08 ISSUE III
FEBRUARY 2025
FEBRUARY 2025
Air fragrant with lime trees
Audre Lorde’s international activism is often discussed in general terms, but her real-world connections in the Global South are frequently overlooked.
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By Sean Jacobs
The American feminist Audre Lorde’s work and activism emphasized intersectionalism, internationalism, and advocating for the marginalized. Her work has profoundly impacted global movements, particularly among women in developing nations and the Global South. While these connections are often discussed in abstract terms, the tangible, real-world relationships she had with women and communities in these regions are often overlooked. For example, consider South Africa.
Few know that starting in the early 1980s, Lorde developed close collaborations with Black South African women and maintained a strong connection with South Africa until her passing in 1992.
The Audre Lorde Collection at Spelman College in Atlanta holds a wealth of materials documenting this connection. These include letters between her and South African women’s groups and with leading figures of the struggle against apartheid like trade unionist Ellen Khuzwayo. In her last years, Lorde formed a close friendship with Khuzwayo.
Lorde also collected South African music, including works by bands like Sankomota (originally from Lesotho but established in South Africa) and Sakhile, as well as performance poet Mzwakhe Mbuli. In her poetry and her essays, Lorde often compared her battle with cancer to South Africa’s police state and its oppressive, racist leadership. “The devastations of apartheid in South Africa and racial murder in Howard Beach feel as critical to me as cancer,” she would write in November 1987. A month earlier, she had been more direct: “I visualize daily winning the battles going on inside my body, and this is an important part of fighting for my life. In those visualizations, the cancer at times takes on the face and shape of my most implacable enemies, those I fight and resist most fiercely. Sometimes the wanton cells in my liver become … P.W. Botha’s bloated face of apartheid squashed into the earth beneath an onslaught of the slow rhythmic advance of furious Blackness. Black South African women moving through my blood destroying passbooks …”
Lorde wrote essays comparing South African apartheid to the United States’ racist police state (“Apartheid U.S.A”), encouraged her children’s decision to join campaigns to sanction South Africa (“our son replaced the Stars and Stripes with the flag of South Africa to protest his school’s refusal to divest”), supported black South Africans’ right to resist apartheid’s violence, and, crucially, shared intimate connections with them. When Ellen Khuzwayo’s sister died in Botswana in April 1986, Lorde wrote in her diary: “I wish I were in Soweto to put my arms around her and rest her head on my shoulder.”
Lorde’s relationship with South Africa began when she and her partner, Gloria Joseph, watched a documentary about working-class Black women in Soweto. Moved by their stories, Lorde and Joseph set up the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa to help raise funds for two mostly working-class organizations, the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust.
In an essay for a book published in 2015 to celebrate Lorde’s legacy, Gloria wrote about how in June 1986, Lorde invited some of the South African women to a conference in Britain. Lorde then invited them on a brief holiday in the south of France before they returned to their homes in apartheid-ravaged South Africa.
The group stayed on a farm in Bonnieux in southeastern France owned by one of Lorde’s friends, Betty Wolpert, who also acted as one of Lorde’s art patrons. The farm was a beautiful old silk factory transformed into a grand villa. Gloria wrote: “The grounds were magnificent, with majestic stone buildings set amidst a stone yard. The air was fragrant with lime trees and other flowers, and the swimming pool sparkled in the sunlight.”
Joseph recalls that their time with the South African women was both “exquisite, enjoyable, and soul-wrenching” and that there was a deep sense of shared friendship.
Their days were filled with relaxing activities, free from the pressures of everyday life. “We spent our time preparing and sharing meals, taking walks around the villa grounds, and discussing everything from quilting to hairstyles, marriage, and raising children.”
However, not everything was carefree. “One incident revealed an underlying anxiety. While walking outside the villa, we came across cherry trees loaded with ripe fruit. Audre and I began picking a few from the low-hanging branches, but the South African women were immediately struck with fear. They were terrified that we might all face severe punishment, be sent to jail, or detained. Such was the grim reality of life in South Africa.”
The South Africans’ reluctance was real. Back home, white farmers would regularly execute or maim black people who they felt trespassed onto their property. The apartheid-era legal system often failed to respond adequately to crimes committed by white farm owners against black residents.
Another “stressful yet humorous” moment occurred when the group spent time in the swimming pool. Like everything else in South Africa, swimming was … by apartheid. Most public pools were in white areas; where pools existed in Black areas, they were often overcrowded or in poor condition.
“The South African women, eager to join in after watching me swim, were inexperienced in the water. It was a sight to behold: the women struggled to stay afloat, Audre and I did our best to support them, and Betty … feared that they might survive apartheid only to drown in her pool.”
And yet, Gloria wrote these moments were part of the shared experience.
“The evenings were extraordinary. We dined outdoors beneath a sprawling lime tree, with the sweet scent of its blossoms filling the air. Here we were, two African American women, learning a few words in Xhosa and Zulu while listening to the stories of the fifteen women from the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust. They shared their tales with us in the evenings, and at night, Audre would write endlessly. Each story was unique, yet there was an undeniable commonality in their suffering, their commitment to the struggle, and their appreciation for each other’s strength and unity. As Audre and I discussed these stories, her emotions fluctuated between profound sadness and an unwavering anger at the horrors of apartheid.”
In her diary, on June 20, 1986, Lorde would write: “I learn tremendous courage from these women, from their laughter and their tears, from their grace under constant adversity, from their joy in living which is one of their most potent weapons, from the deft power of their large, overworked bodies and their dancing, swollen feet. In this brief respite for us all … these women have taught me so much courage and perspective.”
In a long entry the next day, Lorde describes some of her South African comrades: Vivian, Ruth (“majestic and proud”), Thembi (“flames under her taut sweetness”), Petal (“short, solid, and graceful” who was tortured for weeks by the South African police), Sula (“wry and generous,” “a gentle inescapable persistence”), Emily (“sweet-faced”), Vivian, Maria, Linda, (questioned once by the South African police every single day for an entire month), Etta (a budding filmmaker), Sofia, Helen, Bembe, Rita, Hannah, Mary and Wassa.
She ends by describing the mood as the women prepare to return to South Africa: unsure of what reception awaits them at South African immigration, they arm themselves with the knowledge that “there is work to be done.”
* This is a revised and expanded version of a piece I first read at an event in Johannesburg last November at Nelson Mandela's first house that he lived in after he was freed from prison. The event was to mark 30 years of South African democracy.
Sean Jacobs is a professor and director of the Graduate Program in International affairs at The New School.