Cheryl Carolus looked set for a high post in the ANC government; instead she opted to be South Africa’s first female high commissioner in London, writes Liz McGregor
Cheryl Carolus is not your average diplomat. She travels by tube, wears mini-skirts and parties into the small hours. She has strong opinions about her host country and is not afraid to voice them.
Carolus has brought the new South Africa to South Africa House with a vengeance. Those who once protested outside its gates now party inside its gracious rooms.
Since her arrival, she has encouraged the staff to unionise, removed recalcitrant racists and hammered out with the entire staff a “mission statement” on the new South Africa.
“Afrikaans men respect me because not only can I drink them under the table, but I can also cook,” says Carolus.
It is also clear that this tiny woman stands no nonsense. It was always assumed Carolus, a leading member of the anti-apartheid struggle, would go on to a high post in President Nelson Mandela’s government. But, approaching 40, she wanted a new direction.
“My whole life, I had been deployed by the African National Congress. I decided enough was enough,” she says.
It took a while for Mandela to accept that she was not going to obey orders. Then he came up with this option: represent him in London.
After some hesitation – she doesn’t want to be a career diplomat, either – she decided to do it, but her way. She has eschewed the cocktail party circuit and remained the lobbyist.
Carolus believes one positive outcome of the institutionalisation of racism under apartheid was that it was exposed.
“Where racism is not legalised, it’s harder for people to put a finger on it and thus confront it. And where racism affects a minority, like here [Britain], it’s easier to marginalise it.”
Carolus knows racism first-hand. Her father was illegitimate because her grandfather, an African herbalist, could not marry her grandmother, a coloured woman, because the Mixed Marriages Act forbade it.
Under the Group Areas Act the family was moved from their home in Cape Town to the Cape Flats, the sandy, wind- swept dumping ground for coloureds.
Despite this, Carolus had a happy childhood. Born in 1958, the second of four girls, hers was a tightly knit, working-class family; her father was a printer’s assistant, her mother a nursing assistant.
“Our family was very average but also quite extraordinary,” she says. “We talked about sex and menstruation, which none of our friends’ families did.
“Our parents were non-sexist, strongly anti-racist, quite Christian. We were taught that no one was better or worse than us: there was neither baas nor kaffir.”
In the perverted racial hierarchy of apartheid, coloureds were one notch below whites and one above Africans. This schizophrenia often produced an internal fault line: “We could talk about our white relations but never about our black relations.”
In adolescence, Carolus endured the agonies of skin lightening and hair straightening. Then, when she was 15, Steve Biko and the black consciousness movement hit South Africa. “Suddenly I was no longer a negative, a non-white, but black and proud. It sounds like a clich but it gave me a new confidence in myself,” she says.
In 1976, Carolus was detained for three months in the wave of repression that followed the students’ uprising.
Just 18, she was the only female political prisoner and the prison system could not cope. She was eventually held with prostitutes, between security police interrogations.
When Biko was beaten to death by security police in 1977, she organised his funeral.
After studying law at the University of the Western Cape, Carolus became a teacher at a Cape Flats school.
It was a time of great political turbulence, with class boycotts and pupils regularly absconding to join Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the ANC.
In 1983, she and [now Minister of Finance] Trevor Manuel co-founded the United Democratic Front, which was essentially the internal wing of the banned ANC.
“The UDF was the biggest growth spurt in my life,” she says now. “It taught me what democracy was and brought together race and class in a tangible way.”
The apartheid state, seriously threatened, grew increasingly vicious – arresting, torturing and killing activists.
Carolus, high on their hit list, was on the run for four years, living in constant fear of arrest.
“If you arrived home and saw one car in the street that looked suspicious, you had to leave immediately, not telling anyone.”
Carolus was to endure two more spells in detention, her interrogation interspersed with beatings, threats of rape and sleep deprivation.
Carolus is strongly feminist: one of her criticisms of the black consciousness movement is its sexism.
“Black men felt asserting their blackness meant asserting their maleness. A lot of women were forced into sex when they were not ready for it.
“I was one of the few who came through the movement with my virginity intact, although it didn’t last long after that,” she says.
Detention, too, was harder on women. All the attention was focused on men: “The world sent tracksuits and footballs to male prisoners. Women were largely ignored and they often paid a higher price domestically. Their husbands abandoned them because women were not meant to get involved in that kind of thing.”
It was while Carolus was on the run that she became involved with her husband, fellow activist Graeme Bloch.
Theirs was a relationship forged under conditions of extreme stress and danger but also with an overwhelming commitment to a common cause.
Bloch is from a very different background – the white, Jewish son of a plastic surgeon. They have a close, if combative relationship: “I couldn’t be married to a wimp but I don’t take any shit either,” she says.
He, more diplomatic, says: “We’re both stubborn but we like and respect each other.”
The couple live in the Kensington mansion that once housed apartheid’s ambassadors and now accommodates a never-ending stream of family, friends and harassed former comrades needing a break from the rigours of running the country.
Carolus is grateful to be out of it. “South Africa is still so volatile. There is so much turbulence because of the transition. It is nice to be in a job that is both exciting and predictable. If you fix a meeting for three months’ time, you can be fairly sure it will happen.”
She will do this job for just one term, then look for a new challenge. “But I am a very political person. Whatever I do will be concerned with the transformation of my country.”
Meanwhile, she’s content to chill out. “Graeme and I can spend quality time together. We can lie in bed on Sunday morning and read the papers. We go for long walks. I needed that,” she says.