At 13, Noni Jabavu (1919-2008) left South Africa to continue her schooling in England, returning only for short visits in the decades that followed. In 1977, she embarked on a biography of her late father, the illustrious politician, educationist and writer DDT Jabavu; to do her research, she had to return to South Africa. 

A travelling black woman of means, with a British passport and loved ones dotted across the globe, Jabavu was rudely confronted by the indiscriminate cruelty and indignity of apartheid. In this time, she wrote a series of columns for the Daily Dispatch, sharing her often astonishing daily experiences. 

These columns, compiled for the first time in A Stranger at Home, edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Athambile Masola, display Jabavu’s sharp intellect, her love for her family and her people, as well as the intense alienation she often felt. Read the excerpt.

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Back home again …

12 JANUARY 1977 

‘How do you like our country?’ That is the question you are asked whenever you have gone to visit or live abroad. And it’s a delicate one to answer because it is not wholly welcoming, it is guarded, rhetorical and above all loaded. You have to choose your platitudinous answer with all the delicacy you can command to avoid giving offence where you don’t intend any.

‘How do you like being back home in South Africa after so long?’ This, understandably, is the question I have been asked daily since I came from Kenya in March 1976 for three months, and again from July onwards. But any of my normal feelings of delicacy in answering were blunted outright within an hour of arrival. In answering, the words pop out of my mouth involuntarily, and they are more than loaded – a flurry of bird-shot: ‘Like it? Not at all! Since last March each moment for me down here is a minor or a major trauma.’

To clarify, I explain that by saying ‘each separate moment’ of arrival, I mean the earlier one at Durban docks and the later one at Jan Smuts Airport. Each brought its own distinctive shock of the unexpected: the moment of truth when the stranger comes face to face with the peak-capped immigration officers, those first representatives of the State at your point of entry into a country.

They always put me in mind of Hitler’s stormtroopers; I suppose the sight of them makes the traveller feel anxious and guilty for no reason whatsoever.

How they’ll interview you as an individual is something you cannot predict, so you don’t know how you are going to react: ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way you do it,’ as the old song goes. A smile on the face between those forbidding epaulettes of authority will relax you, and immediately your reaction is: ‘I’m going to like this country,’ whereas a chilly or gloomy expression will tauten you, and send your stomach plummeting down to your boots.

As I last visited South Africa in 1955, I may be excused for having forgotten the feel of adrenalin spurting into your bloodstream when a pair of hostile ‘South African European’ eyes behold you, the nostrils between them quivering as at something the cat brought in. But I felt it again in a flash, on seeing the kaleidoscope of changing expressions on the face of the officer who took my passport from my hand.

I had watched him deal smilingly with the couple who had preceded me in the queue. The couple now stood waiting for me, for as passengers we had become friends during the voyage. And as I was alone (being a widow), they were among those who had come to attach me to themselves for deck games, cards, drinks, laughter, general socialising and joyfulness. We had planned to join forces on some of the sightseeing trips the Purser had suggested to on-going passengers after we had – as he called it in bureaucratic lingo – ‘been processed by immigration’; among ourselves, we didn’t call it that, we called it ‘being done’ … use for ribald laughter, need I say, reverting to adolescence!

Later this couple told me how puzzled they had been to see the surly way the man was doing me! They saw him rearrange his face, wipe off the smiles he had bestowed upon them and put on a scowl to bestow upon me. They suddenly wondered what was going on.

This is how my interview went: the officer scrutinised my British passport. Among other details, it says: ‘Place of birth, Fort Hare, CP, South Africa, 20 August 1919.’

He put it to one side, held out a hand.

Then with a start, he jabbed a forefinger at an entry, growled triumphantly: ‘This doesn’t make you British. You’re not British.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Married in 1951 is no good,’ he said scornfully. ‘Even if he was British, date is useless. Relevant year is 1949 for eligibility. Ha! … Sorry, you can’t enter the Republic.’

‘Can’t enter? Yet born here – what do you mean?’

‘You’re claiming you’re British – falsely, it looks like. Wait over there.’ My stomach turned over (that adrenalin!) for he was glaring at me. I glared back but had the wit to jab my forefinger at an entry he seemed to have missed. I said slowly, acidly: ‘Excuse me – read here. This previous husband, 1945, was British, see? And in any case,’ I heard myself say, ‘I became British in my own right in 1933. Forget your 1949!’

The glittering eyes blazed in disbelief. I hurried on for fear my self-control might snap, for by now I was quivering like a catgut. ‘When my Dominion of South Africa passport expired my guardians in England were taking me on holiday on the Continent. They took out a British passport for me. Simple as that in those days.’ Triumphant in my turn, I suppressed a vindictive inward ‘So there’, and ‘Ha!’ … The interview had developed into a duel.

He coloured and dropped his eyes. I too, felt a hot flush suffusing my face, for apart from being old enough to be his mother (he didn’t look a day more than 35; had probably never heard that in prehistoric days South Africa was a Dominion of the British Empire), all that apart, I was well into the hormonal turmoil of my age group. Whippersnappers like him are supposed to show respect to elderly ladies.

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He busied himself re-examining his array of rubber stamps, my passport again and my marriage lines … as well he might, for both are well-filled credentials! At last, selecting a rubber stamp, he gave a page of my passport a violent thump, muttering: ‘Well, you can’t stay in the Republic longer than this, see?’ and shoved my things back at me.

I joined my waiting friends. They were white Capetonians, he a World War II South African Army officer, his wife his sweetheart of the war in Italy.

We repaired to their stateroom, I trembling, they concerned. ‘What the hell was happening, Noni? You looked like fighting cocks! Sit down.’

I couldn’t speak, only handed him my passport while she brought out an ice-bucket and Campari and poured out three glasses. (All of us had laid in supplies in our cabins the day before, because of course, duty-free booze, tobacco and so on are sealed off in port by Customs.)

I begged him to check what the fellow had stamped in my passport. I was too upset to look myself.

Now he became upset. He handed my passport to his wife and broke out into explanations in voluble Italian. Then both looked at each other and exclaimed and swore: ‘Mamma mia!’ ‘Gott!’

He turned to me, took a deep breath and explained that I had been stamped for a ‘three-month only holiday visit’. But, he said gravely, he and his wife were surprised because none of their British passport holding friends were given a time limit. They could come freely for as long as they liked; some of them even took jobs if their cash ran out.

We sat reflecting, in silent communion.

At last he said, sighing: ‘This is our first real experience of petty apartheid pinpricks, Noni. I’m South African born and bred, but have never met a black South African to make friends with until you. Now I’ve seen how they treat you. I could wring their bloody necks, excuse language. What a welcome home for you.’

They had said during the voyage as we had come to know each other, how much they’d like me to visit them in their home. I now wondered whether they’d be allowed to have me in their house as their guest. I had forgotten about the Group Areas Act and they, being typical, ordinary, nice people, ‘had never really thought, let alone realised, what these apartheid laws mean to ordinary people like us’. We were friends, similar social class, similar interests, belonged to the same lovely land. Yet now we had fallen silent, sombre and sad because we suddenly had to think of ourselves in terms of whiteness and blackness, because South Africa’s laws discourage contact and friendship between South Africans of different colours.

She leaned across and squeezed my hand to ask me a question. (Xhosas like me and Italians like her are demonstrative folks. We touch and hug and make a noise.) She asked how I would now be able to write my biography of my father in only three months instead of the unlimited time I had expected to stay in my mother country to do it in.

Her husband murmured grimly: ‘The bastards!’ That broke the ice, and she and I cracked up laughing. I said: ‘Clearly, I have to revise my plans – eh? My book about my father will have to take longer to do. What I could do in these three months I’ve been graciously allowed to darken the doors of the Republic is to go on with my journal, these impressions of my life and times in various countries, can’t I? I’m in another country now here in Durban’ … (They had read my books in the past, in Italian translation. I had lived in Italy at one time, in Florence, so, she called me ‘Firenz’ and I called her ‘Bologn’ – ungrammatical, both of us. (She was from Bologna.) Her husband said: ‘Yes, start with your impression of that “Immigration Van der Merwe”.’ We laughed. DM/ ML

Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Athambile Masola is published by Tafelberg (R350). Visit The Reading List for South African book news, daily – including excerpts!