Wilson Sidina: Tribute to a true comrade

When someone like Wlison Sidina dies, it is almost like a part of our history dies with him. He leaves a void that goes much further than the loss of an individual, but it erodes the memory of people who became involved in struggle because of noble goals and not because they wanted to enrich themselves.

Sidina, who passed away at the age of 81 at the end of July after a long illness, in many ways encapsulated what it means to be a comrade, a term which has lost some of its value in reason years because of the crime and corruption caused by people who called themselves by that name.

But Sidina was one of those who deserved to be called a comrade, because he embraced the values of non-racialism, unity, ubuntu, cooperation and selflessness that informs most of the decisions and actions of true comrades. And he lived it until the end.

An unheralded struggle icon who lived most of his life in Gugulethu, Sidina was part of a group of leaders in Cape Town’s African townships who embraced nonracialism and served the African National Congress loyally until his passing – despite some misgivings in recent years.

Sidina was a prominent activist who was involved in civics, trade unions, sport and also recruited many young people to join MK during the struggle. Those who were involved with him – some younger, some older – included people such as Oscar Mpetha, Zoli Malindi, Christmas Tinto, Annie Silinga, Mama Mtiya, Mama Holo, Mildred Lesea, Alpheus Ndude and Mzonke Pro Jack. Of these, I think it is only Mildred Lesea, who turned 90 a few months ago, is still alive.

My first interaction with Sidina was in 1980. I was a young reporter at the Cape Herald and we reported quite prominently on the meat workers’ strike which had led to a red meat boycott in order to put pressure on the employers to give into the wage demands of the striking workers.

Sidina was one of the organisers at the General Workers’ Union, who organised the workers at the Maitland Abattoir, who realised that all tactics could only work for a limited time frame, and this applied also to the meat boycott. He gave me my first scoop as a young reporter: the suspension of the meat boycott. It was a tough decision for the organisers of the strike and, with hindsight, it was the right decision at the time.

Sidina, as a union organiser but also as an activist, believed in supporting community and workers’ struggles irrespective of where it was taking place. He became involved in the early 1980s in the Wilson Rowntree strike and boycott, the Leyland workers’ strike, and the schools and bus boycotts.

My interactions with Sidina were plentiful over the past four decades, mainly as an activist but also as a journalist.   

He was one of the first people I would contact if I was confused by decisions taken by the township leadership on any issue. He always took the time to explain their position on the issue to me.

Sidina was at the forefront of trying to resolve many conflicts in the townships, including in Crossroads where a violent war had been raging between Johnson Ngxobongwana’s “witdoeke” and the rival group led by Oliver Memani.

Sidina was one of those leaders who believed that one could not only play a political role, but one had to be involved in various strata of society.

He had played rugby as a young man and was considered as one of the best flank forwards of his generation. He was one of the founder members of the Fly Eagle Rugby Club in Nynaga. Later, he became involved in sports administration.

After the banning of the ANC and other organisations in 1960, he played a major role in recruiting young people to join the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in exile. Many of his recruits came from the various sports clubs with which he was involved.

Sidina was among hundreds of activists in the Western Cape who were detained during the state of emergency in 1985. When he was released in 1986, he was slapped with a five-year banning order.

After the ANC was unbanned in 1990, Sidina became the first chairperson of the ANC branch in Section 4, Gugulethu and served the ANC in many other capacities.

Since we became a democracy and after the ANC leadership returned from exile, Sidina was one of those who were not fully recognised for the role they played in the struggle.

He became an ANC councillor in the City of Cape Town for many years, but he could have done much more.

The last time I saw Sidina, at Alpheus Ndude’s 80th birthday, he expressed some unhappiness with the state of our democracy. We agreed we would have a catch-up meeting soon, but that never happened. It was clear to me then that he was no longer as healthy as he used to be, even though he still displayed some of his normal wit.

I am sorry we never had our catch-up meeting. I really wanted to hear what he thought went wrong with our democracy.

(First published in New Agenda 90 - Third Quarter 2023)

Speech to UFS graduation ceremony

Thank you, Professor Witthuhn

Let me start by welcoming the most important people here today, the students who are graduating and their loved ones. Rector and Vice Chancellor Professor Francis Petersen, the Deans of the Faculties of The Humanities, Natural and Agricultural Sciences, and Theology and Religion, whose students are graduating today, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. As they say in government, all protocol observed.

It is such a wonderful feeling to share this special day with you. Congratulations to everyone who is graduating here today. For most of you, today represents the reward for three or four years of hard work, where you often had to forego the pleasure of being young in order to concentrate on your studies.

And you have achieved this at a time when our country is going through all kinds of turmoil, not least still recovering from a pandemic that crippled our economy and defined a new reality for many of us. We will never be able to forget the lockdowns, wearing masks in public and keeping social distances. We will never forget not being allowed to visit family and friends. But we have survived.

I want to share a few lessons from my life based on just two of my experiences: growing up in Hanover Park on the Cape Flats and working at the anti-apartheid community newspaper, Grassroots, in the early 1980s.

I spend most of my formative years living all over the Cape Flats. This is basically the euphemistic term for the poor areas where most black people live in Cape Town. I travelled with my mother and two older sisters from house to house until we eventually were offered a municipal house in Hanover Park, which was then and still is one of the most depressing townships you can find anywhere. The poverty levels are extremely high and, when I drive through the area nowadays, I see hundreds if not thousands of able-bodied young men standing on street corners at all hours of the day, unable to find work and without any hope of furthering their studies. Many of these young men have completed matric but just gave up hope after that, with some turning to a life of crime because they have run out of options.

It was tough growing up in Hanover Park, where I had to sleep in our toilet because that was the only place available for me to sleep. I could run quite fast as a young man and, I suppose, part of it had to do with the fact that I often had to run away from gangsters who could be found in every block of flats in the area and would strip you of every possession if they caught you.

The school I went to was in a prefab building and the year before I matriculated, we went to buy the newspapers to see who passed. Our school’s name was not in the newspaper. When we went to school later, the principal told us that the reason our school’s name was not in the newspaper was because no one had passed. We were determined to make sure that we would not fall to the same fate, so we called in former students, who were now at university, to tutor us, and we divided our fellow learners into groups of six to eight and each of the supposedly brighter children took charge of a group. We studied together and tutored them at the same time. In the end, we had a decent pass rate, with quite a few of us qualifying to study at university.

We did this despite our teachers and not because of them, and we realised that we had to give life to the old Congress of South African Students (COSAS) slogan of the time: Each one, teach one. We had to become students and teachers at the same time.

I learned so much about leadership during that period and still apply many of those lesson today. I also learned a lot about leadership and management when I worked for Grassroots community newspaper in the mid-1980s. I had worked for a mainstream newspaper which was part of the Argus Group, South Africa’s biggest newspaper company at the time, and I left to join the community newspaper for less than a quarter of my salary. But I did this because I was committed to the struggle against apartheid and felt that I could make a bigger contribution working at Grassroots.

The Grassroots experience was amazing and that is where I learned most of my management skills. I still use many of those skills today.

Grassroots was owned by community organisations such as residents’ associations, youth groups, churches, trade unions, sport clubs and women’s organisations. We had to check everything we did with representatives of these organisations. For instance, the paper came out every five weeks and the first week we would have a newsgathering meeting where up to 50 representatives would meet to go through our diary. We would sit in a circle and everyone would get an opportunity to speak and tell us what was happening in their organisations or communities. We would then decide which stories would work best for our next publication. The representatives would then go and write up the stories with the help of their media committees. The following week, everyone would meet and those with stories would read them out aloud and we would comment. Our meetings often lasted five hours. After three weeks of newsgathering, we would hand over to the production committee, which consisted of me and another trained journalist, working with youngsters from various youth groups from throughout the Western Cape.

I am telling you about this because I believe the best education can be obtained by simply listening to the people around you. I never dismiss anyone because they are perceived to be lower than me from a societal perspective, because I believe you can learn from anyone.

I learned from the gangsters in Hanover Park and I suppose that is one of the reasons I never became a gangster myself. I learned from the aunties and uncles in our communities, who worked hard every day to give their children better lives. I learned from the people I worked with at Grassroots and in other struggle organisations such as the United Democratic Front and the Cape Youth Congress.

Among the most important lessons I learned in life were that:

1.       You must always treat others with respect, because you cannot expect people to respect you if you do not give them respect;

2.       You can learn from everyone, because many people might not have riches, but they have wisdom;

3.       You must always be guided mainly by values and morals and not by political, business, religious or other affiliation, because otherwise your decisions might not always consider the bigger picture, which is always wanting the best for the most vulnerable in society. Always try to do the right thing based on values such as respect, fairness, nonracialism, non-sexism and a belief in a more equitable society;

4.       You must never forget where you come from and always appreciate the people who sacrificed and helped you to become successful in whatever it is that you plan to do with your lives. We must always try to find ways of giving back and helping others to also achieve their dreams.

5.       But the most important lesson I have learned in life is that learning never stops. It only stops when you pass away. I count myself among the lucky ones who have an inquisitive mind and who is always hungry for new knowledge.

In conclusion, I want to welcome all of you who have stopped studying to begin working, to a new reality where you will soon realise that while the lessons you learned in university will always be valuable, the lessons you will learn in life are priceless. Congratulations on your achievements and I wish you all the best for the future.

Thank you

(Speech delivered to the University of the Free State afternoon graduation ceremony on Friday, 9 December 2022)

Mlambo-Ngcuka: men and women must work together against gender-based violence

The University of Johannesburg has just appointed Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka as its Chancellor. I interviewed her in August, just before she completed her term as the Executive Director of UN Women. This is the unedited version of the story I wrote.

Former South African Deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka ends her eight-year term as United Nations Under Secretary and Executive Director of UN Women this month (August) and can’t wait to return to South Africa to contribute to the struggle against gender inequality and gender-based violence.

In an interview from her office at the UN head office in New York, she said she was leaving UN Women in a much stronger state than when she started.

“We were a $350 million organisation then. Right now, we have managed to raise US $40 billion. But we are not rich, the money is not for us. The money will go to member states, to civil society and to youth. For member states, the money will fix the things that we have been pushing them to fix.”

The US $40 billion – made up of donation from member states, corporates and civil society – was announced at the recent Generation Equality Forum in Paris.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said she was “hopeful” about the efforts South Africa was putting into the struggle to promote women’s rights.

“At the recent conference in Paris, which came 25 years after the historic Beijing Declaration, South Africa focused on economic justice, financial inclusion, increasing procurement for women, and they were mobilising and lobbying countries all over Africa.

“South Africa focused on young people, making sure that young people can access economic activities, and they focused on ending gender-based violence.

“The country was very strong on innovation and technology, and the need to propel women to be much better represented and active in innovation and technology.

“We all have to make sure that we support South Africa’s efforts. I can’t wait to come back, so that we really live up to the expectations.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka said that women throughout the world were worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Two thirds of the jobs lost during the pandemic were lost by women. Many of these women had an informal employer or were informal employers themselves. We have also seen the impact on women also who are in sectors such as tourism, which has been hit the hardest by the pandemic.

“Many of the women do not have contracts, so they do not have rights in those jobs. They are the first to go when there is a crisis. Women will take the longest time to recover, unless we intervene more aggressively and address the situation.”

Violence against women also increased significantly from the start of the pandemic.

“Within a week of the pandemic starting, we were hearing from our colleagues internationally who were getting messages from the police stations about the increase of reporting of cases involving violence against women. The increase was as high as 30% to 50% in some countries.”

Women were also affected by an increased burden of care, said Mlambo-Ngcuka.

“Many people who could not go to hospital because of the situation in our hospitals in. In most countries, those patients stayed at home and needed someone to look after them. It is the women and girls who do their job. The burden of care increased significantly.”

The role of young people in a country such as South Africa was crucial, she said.

“We have to allow them to be as angry as they need to, because there is radical impatience among young people that can encourage change and policies. We should encourage them, because they don’t make demands without putting in the work that is needed.

“It is about working collaboratively and their advocacy is important for us to move forward. Their engagement and participation are always going to be critical.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka said that South Africa had a particularly serious problem with regards to violence against women.

“There is gender-based violence all over the world, and it is a problem. The fact that women are reporting it in South Africa is progress, because women are not staying in violent situations and stomaching the violence.

“Violence against women in South Africa is a serious problem compared to many countries. We have a violent history in our country that we have not been able to overcome.

“We really have to make sure that we have a stronger way of dealing with violence against women, and we should not allow men to get away with violence against women.

“We need to instill the right values among men. We need men to be engaged, and we have to start early. We have now been pushing the engagement of men and boys in the struggle for gender equality.

“The future is going to require men and women to work together. You need men to be much stronger in playing that role, in sacrificing, in making sure that their contribution counts and is significant.”

 (First carried in Celebrating Women, a Business Day supplement in September 2021)

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s legacy will live on

Ryland Fisher

There is a certain irony in Archbishop Desmond Tutu choosing his last day on earth to be 26 December 2021 – the Day of Goodwill in South Africa and a day after the world celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ.

I use the word “choosing” because I know that, over the past few months, he had basically prepared his family and everyone around him for his final day. Everyone knew he would be going soon; it was only a matter of when. The cancer which he had been battling for many years was eating away at his body and it must have been sad for his family to see someone who was so strong being so weak in his final days.

Irony has always been a strong part of Desmond Tutu’s life. Even during the days of apartheid, while he was in the forefront of the struggle, there were some young comrades, including myself, who felt that he might have been too soft on the proponents of apartheid. There were many others, including conservatives in the church, who felt that he was too outspoken against apartheid.

Later, after I became one of the first black editors of a major South African daily newspaper, the Cape Times, in 1996, I began to interact with him a lot and developed a greater understanding of this great man whose only fault was to love South Africa and his family unconditionally.

The Arch loved to laugh, especially at himself, and would often tell jokes in which he was the subject of the humour. But he was also prepared to tell jokes which might not seem politically correct. Once, he said that the first time he boarded a plane and heard that the pilot was black, he started praying. And when he asked the (black) air hostess for black pepper, she brought him the Sowetan. He would then laugh out loud. He told these jokes as a way of pointing out certain absurdities and ironies in life.

At 90, the Arch had a good innings and made his mark on the world, whether it was as the Bishop of Johannesburg, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, the chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) or as one of South Africa’s four Nobel Peace Laureates.

Publicly, he dealt with the big issues in society, but privately, he dealt with many seemingly smaller problems, including a host of requests from family and friends.

I remember once, in 2003, when I was at the home of my good friend, the Rev Buck Bellmore, who was Archbishop Tutu’s chaplain while he was convalescing from prostrate cancer at Emory University in Atlanta in the late 1990s, I received a call. It was unusual for me to receive a call at Buck’s house, because no one really knew I was there. The person on the other end of the line greeted me in Afrikaans with a “Hoe gaan dit, boet?” (roughly translated as “How is it going, brother?”) and I spent a few second trying to figure out who it was.

It was the Arch who told me he was in Atlanta for one night, staying at his daughter’s house, and he wanted to know if I would like to come for dinner that evening. Buck and his wife, Connie-Dee, were away at the time and I was helping to look after their children, Thomas and Sarah, but I agreed immediately. That evening, I drove Buck’s car on the wrong side of the road (like they do in America) and went to meet him at the house his daughter, Thandeka Tutu-Gxashe, shared with her husband and son.

For a few hours that night, Thandeka, her husband, the Arch and me, spoke about South Africa and the world and his frustration with Thabo Mbeki, who was still President of South Africa. He spoke about how Nelson Mandela had to intervene to ensure that Mbeki accepted the report he had prepared as the chairperson of the TRC, after Mbeki was initially reluctant. The report had made some adverse findings against the ANC, among many others. But we also spoke about many other things, such as the importance of family and the Arch cracked many jokes, which we all appreciated.

A few years later, Buck had left Atlanta, where he had a parish, to join another Episcopal church in Mobile, Alabama. He did not last long and soon found himself unemployed, mainly because of his outspokenness. I went to visit Buck in Mobile while he was unemployed and, soon after I after I returned, I went for dinner at the Arch’s house in Milnerton. I told him about Buck’s situation and asked him to see whether he could put in a good word to someone in America on behalf of Buck. I also asked him to give Buck a call, especially as it was shortly before Christmas.

The day after Christmas, I received a call from Buck, saying that he had been offered a job in Las Vegas and Archbishop Tutu had called him on Christmas day.

Tutu never hesitated to give of himself to the world and, in his later years, became as outspoken about more “modern” issues, such as climate change, xenophobia, gender-based violence and the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.

When I wrote my book, Race, which was published in 2007, the Arch willingly agreed to write the foreword, even though he thought I was “a little bit crazy”.

He wrote in the foreword that “This [writing a book about race] was not a job to be approached lightly and, irrespective of how you approached it, it was bound to upset some people.” He was very pleased when I went to take him a copy of the book after it was published, but still insisted that I was crazy.

I interviewed Archbishop Tutu on his 70th and 80th birthdays. He did not do any interviews when he turned 90 in October this year because he was already very weak. The last time I interviewed him, we spoke about many issues, from child marriages to his views on the quality of South Africa’s freedom and some of low points of his life. Some of the low points, he said at the time, was when Barney Pityana and others were expelled from Fort Hare University because they were protesting, the Boipatong massacre and the death in police custody of people like Steve Biko.

I asked him about his legacy. His response was: “You can’t ask someone about his legacy. That is for other people to worry about. You cannot sit and say you want to be remembered in this way or that way.” He remained self-deprecating until the end. But his legacy will live on.

(First published by IOL on Sunday, 26 December 2021)

The night jazz and classical music gave me hope that it will take more than a virus to silence the industry

I felt a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye several times during the 2021 Jazz & Classical Encounters Festival Vol 3 at the Spier Amphitheatre on the night of Saturday, 4 December.

One was when the amazing soprano Zandile Mzazi, accompanied by pianist Yohan Chun and bassist Francois Botha, in their tribute set to Sibongile Khumalo, played some of the late opera and jazz singer’s famous hits, such as Thula Mama and Ntyilo Ntyilo. It was almost as if one could feel the deceased’s spirit in the room, beyond the huge posters of her and another late, great musician, Andre Petersen, which adorned the stage.

The second moment was when the acclaimed New York-based, South African-born pianist Kathleen Tagg ended off her set with the mellow but haunting Rachmaninoff Prelude in G Major as a dedication to the late jazz and classical pianist Petersen, with whom she had often collaborated. This was after she had played an extract from former President Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech as an opening to one of her songs, a day before we marked the eighth anniversary of his death.

The third was when the night’s main attraction, trumpeter Feya Faku, spoke about how he survived a serious illness which had incapacitated him, making him believe he would never perform again. There was another such moment earlier when he introduced his band members, including pianist Bokani Dyer, who Faku had known since he was eight years old when he played with his dad, Steve Dyer, the celebrated saxophonist.

I felt a lump in my throat every time I looked around the reasonably small audience and realised that it has been almost two years since we have been able to do this: watch amazing live music with a mix of local and foreign-based artists in a beautiful setting.

Yes, it was strange to see so many people sitting with masks while watching the show, and we had to undergo all the necessary protocols before we were allowed into the venue, such as taking our temperature, filling in a form confirming our Covid-19 history (or lack thereof) and leaving our contact details in case there was a need to get in touch if anyone tested positive after the event. There was no indication of the event being open only to vaccinated people, which, I suppose, is the logical next step.

It was the first time in a long time that we went out to an event with so many people, even though the venue was not even half full. But we were nervous in the days leading up to the event. I kept on thinking about the possibility of contracting the virus, even while I was sitting at the concert and even though I am vaccinated.

This is, I suppose, the reality of living in a pandemic. We all have to take precautions and make sure that we keep each other safe if we want to return to any sense of normality.

It has been a tough time for the music industry, in particular, and I found myself wondering how one sustains one’s loyalty to such a craft when there is no clear path to any sense of normality. Many musicians have told me that it is not the same to perform for an online audience. Musicians thrive on their interaction with their audiences and audiences, likewise, value the live interaction with musicians.

Apart from the lump-in-throat moments, there were so many highlights of Saturday’s performances that give me hope that it will take more than a virus, with all its alphabetical variants, to silence the music industry.

Bokani Dyers’s fingers flying over his keyboard; the artistic versatility of the married couple, Yohan Chun and Francois Botha, who both played piano and bass on stage; the you-could-smash-glass-with-that-voice of Zandile Mzazi, making one wonder how high can anyone’s voice realistically go; the intimacy and vibrancy of American-based South African-born violinist Elinor Speirs, accompanied by the hugely talented and versatile Mark Fransman on saxophone and piano, Brydon Bolton on bass and Jonno Sweetman on drums; the piano wizardry of Kathleen Tagg, who convinced Shane Cooper to join her on stage playing an electronic instrument and not his usual double bass; and the energetic drumming of Ayanda Sikade in Feya Faku’s backing band, bringing back memories of the late, great Louis Moholo. All the musicians performed at their best, as if this was the last time.

It was almost like the gods did not want to interrupt the music, with the expected rain only coming after the encore by Faku and his band and as people were making their way home after the 10-hour show.

The Spier Jazz & Classical Encounters are unique in that they bring together some of the best proponents of jazz and classical music and they are able to show the similarities between the two genres, where many people often only see differences.

This year’s rendition was dedicated to Sibongile Khumalo and Andre Petersen, among the many musical greats that we have lost in the past year or two. I am sure that the two of them smiled happily from wherever they are and that others, such as Hugh Masekela and Robbie Jansen, nodded in agreement.

(First published on the Daily Maverick website on Sunday, 5 December 2021)

Trumpeter Feya Faku performing at the Spier Jazz and Classical Encounters Festival on Saturday, 4 December.

80th birthday interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Ryland Fisher

Ten years ago, just before Archbishop Tutu turned 70, I was the only South African journalist and, as far as I know, the only journalist in the world who interviewed him.

It was less than a month after the terror attacks on the United States and the world’s media was, momentarily, not interested in South Africa.

As the Arch, as he is affectionately known, prepares to turn 80 next Friday, things were a bit different this time. I had to join a list of journalists, local and abroad, who wanted to interview the man who, despite announcing his retirement last year, refuses to get out of the media headlines.

I have to declare upfront that the Arch has always been one of my favourite people and, in our many interactions over the years, he has never failed to impress me with his humility and willingness to help others.

One of the first indications for me that Tutu is serious about his retirement is that his daughter, Mpho, has returned home to run the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation and, all indications are, that in the years to come, she will become the Tutu that everyone will be quoting.

It is for this reason I thought I should take my daughter, Raisa, who is starting out as a journalist, along to conduct the interviews with Desmond and Mpho Tutu.

I also decided, in my limited time with the Arch, I would not ask him about the big stories that have been in the media lately, but to reflect a little on his life and the times he became frustrated with God.

Despite his age, and getting tired quicker nowadays, Tutu is still very lucid and very snappy in his comments. I could see this when he tried to interview Raisa and me, in response to questions we had asked him.

I reminded him that I interviewed him 10 years ago and he quickly responded: “So, what changes have you seen in me” and gave one of his trademark Tutu chuckles.

When Raisa asked him about whether he had concerns about his daughter becoming a priest, he asked her in return: “Now what did your dad say when you said you also wanted to be a journalist?” once again accompanied by a chuckle.

Raisa began by asking him about his passion against child marriages and what can be done to stop this concerning practice. For once, the serious Tutu stepped in.

“We’ve just been to New York and we’re very thrilled to have had the opportunity of highlighting such a ghastly custom. If nothing happens, 10 million girl children under the age of 18 will have become brides, 10 million in a year. All of them would have stopped going to school and if they give birth at age 15 or under, they are five times more likely to die than young women 19 and over.

“Researchers have found that we would not be able to achieve six of the eight millennium development goals because of child marriages.

“You obviously want to enlist the support of as many people in the community as possible. We found that it can happen. We visited Ethiopia, and found that, as a result of organisations working with religious and other community leaders, that it is possible for people to begin to discuss and say that this is something we want to stop.

“Our goal is to end this problem in a generation. If you are able to get a girl to stay at school, at least until high school, when she gets married, she’s not likely to agree that her child should get married when she’s under 18.

“The repercussions for communities are very considerable. Women who are relatively well-educated are some of the best multipliers of community wealth. If you want a community to develop, you have to educate the women. What is needed is to end this practice and to keep girls at school for as long as possible, getting them to become professionals.

“There is no question at all about the positive effects of that. You’d be able to, with one stroke as it were, improve child health, maternal health, and you could begin to make a difference on gender equality.

“Most of the girls we saw were married at about 12. One of the girls said to us: ‘You know what, previously, my husband never called me by my name, he used a derogatory term. I had to do everything, I had to clean the house, prepare the meals, I had to clean the children and then I had to go work in the field, and he sometimes even wanted me to wash his feet.

‘Now that the things have changed’ – and you could see her face glowing – she says, ‘he calls me by my name. He even fetches water. Now we sit and we discuss, we share chores.’ And you could see that the marriage has also been enriched.

By dealing with child marriages, you’d also be able to deal with things like HIV/Aids, because when a girl marries a much older man, he’s usually someone who has been very sexually active and possibly HIV-positive. Just imagine a 12, 13-year-old with a 40-year-old man. It’s almost just so ghastly.”

Raisa asked Tutu whether it was a proud moment in his life when he found out that his daughter was becoming a priest.

“We were proud whatever they chose. We said we would support them in whatever they chose. In fact, originally, Mpho said that she wanted to become a lawyer. However, her first degree was in electrical engineering, which she has not used. We were quite surprised when she said that she wants to go to seminary.

“Well yes, I am glad. One daughter is in public health. We supported her and we are thrilled that she is doing something that she wants to do.

“I supposed I’m just a tiny little bit more proud of Mpho, because she is following in her father’s footsteps more or less (he bursts out laughing). But I hope that most parents would say: ‘my child, whatever you choose and believe, if that is what you want to do, we are thrilled for you and we would want to support you in your choice.’

I noticed, but did not point out to him, that while he spoke about his two daughters, that he did not mention his son Trevor, who has been known to be very controversial, for some of the wrong reasons.

Raisa asked whether he had any concerns about her decision.

“No, not really, do you mean that I might have been jealous that she preaches better than me? (laughs) I think she does actually. She’s very much smarter than her daddy.

“I just hope that she will be the best that she can be in what she has chosen and that she will find it fulfilling.

“Now what did your dad say when you said you also wanted to be a journalist?”

“My dad asked me why,” Raisa replied. “After that, everybody would say the same thing about, oh, you are following in your father’s footsteps. After a while it gets a bit annoying.”

Tutu responded: “You chose it because you wanted it, not because your dad happened to be a journalist.”

“Yes”, Raisa replied, “I suppose he had some sort of impact, but we are on different paths of journalism.”

Raisa then asked him about writing a book together and how this impacted on the relationship with his daughter.

“I said to you half facetiously that she is better than her dad. In this book, she does most of the work, almost all of the work, Someone had sent me an email saying that he had noticed that, at the end of each chapter there was something from God, which Mpho composed, and this person was saying how incredibly helpful he had found those last bits in each chapter. This was all Mpho’s creation.

“I would say that God has given her certain gifts. One can only marvel at how generous God can be and one would want to see her blossom.”

Did he have future plans to write another book with his daughter?

“Ha, I don’t know. It may possibly be and since our first experience was a very fulfilling one, I would not dread that possibility. I’ll be glad for it to happen. I hope my judgement is not clouded by the biological relationship. (laughs) I think she does have a gift in counselling and I have to be careful that I am not blinded by, as you say, blood is thicker than water. If I have to make an assessment, she has constantly surprised me by the very sound pieces of advice that she gives.”

I decided to ask him about some of the low points in his life. Most of his higlights, such as receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 and becoming South Africa’s first black Anglican archbishop has been well documented.

“One of the low points of my life was when I was the chaplain at Fort Hare when people like Barney Pityana and others were in the student body and they were all expelled because they had been demonstrating, asking for a more accountable administration. I remember on that particular occasion being very upset with God, when these kids were turfed off campus with nothing. They were told go get their luggage and each one was accompanied by a police officer.

“They were put on buses and trundled off to a station with no food. I was really very angry with God and it was at similar kinds of situations, eg June 16, finding that so many of our kids had been killed and God was doing nothing about it. I found this deeply upsetting. It made me challenge God.

On many of the occasions when one had those massacres, Boipatong, etc. when the security apparatus rode roughshod and were completely unaccountable, at those moments, we were at a very low ebb and things were not looking good. When you had people killed in detention, like Steve Biko in 1977. We had a spate of that kind of stuff and it just seemed they were blatantly getting away with murder and that really shook one’s fate. We had hit rock bottom. And then, when we had the intergroup strife, so-called black on black violence, when it seemed that black lives were cheap.”

I asked him whether, in those dark days, he believed that we would end up in a situation where we would have our freedom.

“Oh yes, I had no doubt that we would eventually win our freedom. The only question was whether one would have been there. There was never any doubt that we would be free. And when it came, the speed at which it all happened was quite breath-taking.

“But, even as you know, that period, 1990 to 1994, was an awful period for us. The intergroup strife was abominable. We had the national peace accord, which was an instrument that tried to rein in the carnage. It was awful; there were drive-by shootings, people being mown down on the trains. They (and he did not indicate who he was referring to) really wanted to subvert the process, and if you consider what was happening in KZN and in some of these areas like Sharpeville, where you had hostels. They were quite vicious. Even with all of that, one never abandoned that belief that we were going to make it, that we were going to be free.”

And what does her think about the quality of our freedom today?

“There are many, many good things. The most important is that we are free. No one can stop me in the street to ask for my pass. People used not to have the freedom to go anywhere in life, where you had curfew laws, the influx control laws. When I was Bishop of Johannesburg, I had to go to the pass office to be endorsed in and Leah had to have her pass stamped with a thing that said she had permission to be in the area of Johannesburg as long as she was married to this man. (laughs)

“We lived in both our house in Soweto and the bishop’s house in Westcliffe, and they would stop us because they wanted to strip-search my wife and daughters on the side of the road. It’s incredible really.

“All those abominations are gone. It is very difficult to talk to people who have never been un-free and try to describe to them what it feels like to be free when for so long you were not. There is such a massive difference between what we are now and what we were.

“The fact that at least on paper, you are saying there is free medical care for kids up to five and expectant mothers.

“For all of us, what we have become was demonstrated in the soccer and rugby world cups. If you had predicted in my presence that South Africa could be so patriotic, I would have told you to go see your psychiatrist.

“I mean, where else have you heard of a sports team being given a send-off? I can’t think that I have ever come across something like that. Yes, teams are welcomed back when they have won the trophy, but here 65 000 people come to say goodbye to the team and I can bet you that many of those in the crowd would not have known the difference between a try and scrum and yet they were there. We really do have an incredible spirit.

“The pride that we have now in the Springboks is quite incredible when you think that, only a few years ago, almost all black people supported the team opposing the South African team.

“And it is a team that still has not significantly transformed. It only has about three black players, yet that has not significantly shaken people to say what about representivity. There are many good things about our country today.”

And some of his concerns?

“Unlike in the apartheid dispensation, when parliament had the sovereignty, we now have the Constitution. That does change the quality of the debate. I think the ruling party has not yet understood that the Constitution has the sovereignty, the last word, and not parliament.

“Maybe we assumed a great deal. We assumed that we would remain as altruistic as we were during the struggle. If you had approached anybody who had been involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, all of them would have said that they are involved in the struggle for the sake of freedom. Whether I am there to enjoy that freedom or not is totally irrelevant. I am going to give it my all for the sake of the freedom of us all. We thought that spirit would transfer automatically to the post-apartheid era and sadly it has not.

“We have lost or seemingly have lost that self-sacrificing, altruistic, being there for the sake of others and not for the sake of self-aggrandisement.”

At this point Tutu started getting restless and I realised that we would have to end the interview soon. He said only half-joking: “Wanneer gaan ons klaarmaak, man? Ek wil gaan slaap. (When are we going to finish, man? I want to go sleep.)

I asked him whether he always wanted to become a priest.

“No, I wanted to become a doctor and I was even more determined when I contracted TB. I was admitted to Wits medical school, but we did not have the lolly. (He laughs out loud.)

“So I went to teacher training. I was a teacher until Verwoerd introduced Bantu education in high schools. He had already introduced it into primary schools. I did not have too many options, but my wife and I were very clear that we did not want to be part of ramming down our children’s throat this travesty of an education and the only viable option that remained was to become a priest. Fortunately for me, I was accepted as a candidate. I don’t know what I would have done if the bishop said to me: nee, nie jy nie (no not you).” He gives another huge laugh.

I asked him whether he thought things would have been different if he pursued a different career, for instance if he became a medical doctor or had remained an English teacher. The world might have been deprived of Desmond Tutu, the spiritual leader.

“One of the most outstanding leaders in Soweto was Dr (Nathatho) Motlana. I don’t think he has been given the recognition that he deserves, he died about a year or so ago. He was the chair of the Committee of 10, a most extraordinary person. If I had done something else, I might not have had the platform, but you did have people like Dr Motlana, and you also had some teachers. For instance, Tom Manthatha (another member of the Committee of 10) was a teacher and they stood out against the system.”

I had to ask him about his invitation to the Dalai Lama and whether, at this late stage, he remained optimistic that he would receive permission to visit South Africa.

“Sensibly, if he was going to be given a visa, they would have done that long ago. It is highly unlikely and the trick is not to have too long a period where people could have a field day clobbering government. I mean, they could still surprise us, but it is something of a sad spectacle.

“You would think that in a truly democratic South Africa, he would be welcome. This is a great man. In any other part of the world, he would be treated like a head of state. The last time I was with him in Paris, he had a huge retinue, security, outriders and things like that, you know. You would have thought that South Africa would have welcomed him.”

I told Tutu that, when I interviewed him 10 years ago, he indicated to me that he intended to retire and he restated this last year. He laughs.

“Last year when I reiterated and re-confirmed my decision, I had engagements to which I had already committed. I said that there were two things from which I would not retire; the Elders and a new initiative, e-health telemedicine – I think I’m a patron or something there. I am going to continue because I think it is a fantastic innovation.

“But I am going to surprise you – ek gaan swyg.” He laughs out loud again and turns to Raisa. “Why are you smiling like that, you don’t believe me. How can you have someone not believe an archbishop?”

Roger Friedman, a former colleague at the Cape Times who now works closely with Tutu, asked: What is swyg?” to which Tutu replies: “You don’t know swyg. It is to keep quiet, man.”

My final question is about his legacy.

“You can’t ask someone about his legacy. That is for other people to worry about. You cannot sit and say you want to be remembered in this way or that way,” he said as he gets up and said he was going to rest a bit in his room. It was just before noon.

After the interview, Tutu asked me about the welfare of a mutual friend from the United States. The Rev Kent “Buck” Bellmore, who used to be his chaplain at Emory University. Loyalty, it is clear, is one of his strong trademarks.

Friedman pointed out that I did not get to ask him about his support for Arsenal football club, but I did not want to embarrass him. I asked him, however, and he just shakes his head.

At 80, he remains as sharp as ever.

(In the first picture below, I interview Archbishop Tutu in Milnerton. In the second picture, I am with my daughter, Raisa, and Archbishop Tutu’s daughter, Mpho. We interviewed the two of them together.)

70th birthday interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu

In 2001, I was the only journalist, as far as I knew, who interviewed Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I struggled to place the interview in international publications, because it was a few weeks after 9/11, but I did get it published in South African newspapers. I am sharing here, unedited, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu turns 70 on Sunday. In a rare interview, with Ryland Fisher, he reflects on his life.

THERE are many sides to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There is the self-deprecating wit and the infectious laugh, which is what most people see nowadays. But there is also the serious side to Tutu, the side which inspired and infuriated so many during the dark days of apartheid.

Contrary to popular belief today, Tutu was not universally loved during the struggle years. He was loathed by many whites, who saw him as a troublemaker, and he often incensed the anti-apartheid “comrades” with his strong moral stance on many issues.

But as he celebrates his seventh birthday today (Sunday), it is as one of the most loved South Africans still alive.

Tutu said he intended to have several birthday celebrations over the next few days.

“On the fifth, which is two days before my birthday, my successor, (Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane) has invited me and Leah to a meeting of the bishops in Bloemfontein. We will be having a dinner celebration there. We will probably have a family bash on the day itself in Soweto. Then we travel down to Cape Town by train.

“There is a concert in St George’s Cathedral on October 10 and on October 14, which is Leah’s 68th birthday, we will have a joint celebration in Bishops Court. The Archbishop (Ndungane) is giving a little party there.”

Speaking to Tutu about the highlights in his life is easy. There are so many for this Klerksdorp-born son of a school teacher and a domestic worker: winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, becoming the first black Archbishop in the Anglican Church, his leadership of the South African Council of Churches and his chairmanship of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, among others.

But the highlight he savours most is when he was told that he was a father for the first time.

“That was one of the most magical moments in my life. It made me feel so like God,” said Tutu in an interview this week.

He also singled out the release of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratic elections and “perhaps being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”.

“At that particular time in the history of our country it was such an incredible thing.”

Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize was also what made him feel most hopeful, in the apartheid days, that South Africa would change for the better.

“When I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, I knew that God was going to help focus the attention of the world a little more on our situation. (Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize) gave notice to the perpetrators of injustice that the world was watching. It was encouraging our people that their cause was just.

“It opened doors. The minute it was announced I got a call from the White House. We were in New York at the time and I had been trying to see Ronald Reagan, but he did not want to see me. Then suddenly the doors were being flung open.’”

Asked about the low points of his life, Tutu again chooses something personal.

“You know when your child doesn’t go in the direction in which you were hoping. The pain of that is severe,” he said, with obvious reference to his son, Trevor, who has hit the headlines several times for the wrong reasons in the past few years. Tutu also has three daughters and several grandchildren.

But Tutu also bore the pain of being involved in the struggle and “shared in the anguish of so many who were being made to suffer so totally unnecessarily”.

“It was painful when you visited some of apartheid’s stamping grounds, the Bantustan homelands, and saw people who had been uprooted.

 “It was also painful when you were in places where there was violence and you had to visit in the aftermath of that violence, looking at the devastation.”

Tutu becomes almost tearful when he recalls another devastating aspect during the struggle years, this time on the part of the so-called comrades.

“ When our people were using the necklace (killing of people by burning a tyre around their neck) and we saw our children dancing around a burning corpse, you just shuddered and said: ‘What has happened to us that we could sink so low that our children could actually exalt in this?’

“I was addressing a funeral on the East Rand, soon after a necklacing had happened in Thokoza. I didn’t know what to say to register my abhorrence and I said if we didn’t stop using that method I would take my children and my family and leave the county that I love. I did not mean it literally but I was just trying to say how appalled I was.”

His time with the TRC is coming to an end at the end of December when the commission is supposed to hand their final reports to the government.

For Tutu, there were many highlights and many low points during his term as chairman of the TRC.

“One of the highlights for me was at the first hearing in East London, when someone who had suffered quite extensively, as it happened a white person, spoke so very warmly about forgiving.

“ Another highlight would be the Bisho hearing where the former head of the Ciskei Defence Force greatly incensed people, not so much with what he was saying but how he was saying it. The hall was packed with the loved ones of victims of that massacre, and the tension was very high. After this army officer had spoken the tension shot even higher. Then four officers came up and said they had given the orders for the soldiers to shoot and you thought the place was going to go up in flames.

Then this man turned to the audience and said: ‘Please forgive us’ and, totally unexpected, the place erupted in thunderous applause. You would have thought that the opposite reaction should have been the appropriate one, given how the people were feeling. It was an incredible moment.

“The low point for me must be the sadness at non-participation by white people by and large. Despite all the statements that we made, they still claimed that the TRC was a witch-hunt against whites and it was set up to be biased in favour of the ANC. The quite extraordinarily ungenerous attitude of many whites in the face of the magnanimity that was coming largely from black people was disappointing.

“Many on white side missed a golden opportunity of being able to account for the past in which they were involved, whether voluntary or involuntary. They were part of a horrendous system that had visited untold suffering on their fellow South Africans who happened to be black.

“They may not all have supported apartheid but they benefited and were collaborators, willingly or unwillingly. There was a great failure on the part of the white leadership because, on the whole, they did not do what they alone could have done which was to have said to their fellow whites: ‘Hey, let us recognise just how lucky we have been.’

“The history around us in the world, the Bosnia’s, the Middle East, the Northern Ireland, just show what we were saved from. When you think riots are happening, not in South Africa, but in Britain, and children are escorted by soldiers, not in South Africa, but in Northern Ireland.

“When you see the awful carnage that is happening in the Middle East, with suicide bombers and the retaliation that happens there, we have been spared that. Had one prominent white leader said to the community: ‘We have been exceedingly fortunate and let us translate our gratitude into a generosity,’ it would have made a difference.”

Asked if there was anything he still wanted to achieve with his life, Tutu said: “I want to be able to help people develop the good that is in all of them to the fullest possible extent and to make them know that we are made for reaching out for the stars.

“Sometimes our kids think that the people who have achieved were born with silver spoons in their mouths. It will probably be a good thing if we could just remind them how many came from poor circumstances. There are very few of my contemporaries who would say that they came from a home that had running water and electricity.

“Circumstances were not conducive to achievements, but they have achieved. I wish to be able to make people believe that you are a masterpiece in the making. You are really special. And that while material circumstances are important, they are not as important as who you are, the kind of person you are.”

During the apartheid days, when Nelson Mandela was still in prison and the ANC banned, did he ever think that South Africans would once day have their freedom?

“Yes, I never doubted that it would happen one day. The thing that did surprise me is the speed in which it happened. Once it started, there was no stopping.

“The pieces sort of fell in place much more quickly than I had thought. I didn’t even think that I would be around to see it. Although I had been making predictions in 1984, when I would say in 10 years time we would have a democratic country, but that was also a kind of whistling in the dark. It was meant to keep up our spirits and boost our morale. That was one of the things that we needed to do, to say to our people: ‘Don’t give up, don’t despair’.

“And the people were tremendous. They were remarkable in the resilience that they showed.”

Tutu attributes the speed with which apartheid ended to events happening in the world at the time.

“There is a nice passage in the bible where someone speaks about ‘in the fullness of time when things are just right. Not a moment too soon, not a moment too late’. We would not have seen the same speed, even perhaps the same kind of transformation, if all these things had not happened in the world at the time, for instance if the Berlin Wall had not fallen.

“We might have eventually arrived at it, but I think it would have been a great deal more tardy. (Former president FW) De Klerk would have found it very difficult to persuade his people that it was right to release Nelson Mandela. It was right at the time because he couldn’t with any credibility claim that they were still the bastion against Soviet expansionism, when there was no Soviet expansionism to deal with. It was crucial that Gorbachev happened when he did.

“I think it was largely that and the new leadership in the world that that was demanding a greater space for the observance of human rights, freedom and democracy. Things gained a momentum. But you also need to have the right people in the right place. Had (former president) PW (Botha) remained, maybe he too would have also been bowled over and stampeded by the force of events, but he would have been a more unlikely agent than De Klerk, although he too had the kind of anticipants that had not held up a lot of promise.”

Tutu said he had several periods of depression during the apartheid years.

“Remember in 1977, when you had (the killing of Steve) Biko and you had all of these things, including the bannings (of several organisations and newspapers).

“In those days it really seemed that those guys were the top dogs and they were going to remain ensconced in power until kingdom come. We realised that we were in for a long haul. Also, the outside world was by and large supportive of apartheid, apart from the Scandinavian countries that continued to give us wonderful support.

“The powerful were not on our side, and it was awful but also it was thrilling to see and experience the support one was getting from ordinary people, when the Margaret Thatchers and Ronald Reagans of this world were against us.

“But we did have remarkable support. In 1988 when we were celebrating Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday. That turnout of nearly quarter of a million, especially young people at Hyde Park Corner, was fantastic.

“Yet there were times when you felt saddened and like you were hitting your head against a stone wall. I remember going to see Maggie Thatcher in 1987. I was trying to get her to see our point of view about sanctions and she was saying that she was quite firmly set against sanctions. Of course, she then had the Falklands war and she was one of the first to call for sanctions against Argentina.”

Tutu said he did not always want to become a priest. In fact, he had wanted to become a doctor and had been accepted at Wits Medical School.

“I didn’t take up my place, because my parents didn’t have money and I didn’t have a bursary. I became a teacher. I taught high school for four years and really enjoyed teaching. But then (former president Hendrick) Verwoerd introduced Bantu education, and I felt I couldn’t collaborate in this so-called ‘gutter education’. I didn’t have too many options. I resigned as a teacher and the only thing that I could do was to train for the priesthood.

“I was fortunate to have been accepted. It has been fantastic. It has had many moments of sadness but very many high points and has been really tremendously fulfilling.

“I have to pay a very warm tribute to my wife, Leah. She has been incredibly supportive. Many people will not easily believe it, but she is far more radical politically than I am. I mean, compared to her I’m a softie.”

Tutu said the most impressive political leader he has met was former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere because of “his extraordinary humanity and transparent intelligence”.

“Tanzania is a strange country. It is poor, but I have never seen people so at peace with themselves. They have an incredible dignity about them. Nyerere clearly influenced the ethos of that nation in a remarkable kind of way.”

Asked if there was anything about the situation in South Africa today that concerned him, Tutu said that his greatest longing would be “for us to recapture the spirit of altruism, which was such a shining characteristic of the struggle.

“During the time of the struggle, it was almost uncanny. Many young people were ready to undergo some of the most awful experiences. They didn’t mind teargas, dogs, quirts, being arrested, tortured and even killed. You can almost say they had a kind of bravado. But when you said to them: ‘Look, you could get killed’, they would say: ‘Well, I don’t mind if it means that the condition of our people is going to be changed, and changed for the better.’

“I wish we could recover that.”

Tutu is clearly upset about what has happened in the United States and concerned that the response of the United States “will not find itself being in the same league of awfulness as the outrage that provoked it”.

“One can understand the calls for revenge and retribution. But then you first have to ask: ‘Revenge against whom?’ The perpetrators, those who masterminded the attacks, should be brought to justice, but it must be justice that operates under the rule of law. It mustn’t just be suspicion; there must be hard evidence.

“One of the things that has made these attacks so horrendous, is that it has involved innocent civilians. If you are going to have a strike, say against Afghanistan, innocent civilians are going to suffer. That can’t be right, and one has to be highly critical of the terms that are used. How can one talk about collateral damage, when you are talking about mothers, sister and fathers?

“Yes, inflict damage on whichever target is chosen, but what is the point, because all it will do is deepen the resentment that people have, the sense of grievance and this will be the best recruiter for the next suicide bombers.

“One hopes that the people of the United States, who are great people, a great nation of very generous people, should realise that their greatness should not be measured by economic or military strength? It should be measured by their moral greatness.

“If they can remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima. If they can remember little girls running naked, aflame from napalm bombs. If they can remember Nicaragua, remember and realise what we realised here in South Africa, that true security will never come from the barrel of a gun and that without forgiveness there is no future.”

Tutu said he has been “less busy” the past year in South Africa than he had been the previous two years in the United States.

“I have been travelling. I still get asked to speak here and there. I have done a fair amount of pulbic speaking but not as much as I used to.”

Asked what he was doing with his spare time, he said: “I try to read a little bit, sleep and pray a bit more.”

Asked about his health (he is suffering from prostate cancer), he said he was feeling “a lot better”.

And did he have a message for South Africa and the world on the occasion of his 70th birthday?

“It’s great to be alive. Enjoy life, enjoy it, live it to the full man.”

Remembering the United Democratic Front

Thirty years ago, almost to the day, on 20 August 1983, I was sitting on the rafters at a packed Rocklands Civic Centre. The occasion was the launch of the anti-Apartheid coalition, the United Democratic Front (UDF), which was formed out of a few hundred organisations opposed to reforms introduced by the Apartheid government.

I was sitting on the rafters because there was no other place where I could comfortably follow proceedings as nearly 15,000 people packed the hall and the huge marquee that had been set up outside. Nowadays my activities would probably be considered illegal, as stringent city by-laws now control how many people are allowed inside public spaces. Sitting on the rafters would be frowned upon by the city fathers.

Speakers at the launch included struggle stalwarts such as Helen Joseph, Frances Baard, Archie Gumede, Oscar Mpetha, Samson Ndou, George Sewpersadh, along with younger activists such as Aubrey Mokoena and the Rev. Frank Chikane. The youngest speaker was eight-year-old Leila Issel, who spoke on behalf of her father, Johnny Issel, who was “banned and cannot be here today”. From where I sat on the rafters I saw Issel, probably one of the most formidable activists in the country at the time, sitting in the audience in disguise. Knowing Johnny the way I did, there was no way that he was going to miss this important event, banning order or not.

But the biggest cheer was reserved for the Rev. Allan Boesak who had mooted the idea of a united front against Apartheid when he spoke at the Transvaal Anti-SAIC committee in January that year. Boesak’s proposal led to a committee being formed to investigate the feasibility of such a structure and, once agreement had been reached, in July 1983, the UDF was launched within three weeks.

The ANC and other political organisations were banned at the time, and the UDF signalled a new upsurge in internal protest against Apartheid. While the organisers of the UDF insisted that it was not a front for the ANC or any other organisation, it became clear very early on that the organisation would be a key ally to organisations forced to operate from exile. The ANC was banned, of course, and any organisation openly aligning itself to the ANC and its aims would also have been banned, almost with immediate effect.

Starting from a focus of attention on the tricameral parliament which was launched by the Apartheid regime as a way of involving coloureds and Indians in their own parliaments while excluding Africans, the UDF very quickly started taking up other political issues and became the main opposition to Apartheid inside the country. Through its continuous mass protests it played a key role in forcing the Nationalist government to the negotiating table with the ANC.

The UDF’s strength was its community structures. It was comprised of of community, youth, women, worker, religious, sport and other organisations, many of them with strong roots in communities throughout South Africa. The organisation was strongly anti-Apartheid but based many of its decisions and activities on a strong commitment to non-racialism, non-sexism and the desire for a more equitable society. It provided a solid training ground for many activists who ended up occupying senior positions within government after South Africa’s first democratic elections almost 20 years ago. Of course, as soon as the ANC was unbanned and its leaders returned to South Africa, it disbanded the UDF, perhaps sensing that it could pose a threat to South Africa’s oldest liberation movement.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) when the UDF turns 30, it will not be celebrated in any major way, except for a paid televised breakfast which appears to have side-tracked from its original intentions to include a tribute to the UDF.

This is not surprising, given the suspicion with which the UDF has always been viewed by some people within the exile section of the ANC. There is also, I suppose, the fear that one would not want to create confusion with the recently re-launched UDF by disgruntled Western Cape activists, who have even hijacked the original UDF colours, logo and slogans. But while the UDF enjoyed mass support, the new organisation appears to enjoy only sporadic support, despite trying to trade on the original organisation’s history.

But while there might not be mass rallies celebrating one of the key organisations against Apartheid, it is important to revisit the values that we learnt from the UDF as young activists. Some of those values still drive many activists to this day. It is important to ask what the UDF stood for and to see how far we have come as a free country in delivering on the demands that people had 30 years ago. It is a good barometer of what still needs to be done in our country.

One of the key lessons we can learn from the UDF today was its commitment to democracy and transparency. Every decision made by the UDF was discussed at length at community level and, as a result, gathered widespread support when implemented. Despite existing under the watchful eye of the security police, the organisation still managed to consult widely. There was always a tendency to share more than was necessary with the people on whose behalf the organisation operated.

Tomorrow I hope to find a quiet corner where I can reflect on the impact that the UDF had on my life and the lives of many others. I will think about the many comrades who sacrificed their lives so that we can be free today. And I will try to think of ways in which I can help to achieve the South Africa for which they were prepared to lay down their lives. DM

(First published by the Daily Maverick, Monday 19 August 2013)

My vaccination journey

There are many myths that get spread easily, especially in the days of social media. One such myth is that government is always incompetent and the private sector is always (more) competent.

My experience of the vaccination process, my wife’s experience and what I have heard from friends, while it is not a definitive or scientific study, show that sometimes the private sector can get it wrong, while government can get it right.

I had my first injection more than six weeks ago at the Life Kingsbury private hospital in Claremont. My second jab, on Monday morning, was at the Clicks pharmacy/store at Cavendish Square.

As someone who is always trying to abide by the law and regulations, after registering promptly on the Department of Health database after registration for those aged 60 and over opened, I waited patiently for an SMS with details of an appointment. I refused to just walk in before I was called.

My SMS arrived on the afternoon of Friday 18 June. I had to be at Life Kingsbury between 8am and 10am on Monday, 21 June.

It was all fairly well organised and I was in an out in about 90 minutes. There were a few walk-ins, but they had to wait on the side while those with appointments were helped immediately. Apart from standing in a short queue, we were seated throughout the process. We were even offered a free cappuccino while we waited.

I had mild side-effects. I was extremely tired for a day or two and felt nauseous, but otherwise I was fine. I began to worry about my second vaccination because some “ friends” told me that it would be worse than the first.

A few weeks later, I went with my wife to the hospital in Lentegeur, Mitchells Plain, for her vaccination. Despite the long queue when we arrived, I was impressed with the organisation. They moved swiftly and efficiently and were also in and out of there in about 90 minutes. There were also plenty of seats, which is necessary considering that you are dealing with mainly older people.

I received an SMS last Friday evening to inform me that I had to report for my second vaccination at Clicks at Cavendish Square in Claremont on Monday morning between 9am and 11am. On Sunday morning, I received a call from someone at Clicks, checking whether I was still coming and asking me to be there between 9am and 10am.

I was there shortly after 9am and joined a queue outside which, somebody told us, was the vaccination queue. After waiting a few minutes and with no sign of any movement, my wife went inside the shop to find out what was happening. She was told that we had to wait for someone who would tell us what was happening.

While we were waiting outside the shop, there was at least one woman of 85 also standing in line with us. We offered to look for a chair for her, but she said she was okay. Her daughter eventually when to look for someone to speak to inside and she was allowed to take a seat inside the shop.

After more than 30 minutes, someone finally came out and told us to sit on chairs just inside the front door or the shop.

We waited there for probably another 30 minutes. One of the shop attendants came to check whether we needed vaccination cards and I told him that I already had one. He said that was fine.

While waiting there, no one came to ask us who had appointments and who were walk-ins. The most painful thing about the wait was probably listening to the canned music that retail shops – because this is what Clicks is – routinely play. I don’t know the psychology of it, but I am convinced that if you played the music backwards, you will hear then urging you to “buy, buy, buy”. But seriously, having to listen to the Spice Girls and others of their ilk so early on a Monday morning is just not on.

After waiting for more than an hour, we were finally told to go to a counter where we were registered, our details taken and told to wait to be vaccinated. The woman at this counter told me and another man who had been there since 9am that those of us with appointments should have come through immediately. There were quite a few “walk-ins” who were vaccinated ahead of us.

She did not ask me for the proof of my appointment, but she did ask for my medical aid details.

She apologised before sending me to Sister Nokulunga Zulu who handled my vaccination with friendliness and professionalism, in stark contrast to the way I had been treated up until then. The vaccination itself, like the first one, was over in a minute.

As I left the sister, I was told by a shop assistant that I had to go sit for 15 minutes in the queue at the pharmacy, among the people waiting to receive medication from the pharmacy.

No one came to check up on me, unlike at Kingsbury where there was always a nurse or nursing assistant asking if you were okay. Two guys who were vaccinated after me just walked away without waiting the required 15 minutes. But, like I said, I am law-abiding, so I waited.

At the end of this process, I found myself thinking about why it is that people always think that corporate is always better than government. Here was a clear case that proved that this is not always the case.

Since I have had the vaccination, I have had many friends and associates asking me how I felt and whether I had any side effects. I have not felt any side effects, except feeling a bit tired immediately afterwards and my arm feeling a bit painful a day or two later. Contrary to expectations, the second vaccination was more comfortable and less painful than the first.

I am glad I got the injection when I did, and I am under no illusion that I am now completely safe. In fact, I have seen some people referring to themselves as being “fully vaccinated”. I don’t think that is possible. But I am glad that I have taken the first step towards protecting me and my family. I don’t intend to start partying, and I will still wash my hands regularly, sanitise obsessively and keep a safe distance from other people and mask up.

My vaccination journey might be over for now, but the battle against the coronavirus is far from over.

(Written especially for this website on Thursday 5 August 2021)

Sister Nokulunga Zulu administers my second vaccination on Monday morning.

A good life and an unfulfilled dream

All Ebrahim Jabaar wanted in his old age was to return to District Six, the place from where he and his family were forcibly removed more than 40 years ago.

But this did not happen and Boeta Hiema, as he was known to the community or Papa, as he was known to us as close family, died early on Sunday morning – at the age of 84 – without that dream being realised.

The fact that Papa left this earth without being able to return to District Six has left me and other family members angry. I am angry at myself for not being able to help him more, but I am especially angry at the government – at all levels – for failing this man who religiously went to meetings over the past 20-odd years to listen to all kinds of supposed community leaders and government officials telling him why the progress on the District Six restitution process has been so slow.

The national Minister and Department of Agriculture, Rural Development and Land Affairs, their provincial counterparts, the Land Claims Commission and the City of Cape Town all need to hang their heads in shame as another former District Six resident – who desperately wanted to return home – has died before his wish was granted.

District Six, as most people know, was declared a white group area in 1966, leading to the forced removal of thousands of residents over almost a 20-year period. Papa and his family were among those to be removed in the late 1970s. 

Papa’s reference number for his District Six restitution claim was J150, a number he memorised because he had to repeat it every time he interacted with officials. I remember how Papa was often the only person on a bus from Westridge to Lentegeur to attend meetings where he would be briefed about what was happening in District Six. He would always come back dejected.

In later years, as Papa became weaker, my wife Ibtisaan and I would go with him and Mama to attend meetings, whether it was in the City Hall or at a school in District Six.

Papa had grown fed up with the excuses and just wanted to know when he was going to get a house.

The last official interaction we had with the people who are supposed to make this happen was in mid-April when Papa was interviewed online by a panel set up by the Land Claims Commission who vetted prospective candidates for houses in the next section of the rebuilt District Six, which they called District Six Development Phase 3.

He gave the panel a hard time. It consisted of young people who probably have no empathy for the original residents of District Six (but I could be wrong). Papa told them that he has been going to meetings for more than 20 years, but he has been waiting for more than 40 years to return.

They told us they would get back to us by the middle of May with an answer as to whether and when he would get a house, but this was another broken promise. We are still waiting to hear from them.

Every time we visited the family home in Westridge, Mitchells Plain, Papa would ask whether I had heard from the Land Claims Commissions. and I could feel the disappointment every time I replied in the negative. We had hoped that he would get a special birthday present when he turned 84 on 2 May this year.

Papa was so much more than number J150, something the District Six officials failed to understand. 

It makes me angry that, in writing this tribute to Papa, I had to start with his unfulfilled dream.

Papa worked as an ironer in the clothing industry for many years and Mama (Gadija née Saban) has always been an amazing dressmaker. She made all my daughters’ matric ball dresses based on a sketch or a picture – and they were perfect.

I used to marvel at how meticulous Papa used to iron his and other people’s trousers. He took great pride in his work. If you looked at pictures of Papa from earlier days, you would see that he always went to work wearing a suit and tie.

As long as I have known Papa – and I have been part of the family for more than 35 years – he has always been an active person. He did all the shopping for the house. I don’t think Mama has seen the inside of a shop in decades. They were married for more than 57 years and Mama has just turned 81.

Papa was a true patriarch of the family and – before COVID – his modest house was always full of family who came to visit: from his three children, the grandchildren, and the dozens of great grandchildren and great great grandchildren, to extended family members who he loved almost equally and entertained with stories of yesterday.

Papa loved his tea and coffee (he insisted that we bring him filter coffee so he could enjoy a special brew from time to time) and he made hot drinks every couple of hours for him and Mama. For as long as I can remember, Papa would get up every morning and make Mama a cup of tea and/or porridge while she was still in bed.

And he loved to drive to one of the local shopping centres and then just walk from shop to shop.

Sometimes, when we talked about politics, Papa recalled how he attended political rallies on the Grand Parade in the early 1960s and he spoke about the march from Langa to Cape Town led by Philip Kgosana. He was a strong rugby supporter, and only supported non-racial sport in the apartheid days.

In the past few months, as his health declined, it was sad to see Papa being bedridden and not being able to look after himself. But I also sensed that he felt bad about not being able to look after Mama in the way that he had done for years.

When he accidentally fell and broke his hip bone during a recent visit to hospital, it was the beginning of the end. He had to have an emergency operation and, while he was trying to recover at home, his blood sugar levels shot up so dramatically that he had to be re-admitted to hospital.

For most of his last hospital stay, Papa was unresponsive and we knew, even though none of us would admit it, that his end was near.

But we were still shocked when we received the call at around 2am on Sunday morning: Papa had just passed away.

In accordance with Muslim rites, he was buried around 11am on Sunday morning after short Janaazah prayers outside his house in Prairie Court, Westridge. 

Papa would have wanted everyone in the court to participate and witness his final goodbyes, I thought to myself. He was a community person at heart and we used to joke about how, over the past ten years or so, all the widows in the neighbourhood called on him to help with plumbing and other jobs.

We buried Papa at the Mowbray cemetery in accordance with his wishes. It was the closest we could bring him to his beloved District Six to which he will now never return. 

May he rest in peace.

(Written especially for this site on Tuesday, 15 June 2021)

Papa on the day after his birthday in May 2021.

Papa and Mama with daughter Ibtisaan, son Sierag and granddaughter Farieda outsdide their house in Mitchells Plain.

Papa and Mama in aclassic Van Kalker photo taken outside the post office in Cape Town.

We shall overcome - 27 years of freedom

On Tuesday, democratic South Africa turns 27. It is an age when our country can no longer be considered young and when we would have been expected to deal with many of the problems we inherited from our apartheid past.

When I think of the number 27, three instances come to mind. The first is that 27 is the number of the prison gang which, according to criminologists, are the guardians of gang law and responsible for peacekeeping in prisons. The second is that the 27 Club is a group of talented musicians who all died at the age of 27, after already making their mark on the music industry. The third is that Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for our freedom.

South Africa is not a prison gang and is too young to die, even though, with the state of the economy and the rampant corruption that we hear about almost on a daily basis at the Zondo Commission into state capture, there are some political analysts who believe that our democracy is seriously if not fatally under threat. There is always a need for our democracy to be guarded against those who are trying to subvert it.

South Africa is in crisis, but, in my humble opinion, this too shall pass. We have overcome worse under apartheid and we shall overcome this tumultuous period as well.

The mistake that many make when they talk about South Africa is to talk only about politics and the economy. While these two things are important, they are not what makes up our society in totality. There are so many aspects of our society to consider: arts and culture, sport, education, housing, social cohesion, civil society, but, most importantly, the people of South Africa. We have some of the most resilient people in the world right here in South Africa.

Politically, South Africa is facing a difficult period with the national ruling party, the ANC, facing an identity crisis with two factions fighting for control of the organisation. Both factions, which would like to be known for promoting certain policies, are strongly based on support for prominent ANC leaders: president Cyril Ramaphosa on the one side with former president Jacob Zuma and/or general secretary Ace Magashule on the other.

On the face of it, this is a battle for the soul of the ANC, but whether the ANC’s soul can still be saved is debatable. The party appears to have moved too far away from the one that had leaders of the calibre of Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela.

The choices for voters outside of the ANC is rather barren, with the DA appearing to be going back to what they know: appealing to white voters, and the EFF trying hard to be revolutionary while enjoying middle- and upper-class luxuries not normally associated with revolution.

South Africa’s economy, which was already battered and bruised after the last global economic recession, was given more serious blows by the coronavirus pandemic which all but crippled the country and the economy over the past year and a bit.

The unemployment rate has gone through the roof with, depending on who you speak with, figures of between 30 and 60 percent being bandied about.

Several industries have been severely affected by the pandemic, including tourism, events and arts and culture, as people who depended on audiences for income had to find ways of reinventing themselves.

The demise of tourism, in particular, has been felt greatly in South Africa, where it was seen as one of the pillars of our economic growth strategy. The great fear is that the sector will take several years to recover, even if COVID is defeated and everyone is successfully vaccinated.

The government’s response has been to throw little bits of money at the problems, for instance the R350 monthly grant which is meant to support people who lost their livelihood because of COVID. Government has not been helped by the ineptitude of officials in certain sectors, such as arts and culture, where a mixture of corruption and inefficiency meant that many artists did not get the money they were supposed to get to help them deal with the pandemic.

Government has vacillated with a succession of economic plans to take the country forward. It started with the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP) which was headed up by special ministry led by Jay Naidoo in 1994. This quickly gave way to the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Plan (GEAR) in 1996, but this also did not last long.

Government began to implement the National Development Plan in 2013 with the noble aim of eliminating poverty and reducing inequality by 2030. Even before COVID, the NDP appeared to be heading into trouble and began to look increasingly impossible to implement.

Twenty-seven years into our democracy – remember the long queues when we voted for the first time on 27 April 1994 – South Africa has not made much progress to deliver the country we were promised at the time.

Corruption and an inefficient public service are easy to blame for this lack of basic service delivery. A bigger and more sinister reason could be a lack of political will.

(First published as an opinion piece in the Sunday Independent on 25 April 2021)

The way I would like to remember Graeme Bloch

One of my many memories of Graeme Bloch is when my wife and I bumped into him and his wife, Cheryl Carolus, probably a decade ago while hiking in the Wilderness. We were walking towards each other and, when we recognised each other, we greeted in the way you always greeted comrades you might not have seen in a long while.

That is how I choose to remember Graeme, as the fit and active man who was always doing outdoor stuff, along with his equally fit wife.

Graeme passed away last week at a hospital in Cape Town at the age of 65 after battling a debilitating neuro-degenerative disease for many years.

I choose to remember the young and fit Graeme, as opposed to the man I saw a few years ago coming to speak at a conference, of which I was one of the organisers, being pushed in a wheelchair. Or the man who I bumped into a few months later at Rosebank Gautrain station, being pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse.

We would normally talk quite a bit, but this time he was only able to say a few words.

I prefer to remember the brilliant input Graeme made at the conference where we were reflecting on the progress of the National Development Plan and he had come to talk to us, as an expert, about how education was being dealt with in the plan.

He had an amazing mind and continued to be one of the country’s leading experts on inclusive education, despite his illness.

It was difficult to reconcile the image of a frail Graeme with the young UCT student and academic who introduced me and many other leaders of the Cape Youth Congress to the works of the Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci and got us to read and discuss Ben Turok’s seminal work (at the time): Revolutionary Thought in the Twentieth Century.

I remember the study groups where we discussed what we had read, even though quite often what was discussed went over my head. I would never admit it at the time, and I am sure there are many others who endured the study groups with the same difficulty I did. Graeme’s influence was felt very widely in the Cape Youth Congress ranks, because he put many of us through the intellectual mill.

I prefer to remember Graeme as the young National Education Crisis Committee (NECC) and United Democratic Front (UDF) activist and leader who defied the apartheid security police so many times with his bravery. Despite being harassed, detained and imprisoned, and being banned for five years (from 1976 to 1981), Graeme never waivered in his commitment to the struggle.

I prefer to remember his marriage to Cheryl, in the late 1980s, I think, and at a time when such marriages were not popular or common. The picture on this page was taken at their wedding. I do not know who took the photo, but I found it in my collection of old photographs from Grassroots community paper, a paper in which both Cheryl and Graeme played a role as activists in the 1980s.

I prefer to remember the young student who was banned by the University of Cape Town to edit their student publication (or any other student publication on campus, for that matter) and who eventually served on the Council of the university.

I prefer to remember the academic who continued to impact on education policy in South Africa, but also played a role in activist organisations such as Equal Education, where he served as a board member. Graeme was a prolific writer and commentator on education policy and other issues.

The last time I saw Graeme was, I remember, at a concert in Kalk Bay a few months before the start of the lockdown. He was sitting quietly in his wheelchair and enjoyed the music, despite his body already being quite broken down. It was difficult to talk to him because he could barely respond.

The younger and fitter Graeme, I remember thinking, would have been up and dancing.

I am probably selfish, but I prefer to remember him like that: full of life and energy, with an engaging mind and a defiant streak.

May his soul rest in peace.

Graeme’s official memorial and funeral will be held at St George’s Cathedral at 10am on Friday, 16 April, while there will be a second memorial, organised by former student activists who were inspired by Graeme, at 4pm on Saturday, 17 April. Both memorials will be livestreamed.

(Written especially for this website on Wednesday, 14 April 2021.)

Esau was an intellectual giant

If ever there was anyone who lived, slept and dreamt the revolution 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it was Cecyl Esau, who passed away last week. He would have turned 66 on September 30 this year.

Esau, who has a hostel named after him at the University of the Western Cape (where, ironically, he stayed for a short while in the 1990s), died of natural causes at his home in Table View.

His name had been synonymous with the Struggle. For much of the 1970s and ’80s, Esau had travelled the length and breadth of South Africa, organising many communities and activists.

One of my most compelling memories of Esau is riding on the back seat of his little Vespa scooter from Mitchells Plain, where I lived, and going to places like Ocean View and Hout Bay to visit branches of the Cape Youth Congress (Cayco), of which we were both in the leadership.

The other most memorable thing about Esau was his hearty, infectious laugh. His laugh was like his signature, making everyone aware he was in the room.

Another of my best memories of Cecyl was when we drove, in the heart of a cold winter, to Fraserburg in the Karoo, to attend his wedding. It is still one of the most memorable weddings I have attended.

Over the past few days, I have shared with former comrades stories of our interaction with Cecyl and the memories that will remain with us forever.

Esau impacted the lives of many who became involved in the Struggle against apartheid, said Goolam Abubaker, who worked as adviser to former UWC vice-chancellor Professor Jakes Gerwel.

Abubaker was also a United Democratic Front (UDF) Western Cape activist and was involved in the ANC’s underground structures.

“Two weeks ago (former activist) Neville van der Rheede and I had breakfast with Cecyl, and he was looking strong and healthy. The news of his passing came as such a huge shock.

“We had spoken about many things: the state of national politics, the challenges of organising coloured people in the Western Cape under the banner of the ANC, and the corruption engulfing the ANC.

“But the overriding concerns remained how to bridge the divide between coloured and African people in the Western Cape; how to generate the organisations and intellectual vigour of the 1980s that resulted in so many activists and intellectuals accepting the leadership of the ANC.

“Cecyl asked us whether this was related to the quality of the UDF and ANC underground (and MK) leadership in the Western Cape? Was it related to the vibrant mass-based civic, youth and women’s organisations? He also asked what it would take to rekindle that leadership and organisation,” said Abubaker.

He described Esau as an intellectual giant.

“He read widely – Gramsci, Lenin, Cabral and Fanon, to mention a few. He enjoyed discussing their relevance with other activists, drawing out their lessons to understand our challenges.

“His influence on generations of student leadership at UWC was immense. His contribution as a youth organiser for the Churches Urban Planning Commission, as organiser for the UDF, building civic and youth organisations in the rural areas of the Western and Northern Cape was immeasurable. His contribution to our hard-won democracy must never be forgotten.”

Elizabeth Cloete, the former general secretary of the Clothing Workers’ Union (one of the organisations Esau helped to form), recalled how Esau was uspended by the ANC for questioning the Africanist tendencies in the organisation.

“After the unbanning of the ANC, Cecyl became provincial organiser of the ANC in the Western Cape. At the time, the likes of Amos Lengesi and Tony Yengeni were in the leadership in the province. In a letter, Cecyl took issue with the Africanist tendencies in the ANC. In essence, he argued for the ANC to give expression to the movement’s non-racial ethos.

“This got him into hot water and, under Yengeni’s watch, Cecyl was suspended as ANC provincial organiser. He was an organiser par excellence.”

Trevor Oosterwyk, the first president of Cayco, said Esau was “the embodimentof the kind of camaraderie that was cultivated during the 1980s”.

“He travelled the length and breadth of this country and the southern African region, taking the message and hope of freedom with him. His indomitable spirit drove many of us even at times of deep despair.”

Dr Allan Boesak, who had been a UDF patron, described Esau as “that rarest of beings: a gentle revolutionary”.

Dr Boesak said Esau was “a fiercely committed activist, one who understood the demands of the revolution with unremitting clarity, and therefore understood what was expected of him. Yet a man who was not so blindly loyal to the cause that he lost sight of the people: their needs, their fears, their joys, their aspirations, their dreams and hopes.

“His passion for freedom and justice never eclipsed his pathos for the people. That is why he was so loved and respected. And that is why he will be honoured and remembered. May God receive his soul in peace and with joy.”

Esau is survived by five children and a granddaughter, his sister, June, and two brothers, Alexander and Jacob .

He studied at the University of the Western Cape during the 1970s and 1980s. His studies were often interrupted due to his activism and several stints in detention and in prison. From

1986 to 1991, he spent five years of a 12-year-sentence on Robben Islandafter being involved in the underground activities of the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe.

Esau was born in Worcester, where he also became involved in the Struggle in the early 1970s. He was greatly influenced by Johnny Issel and Hennie Ferus, who were involved in activities of the banned ANC. Esau was one of the leaders who raised the ANC flag at Ferus’s funeral in 1981.

He was awarded the Freedom of Worcester in 2020 in recognition of his contribution to the Struggle for freedom.

An official provincial funeral/memorial will be held for Esau at the Worcester Town Hall from 10am tomorrow (Saturday 27 March 2021).

(Adapted from a piece first published in the Cape Times on Thursday 25 March 2021)

Fighter for freedom, fighter for truth

Karima Brown passed away on Thursday and, while we all knew that she had been hanging on to life for the past two weeks, it still came as a shock. She had been battling COVID-19.

Karima was never a conventional journalist in the old liberal definition of a journalist. She grew up politically in the anti-apartheid youth organisations of the 1980s and this defined her approach to journalism.

She never believed in the objectivity that one gets taught at journalism school. For her it was always about the cause, always about using her very powerful voice – whether it was through print or broadcast – to shed light on the plight of the poor, working people of this country. She never hid her political beliefs which were aligned to uplifting the poor and, as such, she felt politically attracted to the South African Communist Party and, by extension, the ANC.

However, Karima was never one to blindly follow party lines and would often upset senior politicians who believed that journalists who question always have agendas, political or otherwise. Karima’s agenda has always been about creating a better country for the majority of South Africans. It was never about paying blind political patronage to anybody.

Sometimes, she endured criticism for being too open about her political affiliations. In 2015, for instance, the DA’s national spokesperson, Phumzille van Damme, lodged a complaint with the Press Ombudsman because Karima and one of her colleagues were seen wearing ANC colours at an ANC event. The complaint was dismissed.

I met the young Karima Semaar in the early 1980s when she was a high school student who lived in Westridge, Mitchells Plain. She must have been 16 or 17. She had become involved in the local branch of the Cape Youth Congress (CAYCO), of which I was in the leadership at the time, and its sister organisations who all found a home in the United Democratic Front.

In the late 1980s, when she was part of the CAYCO leadership, she was instrumental in the establishment of the South African Youth Congress, which eventually made way for the returning ANC Youth League.

Even as a young person, she had a beautiful mind and was always questioning everything, so it did not come as a surprise when she later became a journalist. Much of our political upbringing in the 1980s had to do with “following a line” that inevitably came through from Lusaka, but Karima only accepted “the line” after much interrogation.

As far as I can remember, she started her journalistic career at the SABC in the early 1990s. Among others. she worked at Business Day for many years as their political editor before being coaxed in 2010 to join the start-up newspaper, The New Age, which promised to tackle the white monopoly control of South Africa’s media.

Karima had been appointed as Deputy Editor of The New Age while Vuyo Mvoko was appointed editor, but the two of them along with three other senior staffers walked out in October 2010 before the paper had published an edition. To this day, there remains uncertainty about the reasons for their walkout. This is one episode in her life which I wish I had discussed with her in more detail.

Karima would later be appointed as Group Executive Editor of Independent Media, a position which made her responsible for the editorial direction of all the papers. She told me not too long ago that she left this position sooner than expected, partly because she felt uncomfortable with having to be a manager and sometimes having to take uncomfortable decisions.

It was in broadcasting that Karima found her voice, in more ways than one. She first took her feistiness to Radio 702. But she was fearless in her Sunday show, The Fix, on eNCA often making politicians and other influential people in society feel uncomfortable with her direct and incessant questioning.

I was fortunate that she invited me onto The Fix, not to be grilled, but to help her analyse the Sunday newspapers. But even then, she ragged me when I spoke too long.

She was an equal opportunities offender, giving a hard time to politicians irrespective of which faction of the ruling party they came from or whether they were members of an opposition party.

Former activist Ruby Marks, now South Africa’s Ambassador to Benin, wrote in a recent Facebook post how she often feared when she watched Karima asking difficult questions of influential people.

“Did you know that sometimes we, as your friends, have communicates quietly with each other over the years, and said, did you see what Karima said? or, does she have protection? when we worried about some irrational reprisal. But you remained fearless and determined to always speak your truth to power. In doing so you became a shero to some, and an enemy to others,” Marks wrote.

But Karima was more than a political being and a person who liked to debate. She was also a mother, a daughter and a woman who loved to party and who loved to cook.

In the past year or so, she became an important member of a Facebook group, the Lockdown Recipe Storytelling Group, which started off by people sharing their family recipes and evolved into a book project. She enjoyed the interactions with the group and also contributed to the book and magazines that started as a result of this group. Some of the members described her as their main cheerleader because of the way she always posted positive comments on the group.

In the early 1990s, my family and I moved to Johannesburg and Karima was one of the first people with whom we connected, often visiting her and her then husband at their house in Yeoville. She introduced us to her circle of friends in Johannesburg, which consisted of many people who we knew from Cape Town.

We continued our interactions over the years, maintaining a friendship that started in the struggle and continued way into our democracy.

The picture that I have attached to this story is from a small get-together of comrades at my house after the funeral service for Jessica Hendricks, who was a close comrade for many of us. In the picture are former Mitchells Plain activists Sharon Davids, Faiez Jacobs, Trevor Oosterwyk and Logan Wort.

I remember how shattered she was when her father, Achmat Semaar, passed away in April 2019. We spoke at the memorial service about how disappointed her father had become in the direction the ANC had taken in recent years, even though he remained a loyal and committed member of the organisation.

My last long interaction with Karima was when we invited her to facilitate a dialogue on the history of Mitchell’s Plain on behalf of the Mitchell’s Plain Action Collective (MPDAC), a group who had been set up to provide food security, but also to record the history of the area. She agreed without reservation.

Karima was absolutely besotted with her son, Mikhail, and often shared pictures of his achievements in the creative field. She recently shared pictures of the small 30th birthday party they hosted for him. The party was held under strict COVID-19 regulations, something Karima had insisted upon. She often spoke about how she was paranoid about COVID-19.

She became ill after a recent visit to Cape Town, was diagnosed with COVID-19 and was hospitalised immediately. For most of the past two-and-a-bit weeks, she has been intubated with family and friends hoping against all odds that she would survive.

But it was not to be. Early yesterday morning, the news we had dreaded came: Karima Brown has passed away. By the afternoon, she had been laid to rest in accordance with Muslim rites.

We will miss you, my friend and comrade. Rest in peace.

(Written for this website on Friday, 5 March 2021)

A part of me died on Saturday

The plain wooden tombstone on my sister’s grave simply says: “Rania Ceaser / Born 22.07.1955 / Died 20.02.2021”. What it doesn’t say is: “Here lies a mother, a sister, a wife, a grandmother, a matriarch, a family historian, and a person who meant so much to so many in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, even though, in most cases, she did not have much to offer materially.”

We received the news about her passing just after 11am on Saturday morning (20 February 2021) as we were preparing to visit my mother-in-law who was celebrating her 81st birthday. We had to change our plans because we had to make sure that she would be buried before sunset, in accordance with Muslim rites.

While the news came as a shock, it was not unexpected because my sister had had health issues for a while now.

In fact, one of the last conversations I had with her about two weeks ago via video call was when she told me that I should write about the many times she thwarted death. She reminded me of a few years ago when she suffered a haemorrhage and the doctor told her how lucky she was that it did not affect her brain. She also had an incident when her tongue turned blue, but she survived. More recently, she survived COVID-19 and spent two weeks recovering in the Brackengate COVID-19 facility before being declared free of the virus. She had another test last week, but it was negative.

I was worried when she tested positive for COVID-19, because of her frail health. She had just about all the comorbidities that one can imagine. She had asthma, she was slightly underweight, she was 65 and frail.

Last Sunday, she asked me to arrange an Uber on Tuesday morning so that she could go to hospital for a check-up. But on Monday morning, my other sister called me to say that they had taken her to hospital because her lungs were weak.

My last conversation with her was on Friday morning when she told me that the doctor had found a blood clot on her lung and this contributed to her struggling to breathe. Our call was cut short and I tried several times to call her back, but was unsuccessful. I even tried on Saturday morning before we got the call that she had passed away. It seems the blood clot was too big and her lungs too weak to recover.

Rania was my oldest sister and became the matriarch of our family after my mother passed away. But even before that, she had to go work after passing Standard Seven to help support the family. I remember one of her first jobs was at a butcher where she learned about all the different cuts of meat. She did a variety of jobs until she married and stayed home to raise her children.

She was always supportive of my activities and encouraged me, even though she did not always understand what I was doing, and continuously told me that she loved me. This was the way she ended all our calls, especially in recent years.

When I was still young, she nurtured my love for music and reading and would always take me to concerts when I was a teenager. Many of my earlier memories of watching live music involved going with her and her then husband, to concerts at the Three Arts complex, some featuring overseas artists who were breaking the cultural boycott, but I was too young to know about that at the time. She also made sure that I went to the library.

When I became involved in the struggle as a young man in the early 1980s, she opened her house in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain, for youth and other meetings, offering sandwiches and coffee to everyone, even though she could barely afford it.

She welcomed all my friends and accepted them without prejudice, even though they all came from different backgrounds.

While she never became active in organisations, she attended some of our big meetings in the Rocklands Civic Centre, including the launch of the United Democratic Front in August 1983 and a rally we organised in support of Dr Allan Boesak a year or two later.

Her support for me extended to the rest of my family. She took an avid interest in the health and wellbeing of my daughters and always encouraged them in their careers.

But this was the way she was. Her family – in a very undefined and unrestricted way – was the most important thing to her. Her sons were her life and, by extension, their children became her life. She took in some of her grandchildren at our old family home in Rocklands when she felt that their parents were not able to provide for them properly.

I remember how devastated she was when, more than 25 years ago, her second oldest son was killed in a gangland shooting in Tafelsig, Mitchells Plain. He had just turned 20.

I leaned on her a lot in recent years as I tried to construct some semblance of my family’s history. She was our unofficial family historian and would always be able to point me in the right direction whenever I needed to know anything, whether it was from my father or mother’s side. A large part of our history has died with her.

On Saturday afternoon, we said goodbye to her at the family house in Rocklands and, despite the COVID restrictions, we managed to do it in a dignified manner.

While some women were washing her body inside the house, the rest of us waited patiently outside. Later, her body was brought out and people were allowed to walk around it to say goodbye. We were allowed to do this because hers was not considered a COVID death.

We made the Janazah prayer in the street outside the house, which was appropriate and the way my sister would have wanted it. The whole street was able to participate or, at the very least, observe.

Just after 6pm on Saturday, we laid her to rest at the Muslim cemetery in Constantia which, ironically, is in a space from where coloured people had been forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s.

During my last video call with her, she told me that she was worried about me and that I should reach out to my mother, who had passed away more than 30 years ago. She said my mother had been there for her throughout her period in hospital and had helped her to survive COVID.

“Mommy might not be here anymore, but she will always be here for us. You must speak to her and ask her for help,” she said.

Somehow, I suspect that Rania will also always be there, looking out for all of us in her extended family and community. May she rest in peace. I will miss her.

(Written for this website on Monday, 22 February 2021)

Rania at the Cape Town Festival at the Castle of Good Hope in 2017.

Rania’s most recent WhatsApp profile picture.

Die Ses. A poem for District Six

As we remember that District Six was declared a white group area 55 years ago today, I thought I should share this poem that I wrote in 2002, after being frustrated at the slow pace of the restitution process. I wrote a lot of poems back then, but this one is rare because it is written in Afrikaans/Afrikaaps. I am still frustrated at the slow pace of restitution.

Die Ses

Die oemies en die bieyas,

die motjies en die pankies,

en ’n paar anders,

staan in Distrik Ses

en luister na die President:

“Ons gaan huis toe,” se hy

en almal cheer.

Agtien maande later

staan hulle weer in Distrik Ses

op ’n ander stuk grond.

Die oemies, die bieyas,

die motjies en die pankies,

en ’n paar anders.

En die leier van die mense,

van die beneficiaries, se:

“Ons gaan huis toe.”

en niemand glo hom nie.

(Written on Sunday, 24 February 2020)

Ahead of SONA, some advice for President Ramaphosa

When President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his State of the Nation Address on Thursday night, he will not have much positive to report. The governing African National Congress, of which he is president, has consistently failed to deliver the kind of South Africa that all of us want and deserve to live in.

Ramaphosa would have done well to have read the book called The South Africa We Want To Live In, which I compiled based on a series of dialogues which took place in 2019.

The dialogues were hosted by the District Six Museum, the Community Chest of the Western Cape and the One City, Many Cultures Project. In the book, the reports on the dialogues were supplemented with contributions from South Africans of different ages, different genders, different cultures, and from different provinces, among others.

But the one thing that everyone had in common – the participants at the dialogues and the other contributors – is that they all love this country and want to help turn it into the best possible place for all of us to live.

What I learned from the dialogues is that South Africans place too much responsibility and have too much faith in government. We are always expecting government to do stuff for us.

At the dialogues, the focus was on what we could do for ourselves. This does not mean that there is no role for government; it just means that we should also take our futures into our own hands and not just expect government to make things happen.

If he had attended any of our dialogues, President Ramaphosa would have found a group of committed South Africans who are all doing their bit to improve our society. Some are working in education, while others are working at keeping communities safe. Others are trying their best to make sure that the poor and most vulnerable, including the homeless, are looked after and treated with respect and dignity.

Sometimes when I watch television and I see ministers being completely out of touch with society or not applying common sense, I feel better when I think about some of the beautiful conversations we had at our dialogues and how eager everyone was to make a difference.

Often when we talk about the problems in South Africa, we are quick to point fingers, whether it is at the ANC or the Democratic Alliance or the Economic Freedom Fighters.

What we tried to do with the dialogues was to treat everyone who attended as South Africans first and foremost. People who attended our dialogues in the main left their political hats at home and joined our conversations as concerned South Africans.

A few lessons that we can share with the President and other politicians based on the dialogues:

1.       South Africa is bigger than any politician or political party. This is something that particularly ANC politicians don’t seem to understand. They often think that the party is more important than the country.

2.       Political parties should learn to search for what they have in common instead of how they differ. The differences can come into play at election times, but in between they need to find ways of working together.

3.       South Africans have always been capable of finding solutions to complex problems. We must find a way of tapping into these potential solutions.

4.       There are more people who want to make a positive contribution to our country than those who are persistently negative.

5.       Our Constitution is a beautiful and progressive document which contains a vision of what our country should look like. We all need to embrace our Constitution and we might find solutions to our problems a lot easier.

6.       Our support for any cause should be based on love and not on hatred or dislike. For instance, we abhor racism because we love all people and we want all people to be treated with respect and dignity. Our support for #blacklivesmatter is not because we think white lives don’t matter, but because many whites think that black lives don’t matter. We oppose gender discrimination and gender-based violence not because we hate men, but because we love women and oppose the way many of them are being discriminated against or being hurt merely because they are women.

7.       Our support for politicians should not be based on personalities or slogans, but on their actions in support of the upliftment of the majority of people in South Africa who are poor and vulnerable.

8.       We believe that there is no such thing as ordinary people because the assumption is then that there are extraordinary people who deserve special treatment and privileges. We believe that all people should be treated in the same way: with love and respect.

9.       Everybody can play a role in building the country we can all be proud of, irrespective of age, race or gender. We all have something different to offer and we need to find ways of tapping into these differences and using it for the better good.

President Ramaphosa has many people around him and, no doubt, some of them might even give him good advice from time to time.

We are not saying our advice is better or the best, but it comes from the ground, from South Africans who love this country and want it to succeed, irrespective of who is in power or who is president. I suppose he would not have read our book, even though we sent him a copy, but I hope that he will find inspiration in what we wrote and what we discussed. Our conversations came from the heart.

If you have not read it yet, please buy your copy of The South Africa We Want To Live In via the Community Chest website or from selected bookstores. Maybe you will also feel inspired and will join the non-political-party-affiliated movement to make our country a better place.

(Written especially for this website on Monday, 8 February 2021)

Let’s reintroduce decency into public debate

When I was a newspaper editor many years ago, I had a rule that I would never respond to readers’ letters criticising my articles, and neither would any of my staff. My argument was simple: We had the first chance of stating our case and we should not necessarily have the last opportunity. The right of reply should be the preserve of our readers and not journalists. So, I allowed responses from my reporters only as far as factual inaccuracies were concerned.

Nowadays, with social media, the rules have changed completely and it is difficult for journalists to apply the rule that I have always believed in. Social media allows anyone to respond immediately, to tag others who they wish to see their response and to retweet or share which means that their comments can take on a life of its own.

I still try to not respond to comments on my writing, believing that is good enough if my articles prompted people to have a discussion without me wanting to dictate the discussion. But most journalists can’t help themselves from engaging, which then often leads to more and more vicious and sometimes personal attacks on the journalists involved.

I don’t like social media, especially Twitter, and I would not have been on the platform if I were not involved in the media industry, which requires that I need to know what is happening on most platforms.

Twitter users tend to be rude, personal and lacking respect. In the past few days, I have seen slanderous comments being made on Twitter about a senior and respected church leader and I have seen how young people with no experience of our struggle would attack, in a vile manner, people who have given their lives to fighting for the liberation and upliftment of South Africans and continue to do so. I have also seen how some people have reacted negatively and personally to some older people who have already made their contribution in life and try to use platforms such as Twitter as a way of giving back or learning about young people.

Many young people feel that, because they have a sizable Twitter following and they might follow or be followed by prominent people, that gives them the right to say whatever they want to whoever they want to, without applying the basics of respect with which we grew up.

Yes, I know, I am talking about a different generation and that respect should be earned, but you should also be careful about what you say about anybody, just because that person might have expressed an opinion with which you don’t agree. It is always good to look at a person’s body of opinions so that you can make a more accurate judgment.

I spent most of my early career in anti-apartheid media and later, after we became a democracy, made my mark in what is called mainstream media. I have always applied the same rules of journalism, whether it was when I worked for Grassroots community newspaper, The New Nation, South, the Sunday Times, the Cape Times or The New Age. I even applied these rules when I helped to produce clandestine publications on behalf of the Cape Youth Congress and the United Democratic Front in the early 1980s.

I suspect that most journalists, especially the more experienced ones, would do the same. You try to treat all the people you write about with a certain level of respect and, as far as you can, you try to represent most views in your articles. Even when you write negatively about someone, they should not be able to say that you have been unfair. I can cite many examples of when I wrote strong anti-apartheid articles only to receive positive comments from the people who I portrayed negatively in my articles.

But the real reason I am writing this ramble is because I am concerned about the vitriol displayed towards one of my colleagues, Karima Brown, for what is seen as perceived insensitivity by her because she dared to ask about the possible successor to Minister in the Presidency Jackson Mthembu on the day of his death from COVID-19-related illnesses.

It turns out that Karima did not publicly ask about Mthembu’s successor but told a government communicator in a text message that she might ask about it.

Be that as it may, it is an important question to ask, given the important role that Mthembu played in the government’s communication, especially around the coronavirus pandemic and his generally healthy relationship with those in the media. Most journalists, including Karima, had a lot of respect for him.

I suspect that Mthembu would have expected her to continue asking the difficult questions that she has always asked of politicians, realising that politicians have to serve the nation and need to be held accountable by the media.

But the vitriolic attacks on Karima – for even thinking about who would succeed such an important minister – seems unjustified, unfair and, frankly, disrespectful towards the work of journalists. In some ways, I think it is meant to instil fear in journalists who might want to ask certain questions.

There are a few journalists who I suspect might have political agendas – which is not unusual given South Africa’s history and our obsession with politics – but most journalists I know are just people who are committed to the truth and being ahead of the news and/or analysis. Karima is not a news reporter, but she has always broken stories, even through her analysis and interviews with influential people in society, including government ministers.

I suspect that many people who have used this opportunity to attack her feel uncomfortable with her style of journalism. If this is the case, then attack her with arguments, logic and facts and not with personal insults. She might have been insensitive with her query on who would replace the minister so soon after his passing, but she was probably verbalising what many others were thinking.

I suspect that, through my defence of Karima, I am setting myself up for attack from those who attacked her. But I don’t mind. I have experienced much worse. I just wish there was a level of decency in the way we engage with each other publicly and especially on social media. Journalists have an incredibly important job in a democracy, something that Jackson Mthembu understood, and it would be a pity if journalist felt that they could no longer ask questions because they fear a backlash via social media or other platforms. Let us rather engage each other and try to understand each other’s arguments, instead of always wanting to fight and disagree.

(Written especially for this website on Friday, 22 January 2021)

Why I could almost fall in love with America again

I have always had a love/hate relationship with the United States of America. The first Americans with whom I interacted when I was a young reporter and youth activist in the early 1980s were brash, loud and arrogant and this put me off from visiting the country until I was in my 30s.

I have visited many times since and have made some great friends in the country that, in my young, revolutionary mind, always represented the worst of capitalism. It probably still does.

Over the past four years, I have often sympathised with my American friends – who could all be described as progressive or at the very least liberal – and I could feel their relief today that they have an opportunity to have a new beginning, ironically under their oldest-ever president who, at 78, has reached the average life span of an American male.

Like many people throughout the world, I watched Joe Biden’s inauguration with great interest. Yes, I was interested to see whether any of the right-wingers who stormed the Capitol a few weeks ago would turn up today, even though I knew they would not risk taking on 25 000 members of the National Guard. But I was also interested to see how the new president was going to deal with a country that has become so divided, especially over the past four years, with, in my opinion which is shared by many others, no hope of unity ever again.

I had fallen in love with America when Bill Clinton was president and admired him, despite all his many imperfections. I bought into the notion that he was the closest thing to a black president that America could ever have.

I fell in love with America again when a real black man in Barack Obama became president and gave hope that this racist country had finally turned the corner. I realised very quickly that, in the final analysis, Obama remained an American and despite his beautiful speeches which appeared to embrace all humanity, he would always act in America’s interest first, even if it meant killing people of a different nationality perceived to be terrorists by Americans, often on foreign soil.

But I loved the symbolism of a man from a minority group in America – and yes, South Africans, blacks are a minority in America – becoming president in such a messed-up country.

When Obama had to step down after serving two terms, it allowed an opportunist of note by the name of Donald Trump to stir up hatred among the many people who considered themselves Americans. Trump’s definition of Americans was basically anyone who was white and Christian. Those who were not white or Christian were not welcome. He made life difficult for anyone who did not fit into his definition of American.

And so, four years ago almost to the day, began one of the most hateful periods in American history and it reminded me why, as a progressive young man, I had hated America with every bit of my body and my soul.

Today, as I watched Trump’s pitiful last speech as president and Biden’s first, very touching speech, I felt like I might be ready to fall in love with America again.

I don’t know what it is, because I am not a sentimental person. But I felt touched by the warm reception given to the Obamas. I felt touched by the powerful rendition of the American national anthem by Lady Gaga, who I have always rated as a singer despite hating her earlier gimmicks which she used to gain popularity. I loved the symbolism in the first Latino judge swearing in the first woman vice president who happens to be black. I absolutely loved the beautiful and thoughtful poem read by a black woman, Amanda Gorman, aged 22. Her poem spelled out the challenges America faces with greater clarity than even the new president’s speech.

Not that the president’s speech was bad. In fact, it was really good and perfect for the occasion. He spoke about unity and humanity and urged all Americans to work together.

In the end, I found myself thinking why I was so interested in this inauguration and what the implications are for my beloved country, South Africa.

America’s democracy is not perfect. It is not much more than a two-party system, but it is working, and we can learn from it.  One of the main things that I am taking away from the inauguration is that the president of the country should always try to be a president for everyone and not just for the people or the party who elected him. Our president needs to learn that sometimes he needs to take decisions that might not find favour in his own party but could be in the interest of the country. The party should not always come first.

I learned that, despite how much one might hate racists and people who promote other intolerances, it is sometimes better to try and convince them with good arguments and not through shouting them down or shutting them out. In fact, I knew this already, because this is what we did in South Africa when we negotiated with the apartheid Nationalist Party leadership. But I temporarily forgot it.

I learned that despite all our best intentions, you will never be able to change the world unless you involve the people with privilege and resources. On a global scale, it might be good for South Africa to be involved in BRICS and other such initiatives, but we can never ignore America because of its economic and other powers. On a local level in South Africa, we need to find more ways of engaging those with economic power if want to effect true change in our country. There will never be proper change as long as they hold onto their economic power. I don’t always blame them, because nobody has given them a good enough reason to give up this power.

America has colonised the world in many ways, sometimes even without an American setting foot in most countries. But they have used their economic might to promote their culture, their music, their movies and even their poor coffee and fast foods.

Maybe instead of only being obsessed with American music, movies and other cultural stuff, we should look more closely at the political culture and what we can learn from it. If Joe Biden delivers on everything he said in his inauguration speech, America will be a much better place. And if more political leaders from other countries follows his example, the world might also become a better place.

At this time in our history, when the world is still under threat from a killer virus, we should learn to set aside partisanship and work together. It requires, as Biden said, unity and decency, something that is often alien to politicians. I still hate it when an American is right.

(Written exclusively for this website)

Farewell to the quiet man who was the engine of our festival

Yusuf Fakier was laid to rest this morning. He passed away yesterday (Saturday 2 January 2021) and was buried by Muslim rites by 11am the next day (Sunday 3 January 2021). He was 67.

Uncle Joe, as he was known to everyone, was the longest-serving employee of the One City Events Company which organised the Cape Town Festival and a host of other activities under the banner of the One City, Many Cultures Project, including community festivals, youth workshops and dialogues.

His Janazah was held in accordance with COVID-19 regulations. The men gathered in the backyard of the house in Ormskirk Street, Woodstock, where he had been living for years with his teacher wife, Firdose, and children. After the short prayers, the body was carried to a van parked in the street outside the property and transported to the Mowbray Muslim Cemetery. Normally, at Muslim funerals, men carry the body a distance, taking turns as a show of respect, before the body is put on a van, if the cemetery is too far a distance to carry. Normally, there would also be a stop at a local mosque before the trip to the cemetery.

At the cemetery, the three young men who would get into the grave to place the body, in accordance with Muslim rites, had to put on protective full-body plastic suits. They had to sanitise before and after, and in between.

A cemetery official stood at the gate to make sure that no more than 20 people attended the graveside service.

At the end of the short funeral service, a relative announced that there would be no traditional meal at the family home because the family had to isolate in line with the COVID regulations.

The funeral began with the Janazah prayers at home at 10am. It was all over by 11am.

For many years, Joe was officially the office manager of the One City Events Company, but he was much more than what the title suggested. He was the engine of the festival and the company, making sure that we complied with all government requirements, whether this be taxes (including PAYE, VAT and UIF) and sorting out things like event insurance and other logistics. He also kept a tight eye on expenses, which is necessary in an events company.

When we were forced to curtail our activities a few years ago because of a lack of funding, I had to take the difficult decision to let all our staff go, employing everyone on a project basis only, but I tried to hold on to Joe for as long as I could because he was the one person with historical knowledge of just about everything related to our projects.

In the last few years of the project, when it was often just the two of us, Joe became a good friend and confidant. He was someone I could talk to about many things, including the state of our nation and the need to end the inequality and intolerance in our country.

I often wondered how Joe, a devout Muslim, coped with working in an environment where most of our staff and the people we worked with on different projects, were eclectic and diverse. But this was part of our mission, to bring together people despite their perceived differences, something Joe understood better than many.

We came from different political backgrounds, but we shared a common desire to make our country the best it can be. We shared our frustration with inefficiencies in government and the total disregard for the arts displayed by government and corporates.

Grant Bolters, former operations manager of the One City Events Company, remained close to Joe long after both were no longer with the company. He described Joe as having “the kindest nature. He was so gentle of spirit”.

Yusuf Ganief, former CEO of the company and the festival, said he and Joe were childhood friends.

“I met him in the late 1960s when I joined the spiritual group that his father led as an imam. We made dhikr (sacred chanting) every Saturday night. His father was a spiritual healer and was responsible for me doing solo recitals since age 10.

“Joe was always a bit shy and introverted but had a lovely sense of humour. We were domino partners when the family played every Sunday afternoon and he was quite formidable with his memory for numbers, which probably explains his occupation for many years as a computer programmer.

“What made Joe special to me as a friend was his loyalty, work ethic and his dislike for gossip. I never heard him talk bad about anyone. He was a dedicated Sunni Muslim who lived a silent, introverted but purposeful life, devoted to his beliefs, his family and always ready to support his friends. Over the last year he battled with leg problems and constant pain. May his soul fly in joy as the river joins the ocean once more.”

Ncebakazi Mnukwana, a board member of the One City Events Company, said that Joe had been the institutional memory of the Cape Town Festival. She said it was important for me to go to the funeral, despite my COVID-19 fears. “You said goodbye to a lot of things today.”

Joe’s health had taken a turn for the worst a few years ago and he had to have an emergency quadruple heart by-pass operation, which forced him to give up smoking, his one vice. He had smoked an unhealthy packet a day until then.

When I chatted with him on WhatsApp in July last year, he told me that he was struggling with his knee after a fall a few months previously. “I developed gout as a result, and it is still badly swollen.”

I told him that we should get together once the COVID-19 pandemic was over. Unfortunately, that day will now never come. The pandemic has robbed me of a friend, colleague and a comrade, but it robbed our country of a patriot and a humble servant.

(Written especially for this website on Sunday, 3 January 2021)

Joe Fakier a few months ago. Picture by Grant Bolters.