THE LONG WAY HOME by AnnMarie Wolpe (1994) When leaders of the ANC were raided and arrested in Rivonia, South Africa in July 1963, AnnMarie Wolpe knew that her husband Harold โ member of the banned movement and lawyer to Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others โ would inevitably be imprisoned. Suddenly, alone with three children, one of them very ill, AnnMarie found herself at the heart of an intense political and social drama. She smuggled a saw and files to Harold and helped him and three others in a dramatic prison escape. While Harold took flight to Dar-es-Salaam, via Swaziland (now eSwatini), Botswana, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), AnnMarie waited anxiously. Finally the news came Harold was safe. AnnMarie left for London, joined soon by Harold and later by the children. In London they made a new life for themselves until, after nearly thirty years in exile, they were able to return 'home', in 1991 with excitement and huge misgivings. Telling for the first time the saga of the escape that made world headlines, and exploring the consequences of being the wife of a political figure, THE LONG WAY HOME is an extraordinary, gripping autobiography
A selection of life-altering books beloved or enjoyed by The Emperor of Solitude across the decades of a long life and in the many incarnations of the #LateImperialLibrary.
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#WomensDay in South Africa #9August
![A LIFE'S MOSAIC: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Phyllis Ntantala (2009 [1992])
Phyllis Ntantala tells us that
'Like Trotsky, I did not leave home with the proverbial one-and-six in my pocket. I came from a family of landed gentry in the Transkei.' This is what makes her vivid and spirited story so special. Born in the 1920s, Phyllis Ntantala lived her early life in a world of relative privilege. After school at Healdtown and Lovedale, she attended the University of Fort Hare โ all premier educational institutions for Black people from across Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries โ where she met her future husband, A.C. Jordan (one of the foremost Blscm intellectuals and academics of mid-twentieth century South Africa). Her gripping story is not of a struggle
to escape from proverty and obscurity but of a creative and articulate
Black woman's search for identity and fulfilment at a time and in a place where both were denied to Black subjects by white supremacist colonialism and its extension and intensification as apartheid.
In the early 1960s, as the apartheid net tightened in South Africa, the Jordans decided to emigrate to the United States. But this did not prove to be the escape to a land of freedom and opportunity, and the racial
discrimination they were subjected to and witnessed in the USA was, sadly, only too familiar to the Jordans
Phyllis Ntantala describes evocatively and with searing honesty her life
of rich experience, and not just as the wife and mother of famous men โ the pioneering scholar, A.C., and the ANC activist and intellectual, Pallo Jordan โ but ad a subject of interest in her own right. Her politics and her feminism have been grounded in the need to carve out a space for her own life, her own story.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:liweifjp72sawd2tfklp6egk/bafkreibyjcwnenrqjdklattnkhqxeoyc72qiqrvwrtysczrvk3535cnttq)
