Faced today with the sordid lies and political hedonism undergirding the Zuma complex how do you fall out of love with yourself and the history that brought us thus far, asks Michael Weeder.
We were married, Bonita and I, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Mitchells Plain in December 1984. Yesterday I was paging through our wedding album when the news of the death of Prince was reported on the radio.
Journalist Heather Robertson recalled on social media the 1989 Purple Rain March in Cape Town: “Prince... provided us with an anthem for our struggle against the tyranny of beige National Party bureaucracy and Stalinist political correctness.”
My nuptial memorabilia in hand, I thought about love and family and the love of struggle and people.
One photo featured us posing with our long-time friends: June, holding young Ruary in her arms and standing easy, a gentle smile on his dark, handsome face, dear Vernon Petersen. I am wearing an itchy-clothed charcoal suit I bought for R30 at a second-hand shop in Grahamstown. The brown leather brogues I had purchased in New York two years earlier bothered my mother no end. As I said my vows she whispered to her childhood friend, Louise Daniels: “Ai, meisie, sy skoene lyk soes bruin broodtjies.”
Our faces show no inkling of how the future would touch our lives: the fear, the joys, the wounds that will never heal. We and many others in the church that day were, at least since 1980, members of the ANC.
Generally our entry into liberation politics was along quiet, modest routes. Bonita, for instance, had given me my first copy of the Freedom Charter. She had sourced it from Special Collections in the African Studies Department at the University of Cape Town.
During orientation week in 1980 a chance encounter with Linda Chisholm, a substitute English teacher at Athlone High, had guided her to the department where banned literature was kept.
“I went to the catalogue cards and looked under ‘freedom’ as that’s what I wanted to know about. The Freedom Charter popped up. I took down the reference number and I looked under ‘Africa and freedom’ and the crossreferencing of the charter caught my eye; the same thing happened when I looked under ‘black people and freedom’. Without knowing what it was I thought it must be a document of note and requested it. I was so inspired by it I decided to make copies for my newly formed comrades in Mitchells Plain.”
We had been recruited by the struggles of our parents, the poverty in our neighbourhoods. We wanted to know about freedom and the ANC showed us the way. It provided a bridge into the black African communities from whom my generation had been separated and lived in mutual ignorance of. We fell in love with a movement of ordinary men and women.
In my third year at seminary I was part of a project aimed at acquainting us with country ministry. On the last Saturday in the month I and two others left Grahamstown after lunch and headed east. We journeyed to the dull-brown hills of the Peddie District sloping its peaceful way to the Indian Ocean.
Our first stop was the rectory of the late Father Alf Dlamini. We would leave a cup of tea later. Sometimes. It depended on how glad Father Alf was to see us. We carried with us the reserved sacrament for the communion services scheduled for the next day at one of the many out-stations in the parish.
Later we would sit in the late afternoon sun, looking at the hoenders scratching in the yard and wondering which one would be our Sunday lunch. On one of these occasions I met people who had been volunteers in the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s. They had been of the “amadelakufa”, literally “those who are prepared to make sacrifices”. It was here that I became aware of my African self as I learnt of the Abatwa of whom late President Nelson Mandela wrote in a letter from Robben Island: “A community that once were the sole occupants of our beautiful country… They are the men who strove for a free South Africa long before we reached the field of battle.”
Faced today with the sordid lies and political hedonism undergirding the Zuma complex how do you fall out of love with yourself and the history that brought us thus far?
* 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