of my first purchases was a small black and white TV set. I grew up without television, which was only introduced in 1976. "South Africa would have to import films showing race mixing, and advertising would make Africans dissatisfied with their lot," claimed one cabinet minister. Did they really believe that Africans were not already "dissatisfied" with their "lot"?
I was hooked: the morning and nightly news, the education channel's documentaries, detective series, movies, even Sesame Street! But what left my mouth gaping in disbelief were images of black Americans expounding on racism, inequality, slavery. In my country, such criticism of the government would have meant a one-way trip to Robben Island prison to join Nelson Mandela.
By the mid-70s and through the 80s, scenes of protest and police violence in South Africa entered my living room through my new color TV. My eyes were fixated on the revulsion and contempt on the faces of the police; on the volley of bullets aimed at protestors - teenagers, youth; at funerals for those killed; at kids running from the police in the township streets. Every day, every day, every day. The thousands of arrests. The deaths from torture.
The pass laws were eventually rescinded in 1986, when the anti-apartheid struggle was heating up. Nelson Mandela was released four years later, and South Africa's transition to democracy began.
The horrors that marked South Africa haunt my days once again
Decades after I left South Africa, scenes of unrestrained violence again enter my living room, as I again hear the aspersions of my childhood uttered by another president: "Animals." "Illegal monsters." "Killers." "Poisoning our country." "Bad genes."
In a terrible irony, the few refugees now admitted to the United States are South African Afrikaners, who still long for the "good old apartheid days". Trump claims that genocide is being committed against farmers in South Africa, a claim labeled false by organizations representing farmers and by John Steenhuisen, South African Minister of Agriculture, who himself is a white Afrikaner.
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Germany had the Gestapo. South Africa had BOSS – the Bureau of State Security with its feared Security police. The United States has ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), our equally unaccountable paramilitary force.
The world hears and sees it on TV and social media: scenes of ICE, in plain clothes with black masks, no identification, getting out of unmarked cars with blackened windows; undocumented immigrants (and sometimes citizens) brutally beaten, handcuffed, manhandled into ICE vehicles; plumes of teargas, pepper spray enveloping demonstrators and areas where children are in school. I hear obscenities and racial slurs caught on cell phones. I cannot erase the terrified looks on the faces of children trying to hang onto their fathers, their mothers as they are forcibly separated, everyone crying, some hysterically.
A few days after the first blast of arrests of undocumented immigrants, I got a call from a South African Coloured friend. "It is just like influx control," she said, her voice strained. I immediately saw in my mind's eye, the millions of arrests for pass offences when South Africans risked being caught in their desperate search for work, jailed and beaten for violating "influx control" legislation, aimed at keeping "illegal" Africans out of the urban areas.
Although I had long since realized there is no "democracy heaven" in the United States, I was unprepared for the rapid acceleration of the familiar marks of rising fascism. In the early 90s I saw the end of apartheid brutality and the beginning of democracy. Now I ask myself, it this the beginning of the end of U.S. democracy?
There are, however, cracks in the curtain of despair. People of all ages are protesting, rising up. Millions of people have marched in "No Kings" rallies in all 50 states. Neighborhood activists from state-to-state blow whistles to alert their communities to the presence of ICE agents; mutual aid groups and individuals bring food to and shop for immigrants too scared to leave their homes; teachers teach remotely children kept home by fear; judges throughout the country try to maintain the rule of law. There is courage and anger, determination and organizing. It is showing up in the polls: sixty percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling his immigration policy.
The anxieties and trepidation of my life under apartheid, which I hoped to forget, have returned. It's hard to digest, but not hard to see. I fear it will be a long time before I can once again bounce out of bed, ready for whatever the day might bring.
But as the South African struggle against apartheid taught me, where there is courage and resistance, there is hope.
Stephanie Urdang is a writer, journalist and former UN consultant on gender equality. Her most recent book is Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa. She lives in New Jersey and regularly returns to South Africa.
