ABSTRACT
How did I discover that I was a terrorist? I had been invited by the Contemporary History Department at Yale University in Connecticut to attend a conference on contemporary South African history and I applied for a visa. I discovered that I couldn’t get a visa because I was a terrorist. Why was I a terrorist? Because I belonged to the African National Congress (ANC) which had been classified as a terrorist organization, and any member of a terrorist organization is, and was, a terrorist. Happily, the lobby group for the ANC in the USA dealing with the Department of Immigration, which had classified me as a terrorist, turned out to be a little more persuasive than the lobby group against the ANC. And so I discovered that after all I wasn’t a terrorist, and yet the description resonated, and irritated. I wouldn’t say it hurt. It irritated because we knew who we were and who we weren’t, but it rankled.
