Skip to main content

Mom's view

EVE HALL (STEINHARDT)

After Kingsmead I went to Wits, where I did a BA in English, French and German, and met Tony. We married in 1959 and by 1961 we had son Philip, and twin sons Andrew and Christopher.
Sharpeville shocked us into joining the ANC, and I worked as regional organiser for what was then its “white wing”, the Congress of Democrats, while Tony was a journalist on the Star. I spent a few months in jail for “furthering the aims of the ANC” in 1963, and as we were both “listed” and could no longer work in South Africa, we left with our sons into exile in 1964. We came back to Johannesburg, very joyfully, in 1991!



In the intervening years, we lived and worked in many countries, Tony always in journalism, eventually specialising on the Middle East, then Southern Africa. I began as a journalist, but while working for Oxfam in India, I became more interested in development and gender issues, and did an MA in Rural Development at Reading University in 1976. After that, I worked for many years for the International Labour Organisation, a UN agency, concentrating on gender issues in employment in Africa mainly but also Asia. I retired in 1997, but I still do the occasional consultancy that takes me around the continent and helps keep my mind limber.
We’ve lived as a family, then later as a couple, in Tanzania, Kenya, India, Somalia (an incredible eight years!), Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, as well as a couple of two year spells in England. Now, we live in splendid isolation in the beautiful lowveld bush, on a private nature reserve, where our sons, their wives and our ten grandchildren love to visit from England. I had a mastectomy for breast cancer in ’01, but now feel strong as an Amazon.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...

Aerogramme from Lisa and Richard

To: Mr & Mrs J. Hall, Box 49 Eikenhof (TVL) Johannesburg Afrique du Sud. 28.3.76 Dear John and Nola, Today a week ago we were still in New Delhi with Eve and Tony and the boys and the whole thing looks like a dream. We arrived on the 28.2 in New Delhi and were happy to see the whole family fit and in good health. The boys have grown very much, Phil is just about the size of Tony and the twins are above average. We stayed untill the 22nd March, as our visa ran out and we did not want to go through all the ceremony of asking for an extension. It also got hotter and I don't know how I would have supported the heat. The extra week would also have passed, so we decided not to go to all the trouble with the authorities and leave on the 22nd. I cannot tell you how happy we have been to see such a lovely family, so happy and united. It is rare to experience sucha thing and we have both all the reasons to be proud of them (when I say goth I mean you and us ). There is su...

I pushed the red button

 Be against forced marriage not immigrants.   Human sacrifice, forced marriage and clitorectomy; unacceptable in Surbiton. If an Aztec, an Ancient Roman or a member of the Golden Horde was transported in time to Britain circa 2011-2, he might want to continue practicing his beliefs, however, and rightly so, there would be limits.  It might be a little difficult for him at first, but it would be easier for his children. Fights to the death, human sacrifice, pillage, murder, clitorectomies, forced marriages and explosive martyrdom are definitely 'no nos' in the UK. Early this year I had an 17 year old student who confided in me that her mother and father wanted her to marry her cousin, her mother's brother. The girl didn't want to, whereupon the mother took away her phone and computer. She told me that she was afraid she might get up one day and be told she would be on a flight out to Sri Lanka - suffering extraordinary rendition. On the walls of the college...