In my family, the men are in a league of their own. They are authoritative, speak their mind, they’re elders in the church, patriarchal.
Politics has always been a part of my life; ever since ex-President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was released on that eponymous day from house arrest. My paternal grandfather, Staff Sergeant Joseph William George served in Regiment 39 during the Second World War. He was a highly decorated war hero. My father was a God-fearing, devoted, hands-on father, devoted husband, loving son, an educationalist first and foremost, (who was) later promoted to an Inspector of schools during the heyday of post-apartheid when all the primary and high schools in the Eastern Cape of South Africa had to be integrated (due to race relations because of our new-born democracy).
My father also found the time to be writer, scholar, and academic, lecturer, volunteer and community leader, and who graduated from no less than universities with six degrees, (Rhodes University, the University of the Western Cape, the University of South Africa, and London University). My father wanted to be a medical doctor, he had the marks in mathematics and physical science and chemistry for it, but he came out of the impoverished (now vanished, dysfunctional) community of South End, (District Six in Cape Town is more well-known), in the city of Port Elizabeth (situated in the Eastern Cape). It is the price he had to pay. My father taught me that a life of service is never easy.
Now I wish that my father just had more time to settle down and pen his autobiography. All the families in South End were forcibly removed (my dad has written about this, co-authored books, written pamphlets on mental health awareness, see the historic forced removals, South
End: As We Knew It, South End: The Aftermath, Depression the Sickness of Our Time: A Sufferer’s Perspective) from their homes, from a non-racial, inter-faith conscientized, cosmopolitan and vibrant community that knew nothing of gangsterism, illicit drug use and abuse, crime, and alcoholism, addiction, sexual, and domestic violence. This community knew absolutely nothing about endemic racial slurs, the class system, prejudice, and racism.
Due to the promulgation of the Group Areas Act it literally tore families and worlds apart, and now apartheid is supposedly a part of a bygone area, and yet the emotional baggage, the scars are carried by the youth, the young men, young women of the Northern Areas of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Here God means everything to the mothers, and grandmothers of this downtrodden-violent, and brutal, and close-knit, protective community. We are staunchly fundamentalist when it comes to Christianity, church, religion, and family. In the Northern Areas young people don’t get the fairy-tale ending, the happily-ever-after. Instead the young men are the assassins of a kind of Dante’s inferno, the kingpins of the underworld.
Nobody has spoken about the compensation on the land question, (not yet anyway), nor the widows, children, and compensation for the great-grandchildren whose great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and uncles served in the Second World War, although the question(s) of land reform is on the lips of everyone. Will divinely-elegant solutions and positively-intuitive answers come in time, before combative, nonverbal -communicative revolutionary acts will be trending like who the Duchess of Sussex is wearing, climate change, global warning, and the global recession. It seemed as if my father wanted to save everyone that he has met, and come into contact with in his life from the mental anguish, and pain, clinical depression, and hospitalisation, institutionalisation for mental illness.
He obtained his teaching diploma at 16-years-of-age, my father never drank, he gave up his six-pack-a-day cigarette and tobacco smoking habit before I was born in 1979. My father is primarily the oral-storyteller in our family (and I’m a filmmaker, playwright, poet, and short story writer because of him), and he was also the first in his family to achieve his doctorate (in philosophy). He made his own way in the world, on his own terms, while eating the dust of the colonial masters, eating the breadcrumbs from their kitchen tables. My paternalistic-family has the blood of slave ancestry, European, non-European, Germanic, Dutch, and Saint Helena flowing through our veins.
The turning points in our lives make us aware of our own survival instincts. What do poems make us aware of then? Our own immortality.
We’re all rivals at some point in our lives. We all compete with each other until the day we mourn the days we lost listening to our souls and the feeling lost and numb only comes down to this. Not having a profound and serious respect for humankind. He’s been described as legendary, but he won’t even accept the word “mentor” in his vocabulary. Winter is the most perfect time to rest. There’s a lightness and a being in the air. Now there are only time for ‘botanical drawings of observations’, a palace, throne room, metaphors, and for growing older.
My father is now the illustration of a dark horse of a man growing dimmer and dimmer, and I leave that open to your own interpretation.
My own childhood transformations have come and gone taking bedtime stories, Disney and chipped teeth with them. Family history, imagination, the wilderness. When the world feels apocalyptic. When your mind’s eye sits through silences. The day your parents told you they were either going to separate or divorce and you felt like an interloper. I was the chosen one in summer, spring, winter and autumn.
The sun and days compensate for the lack of you. Now, we talk about love as if it is a mountain. We want to hike to the stars and forget about our hearts and what startled us into believing that we cannot live forever. Love is not love when it alteration finds. Shakespeare said that. My father taught me that God can even bear fruit in drought. God has no substitute. He can boast of having known poet Arthur Nortje, political activist George Botha, diplomat Bhadra Ranchod, intellectual Neville Alexander, assassinated struggle heroine Dulcie September, but he won’t with every altruistic bone in his body, so I will do it for him here.
Daddy is in the autumn of his years now, and I find myself thinking of his legacy, the thousands of lives he has touched with his fatherly concern, charitable kindness, humane goodwill, I will miss you more than the stars the day that you are no longer here. He has never curried favour with anyone, least of all politicians, and government leaders. It is both a curse, and a gift to write about my father. I am well aware that I cannot illustrate him as a man, he was daddy, confidante, and friend. My father always took a neutral stance in the arena of community politics when it came either to parliament to prevent the closure of the Elizabeth Donkin Hospital, a well-known psychiatric facility in Port Elizabeth, or the boards he served on in an executive capacity.
Everything, everywhere in this place, in Port Elizabeth, in the Northern Areas is marked by my father’s tenacious spirit. He has fulfilled his “mission, and five commissions”, this son of Sarah Rosaline, a domestic worker for prosperous white families (she took in washing to make ends meet, was a seamstress at Collegiate High School for Girls, that I attended for a year, and that real estate mogul Pam Golding also attended. My grandmother was so financial-savvy she even bought property in Fairview, unheard of in those days), and he was also the son of Joseph William, a casual blue-collar worker. In my mind, to me, his daughter, this “missionary-son” of the Northern Areas of the Eastern Cape, has fulfilled his divine obligation.
He has fulfilled his spiritual duty, and his prophetic vision with his age-in-action attitude. My father, or rather “daddy” has lived a fascinating and remarkable life, his glittering-mudslinging story deserves to be told, and we all know that, in his eyes lies confession, memories of attending a talk by comrade and compatriot Ruth First at a political rally in London, memories of writing with invisible ink, memories of university life in London, interrogated for over an hour as if he was a terrorist at Dover Airport. Confession that he was recruited into a subversive political organisation at the age of 16-years-old led by the late struggle stalwarts and intelligentsia Neville Alexander and advocate Fikile Bam.
Ever heard of the Yu Chi Chan Club? If you haven’t, I’m busy writing that story, transcribing his (daddy, of course) “all of his confessions” before I get to Robben Island: Our University.
He was head over boots into politics, and the only thing that saved him from Robben Island, the quarry, the bucket system, his conversations being bugged, was his comrades, and compatriots.
I came home to forget about my glory days at film school, and instead found people who were extra-ordinarily gifted in times that were much too late for lullabies.
