Suchergebnisse

Stephanie Urdang was born in Cape Town, South Africa, into a white, Jewish family staunchly opposed to the apartheid regime. In 1967, at the age of twenty-three, no longer able to tolerate the grotesque iniquities and oppression of apartheid, she chose exile and emigrated to the United States. 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 during its war of independence; in the 1980's, she returned repeatedly to Mozambique and saw how South Africa was fomenting a civil war aimed to destroy the newly independent country. From the vantage point of her activism in the United States, 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 finally 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 is a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, while yearning for home, continued to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the United States, 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?"

There is still much difficult terrain to traverse before women in Mozambique achieve full liberation. But the process has been set in motion, supported by FRELIMO and the Government who have acknowledged the struggle of women to be integral to the total revolutionary process which the country must follow. Urdang's concern is to gauge how far the official concern is manifested in practice, how far FRELIMO's underwriting of the need for women to achieve full equality and full participation in Mozambican society has affected the day‐to‐day lives of ordinary women. She finds much which is lacking, particularly as regards change within the family. As elsewhere, the widening of women's participation in the economy and in political affairs is achieved at the price, at the individual level, of women being obliged to double their work and responsibilities, rather than achieving a more equitable share of the total burden with men. Yet consciousness of the need for increasing change, particularly among women themselves, portends the possibility of progress in this area as well as in others.

A striking aspect of the on-going revolution in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau is the insistence on the need for the liberation of women to be an explicit and integral part of that process. "Liberation of women," reads an oft-quoted statement of Samora Machel, FRELIMO president, "is a fundamental necessity for our revolution; a guarantee of its continuity and a precondition for victory." In a similar vein, Amilcar Cabral, assassinated leader of PAIGC, used to state firmly that their revolution could not be successful unless it ensured the full participation of women, or, "In Guinea-Bissau we say that women are fighting two colonialisms; one against the Portuguese and the other against men."