Half the Way Home by Adam Hochschild

Author:Adam Hochschild
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

XIII

IN THE SUMMER after my first year at college, I went along with Father on one of his business trips to Africa. We stayed in guest villas in Company mining towns, but also visited several offices of a new organization Father had helped start, the African-American Institute. The Institute had somehow acquired a great deal of money; it was a foundation that brought large numbers of African students to the United States and sent American teachers to Africa. Its ultimate purpose was to ensure that the elite of newly independent English-speaking Africa would be trained in America, and thus more open to doing business with the U.S. Father was chairman of the board, as he usually was of anything he became involved with. Everywhere we went, the Institute’s field representatives, eager to please, met us at the airport.

Father traveled with memos prepared by officials of the Institute or the Company, giving little capsule biographies of people we were scheduled to meet at dinner parties: “Mr. Marube is in his late thirties. Educated in England. Protege of Minister of Commerce. May run for Parliament from Nizamba district. Friendly, intelligent, and ambitious.”

At the end of our travels together he headed home, and I continued southward, to South Africa. I had begun to read about the country; my imagination had been caught by the stark injustice of apartheid, and by the drama and heroism of the resistance to it: the great marches and demonstrations, the bus boycotts where thousands of black people walked many miles to work rather than pay an increased fare. It was a society where the moral issues seemed clear. The right and wrong sides seemed absolutely unmistakable, and that appealed to me greatly.

Something else drew me to South Africa as well, although I could not see it clearly at the time. The Company’s main African holdings were elsewhere, but some were in South Africa itself. South Africa was the continent’s industrial heart, and Father’s trips always began or ended in Johannesburg. With its vast extremes of wealth and poverty compressed into one country, I think South Africa had come to represent for me in purest form the pattern of worldwide inequity from which I had benefited so much.

Before long I reached the continent’s end, Cape Town. And there, because a friend had given me his phone number, I chanced to meet a man who was to have a considerable effect on my life. Patrick Duncan, although white, was in the front lines of South Africa’s movement for racial equality. He was the editor of a biweekly anti-apartheid newspaper, was angrily denounced by the government, and was one of the handful of white people invited to speak to mass black protest rallies. He had been jailed three times. Yet paradoxically—and this was partly what made me feel a sudden bond with him—Duncan had come to all this from the top of his country’s elite: his father had been a Cabinet minister and then Governor General. His life seemed proof that you could do battle for a good cause even if you had been born on the wrong side.

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