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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)


	This is Africa: local girls in the township of Waterval Boven (Jimmy Chin)

BUCKING THE SYSTEM—whether apartheid or the draft—was just one more ability that Ed and Andy shared. But it didn't make living in South Africa any easier.

In 1981, Ed met Nicky Allsopp, a graduate student in botany who now works for the government's Agricultural Research Council, helping communities rehabilitate rangeland. Because Nicky is white, "it was against the law for us to be going out together," Ed says. "We couldn't go to movies, restaurants, pubs, or the beach together, but we could go hiking." In 1984, they moved to the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Bokaap, into the house where Ed's father was born and where they still live. In Bokaap, people weren't bothered by an interracial couple, and in 1996, they wed.

Ed threw himself back into academia, finishing a doctorate in botany at the University of Cape Town that same year. Still, as a climber, he felt like he'd been left behind. For years, he'd watched white friends set out on club-funded expeditions wherever their passports were welcome—mainly in the Andes. "I am pretty bitter about it now," he says. "I can sit and listen to these guys talk about all the great expeditions all over the world they went on, and I think, Fuck, those were the days I was struggling to find a climbing partner. And I was probably climbing twice as hard as any of them at the time."

In 1996, Andre Schoon, then president of the MCSA and still an active member at 65, knocked on the Februarys' door. Ed was 42 by then, a grand figure in South African climbing, and Schoon wanted him to join. Ed was reluctant—he'd criticized the club in the press as a white-elitist institution even when, in 1986, his friend Richard Hess, a black entrepreneur from Cape Town, joined as the first nonwhite member since the club's founding in 1891. (Hess no longer climbs.) But now Mandela was calling for racial unity despite having been locked up for half his life. "I joined," Ed says, "primarily because I agree with Mandela—we all have to work together to form a united South Africa."

Ed would be one of the few nonwhites in the 1,800-member Cape Town section, the largest of the 4,500-member club's 13 chapters. (The club has 35 nonwhite members today, 20 of them in Cape Town.) "I received a lot of criticism from people in the nonwhite climbing clubs," he says. In 1998, Andy Johnson, the father of black climber Trevor Johnson, went so far as to call him the MCSA's "rent-a-black" in the Cape Times newspaper.

In 2002, the club gave Ed the Gold Badge, the first time they'd awarded it to a nonwhite. Though gratified to receive it, Ed was still adamant that the MCSA owed him, and the entire nonwhite outdoor community, a formal apology. The nation had just undergone a wrenching national catharsis—the process of historical reckoning that emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in which apartheid's worst oppressors had asked for forgiveness. Ed felt the club should, too.

"If the foremost people in this country have apologized, then what is it for the mountain club to say they're sorry?" Ed asks. "They want to sweep this matter under the rug. That's where my bitterness stems from."

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