Michael Weeder remembers dreaming of a day when every day for every mother, orphan, youth and friend would be a holiday, and the would be prisons empty.
Dear Raymond, Even after so many years I still think of you by your nom de guerre, your so-called “war name”. Others, such as Hedley King, I would later learn, knew you as Benjamin. I had been ordained to the priesthood on December 22, 1985 and had just been appointed to the Parish of St Timothy’s in Factreton.
The oil of my ordination was, so to speak, still wet on my forehead, when we met early in January the following year. You lived with us for just under a year. Bonita and I would introduce you to visitors to the rectory in Sunderland Street as a trade unionist friend from East London. You were easy to relate to and soon we were talking freely about your place in the underground structures of the ANC in the Western Cape.
We had much in common. You too were an Anglican, if not also an altar boy at one time.
You fondly recalled the memory of Father Stanley Qabazi, your parish priest at St Mary Magdalene in Gugulethu - the Isaac Hayes look he affected so well; his love of fancy cars and his pin-stripe suits.
Your mum was a member of the Mothers’ Union. You inducted me to what you termed the “defensive aspects of guerrilla warfare”.
One day, after I said the office of Morning Prayer, you casually placed the accoutrements of the urban guerrilla on to your bed - a limpet mine, a menacing-looking grenade and a Makarov pistol.
I confessed to my linker-poot clumsiness. I feared, if called upon to toss the grenade in any given direction I might just throw the pin and hold on to the explosive.
The timing devices of the limpet mine was a concern: each colour equalled a certain length of time. What would happen if I got the colour codes wrong?
“Comrade, you will never know” was your laconic reply. Yet it was you who helped disabuse me of any aspirations of being a guerrilla-cum-priest. You knocked on the door of my pastor heart when, one day you tearfully confided your fear of not being able to locate the whereabouts of a guerrilla under your command.
Terrance Lester, my colleague and friend who knew what the brother looked like, visited the mortuaries. Fortunately, our missing MK was found in good health in Khayelitsha.
You had moved on from our home by the time Chiara was born. The Saturday morning after her birth you brought a gift, a white-coloured charley. My joy comingled with your sadness. Your cousin-brother had been killed in the week and you would not be able to attend his funeral that day. I wrote this poem after your arrest in 1988. You had been so severely tortured and beaten that Lumka had recognised you only by the shoes you wore..
Every day a Holiday
You and I, wrapped tight in the cosiness of mutual trust and confidence, spoke once on a day, many winters past, of a time away from the routine measure of prison.
Of death. Of compatriots in exile. A time when every day for every mother, orphan, youth and friend would be a holiday, and the prisons empty and the streets filled with the shouts and laughter of fathers and lovers, hugging and holding, drying tears once forever as close as a thought or a whisper of a name.
A time when our parliament of the people and of mercy would outlaw racism, banish hunger and unemployment and, for sure, abolish the death penalty.
For such would be our world when Africa comes home. At last.
You and I spoke on a day many winters past about our dreams of a dawn that would bless our land and brighten our doubt-contoured days.
And now, in this spring-hint of a morning I thank God for you and that my name was not amongst those you mouthed as the wet rubber, Lieutenant Benzien heavy on your hand-cuffed body, suffocated your beaten head, smothered your breath to a dead-slow pulse in the femoral artery of your inner thigh.
And now, ever so often, in this longing distance from our dark winter day I scan your laughing face on TV or in a newspaper for a glimpse of that hope that mothered our victory and its promise of a time when every day for every mother, father and orphan, youth and friend, would be a holiday.
* The Very Rev Michael Weeder is the current Dean of St George's Cathedral.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Weekend Argus