Rachel Odhner Longstaff’s earliest memory of South Africa is an engine fire and an aborted plane flight near the end of a long journey from Pennsylvania to the city of Durban in the KwaZulu Natal province.
(Courtesy Susan Foster)
“I remember being carried from the plane by a huge black man under an umbrella,” said Longstaff. “I think he was the first African I had seen.”
She was a 3-year-old.
Her father was a Swedenborgian minister sent to South Africa to establish a theological school for Africans.
The year was 1948, the year the white South African government voted to establish apartheid. The brutal system institutionalized discrimination against blacks, and the strict separation between the races.
For the next 12 years, Longstaff grew up in a divided world — one where she enjoyed a happy childhood amid white privileges, but also witnessed the harsh reality of apartheid.
As a child, she didn’t always understand what was happening. But, as an adult, Longstaff began exploring her feelings of guilt and shame for not being more aware.
The result is her book, “In the Shadow of the Dragon’s Back,” published in November by Culicidae Press. Its dedication is to the boys and girls of South Africa, and in memory of her older brother, Pehr Odhner.
“What I wanted to do was show the contrast that had always distinguished my life and Africans under apartheid,” Longstaff, a retired librarian, said of the first book she’s written.
“I think I wanted people to know what it was like. It was a unique slice of history,” she said.
She struggled with how to tell her story.
She didn’t feel qualified to write as an expert on history and politics.
So, she chose to share her experiences in South Africa through a series of personal vignettes — not always told in chronological order — and through family photographs.
Each vignette is followed by excerpts and references to news articles, interviews and commentary on laws and events that give context to the apartheid regime.
The book’s title refers to the Drakensberg, or the “Dragon mountains” of South Africa, which Longstaff describes as being wild and beautiful.
One of the mountains is known as the “Dragon’s Back.”
To her, a dragon is something to be afraid of and something that portends evil.
“As I thought about what happened, I grew up in the shadow, and it was apartheid,” she said. “I grew up in a police state. No wonder I was such a nervous creature.”
The government wasn’t alone in enforcing apartheid. Even neighbors could be watching for missteps.
There was a young boy, Victor, who was the grandson of the family’s cook, Miriam Nyandu.
Longstaff and an older brother often played with Victor. But, a neighbor complained to their mother.
“You have to go and play with him behind the fence,” Longstaff said her mother told them. “We thought it was because we made too much noise.”
She realized later it was because the neighbor was offended that white and black children touched one another.
An older sister, Jeanette, walked to a bus stop for a ride on her first day of school. A sign at the bus stop’s bench said “Europeans Only,” but her sister didn’t think that applied to her, as an American. Another sign, saying “Whites Only” was written in Afrikaans, a language Jeannette didn’t speak.
So, she stood off to the side with the black maids, and servants, who traveled daily in and out of Durban.
Whites, Africans, Coloureds (mixed raced) and Indians lived in designated residential zones.
“They had to live outside the town because black people were separated,” Longstaff said.
Under apartheid, South Africa approved “pass” laws for nonwhites, requiring them to carry identity cards. They could be arrested for not producing them when asked.
“The police were pretty brutal,” Longstaff said.
Longstaff’s mother and father at times violated behavioral norms. Her mother would drive an African minister’s wife to the hospital, and allow the woman to sit next to her in the front seat.
She would be scolded and told that she “was giving them ideas,” Longstaff wrote.
Her father and his African secretary, Billy Khoza, once quietly tried to help someone escape from South Africa.
One day the South African secret police showed up at the house to search through her father’s office, looking for evidence of his support for the banned political party, the African National Congress.
They said Khoza was a “Communist” and an ANC party member. Her father reluctantly had to fire Khoza.
Years later, Longstaff’s mother invited Khoza (then a successful businessman) and his daughter to tea at their Pennsylvania home.
“It was quite nice,” said Longstaff because it would have been forbidden in apartheid South Africa.
Longstaff said her father had to learn to navigate through apartheid’s rigid rules. Otherwise the church and school could be shut down, and the Odhner family deported, she said.
When Longstaff was 16, her family returned to Pennsylvania.
It was difficult to adjust to an American culture that felt foreign to her in many ways, after being away for most of her childhood.
She is what is known as a “third culture” child, trying to straddle two separate cultures.
She went on to earn an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, and a master’s degree in library and information science from Drexel University.
For 20 years, she was an academic librarian at the Swedenborg Library in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania.
Later, she and her husband Alan moved to Florida where Longstaff joined the faculty at Saint Leo University. She is now retired.
It was an annual event at Saint Leo, “Focus the Nation,” that in part spurred Longstaff to think about writing a book. She and other faculty members organized the program, which invited students to explore environmental and social justice through art and literature.
But, she also reached out to her siblings to write about the family’s collective memories of their time in South Africa. One brother had about 300 photo negatives.
“At that point, I said I’m going to write the book myself,” Longstaff said.
She started her research with newspapers, including the London Times.
South African newspapers were so heavily censored they weren’t useful, Longstaff said.
“I learned a lot about apartheid that I didn’t know,” she said.
Longstaff hopes her book brings attention to press censorship especially as media reports now often are the targets of “fake news” charges.
That’s an uncomfortable reminder from the past, Longstaff said.
“In South Africa, they were only allowed to print the party line,” she said.
Revised March 21, 2018
