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Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa

Amazon.com Price:  $16.85 (as of 01/05/2019 19:06 PST- Details)

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Description

Stephanie Urdang used to be born in Cape Town, South Africa, into a white, Jewish circle of relatives staunchly opposed to the apartheid regime. In 1967, on the age of twenty-three, no longer ready to tolerate the grotesque iniquities and oppression of apartheid, she chose exile and emigrated to the USA. There she embraced feminism, met anti-apartheid and solidarity movement activists, and encountered a particularly American brand of racial injustice. Urdang also met African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral, who would influence her return to Africa and her subsequent journalism. In 1974, she trekked through the liberation zones of Guinea-Bissau throughout its war of independence; in the 1980’s, she returned many times to Mozambique and saw how South Africa used to be fomenting a civil war aimed to destroy the newly independent country. From the vantage point of her activism in the USA, and from her travels in Africa, Urdang tracked and wrote about the slow, inexorable demise of apartheid that led to South Africa’s first democratic elections, when she could in the end return home.

Urdang’s memoir maps out her quest for the meaning of home and for the lived reality of revolution with empathy, courage, and a keen eye for historical and geographic detail. This can be a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, whilst yearning for home, continued to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the USA, she belongs. “My South Africa!” she writes, on her return in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, “How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty, and not its pain?” 

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