Peter Jones, the eternal revolutionary, was detained with Steve Biko, one of the icons of the liberation movement.
Steve was taken away, tortured and killed on September 12, 1977. Peter is the last person from the liberation movement who saw Steve before he was brutally murdered.
Peter was tortured and then spent approximately 540 days imprisoned without trial. He has his own compelling histories of independent contributions to the liberation of our country.
Peter suffered a stroke a while back. I visited him recently after communicating with Ingrid, his wife, who is a strong and independent woman in her own right.
When I entered the room where Peter was serenely lying, the soft air swirling around him created its own music. An orchestra of memories produced exquisite sounds as if to warmly welcome me after so many seasons of absence.
There is something magical when people with good histories who have not seen one another for years meet in ways that are seamless. The strands of beautiful experiences generate their unique coding to celebrate such a momentous reunion.
Peter and I cried when we saw one another. The violence of the stroke had deprived him of speaking. This was especially cruel because Peter is a gregarious and vibey person. His ability to walk was also taken away by this invisible, insurgent enemy that launched an attack on his brain.
Yet there was exuberant vibrancy in his facial expressiveness and he had a really strong hand grip. His eyes and face laughed raucously, with tears streaming down his cheeks at my use of the uniquely colourful language of the Cape Flats. I had described the country’s situation in lekka and local indigenous terms.
Songezo Maqula, a former convocation president of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), was also present and thanked Peter for reminding the current generation to apply the concept of self-reliance.
Peter emphasised that those who are facing problems in whatever form must accept the obligation to positively transform those challenges.
Dr Mogamat Riederwaan Craayenstein called Peter from the UK. This call was particularly profound and Peter again started to gently cry at some of the refreshed memories that Dr Craayenstein awakened.
Peter always argued that freedom from injustice, which the poor and the destitute experience, will only be achieved if we start by loving ourselves.
The path to sustainability for all of creation is interconnected to self-love and love as an active expression of peace. Peter epitomises the words of Che Guevara, who stated that “… the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love …”
Peter correctly postulated that we need inner peace as the foundation upon which to build our ideas. He illuminated the point that we can only enter into dignified relationships with others once we accept our equal humanity as a people despite being downtrodden.
We are beautiful and we must accept our beauty on our own terms. Our beauty must not be degraded and defined by oppressors who seek to treat us as “children of a lesser God”.
For Peter, “black consciousness” was a conscious concept of self-love based on human equality. He said that we must refuse to allow ourselves to be reduced as human beings.
Black consciousness is not based on a concept of race, which he rejected. Peter said that those who are targeted as “blacks”, must unite as different categories of oppressed. Peter insists that there is only one race, the human race. To achieve the recognition of a common humanity, anti-racism was a strategy towards non-racialism.
The core of his beliefs are reflected in active opposition to racial capitalism. Peter promoted revolutionary peace and all the different types of justice, including but not limited to economic and social justice.
Even “the oppressor must be given love so that we humanise them”. But Peter cautioned against appeasement and opposed empty gestures of reconciliation in a post-apartheid period. After the formal ending of apartheid, Peter stated that “we must not pretend that things can be normal after such long winters where broken souls were thrown into the pits of hell so that a few would profit at the expense of the many”.
On November 1, my daughter Nicole and I visited Peter. He was delighted to see us and once again, his radiance burst into generous colours of joy. They both do not remember that they met during the 1980s.
Now, Nicole is a young woman with her own family. She believes that we must celebrate our heroes and role models. Peter comes from a long line of resistance fighters who first opposed colonialism centuries ago at the Cape. As we drove away, I was again inspired at the indomitable spirit of Peter Jones, whose life is a library of dramatic histories.
* Brian Williams is Visiting Professor in Peace, Mediation and Labour Relations: University of the Sacred Heart Gulu in Uganda; Chief Executive: WLLM (Williams Labour Law and Mediation); Thought Leader Award Recipient for 2018 (Black Management Forum); International award winning poet
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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