On a Mission
Spring 2007
“The entire country was on the verge of exploding.”
| Apartheid South Africa was on fire around me. Just after dawn on a December day in 1986, I was riding in the back seat of a United States Embassy limousine on a quiet mission that would shake up the South African government. I knew the black townships were burning with riots, bombings, gunfire, looting and vandalism. As the black resistance to white rule intensified, the South African government clamped down on the majority black population and declared a state of emergency. Curfews were imposed. Media coverage was limited. State police raided townships and arrested people by the hundreds. Some 20,000 political prisoners were jailed. Thousands of children, some as young as nine years, were arrested and detained, their whereabouts unknown. More than 200,000 other black children protested against the government by boycotting Afrikaner schools; they roamed the streets undisciplined and unsupervised... “The struggle,” as it was called, was growing in ferocity. The entire country was on the verge of exploding. I had arrived in November as... America’s first black ambassador to South Africa. My appointment had made headlines, but I was far from being a popular choice. Most Americans had never heard of me. Many of those who had, black and white, thought me an unfortunate choice for the job. “They’ll eat him alive,” a colleague told the press. Some black leaders in America scorned me for accepting the appointment and murmured that I had sold out. The black South African revolutionaries disdained the United States as unsympathetic to their cause and considered me President Ronald Reagan’s “house nigger.” The white South African government claimed the president of the United States as its friend and ally, so officials were confused and insulted by my appointment. What nobody in South Africa yet knew was that I had been sent to change America’s policy in South Africa. ... With direct orders from President Reagan, my assignment was to dismantle apartheid without violence. To accomplish this, I was given the rare leeway of making policy on the ground. I already knew something about segregation. I grew up in the segregated South, raised on a cotton farm in Louisiana by grandparents who could neither read nor write but who believed that education would be my road to a better life. I lived through an ugly time in American history, when familiar sights were signs such as “No Coloreds or Dogs Allowed.” As a young man I took the only jobs available to blacks, working as a redcap at a bus station, as a janitor, and as a waiter. I was refused services at soda fountains, and I rode in the back of segregated buses. I never, ever, let any of that slow me down. This excerpt is from Mr. Ambassador: Warrior for Peace, by Edward J. Perkins, with Connie J. Cronley. Copyright © 2006 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. |
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