“I Knew I Had to Find Another Way….”

An Interview with Jennifer Hyman by Richard Deats

Hyman is F.O.R.’s new communications coordinator

RD: What is your background, growing up in apartheid South Africa?

Jennifer Hyman on her way to first grade.

JH: I am a second-generation South African Jew of British and Lithuanian descent.
I was raised in Johannesburg, where my father was an attorney and my mother a homemaker. Being white and upper middle class made my childhood doubly privileged. We attended good schools, went regularly to synagogue, participated in sports, had dance and music lessons, and took long family vacations exploring South Africa. We had live-in servants, as all white South Africans did. They addressed my parents as “Master” and “Madam” and were in turn addressed by their first names. It is painful for me to talk about this but as a child, I knew no other way. Among many of our friends, servants were also referred to as “the boy” or “the girl,” regardless of their age. I loved our servants but knew little of their lives and families; their role was to be appendages to ours. The only difference between my family and most white South Africans was that we were taught to be polite to our servants and fair in our dealings with them. As a child, I never questioned the inherent injustice of the master-servant relationship in my own home, let alone in society at large.

RD: What got you involved in the anti-apartheid struggle there? Any particular persons, experiences, books, etc?

JH: The turning point came when I was fairly young. Worried that I wasn’t receiving a sufficiently Jewish education at my

elementary school, my parents sent me to a Jewish day school at the age of thirteen. King David High School was an extraordinary institution for its time. Due largely to its progressive headmaster, its roster of teachers read like a Who’s Who of the anti-apartheid movement. We had teachers who were arrested, interrogated, banned, imprisoned, and a couple who had to flee the country. There were times during the State of Emergency in the mid 1960s when, depending on the latest news of raids and round-ups, we would take bets in the classroom on which teachers would show up at all.

I owe much of my awakening to two people. The first is my high school history teacher, Donovan Lowry, who was an early member of Alan Paton’s Liberal Party. He gave me Cry the Beloved Country to read (the book was not exactly required reading in South Africa at the time!) and inspired me to join the Liberal Party as soon as I was old enough. The other was my Afrikaans teacher, Marius Schoon, a member of the Congress of Democrats who grew so desperate about the situation that he attempted to plant a bomb in the Hillbrow police station in 1964—an action that prompted much youthful discussion about violence as a means to an end. He was arrested out of my classroom and served twelve years in prison.

Under the influence of these and other teachers, I began to follow closely the Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela and others, to read Mandela’s (banned) writings, and to learn the Freedom Charter—eventually by heart. I learned about the Congress Movement: the African National Congress and its partners, the Indian Congress, the Coloured Peoples’ Congress, and the (white) Congress of Democrats. Yes, even the anti-apartheid movement had segregated in order to survive. The only political group that was racially integrated in the 1960s was the Liberal Party of Alan Paton, and that was forced to disband—before I was old enough to join!

I crossed paths with both Donovan and Marius years later, and want to add a postscript about Marius Schoon, who died of cancer in 1999. Upon his release from prison, Marius married a friend of mine, Jeanette Curtis. They were both banned, so marriage was the only way they could be together. (Banned people, aside from not being able to receive more than one visitor at a time, or leave their homes at night, or travel outside a municipal area, were also not allowed to communicate at all with one another.) Marius and Jeanette chose exile in Botswana, had two children, and when we had to get people out of the country fast in the 1970s, they were the ones to help. When Botswana became unsafe due to the activities of the Security Police, the ANC sent Marius and Jeanette to Angola. There, in 1984, Jeanette received a parcel addressed to Marius. She and her six-year-old daughter Katryn died in her kitchen, in front of her son Fritz, 4, who had been lagging behind and was just entering the apartment when the bomb exploded. The man who sent the parcel bomb was, we later discovered, a notorious former “student activist” called Craig Williamson who had befriended Marius and Jeanette (and many of us as well), and turned out to be in reality an officer of the

Security Police. Williamson later apologized to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, admitting that he had also prepared the fatal mail bomb for Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, and was behind the bombing of the ANC office in London in 1982. Marius felt so bitter about Williamson that although he generally supported the Commission’s work, he found he could not forgive Williamson and filed a suit against amnesty.

By the time I began studies at the University of Cape Town, I was committed to the liberation struggle. I joined anti-apartheid groups and the very liberal National Union of South African Students. I read everything there was to read about the struggle and South Africa’s history, and also about the civil rights movement in the United States, which we saw as a model for our own. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was banned in South Africa but we managed to get a pirate recording and would gather in small, secretive groups to listen to it with wonder and envy. We composed anti-apartheid songs based on the songs of America’s civil rights movement. In fairly short order I became a target of the much-feared Security Police. Along with friends, I was investigated, taken in for questioning, and my home was searched. I also received the attentions of a male student who was subsequently exposed as an informer sent deliberately to befriend and report on me. The Security Police even called my parents with threats and warnings.

RD: You were the first to report that Steve Biko was beaten to death at the hands of his interrogators. How did that come about? What were the consequences to you as a result of this reporting?

JH: Steve Biko’s death was a personal as well as a political shock for me because I knew him personally. I first met Steve at a National Union of South African Students conference in Cape Town in the early 1970s. I was covering the conference for the Rand Daily Mail; Steve was leading a delegation from the University of the North, the all-black university he attended. The conference proved a landmark event in the anti-apartheid struggle because Steve, after making an impassioned speech about black South Africans taking charge of their own destiny, led a walkout of all black delegates. It was the beginning of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa. (I saw Steve socially a few times after that, for potlucks and political chit-chat; he rejected working politically with whites but didn’t reject them as friends.)

When Steve died in detention, I was working for the weekly Sunday Express. News of his death broke on a Tuesday, I think, and the official explanation was that he had been on a hunger strike. However, everyone also knew the track record of the Security Police. Dozens of activists had already died in detention under suspicious circumstances. I knew the Biko family lawyer, Shun Chetty, and the private pathologist he had hired to attend the official government autopsy, Dr. Jonathan Gluckman. I hoped Jonathan would give me more information than he had given other newspapers. He confirmed that he had been at the autopsy but said that he couldn’t divulge any of his findings until the inquest. I was pretty persistent and he agreed to see me. I went to his office on a Saturday morning, working against an impossible Saturday night deadline. All the newspapers were still going with the hunger strike story, and I wasn’t optimistic. Jonathan repeated—rather slowly and loudly for the benefit of the eavesdropping devices—that he couldn’t help me, then very deliberately opened a file on his desk and left the room. The file contained photos of Steve’s body, mostly his head, with the unmistakable lesions on his temple. I had time to leaf through all the gruesome photos before Jonathan came back. Without saying a word, I pointed to the lesions and he nodded. I made a sort of clobbering gesture and he nodded again. We continued this macabre, charade-like enactment of a killing until I fully understood. Not a word was spoken but I had the story. The Sunday Express was the first paper to report the next day that Steve Biko had died of head injuries at the hands of his interrogators, and not because of a hunger strike.

There weren’t any specific consequences from the Steve Biko case, but the usual harassment continued. My home was raided and searched. My husband went on trial for possessing banned literature. When a “banned” friend felt lonely one evening and broke her banning order to visit me, the Security Police were not far behind. Had they prosecuted her, I would have had to refuse to testify, and possibly go to jail. She always thought it was me they were after, not her. When I exposed the secret proceedings against juvenile activists who were being sentenced to years in prison after thirty-minute sham trials, without defense attorneys or their parents present, the police came after me: the person they really wanted was the lawyer who had given me the information, Shun Chetty. When I refused to reveal his name, the police served a warrant on me. A huge trial followed in the Natal Supreme Court, with my editor and myself in the dock. We were ultimately acquitted on the grounds that what we had published was true.

RD: In this country we heard a lot about the work of the South Africa Council of Churches and people like Bishop Desmond Tutu. What about the rest of the religious community? Did you learn things in that struggle about the role that people of faith can play in defending human rights and speaking out against injustice?

JH: I learned a great deal and met some wonderful, spiritual, extraordinary people. Actually the South African Council of Churches wasn’t the leading religious organization in the anti-apartheid struggle: The Christian Institute was. It was established by an amazing man, the Rev. Beyers Naude, who was a minister in the historically pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed Church and had been a member of the Afrikaner secret society, the Broederbond. Like the lawyer Bram Fischer, who went to jail with Nelson

Mandela, and Marius Schoon, my former Afrikaans teacher,

Beyers was a “turned Afrikaner”—no half-measures would do. Beyers took religion seriously, and when he began to perceive that what his people and his church were doing ran counter to his faith, it wasn’t enough simply to nurture private doubts. He had to act. He formed the Christian Institute, which rapidly attracted anti-apartheid activists of all faiths (his secretary at one point was Jewish.) The CI branched out into publishing with the very influential SPRO-CAS reports (Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society,) which were co-sponsored by the SA Council of Churches. The CI soon became a huge target of the Security Police, with unexplained fires in their offices, frequent raids, denouncements in the media and so on. But they still managed to produce some of the best documentation of the horrors of apartheid, and to provide a home for people of faith who were uncomfortable with the ANC’s commitment to armed struggle. If you wanted to work for justice and an end to apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, and you felt ambivalent about Umkhonto We Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” the ANC’s liberation army,) there was really only the Christian Institute.

(Let me add a brief postscript about Beyers Naude, who is also no longer with us. He became a close personal friend and participated in my wedding, co-officiating alongside our very progressive rabbi and giving the event an ecumenical air that mirrored the spirit of the work we were all engaged in.)

RD: After coming to the United States to live, you continued the work of investigative journalism. You were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. What, in brief, was the case you reported on?

JH: The story was about the CIA and its influence on a Rochester-area university, the Rochester Institute of Technology. In a nutshell, the CIA had for years funded programs in imaging science, commissioned research into spy technology, and recruited faculty and students—all without disclosing the relationship. The investigation began with a simple press release landing on my desk—I was the higher education reporter at the time—to the effect that the president of RIT was taking a sabbatical in Washington and working on “national security.” Actually it was CIA headquarters in Langley. I started doing research and interviews, and once my stories started appearing, past and present faculty came forward to volunteer information, including memos they had kept detailing the “Agreement” between the CIA and the university and the security checks they had been pressured to undergo. Copies of reports RIT had prepared for the CIA were leaked to me, and the story began to receive national and international coverage. Of course RIT and the CIA hit back: I was denounced as a “foreign national” with a longstanding grudge against the CIA. Fortunately my newspaper stood by me. The end result was that the president of RIT, as well as several other officials, resigned. A legal investigator was hired to examine the relationship, and the ensuing report basically told RIT its relationship with the CIA threatened academic freedom, and that it had to establish full disclosure and oversight.

RD: You come to the FOR at a very critical and dangerous time, with our country involved in war abroad, rejecting the Kyoto Treaty, resuming nuclear weapons efforts, dismantling environmental regulations, giving enormous tax breaks to the most wealthy, and cracking down on our civil liberties. What attracted you to take the position of communications coordinator of FOR under these circumstances?

JH: I agree. America is in crisis. The cynical and dishonest use of the tragedy of 9/11 to launch this war was a sort of watershed for me. When I saw the mass co-option of the mainstream media, I knew I had to find another way to work for what I believe in. It’s a big change for me, as I have always pursued my goals through writing and reporting. Now I will be doing it through advocacy work. I’m quite excited about that. In these dire times there is nothing else to be done but to work aggressively for peace and justice. It’s the only way to retain our humanity, the only hope for the future. What appeals to me about FOR is its insistence on the moral and religious underpinnings of that struggle and its commitment to pacifism and nonviolence. I’ve seen firsthand how violence, even in the service of a lofty goal, is never good, never justifiable. Violence and war create endless rancor, bitterness, and desire for revenge and retribution, inevitably leading to more war and violence. Just look at what is happening in Israel and Palestine. And there are the ugly spin-offs of war on the home front: the greedy profiteering, the growing authoritarianism, the attack on our civil liberties, the “you’re either with us or against us” siege mentality. FOR, with its message not of anger, retaliation, or retribution, but of faith, active pacifism, and reconciliation, is the perfect antidote.

RD: What keeps you going? What are your sources of hope?

Jennifer Hyman, FOR's new Director of Communications

JH: If my experience has taught me anything, it is that people with faith, with a fundamental sense of justice and the sanctity of human life, can bring about change—even if it doesn’t happen in their lifetimes. I saw it in South Africa, where twenty-five years ago the prospect of a relatively bloodless end to apartheid seemed the stuff of fairy tales. But it happened, and then something else extraordinary happened. Both sides agreed to learn about one another and then to talk to one another. They found the strength to tell the truth, and finally to be reconciled. They acknowledged what they had done, and their larger communities acknowledged what had been done in their name. All those hundreds of years of institutional racism, oppression, retaliatory violence, and mutual fear were consumed in a desire to reach out and accept a common nationality, a common dream, a common humanity. South Africa’s problems are by no means over, but in its decision to confront its demons, it gave us all a model of hope. What keeps me going is the belief that all peoples, all religions, all nationalities essentially want the same blessings in life. And if they ask themselves “By what means can I obtain these blessings?” the answer is through working for truth, justice, and peace. Or, as Rabbi Shimon Ben Gamliel, a Talmudic sage, said: “The world stands on three pillars: The truth, the justice, and the peace. And these three are indeed one. When justice is served, truth is served, peace is served.” That’s what I believe and that’s what keeps me going.