with President Nelson Mandela and my father – Johannesburg 2008President Nelson Mandela and my father –1950s Johannesburg
President Nelson Mandela and my father – post Apartheid South Africa
My family – A journey through the Seasons.
Part One: Winter
There is a legend in Delhi that when a male-child is born, the parents are visited by a group of ‘Hijras’, a derogatory term used to describe the Transgender community. The troupe gather en-masse outside the home of the parents of the infant boy and sing and dance, and offer blessings to the new arrival, while in return a small sum of money is offered to the visiting party and all returns to the relative ‘normalcy’ that prevails in a home that has just experienced the birth of a child.
These were the early 1970′s, and this story was told to me in great detail by my parents, who themselves were recently arrived political exiles in India, having to leave South Africa, where my father was arrested along with Nelson Mandela and 156 others in the infamous ‘Treason Trial’ of 1956.
The ‘main’ “Treason Trial” lasted four years till 1960, though the entire trial lasted till 1961, when the 30 remaining accused (of which my father was one) were acquitted by the Supreme Court.
The outcome of the trial was that all 156 were acquitted of the charge of ‘High Treason’.
During the 5 years of the trial my father and his co-accused had to travel daily to court in Pretoria from Johannesburg, some 60 kilometres away.
The accused were all charged with ‘High Treason’ and faced the death penalty if found guilty. My father was the youngest accused at 22 years of age.
A Flash Forward –
Later, in 1963, when my father was arrested again and held at Marshall Square Police Station in central Johannesburg, my father and three fellow political detainees managed to convince a young Afrikaner warder, Johan Greeff, into helping the four escape from the downtown Johannesburg prison. He was promised financial remuneration for his cooperation.
The news of ‘The Great Escape’ embarrassed the Apartheid state at a time when it felt that it had crushed the African National Congress (ANC), with most of its leaders either in jail, or having gone underground. The ‘Sharpeville’ massacre of 1960 resulted in the Apartheid state declaring a State of Emergency and banning the African National Congress (ANC) and other political organisations.
My father, Moosa ‘Mosie’ Moolla and his three fellow escapees (Abdulhay ‘Charlie’ Jassat, Harold Wolpe, and Arthur Goldreich) parted ways and moved from one safe-house to another, until my father, heavily disguised, managed to slip through the border into neighbouring ‘Bechuanaland’, now the country Botswana.
Goldreich and Wolpe managed to disguise themselves as clerics and made their way to Swaziland, a British High Commission Territory, from where they flew over to Bechuanaland (now Botswana).
The South African authorities offered a reward of 5000 Pounds Sterling for the capture of any of the escapees.
Following the escape my father and His fellow escapees were separately sheltered by members of the ANC underground for a few days.
They then parted ways for safety reasons and Abdulhay Jassat made his way to Bechuanaland where he sought political asylum.
By the time my father made his way about a month after the escape to Bechuanaland, the two white colleagues ( my father and Jassat are of Indian-origin) Wolpe and Goldreich had flown over to Tanganyka (now Tanzania) where the ANC’s external headquarters were located in Dar-es-Salaam.
It should be noted that a chartered plane to ferry ANC students and Wolpe and Goldreich was blown-up on the tarmac by South African agents in the early hours of the morning.
Wolpe and Goldreich then flew over on another flight. Jassat followed suit.
An Interesting Fact –
My father and Abdulhay ‘Charlie’ Jassat were both born on June 12th, 1934, and the two were arrested and escaped from prison together, and subsequently lived 30 years of their lives in exile, and both men returned to South Africa following the release of Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners, and the unbanning of the ANC and all liberation movements, and the return of political exiles.
As I type these words, my father and ‘Charlie’ live a few kilometres apart in Johannesburg and meet fairly regularly – mostly at functions or events held to commemorate the years of the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa.
But more about my father in a bit.
A Flash Back –
My mother, Zubeida or ‘Zubie’, a nurse at the time, and expecting my brother Azad (which means ‘to be free’ in Urdu) was subsequently arrested and detained while having to endure interrogation about her husband’s whereabouts. Azad was born in late 1963, a few months after my father’s escape.
Thus my father did not see his first-born son till 5 years later in 1968 when my mother and young brother and sister reunited with my father on the Tanzanian border. My father had by then joined the Armed-Wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto-we-Sizwe, or MK, ‘The Spear of the Nation’, which was formed in 1960 following the ANC’s decision to abandon non-violent opposition against Apartheid and to take up arms.
My sister Tasneem Nobandla, ‘Nobandla’ or ‘she who is of the people’ in isiXhosa was given her Xhosa middle name by my father’s comrade-in-arms and his Best-Man, Nelson Mandela, who couldn’t make it to my parent’s wedding because he was in detention at the time, a few years earlier!
My sister Tasneem Nobandla Moolla was born on October the 14th 1962
‘Nobandla’ was named when Mosie asked his comrade and Best-Man, Nelson Mandela, who could not make it to his wedding to name his new-born daughter. The two men had spent time in jail together in adjoining cells a year earlier in 1962.
Times were tough in those early years of exile, with my father off on military training with the newly formed ANC’s ‘Spear of the Nation’, and my mother having to shoulder the extreme difficulties of life in exile, in a strange country, having left her family behind, and having to essentially fend for herself and her two young children.
This led to a decision that continues to haunt my family to this day.
According to my parents, the situation in exile in those early years of the Anti-Apartheid struggle abroad was so dire, and my father being away training in guerrilla tactics and the like, while my mother worked as a nurse trying to raise two young kids, suffering from bouts of Malaria and being short on money as well, a decision was made to send my young brother and sister back to South Africa to remain in the care of my maternal grandparents, in the hope that when things in exile ‘improved’ or at least settled a bit, the kids would leave the care of their grandparents and join their parents abroad.
This did not happen, and this is one of the most difficult parts of our family’s history to write and talk openly about. Due to circumstances beyond their control, and due to a myriad other reasons, my young brother and sister remained separated from our parents, and grew up in Apartheid South Africa with my maternal grandparents in Johannesburg.
My mother, who passed away in 2008 after a lengthy battle with Motor-Neurone Disease, carried the pain and the guilt of that decision till she died. My father still lives with the guilt and the trauma of being separated from his children, and his family for over 30 years.
My brother Azad and my sister Tasneem, had to endure the unimaginable trauma of knowing that their parents were alive and on distant shores somewhere, yet being utterly helpless in joining them and living as a family, albeit a family in political exile.
The wounds are deep, and the trauma is still raw, all these years later, and my mother died broken-hearted, having to endure the separation of a mother from her children, as well as having to deal with a husband who was engaged full-time in the ANC and the anti-Apartheid struggle in exile.
It is only now that I can understand my mother’s strength of character and fortitude in remaining sane under circumstances that no parent should ever have to go through.
My siblings, on the hand, had to grow up with grandparents, and this has led to our family having to continuously grapple with the scars of a family torn-apart by Apartheid.
My brother Azad, a lawyer, is married with two beautiful young girls, and my sister, a teacher, is married with four beautiful daughters as well.
We all live in Johannesburg, and though some progress has been made in reconciling our family, it is very painful to say that there are many unresolved emotional wounds, which are completely understandable given the circumstances.
President Nelson Mandela and my mother – post Apartheid South Africa
My Family – A Historical Journey through the Seasons
Part Two: Spring
The narrative here is neither chronological, nor is it meant to be a complete history of my family thus far – that would be highly presumptuous of me to attempt – so what you, dear reader, are reading (praise be to your perseverance!) are the disjointed thoughts and memories and anecdotal and other stories that every family shares.
I must state that the facts about my father’s internment and escape are all verifiable using a web-search engine, as are the facts about my parent’s involvement in the struggle for liberation in South Africa, and my father’s subsequent appointment by then President Nelson Mandela as South African Ambassador to Iran (1995 – 1999) and later by President Thabo Mbeki as South African High Commissioner to Pakistan (2000 – 2004) in the newly democratic country that countless South Africans sacrificed their lives to achieve.
My parents often spoke of the privilege that they felt to be alive and return to the country of their birth after spending virtually their entire lives as foot-soldiers in the African National Congress, the liberation movement that included in its ranks giants of South African history – Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Dr. Moses Kotane, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo, Bram Fischer, Chris Hani, only to name a few, and with no disrespect meant to the many, many more that I have not named.
The ‘privilege’ my parents spoke about was that they were the ‘fortunate’ ones, the ones who lived to see the non-racial, non-sexist, democratic constitution being drafted, and a South Africa without the crime against humanity that was Apartheid.
So many comrades and friends and fellow compatriots did not live to cast their vote on that glorious April day in 1994, and to see Nelson Mandela being inaugurated as South Africa’s first freely elected black President, a President who represented the whole of South African society.
A Flash Back –
And so it was that I was born in 1972 in an India that had just been engaged in a war with Pakistan, which in turn led to the establishment of a new country – Bangladesh.
India at the time was the in midst of austere Nehruvian Socialism, and my parents who had spent the mid and late-1960′s in Tanzania, Zambia and Britain, were deployed by the African National Congress to India, where my father was the Chief-Representative of the ANC.
My early childhood years were spent in India, and I recall the sweltering Delhi summers and the torrential monsoons that offered respite, albeit briefly, from the furnace of the Indian summer.
When I was 6 years old, my father was deployed by the ANC to be its Chief-Representative in Cairo, Egypt, and to be the ANC Representative at the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO).
This was 1978, and as a 6 year old, I am afraid I have very few fond memories of Cairo – we lived on a meagre stipend and though we lived in an apparently ‘better’ suburb of Cairo called Zamalek, an island on the Nile, the flat we occupied was on the ground-floor of a high-rise apartment block and it was damp, dark, and had the unfortunate distinction of being right next to the apartment block’s garbage-disposal area!
This meant a steady stream of litter, literally being flung from the windows of our neighbours in the flats above us, and often landing with a crash of shattered glass right outside our tiny kitchen.
Cairo was also where I had to unlearn the Hindi I had learnt in Delhi and pick up Arabic, which I did as most 6 year olds do when required by circumstance to learn a new language.
I faintly remember the Presidents’ Sadat-Carter meetings around the time of the Camp David Peace Accord signed between Israel and Egypt and my days were spent riding my bicycle through the dusty lanes of Zamalek.
One memory that is particularly poignant is that of my mother, with her head in her hands, sobbing as she pined for her two children at the opposite end of the African continent. I remember many days walking back from school and before stepping into our apartment block, seeing my mother through the window of what was my room, head in hands, crying.
It is a memory that I carry with me still.
Another indelible memory is when we visited the WWII museum of the battle of al-Alamein, in al-Alamein. Walking past the graves of the fallen in the war against Nazism, we came across many South African names, and I remember vividly how my father explained to me what Fascism and Nazism meant, and how important it was at the time for the world to fight it.
As we walked through the tombstones of the WWII soldiers from all parts of the world, my father explained to me how Apartheid in South Africa was a scourge (though not in those words!) like Fascism and Nazism, and how just as the world had joined forces to fight Hitler and Mussolini, we too had to fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and that is why I was not at ‘home’ with my brother and sister.
‘Home’. That was something for a 9 or 10 year old to hear, because I had grown up always being told about ‘home’ being South Africa, which was as distant to me as the stars above the Pyramids. I was aware from as young as I can remember my parents’ sometimes angry insistence that home was not where we happened to be, at a particular time, whether in Delhi or in Cairo, but in distant South Africa.
I however, could not understand why ‘home’ was not where I was. In Delhi I spoke Hindi like a local, and had friends and felt that ‘home’ was our little flat on the 1st floor of a block of flats in Greater Kailash. But then came the move to Cairo, and in no time at all I completely forgot my Hindi, and learnt Arabic like a local, and had friends and felt that ‘home’ was our dinghy flat in Zamalek.
And then in 1982, my father was re-deployed from Cairo back to Delhi, and suddenly there I was, 10 years old, meeting my old friends and not knowing a word of Hindi!
So the idea of ‘belonging’, of ‘home’, of being rooted in a place and time was alien to me from a very young age. I remember dreading when the next ‘move’ would be, given that my parents were political exiles and often having to pack up our few belongings and travelling at very short notice. I do not want it to sound like it was particularly unpleasant in any way, because there also was the thrill a child has of the packing and the plane rides, and the new places that were so, so new to me. Cairo and Delhi probably had only the following things in common: the heat, the population, and the fact that both Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser and India under Jawaharlal Nehru were two of the four countries (the others being Sukarno’s Indonesia and Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia) that founded the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during the Cold War.
A Flash Forward –
The year is 1990, and my parents and I found ourselves in Helsinki, Finland, where in November 1989 the ANC deployed my father as ANC Secretary to the World Peace Council (WPC) which had its headquarters in Helsinki.
For the 17 year old that I was to suddenly, in a matter of weeks, pack up and leave high-school, friends and a girl-friend at the time, was particularly harsh for me.
I remember spending the winter of 1989 holed up in our two-bedroomed flat in Helsinki, not knowing what had just taken place. I pined for the girl I was (kind of!) dating back in school in Delhi, and I was thoroughly shocked by the below-zero temperatures of winter in Scandinavia, and thoroughly disheartened by the short days and long, long nights. I did love the snow however!
Then it happened. We heard the news that Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners in South Africa were to be released, unconditionally, and that the liberation movements and the ANC were to be unbanned!
This changed everything.
It was a chaotic and heady time, with high hopes and renewed life as the once impossible dream of returning ‘home’ was to be realised.
A very memorable trip was made by my parents and I, by ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm, Sweden. An overnight ferry-ride, the trip was magical, for we were to meet Nelson Mandela, free after 27 years on Robben Island and in Sweden to meet the President of the ANC, comrade Oliver Reginald Tambo, Mandela’s old friend, law-partner and life-long comrade in the ANC. President Oliver Tambo, who had been in exile for almost 30 years was a dynamic and charismatic and intellectual giant who had built the ANC in exile from being just another liberation movement in exile into the voice of the South African freedom struggle, launching successful campaigns to isolate Apartheid South Africa from the world community.
Unfortunately President Oliver Tambo had suffered a stroke and was convalescing as a guest of the Swedish government; themselves staunch allies in the fight against Apartheid. Nelson Mandela met his old comrade in Stockholm and we met the godfather of my sister, and the would-be best-man of my father in a hall in Stockholm. I have photographs of the tears and joy as Mandela hugged my father and mother, and as old comrades including Ahmed Kathrada who also spent 27 years in jail with Mandela and the other Rivonia Trial accused, met after nearly 30 years! I was overwhelmed, as were countless others to finally meet the man who had become the face of the worldwide struggle against Apartheid.
That my parents knew the Mandelas as young friends and comrades only made the reunion on a Scandinavian day all the more special.
There was a sense of vindication, of oppression though still not defeated, but definitely in its final moments, as we acknowledged that we all stood on the cusp of something so many had not only dreamed about, but dedicated their entire lives to achieve.
We spent a few days in Stockholm and Uppsala, and then hopped on the ferry back to Helsinki, to finally begin preparations for the return home.
The trip we made was on freezing November night, when we boarded a train from Helsinki to Moscow, and then flew to Maputo in Mozambique where we spent a night, before boarding a South African Airways flight to Johannesburg.
I will never forget the stifled sobs of my mother as the pilot announced we were flying over South African soil.
My parents and I returned to South Africa on a November day in 1990, as part of a batch of returning political exiles.
I was 18 years old and met most of my family members for the first time.
My father receiving “The Order of Luthuli” in Silver from President Jacob Zuma
My Family – A Historical Journey through the Seasons
Part Three: A Summer Digression
And now, dear reader (may your patience be praised!), I am going to steer this ship of memories as we embark on a journey of emotions – a subjective voyage through the feelings that I have felt, the emotions that I have experienced during the course of my 40 year old life.
You, dear reader, may stop reading right now if you find outpourings of emotion and wearing one’s feelings on one’s sleeve not your cup of Earl-Grey! If however, and I sincerely hope you do decide to read through this ‘summer’ of life’s memories, I assure you that what you will read will be savage honesty, however painful and hard it is to bare one’s soul for all to see the flawed human-beings that we all are.
And so it was that just past my 18th birthday in September of 1990, I found myself ‘home’ in South Africa, after 18. Years of dreaming what ‘home’ would be like and how my brother and sister and cousins and aunts and uncles would take me into their homes and lives.
I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and kindness showered on me, the ‘returning’ boy who was not really returning, but was dipping his toes into the early 1990′s, a period of South African history, just preceding the first free and democratic election in 1994 that was one of the country’s most trying of times.
The Apartheid regime, having unbanned all political organisations and liberation movements and releasing political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and others, was still not willing to relinquish power, and had embarked on a cynical and dirty campaign of fomenting violence in the sprawling black townships in Johannesburg, Durban and other cities around the country.
There were killings and hit-squads that roamed and terrorised communities while negotiations between the Apartheid government and the African National Congress (ANC) offered hope and then broke down, and then were restarted until finally, on April the 27th, 1994, black South African, for the first time in their lives, cast their ballots which resulted in sweeping Nelson Mandela’s ANC into power, with Nelson Mandela or ‘Madiba’ as he is known becoming South Africa’s first black President.
I attended the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first truly democratically elected President in Pretoria on a crisp May 10th morning along with friends and comrades, and we openly wept as the South African Air-Force flew overhead, the flag of our new ‘rainbow’ nation fluttering below.
A Flash Back –
My early days in South Africa were ones of family dinners and visits to relatives and old family friends and comrades in the struggle. My father started work almost immediately at the ANC’s headquarters in central Johannesburg, and I attended my final year of high-school, also in central Johannesburg.
Looking back now, I see myself then as a caricature of the immigrant who just wants to fit in, always being on one’s best behaviour, and under no circumstances allowing the turmoil within to bubble to the surface.
I was born to parents who were non-religious; my father definitely more so than my mother, who ‘believed’ in God, though was never one to make a show of it.
I grew up not really knowing what religion I was born into, as my parents never, and though never is a strong word, it is applicable here; my parents never mentioned religion at home.
My mom would cook up a storm on Eid-ul-Fitr every year, the feast that is the culmination of the fasting month of Ramadaan, but then we never fasted or paid attention to religious ritual or practice. I can say that religion was absent from our home, whether we were in India, Cairo or Helsinki.
I am forever indebted to my parents for having raised me with and this may sound pompous of me to say, humane values, rather than strictly religious ones, not that the two are mutually exclusive!
I attended a school in Delhi in the 1980′s, Springdales, an institution founded by two great humanitarians, Mrs. Rajni Kumar and her husband Mr. Yudhishter Kumar, both human-beings who possessed the highest qualities of compassion, humanity, and a burning sense of the need to tackle injustice, wherever and in whatever shape or form it was to be encountered.
My years at Springdales in Delhi, though I was hardly a promising academic student (having failed standard 8!), I now look back and am forever indebted to the culture of tolerance and respect for all people, regardless of station in life, religion, caste, gender or race, that my still-beloved Springdales inculcated in me.
The culture of Springdales School and the manner in which my parents raised me, has led to a life-long aversion to intolerance in any shape, colour or form, and a strong belief in the power of rational and critical thinking.
I thank my parents again, and my Springdales, for bestowing on me this invaluable gift.
A Flash Forward –
And so I find myself, now in the teen years of the new millennium, still always feeling that I am on the outside, looking in – and I find this vantage point to be, strangely, comfortable now, I must admit.
I do not have much time for religion or for cultural affiliations. Again, this is not meant to be offensive to anyone, these are the feelings I am comfortable with. I cannot stress this enough, just how my upbringing and my years at Springdales have hewn into my consciousness, and the absolute need for the respect for all.
I am growing weary of talking about myself, as I am sure you, dear reader, are as well, and so I shall stop this monologue with the words of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara who when responding to a woman who also bore the ‘Guevara’ name and who had written to Che asking him where in Spain his ancestors came from. This was Che’s response …
“I don’t think you and I are very closely related but if you are capable of trembling with indignation each time that an injustice is committed in the world, we are comrades, and that is more important.”
Thank you, dear reader, for your patience, and for your taking the time to read these ramblings of mine.
President Nelson Mandela and I – Sweden 1990
My Family – A Historical Journey through the Seasons
Part Four: Thoughts about Exile, Home, Identity, Belonging
A Flash Back –
I look back to that November evening in Helsinki, Finland in 1989, where the temperature was around -20 degrees Celsius, and we stood on the railway platform with our little luggage (mostly books, photographs etc) with tickets to Moscow via Leningrad (yes, it was still called Leningrad back then).
I recall my mother and father, by then already in their late 50′s, and preparing to return to their home, South Africa, after almost three decades living in exile all across the globe, from Zambia to Tanzania to England to India to Egypt to India again and then to Finland, and now following the Apartheid regime’s unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and other political parties and the release of Nelson Mandela and political prisoners, my parents were to return to a country they had called ‘home’ for as long as I can remember. South Africa was always; always home, no matter where we happened to be.
Whether it was in our ground-floor, bleakly dark flat in Zamalek, Cairo where we had to keep the fluorescent lights on during the day, or in our 1st floor flat in Safdarjang Development Area in Delhi, or in our cramped 2-bedroom flat in Helsinki, Finland, I was always told about ‘home’, about family and about the country that I grew up loathing (Apartheid South Africa) as well as the country that I grew up idealising, for South Africa was after all ‘home’, that mythical place where family stuck together and where my brother Azad and my sister Tasneem grew up, separated from their parents, and where finally, at long last, Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years in Apartheid’s jails.
I often look back on my years growing up as a child of political exiles, and I am thankful, as I grew up without the hardships that so many fellow exiles had to endure.
I am also thankful, for the depth of humanity that I saw in strangers and friends and people who took us in, and loved us, and extended hands of solidarity and assistance and warmth when we were most alone.
I owe a debt of gratitude to so many people, ordinary folk, workers, labourers, academics, doctors and engineers, school-teachers and students, who chose to identify with the plight of the oppressed people of South Africa, just as they chose to support the cause of justice, of freedom and of self-determination in Namibia, Western-Sahara, and Palestine.
I can vividly remember the pain and anguish that my mother endured, being separated from her family and her children, and I remember her tears, her quiet sobbing when I used to return home from school, knowing that my father was away travelling, often for months at a time.
It is not easy to put everything down on paper, and indeed it is impossible to capture all of one’s experiences, yet I feel it is very important that I share these thoughts with you, dear and patient reader, not because of what I wish to say about myself, or even about my parents, but to honour and to remember and to cherish the strong bonds that were forged during those sometimes hard times, and to convey to all, that no matter what one hears about our differences as people, be it differences of creed, of colour, of nationality, there is a ‘human’ connection that I have seen that simply extinguishes the claims by the religiously fanatical, or by the jingoistic nationalists who seek to impose upon us a barrier, a wall, a divide that cannot be breached. I have mentioned what I am about to write earlier, and I only repeat it because I believe it needs to be repeated, so forgive me, dear reader, if I seem to be revisiting old ground.
The old ground that I feel I need to revisit now is that of a story that my mother used to tell me, repeatedly, and always with tears in her eyes, and always with her crying openly as she retold this story over and over again to me.
Let me place the story in its historical context. The year was 1971, and India had just been at war with Pakistan, and my parents had arrived in what was then called Bombay and had rented a small apartment in one of Bombay’s high-rise blocks of flats.
It is important to remember that India had gained independence only 24 years earlier, so the wounds and the trauma of the division of India (into Pakistan and East-Pakistan) were still very fresh.
My father was sent by African National Congress (ANC) to India, in order to work to further strengthen the support that the liberation movement had received from India.
My mother, who was a nurse by profession, had started working at Bombay’s Breach Candy Hospital, and my father was busy establishing links within the sizeable South African student community that Bombay was home to.
One day my father decided to jump over a railing, in order to catch a bus, and slipped and fell.
I shall now let my mother tell her story …
… Now we had just arrived in India, and though Mosie and I spoke Gujarati, we still didn’t know Hindi or Marathi (the language spoken in Maharashtra, the state in which Bombay/Mumbai is located), and here comes Mosie, limping and in pain. I am a nurse and so I took a look at his foot and it looked bad, but what were we to do? We didn’t know anyone, we didn’t have a telephone, and we didn’t speak the language. So I went and knocked on our neighbour’s door. An elderly lady opened the door and I explained in English that we were new in the apartment-block and that my husband had suffered a possible fracture. The old lady then asked me to sit. I sat. The elderly lady then asked me my name and I said ‘Zubeida, but you can call me Zubie’. I then told the lady all about South Africa, about how I had been separated from my two children, about Apartheid, about Nelson Mandela, and about how we were freedom fighters and were in exile. The old lady broke down and sobbed, and I cried too, feeling her warmth towards me, even though I was a total stranger. Then the elderly lady told me that they were Punjabis and during the partition of India, they had to flee their home in what later became Pakistan because they were Hindus. The old lady sobbed when she told me about the rioting, the massacres, the pain of leaving everything behind and fleeing with only the clothes on their backs, and then she grabbed my hand tightly and said that she understood everything, and she shared my pain, because she too had been a refugee once … (at this point my mother would be crying openly while telling me the story) … and that from then on, she was my elder sister. This from a woman who had experienced the horrors of partition, and who realising I had a Muslim name, chose to share her life story with me, and who could understand what we were going through. Anyway, we called a doctor who turned out to be a Parsi ‘Bone-Setter’ … (laughing between tears now) … and later when we moved to Delhi and her daughter Lata got married to Ravi Sethi and also moved to Delhi, she told Lata that ‘Zubeida hamaari behen hai’ (Zubeida is my sister) and that Lata should keep in touch with us. That’s how Papa and I know aunty Lata and uncle Ravi …
Hearing my mother tell me this story over and over again, emphasising that aunty Lata’s mother had gone through hell at the hands of Muslims, and still she chose to see my mother not as a Muslim, but as a fellow human-being, who shared a similar life in the fact that my parents were also refugees, having fled their country, and that aunty Lata’s mother ‘took’ my parents in, and shared a bond that cannot be described sufficiently in words, as words would only dilute the depth of feeling that the two women shared for each other, only makes my belief in the power of the humanity that binds us all together that much stronger.
Yes, there will be those who will say that those were different times, and that nowadays things have changed.
Yes, there will be many who may call it idealism, romanticism, or simply burying one’s head in the sand, but I still hold on firmly to the belief that aunty Lata’s mother and my mother shared, one person to another, regardless of religion, colour, caste, wealth, status or any of the many other ‘yard-sticks’ that people are measured by, and by emphasising our shared humanity, rather than by highlighting our differences, that we can, and that we shall, indeed, overcome, someday.
Myself and my poem “Remember us when you walk this Way” as part of the permanent exhibition at the Lileasleaf Farm Rivonia Trial Museum – http://www.liliesleaf.co.za
Remember Us When You Pass This Way.
(Dedicated to the countless South Africans who gave their lives for freedom and democracy)
Remember us when you pass this way.
we who fell,
who bled,
remember us when you pass this way,
we who fell so that countless others may stand,
we who bore the brunt of the oppressor’s hand.
Remember us when you pass this way,
leave a flower or two as you pass along,
sing! sing for us a joyous and spirited song.
Remember us when you pass this way,
we who fell,
who bled,
remember us when you pass this way,
remember us in your tomorrows,
as you remember us today.
Comrade Winnie Mandela and myself – Johannesburg
My Family – A Historical Journey through the Seasons
Part Five: Thoughts about Exile, Home, Identity, Belonging
This scribble is going to be a rambling, not too coherent piece all about my thoughts on identity, belonging, exile, and about ‘home’.
So, my dear friends, I invite you to accompany me, with sufficient forewarning I hope, on this scribbled ramble…
‘Home’
Looking back now, I can say that I grew up with two very separate yet entwined ideas of ‘home’ – ‘home’ being both the idealised country of my parents, who spoke of ‘home’, which meant South Africa, as being the place where ‘family’ was an umbrella of safety and a source of comfort, and the other reality of what ‘home’ meant was the reason I was born in exile in the first place, the country that had become a pariah of the world, with its brutal, oppressive system of Apartheid racial-segregation.
Now this may seem odd from today’s historical vantage point, but back when I was growing up in India and Egypt, there was a definite sense that we would never see ‘home’ again.
The hopes and aspirations with which my parents lived by, and probably had to live by, was that freedom would come in our lifetime. But a lifetime can be a long time, so there was also the possibility that we may never see the end of Apartheid, and this fear, which I think is shared by exiles, refugees, and all displaced human beings, was always just below the surface.
This ever-present and often repressed fear was fuelled by the deaths of fellow exiles who passed on before South Africa’s transition from Apartheid state to democratic nation took place in 1994.
I recall an old ANC comrade, an elderly man in his 60′s, who lived with us in Cairo in the early 1980′s, and to whom I became quite close, who later took ill and passed away in a Cairo hospital.
I was 8 years old at the time, and even though my parents did not tell me that ‘uncle’ had passed away, I knew it. I sensed it from his deteriorating health earlier, and from the grave expressions my parents wore for months after ‘uncle’ ‘left’.
My parents carried their own feelings of guilt and pain, of leaving behind a young son and daughter (my siblings Azad and Tasneem whom I did not grow up with) in South Africa, who grew up with my maternal grand-parents in Johannesburg. My parent’s guilt and pain never left them, and I remember my mother as she lay bedridden with Motor-Neurone Disease almost 14 years after freedom still carrying the anguish of the separation of parent from child.
My father still carries the pain with him, and I think even more so today because of the difficulties and emotional minefields that he has to navigate through knowing that he did not share his two eldest children’s childhood, and only now, after all these decades, are the relationships being strengthened, and that too is still a work in progress.
I can only imagine the pain, emotional trauma, anguish and heartbreak that my sister Tasneem, and my brother Azad felt growing up knowing that their parents were out in the world, yet remaining separated from them.
It is a legacy of pain, of homes and of families split up and separated that remains with us today, of Apartheid’s continuing brutalisation of South Africans.
These complex and conflicting issues that we as family, and we as a nation have to deal with may still yield some measure of peace, if that is at all possible, given the weight of the past.
I have so much more to say, dear reader, but it can wait for later.
I can say that my experiences growing up here, there and everywhere have been a convoluted scattering of disjointed places, of half-remembered faces and of many a restless night spent contemplating the questions of identity, home, belonging and of what ‘anchors’ a person.
Perhaps there are reasons for the times when that vagabond exile blood gets restless and that itch, that impatience, that urge to move, to flee, to rejoin the nomadic community surfaces.
And perhaps, there are reasons too, for my ability to suppress the sometimes fiery urge to trade quiet suburban stasis for the unknown path of the unnamed exile.
I leave you, respected reader, with a poem I scribbled some time ago:
Freedom – The Unfinished Dream …
The shackles have been cast off.
The chains broken.
A people once squashed,
under the jackboot of Apartheid,
are free.
Free at last!
Freedom came on the 27th day in that April of 1994.
Freedom from prejudice.
From institutionalized racism.
From being relegated to second-class citizens.
Freedom came and we danced.
We cried.
We ululated as we elected
our revered Mandela.
President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.
Our very own beloved ‘Madiba’.
Black and white and brown and those in-between.
The many hues of this nation,
rejoiced as we breathed in the air of freedom and democracy.
Today we pause.
We remember.
We salute.
The brave ones whose sacrifices made this day possible,
on that 27th day of April,
24 years ago.
Today we may dance.
We sing.
We ululate!
We cry.
Tears of joy and tears of loss.
Of remembrance and of forgiveness.
Of yet to be realised reconciliation and of the ghastly memories that still torment us.
Today we pause.
We acknowledge the tasks ahead.
The hungry.
The naked.
The destitute.
Today we reaffirm,
that promise of freedom.
From want.
From hunger.
From eyes without promise.
Today we reflect.
On unfulfilled promises.
On the proliferation of greed.
On the blurring of the ideals of freedom.
Today we say:
We will take back the dream.
We will renew the promise.
We will not turn away.
Today we pledge:
To stand firm.
To keep the pressure on.
To remind those in the corridors of power,
that we the people still need to savour the fruits of the tree of freedom*.
And till that time,
when all shall share in the bounty of democracy,
We shall remain vigilant,
and strong.
And we shall continue,
to struggle.
And to shout out loud,
“Amandla – Awethu!”**
________________
* – final words of Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu before he has executed by the Apartheid regime in 1979
“My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight”.
** – “Amandla – Awethu” means “Power to the People, and was a rallying slogan during the struggle against Apartheid.
President Nelson Mandela’s mother and my mother 1950s demonstrating against the imprisonment of political prisoners
you hardly spare me a glance, as you walk past me, a fellow human, whom you pretend not to see.
you send me off to fight your wars, remaining comfortably ensconced in your ivory tower, while in the trenches i shiver and cower.
you dock my pay if one of your fine bone china cups gets chipped, you withhold my wages, while the hunger in my children’s stomachs rages.
your children still call me ‘boy’ or ‘girl’, though it was i who changed their diapers long ago, but it is still i who is the recipient of the epithets that you and they hurl and throw.
you use my body for your carnal desires, throwing some money on my stained bed, you use me as a lifeless rag, then dispose of me in a rubbish bag.
you claim to be so liberal, so open-minded and progressive, yet you ignore my plight, you discuss poverty in your chandeliered rooms, as i prepare some beans in the dim candlelight.
you send your cheques to greenpeace and amnesty, perhaps to assuage your guilt somehow, as you refuse to pay me my overtime due, your body weighed down by heaving jewellery, in red and white and blue.
you see me building your glittering skyscrapers and your glitzy malls, my hard hat pummelled by stone and dust, as i eke out a living, my dreams turned to rust.
you walk and you talk, leaving me to scrounge in the garbage heaps, for scraps of this and that, while your stocks and portfolios grow ever more fat.
i am invisible to you, to your posh and pompous kind, and i doubt your humanity will be ever anywhere to find.
you see me, a festering sore on your manicured lawns, a piece of dirt living on ‘charitable’ rations, and the first to bear the brunt of your police batons.
i am human, though only barely just, easily interred, once my purpose has been served,
i am human, though only barely just, as i get buried in a heap of dust.
President Nelson Mandela’s letter of condolence to my father when my mum passed on – Johannesburg April 2008
President Nelson Mandela’s mother and my mother in the late 1950s or early 1960s protesting the imprisonment of their loved ones – photograph courtesy of the Nelson Mandela Foundation
my mother – a true story …
My mother used tell me this with tears in her eyes.
My mother left South Africa in the 1960’s to join my father who was in political exile at the time in Zambia and Tanzania.
My father was a close comrade and friend of Nelson Mandela and shared the cell next to Mandela during one of their periods of being jailed by the Apartheid security services.
My father later escaped from Marshall Square jail along with his comrades, Abdulhay Jassat, Harold Wolpe, and Arthur Goldreich.
The four escapees were then were spirited out of South Africa as there was a then £2000 reward for them to be captured – dead or alive.
In 1970 my father was deployed by the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC) to India to be its Chief-Representative there.
I was born in New Delhi a couple of years later in 1972.
My mother and father spent two years in Mumbai (then Bombay).
One afternoon my father fell and broke his leg.
My mother knocked on their neighbour’s door of the apartment complex where they lived.
The neighbour was an elderly Punjabi lady.
My mother asked the elderly lady for assistance in calling a doctor to see to my injured father.
A Zoroastrian (Parsi) ‘bone-setter’ was promptly summoned.
My mother and the elderly neighbour got to talking and the lady asked my mother where they were from, as their accents were clearly not local.
My mother told the elderly Punjabi lady that my father worked for the African National Congress of South Africa and had been forced into exile to continue to struggle to raise awareness internationally about the appalling situation in Apartheid South Africa.
My mother also mentioned that they had to leave their two young children (my siblings, whom I met only later in life) behind in South Africa, in the care of grandparents, and that they were now essentially political refugees.
The elderly lady broke down and wept uncontrollably.
She told my mother that she too had to leave their home in Lahore in 1947 and flee to India with only the clothes on their back when the partition of the subcontinent took place and when Pakistan was torn from India and formed, due to narrow religious and sectarian reasons, whose repercussions are felt to this day.
This was also a time when religious violence wreaked havoc, and untold suffering and death for millions of human beings.
The elderly lady then asked my mother what her name was.
‘Zubeida’, but you can call me ‘Zubie’.
The Punjabi woman hugged Zubeida some more, and the two women, seperated by age and geography, by religion and all the things that seek to divide humanity, wept, for they could understand the pain and trauma of a shared experience.
The elderly Punjabi lady told my mother that she was her ‘sister’ from that day on, and that she too felt the pain of exile after being forced to become refugees, and what being a refugee felt like.
Zubie and her husband Mosie (my father) and the family next door became the closest of friends.
Then came the time for Mosie and Zubie to leave for Delhi where the African National Congress (ANC) office was to be officially opened.
The elderly Punjabi lady and Mosie and Zubie said their goodbyes.
A year or two later, the elderly lady’s daughter Lata married Ravi Sethi and the couple moved to Delhi.
The elderly lady telephoned Zubie and told her that her daughter was coming to Delhi to live there, and that she had told Lata, her daughter that she had a ‘sister’ in Delhi, and that she should not feel alone.
Lata and Ravi Sethi then moved to Delhi in the mid-1970’s.
Lata and Zubie became the closest of friends and that bond stayed true, till the both my mother passed away in 2008.
My father and I still feel a close bond with Lata and Ravi Sethi, and vice versa.
A bond that was forged between Hindu and Muslim and between two countries of South Africa and of India, shattering the barriers of creed and of time.
A bond strong and resilient, forged by the pain and trauma of a shared experience.
That is why I shall never stop believing that hope shines still, for with so much religious bigotry almost consuming our world today, there will always be a woman, somewhere, anywhere, who would take the ‘other’ in as a sister, and as a fellow human being.
And that is why, I believe, that there will always be hope.
Hope in the midst of unbearable pain and hope in the midst of loss and of unspeakable suffering.
Hope.
For we can never give up hope for a better world.
Never!
(For aunty Lata’s late-mother, my mother’s ‘sister’ and who took us all into her heart, and for Lata and Ravi Sethi of Defence Colony, New Delhi, India)
President Nelson Mandela and my father – late 1950s or early 1960s
President Nelson Mandela and my father – Johannesburg 2000s
the brutal slave-ships of centuries ago, from the cradle of humankind, the continent of Africa, may no longer ply the seas,
the unspeakable horrors meted out to the millions of human beings are now conveniently forgotten.
today the ships of commerce and of Capital carry the noxious cargo of slavery – neo-slavery – as they ferry designer goods from the aisles of slaves in the free-trade zones of this world.
the slave-owners mentality has changed little,
the promise of the filthy notes of money,
the 20-hour long shifts enforced inhumanely,
the shackles of bonded labour, of small hands sewing high-street apparel,
reeks of ugliness, of the depths of depravity that the 1% are gladly willing to rain down on fellow human beings.
the vile stench of greed, sinks it’s talons into the souls of those in need,
in need of a few grains of rice, of some beans, as tears down the cheek of humanity perennially streams,
while labourers who sweat and toil build obscene skyscrapers that in the ashamed sun gleams.
the migrant workers who built countries with their calloused bare hands,
enslaved by colonialism and forced labour, of being auctioned as if they were soulless machines,
only to be flung when death visited them, into the emptiness of savage ravines.
today we see the same, on 24hr television screens,
the stories of the ravages of hunger, the tears of mothers and fathers, the little faces whose innocence has been stripped,
whose very sense of dignity is continually whipped,
all so we may drink champagne and shuck oysters and dance and fuck,
never for even a second thinking about the 99% ensnared in the rotten muck.
these words of mine may be obscene, but the ugliness of man lies elsewhere,
somewhere, everywhere,
while immigrants are vilified, ripped apart from them, the tiniest sense of decency,
while as before they are treated as mere disgusting currency.
these impotent words i spew make not a scintilla of a difference,
they just pour out and swirl down into the gutters of apathy,
so I lay my pen down now, in disgust and self-loathing,
of being a part of the machine that off human beings slave,
from the moment they are born and till they are thrown into countless a nameless grave,
yes i lay my pen down now, rotting inside, as the bile erodes,
the platitudes i scribble.
yes i lay my pen down now, knowing i am merely spouting inconsequential drivel,
Please visit this site and this absolutely heartwarming and hopeful and moving and touching piece on Phyllis Wheatley – with my friend Léa’s deeply personal tribute to a giant of a woman – aunty Aggie Msimang – a giant in the struggle for freedom and democracy and justice in South Africa.
Léa has posted this deeply moving piece on Phyllis Wheatley and I thank you, my friend Léa, for making me read up more on Phyllis Wheatley as well as about the countless other women who fought and struggled and dedicated their lives to the cause of humanity.
Merci beaucoup my friend and comrade and fellow-traveller.
Please do read Léa’s other brilliant pieces and do follow her here on WordPress – her blog and her writing are so needed and necessary in this cold and callous and unjust world we find ourselves in.
For hope and for justice and for gender-rights and for equality and for fairness and for peace and for truth.
How dare I stand before you, a man – to recite a poem on women and about the rights of women the world over?
Am I not the perfect caricature of that man – who deems himself capable, and so very able, even entitled?
Yes, aren’t I that man who thinks he understands,
who believes righteously that he knows what it has been like, and what it is like being a woman in this crass, misogynistic world.
The man who presumes to know and to empathise about countless women’s deeply personal and painful truths that they live each day, not just at times,
I am that man who thinks it possible, even admirable of him to scribble out a few rhymes.
Isn’t this what caricatures like me have always done – speak on behalf of, or drone on about women, their struggles and the need of the now, the forging ahead in the countless battles yet to be fought for the emancipation of women,
yes caricatures indeed, us men who beat down with bloodied fists the very same women, for whom we hurl a few slogans around, utterly meaningless as they fall to the blood stained ground.
But never will I admit to the profanities I have spewed, in-between off hand chats with male friends, those chats about how many chicks I have screwed.
The man before you stands and pontificates about all that women need – the liberal manifesto – equal pay for all, the right of a woman to determine what is best for her body, the calling out of the lewd catcalls and the uncouth slow-eyed once-over leering stares, shamelessly violating the woman, even as she with contempt at them all glares.
The man, oblivious to the hypocrisy, prattles on and on, speaking on behalf of women the world over, so attuned to their struggles, harping and carping, about feminism and women’s lib, all the while with a self-congratulatory tone so condescending and glib.
Ah but the facts speak for themselves, and they stack up time and time again, from time immemorial, to today, to a backdrop of the shrieks of collective pain.
The time has come and long passed, for the facts to be driven into the consciousness of every man, every boy, every girl, every person this wide world around,
if for once, we may actually, onto a sliver of hope hold, it must be to accept our complicity in this sorry parade, while dusting off the grime and slime of this endless charade.
The facts are brutal, they speak for themselves – the facts are grotesque, screaming to us all,
for as the worn-out adage goes, we stand together, or together we will fall.
The facts are plain to see, they condemn us for our inaction, the facts are unalterable, they will never be what we want them to be, even as we sew our eyes shut not wanting to see.
I should perhaps apologise for not being more positive, and for being so abrasively cynical,
but I would rather say what I’ve said now,
and say it ever more,
because somehow I feel,
the platitudes will be dished out on Women’s Day and whenever our consciences are pricked,
by news reports of the unspeakable crimes of the savage treatment of women, the truths we live with daily, the said and the unsaid, the unspoken behind-the-picket fence abuse,
where no matter what we may think, it is us men who shroud ourselves behind the veil of complicit silence, seeing only what we choose.
Yes, so I would rather say all of this, gagging in this stench of rotten egos laid bare, as the truth we unpeel,
instead of gurgling out more lame, old feel-good, and utterly meaningless spiel,
while us men, the chosen ones, the patriarchy at its most hideous,
still, and for quite a while longer, I’m sorry to say,
with aunty Aggie at Luthuli House ANC Headquarters in Johannesburg – 2000s
Hamba Kahle* uMama Agnes “Aunty Aggie” Msimang
Our mother and comrade Agnes Msimang has passed away.
Aunty Aggie dedicated her life to the struggle for liberation,
she spent decades in exile with young children and faced the pain and difficulties of a life in exile – distanced from her country and family.
Aunty Aggie was a second mother not to just me, but to all ANC exiles in India who took shelter and received unconditional love and motherliness from the amazing, caring, politically principled woman that she was – and all under the harshest of circumstances of exile.
Aunty Aggie returned from exile with our family and continued to work in the African National Congress (ANC) till the last days of her life.
Her life of selfless struggle, her love for all, her unwavering stance as a revolutionary, her life as a freedom fighter for the noble cause of liberation from Apartheid tyranny and oppression, must serve as an inspiration to the younger generation who breathe the air of freedom because of the sacrifices of people like aunty Aggie and so many others.
Aunty Aggie will always be a very special part of who I am as a person.
She was indeed a motherly figure who offered comfort and solace when times were hardest during our years in exile, forced to leave her home to fully immerse herself into the revolutionary movement against Apartheid.
Today we pause,
today we reflect,
today we give praise and shed tears of deep grief and sorrow in this most heartbreaking of times.
It is never easy to share ones sentiments about a person so close to our hearts who has passed away, but with aunty Aggie I will always be her “sweetiepie” and she will always remain my mother, my beloved aunt, my strength and my inspiration to try and my best to emulate her principled belief in freedom and justice for all, in the values of non-racialism, and to be a true human being.
I have never managed to come even close to the principles and values imparted to me by my beloved aunty Aggie, but I pledge once again to honour her life by continuing to try to live as aunty Aggie would have wanted to me live – a life of always speaking out and struggling to fight injustice wherever it may be found, and to stand firm and with one’s head held high no matter what this harsh world may throw our way.
Rest in peace, respected aunty Aggie.
The example you have shared with countless comrades shall never fade.
You will continue to live within us all – your children and your comrades.
Hamba Kahle* uMama Agnes Msimang!
Long live the revolutionary spirit of Comrade Agnes Msimang!
The Struggle Continues!
Viva the spirit of the women Viva!
* – Hamba Kahle – an isiXhosa and isiZulu term meaning “travel well” – often used when bidding a departed one adieu.
My poem dedicated to the memory of Ahmed Timol’s, who was severely tortured and murdered by Apartheid’s Security Branch, recited by Luthuli Dlamini in the documentary “Someone to Blame” by Enver Samuels and aired on SABC 3 on Sunday 14th October 2018
Ahmed Timol – A martyr to the cause of Freedom …
(dedicated to the undying spirit of Ahmed Timol, brutally tortured and murdered by the Apartheid regime, and to the countless others who made the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle for liberation)
They tortured you, as you waged your struggle in the just battle,
they murdered you, as you made the grotesque walls of Apartheid rattle.
Your indomitable will, your unshakeable principles, your unbreakable spirit,
soars high today in our collective African skies,
your ultimate sacrifice for freedom, inspires generations, as you silenced their cowardly lies.
Today justice has prevailed, after decades of insufferable pain, years of deeply gnawing hurt,
today their lies have been consigned to the dirt.
They tried to murder an ideal,
the revolutionary spirit that burned bright in your heart,
they tried to silence you, not knowing your memory shall never depart.
We stood beside each other, in the icy sleet and the piercing rain,
she held a book in her hand, Nelson Mandela’s “Long walk to Freedom“.
She asked me if I had read it, and I betrayed my ignorance,
“I don’t like politics, its too dirty” I said,
“Everything is political”, she replied as I felt myself being read,
by her eyes chiseling into mine, until I shook my head.
“What comes of politics, when it is all a corrosive pond of muck?”, I asked,
she nodded, “we would not be standing at this bus-stop, were if not for people like him”, and she looked away,
“but his was a struggle for freedom from the tyranny of Apartheid, nothing close to the politics of greed we witness each day”, I said with a self-assurance so plain,
“his comrades and him struggled against Apartheid, yes”,
“but his political creed was the bedrock upon which all his ideals lay”,
“and that was the politics of revolution, and of pursuing a political end”, she smiled at me,
“and was it not his selling out that lead directly to this, our country’s mess?”, I pushed back,
“and you say you’re not interested in politics yet have such stinging political views”, she looked me straight in the eye,
“he sold out so that you and I may share this bus stop together, he sold out so that you and I may walk these streets as citizens, he sold out so that you may vote, he sold out so that your door is not knocked down at 3AM because you hold these views”,
“he sold out so that you and I and all the different races in this country can ride this bus that we are waiting for”.
As we got onto our different school buses she waved goodbye.
in the sleet and pouring rain,
I smiled and waved back, never to see her again.
The girl with the book.
The girl with Nelson Mandela’s “Long walk to Freedom” in her hand,
and I knew then that there is, and that there will always be hope,
even as today looked and felt impossibly bleak,
there will always be hope,
for a better tomorrow, less cruel and more just,
as long as we carry in our eyes and hold in our hearts,
( inspired by Woody Guthrie, Hugh Ramapolo Masekela, The Amandla ‘ANC Freedom’ Choir, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter, Pete Seeger, uMama Miriam Makeba, Vusi Mahlasela, Youssou N’Dour, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Christy Moore, and far too many more to mention )
walkin’ down these jo’burg streets, where glimmering chariots and hunger meets,
talkin’ about these jo’burg boulevards, where few sip whisky while the many are pierced by jagged shards,
yes, just walkin’ down these suburban roads, where high fences shield the 1%,
while the generous ones roll down their windows to fling out a 20 or so cent,
they said that ‘capitalism with a conscience’ would lead to more equality,
now we know that those words were empty and meaninglessly shitty,
there is no ‘capitalism with a conscience’ to be found,
the system itself is designed to keep the have-nots manacled and bound.
doesn’t all this sound like familiar talk, wherever in the world you live and walk,
doesn’t this happen in your city too, no matter what the stock exchange wants us to believe is true,
as you go walkin’ in your countries and cities the world around, doesn’t all this talk of the economy seem like hollow mishmash sound,
doesn’t the shimmering of gold and diamonds, of fillet mignon and blue label neat, sicken you as you emerge from your cocoons onto the raw festering street,
yes, it’s the same the whole wide world over, the grip of need that binds like a twisted choker, while millions are wagered in casinos around the whole world on games of poker,
so yes we’re talkin’ 21st century blues, where crocodile skin footwear meet torn shoes.
johannesburg,
detroit,
lagos,
gaza,
delhi,
london,
freetown,
beijing,
soweto,
harlem,
the favelas,
the “squatter camps”,
the “inner cities”,
all these festering sores on all of our consciences, are just blabbered on about in countless conferences,
where the rich and powerful and the greedy, give not a hoot about the starving needy,
where men in suits sip wine and on fresh salmon dine, as the conveniently invisible ones magically appear for a quick shoeshine.
i’m talkin’ these blues not because i’m wise, or humane, or have something so different to say, no i talk these words because i know there is a better way,
a better path where hope lights the lamp of equality, where protest and songs and the fight continues for true liberty.
i’m walkin’ and talkin’ these 21st century blues, knowing injustice is unsustainable, where the 1% will and must pay their pitliless dues,
it is our common internationalism to fight and pull out the dagger of inequality, so all may share the bounties of this earth, with no need for flinging money at the odd charity,
it is a hope we must all carry deep inside us all, and yes they will call us impotent and naive, but these are the common principles and values in which we have no choice but to believe,
as we go walkin’ and talkin’ these 21st century blues, fighting the good and the right and the just fight, even as they call us naive, against the stilettos of greed that into humanity do cleave,
so that the dignity, the respect, the gender-rights, the stab of hunger, the being homeless in the sleet and the rain, is not taken for granted as the normality of this life, where bombs and hunger are no longer taken for granted as “theirs” and not “our” strife,
but where uBuntu* is practised from the cradle to the grave,
for that is the only way we can our beautiful planet, our sisters and brothers, our mothers and daughters and the women so very brave,
fight on, resisting the grotesque truths of our world and our realities from callous greed shake off these suffocating chains, the hideous materialism that we crave,
that are designed to perpetuate the tyranny of the master and of the slave …
* – uBuntu is a Southern African isiXhosa/isiZulu concept that espouses the “belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”
On that rainy windswept night, when we took shelter under a leaking bus stop,
shivering as invisibles, scratched out of this world’s pitiless sight.
We spoke at length, as the buses passed us by,
we bared our souls to each other, as strangers often do,
laughing about how we roamed these avenues without a clue.
We spoke of excruciating truths, of life’s random cruelty, of our hopes and of our dreams, of our small joys and of our fears,
as we stood under that leaking bus stop, the rain streaking down cheeks that were salty with tears.
I barely saw you, and you could hardly see me, in the rain and in the fog,
as we laughed and cried together, sharing feelings of being swamped in life’s quicksand tugging bog.
We spoke so much that rainy night, we shared what we could not share with anyone else, we spoke of love and the beauty of it all,
we stood in the rainy sleet, dwarfed by the grey buildings towering so impersonally tall.
The beauty that I felt in those moments spent with you, the truest beauty I have ever felt, far beyond the fakery of strutting it all on this daily, gaudy parade,
truer than it all, all of it, far beyond the hollow shells of the neverending charade.
That night passed, as all nights must, yet you remain with me, within me, the beautiful stranger I could hardly see.
Today, I look back through the wisps of time, failing to scribble even the simplest rhyme,
knowing not much, but this much I know to be true,
the truest beauty of all, caresses your soul, and envelopes your heart,
When we kissed, beneath our shared African skies, you doused me in the cauldron of an aching desire, as you lit within me, a scorching, eternal fire …
When our bodies writhed, a dazzling confluence of two souls, you tantalised me with many a whispered ode, keeping me company through my vagabond journeys, on this my eternal abode, the yawning desolation of the lonesome road.
When your heart beat against my chest, our bodies a union of love, I sailed the waves of passionate need, imbibing your essence, my constant companion on infinite alleyways tread, as I hobbled further, never knowing what lay ahead.
We were one on that distant Jo’burg night, merged with the rumbling thunder of the African rains, free with gay abandon, breaking the chains, letting go of all stifling reins.
The beauty of those nights of togetherness may be faded sketches on the carpet of yesteryear, though it has always been you, as it always shall be you, my true love tucked away in my heart, kept close so the memories of you may never depart.
Today I yearn to be swept away by you once again, escaping these meagre scribbles that barely rhyme, these paltry words that too many an emotion confine,
to be one again, our souls pining with one another to entwine, our hearts unshackling the knots of all these years, our cheeks no longer feeling the sting of trickling tears.
I want to taste the yearning on your lips, to be woven again, into the tapestry of our exquisite embrace, to banish the distance between us, this void, this empty space.
I wish to hear our hearts beating to that old, sublime refrain, dispelling at once, the pangs of our hearts’ gnawing pain,
to be once more bathed, in the nectar of our shared African rain …
The violated woman receiving the sideways glances and the murmured whispers.
Always.
The woman questioned by family and friends and colleagues and the law.
Always.
The woman’s looks sniggered at.
The woman’s weight giggled about.
Always.
The violated woman torn down and brutalised and shredded more and more by barbed words from disbelieving family and friends and acquaintances and colleagues.
Always.
The woman’s conversation from 30 years ago used as a jackboot to crush her even more.
“Why did you say this at the time?.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone at the time?.
“Why didn’t you seek medical treatment at the time?.
In memory of “The Big Man” Clarence Anicholas Clemons Jr. (1942 – 2011)
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Growin’ Up in Delhi town, far away from being Born in the USA,
your words rang true to me,
nothing more so than when you sang Cover Me,
as i ached for release from my urban Jungleland,
to the rock ‘n’ roll tunes of The E-Street Band.
You made me weep with your melancholic My Hometown, as i related so deeply to I’m goin’ Down,
cos’ when you sang, you sang from the depths of your Hungry Heart, all the way across the seas from Asbury Park.
Your lyrics sliced deep, scraping away the veneer of cellophane,
stuck inside the prison of my Downbound Train.
I remember the first girl i met, with Bobby Jean stuck in my lovestruck head,
and as we walked hand in hand through the city park, all i wanted was to be, with her, Dancing in the Dark.
I believed that we were Born to Run, far away from that Brilliant Disguise,
far beyond the Darkness on the edge of Town, escaping our fragile spaces, on our Rocky Ground.
When Little Steven sang Sun City, it gave me more of a Reason to Believe,
singing truth to power, raging against Apartheid’s vile hell, for all who from racial discrimination had no reprieve.
When you sang with Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel, and Sting, all of you on stage for the Amnesty international concert, you carefully picked your principled fights, as we all sang Bob Marley’s Get up, Stand up, Stand for your Rights.
As i grew up, on that forked Thunder Road, you reminded me of The Ballad of Tom Joad,
your lyrics cut straight to the bone, when you belted out your sarcastic classic We take care of our Own.
You made me cry some more on the Streets of Philadelphia, while so many sweated it out in many a Darlington County, while the wealthy smiled and grabbed at this earth’s common bounty.
Oh how we joined you in the chorus, when you sang Woody’s angry This Land is your Land, while you paid homage to the countless immigrants in your powerful and visceral American Land.
I imbibed your words, feeling them course through my veins when i was bruised and tender, because you spoke to me of holding on tight to hope, to the words of No Surrender.
We are Alive spoke of the many who died trying to reach The Promised Land, to give it a shot, of Working on a Dream, while crossing The River would impossible seem.
Today, as so many are still sweating it out Working on the Highway,
we shall walk this earth, along the rolling African plains, we shall dance with glee, in the cool gentle rains,
we shall wade through the wetlands, we shall sing in the streams, we shall live life as it should be lived, as we have lived it in our shared dreams,
we shall travel to far flung places filled with flavours spicy, and to ancient cities filled with wonder, we shall wear out our walking shoes, as through the miles we continue to wander,
we shall walk side by side, our journey taking us to places and to people unknown, we shall break bread with all, singing songs of different cultures, woefully out of rhythm and tone,
we shall walk hand in hand, two friends roaming so many a diverse land, feeling the powdery talcum sand under our feet, on so many a distant island,
we shall talk as we walk, of hopes and of fears, of broken souls whole again, of eyes no longer moist with tears,
we shall soak in the warmth of human contact, of languages seas apart, we shall learn to speak many tongues, bidding adieu to friends made along the way, for the memories within us will always stay,
so let us walk along these paths ahead, leaving it all behind, our tortured past to finally be shed, making the soft grasses our nightly bed,
sharing with all peoples of all races, all religions, all man-made divisions,
that the colour of the blood that pumps through all our veins,
he continues walking down the empty boulevards, the soft petals beneath his shambling feet, his head down, feeling the earth crunch and the flotsam scatter, as he reminisces of yesterdays bygone, and tomorrows yet to dawn. he speaks to no one, just the obligatory shake of the head in acknowledgement at another soul traipsing down the same cobblewebbed slippery slope, braving the sudden winds that lash his frigid hands as he turns up the collar of his coat, feelings swell and peak, the music of the banal soothing him somewhat.
he lets his mind wander too, mourning crushed flowers strewn like blood on the soft earth, and fears the onset of the years, slower and dimmer, yet racing past at breakneck speed, heading for a heavens knows where, but just content, content to be in motion, walking, walking down the rusty dusty alleyways of this life …
art by banksy
