A Bracket
In my memoirs, it is as if the two years at the African Gender Institute are contained in a bracket. There was my life before the AGI, and then my life picked up again where it left off after my two years’ experience at the University of Cape Town – from mid-1995 till the end of June 1997.
It’s almost as if I was given this opportunity to return, to undergo a difficult but cathartic experience, completing processes which had been truncated and interrupted when I left eighteen years earlier – taken out of an impossible situation by fate and my higher guidance. But now I was back with some unfinished business, and before the end of 1995, I had slipped again into a deep depression. There were a couple of events which triggered this decline. My oldest friend had confided her HIV status on my arrival; my beloved uncle had been diagnosed with some rare form of cancer; and I soon discovered that my post and the AGI had no allocated funds or budget. My task would be essentially fund-raising, and I would be interacting with university administrative structures more than I had anticipated. I had raised funds easily for my development work but felt I had little academic management skills of this nature. I found this time very difficult. To compound things, Ronald had been posted to Bosnia, which was just emerging from the terrible war. He visited me during my first months in Cape Town, and from my bedroom, I had heard his telephone conversation with the Swiss foreign ministry finalising arrangements, as I felt the first desperate onset of waves of panic.
These feelings were similar to how I felt when I had left Cape Town eighteen years earlier. My depression was put on hold then but now seemed to come with greater depth and intensity. In addition, there had been eighteen years of achievement and ‘success’ in the interim, which had blocked out earlier memories, but now the contrast was very dramatic. I sought out a Jungian analyst, also a medical doctor, who suggested anti-depressants, and reluctantly I took the prescription.
Details of this period are vague, yet impressive things got done, and I developed a series of coping strategies and raised large amounts of funding.
Perhaps the greatest gift to me during this time was being introduced to the Japanese healing art of jin shin jyutsu, a gentle way of harmonising body, mind, and spirit. I received weekly treatments from a therapist close to my office and was able to slip away easily at lunchtime. In this way, I coped. I was also given two kittens, which brought a lightness back into my existence. I remember exactly the moment when I was seated on the floor of my long corridor watching these little beings playing. I had returned from my first self-help workshop in jin shin jyutsu and had turned on some music. It was Mozart, and the kittens’ movements began to entrain with the music. I was witnessing the most exquisite ballet. As they managed impossible jumps and pirouetted on two legs, I could feel a smile forming, and my heart ached as it began to open. And the tears streamed down.
I decided then and there that I would not be renewing the anti-depressants, which had just run out. I would embrace the self-help techniques I had been introduced to, as well as continuing weekly sessions with Rose, the JSJ practitioner, who was to become a friend and confidante, guiding me through challenging times and introducing me to other people who would play significant and positive roles in my life.
***
My two-year contract was to end at the end of June 1997, and I can recall parts of this final month at the AGI with great clarity.
The Cape winter was beginning to take hold, and there were strange and powerful energies at work too. These were possibly planetary, as ‘peace’ appeared even more precarious in Bosnia and elsewhere in the Balkans. There was a particularly dramatic storm over an entire weekend around mid-June, and I received an unexpected telephone call from Ronald on a Saturday night. We had frequent and agreed-on contact, so I voiced surprise at this one. There was a pause.
“You could say… I am a hostage”… “I am in my office, and have been here since I arrived early this morning.”
All Ronald could tell me was that on that Saturday morning, he had found a huge crowd of angry women at the building when he got there. Several grenades were visible. They took him hostage and entered the building. Now they were in negotiations. They said he could call his wife. I later learnt that the reason for their anger was that, as wives and mothers, they were frustrated at the gaps in the lists of names of disappeared men furnished by the international officials. Their fury and frustration were manipulated by Serbian leaders in Belgrade, of course, but clearly the situation was extremely delicate.
Thinking back on this event, I remember my reactions sitting in my study listening to Ronald’s short, loaded sentences. Interestingly, my first thought was: “Thank goodness it is Ronald who is the hostage and not some young naive UN soldier, whose reactions might have provoked intervention to ‘rescue’ him”. I had no fear for Ronald and, in fact, found myself asking if he was helping the women to formulate their demands for information? Indeed, he was. By the time of his third call to me, the gravity had shifted, and it sounded as though hostage and hostage-takers were getting along quite well, with quite a bit of joking in the background. Bosnian humour is quite special, as I was to discover.
I believe Ronald had two nights as a hostage, and then it was over, and everyone went back to business.
But in Cape Town, soon after this storm, I received the devastating news that the 19-year-old daughter of someone in my team had died in a car accident. This was only a week or so after her mother had died, and I had gone to her funeral. Our colleague was still reeling from the first loss and had not yet returned to work, and now this.
So, in the final week of my ‘contract’, I drove to the modest cottage in Mowbray where the bereaved woman was surrounded by shocked and silent friends and family. I walked down the long corridor into the living room where something electric happened as she looked up and saw me enter. She sprang up off her chair and threw herself into my arms, howling, wailing, as if something had just burst open and was flowing in torrents. I have not personally experienced such depth of grief or experienced such an overwhelming sense of loss in another. I remember clearly just holding her. I didn’t say a word, just taking in, absorbing the sound of her weeping, into my being. It was some time before the wailing subsided into sobbing, with sobs still wracking her body.
What I do remember is that I leaned forward with my eyes closed and gently placed my forehead on hers; she was a little shorter than me. Slowly, a stillness entered her and the room. I felt the eyes of all those seated around fixed on her and what was unfolding. Then I felt it… rushing into me and flooding through me, from the space surrounding me, a force, a power so huge, so great. I experienced it as Love and had a sense that this Love from another unseen dimension was being channelled through me directly to this fragile, wounded human being. It was overwhelming, this sense of presence of the Divine, of Grace.
She became still, silent, and we moved slowly across to a small couch where, with my arm around her, we sat in stillness. Later, I quietly took my leave. Throughout this encounter, I had not spoken a word.
What was there to say?
***
Before leaving South Africa yet again, I participated in an EU mid-term evaluation of the national Pilot Land Reform Programme from mid-July, as soon as I’d finished my contract.
This evaluation took place immediately after my first visit to the St Francis Health Centre in the Eastern Cape, which I had signed up for as soon as I left the AGI, deeply aware of how much I needed to find my centre and regain my balance after the intensity of the past two years on a university battlefield. As I walked down to the river valley on my last morning and then back up along the cow path, I got bitten by a tick, and a small infection manifested a week later on my arm below the elbow – in line with where a cow would have been on that path!
So it was that I found myself flying around South Africa with tick-bite fever, from province to province in a daze as part of a team of five international experts. My responsibility was how gender and the community development component of this flagship programme in the new South Africa was being addressed. I was under tremendous pressure and rather ill, and I am now not clear whether I was treated before or whether the tick-bite fever was diagnosed when I returned and almost collapsed.
My findings were scary, ‘politically incorrect’, identifying signs of early corruption and the potential for creating areas of rural poverty with no economic base, as farms were being purchased and resettled with large numbers of claimants. ‘Community development consultants’, who appeared to me to be predominantly white male technicians, previously land surveyors responsible for implementing apartheid land policies, had reinvented themselves almost overnight, and the community development consultancy business was thriving in the new South Africa!
I was very disheartened as I reflected on my home-coming. It had lasted exactly two years, and here I was flying away again. This time to join my husband in Bosnia.