On Monday we lost a friend, comrade and son of the people; Yusuf Talia.
Talia, or Yusuf as many of us knew him, was a comrade who was concerned, always, with contributing to a meaningful social change. I personally know of no man with so fatal a condition who insisted – even at the face of countless threats of death – to live not for himself but for others.
His condition put him on a wheelchair, and on it he would arrive on the picket lines of protest and resistance to injustice and at times even against the advice of medical wisdom. He would be there to plan rallies, boycotts and direct political action against power. He sought change, social change and many of us know that he did not have to.
He could have accepted the comfort provided by his parents, and made his existence precisely about himself. Yet the comfort they sought to give him never suggested for a minute – at least to Yusuf – that existence should be about him and his close ones.
He could have also taken his condition to mean he must be disabled from seeking to live for others. He could have degenerated into self pity as many do, wallowing in the muddy fields of self-obsession and low self esteem. Yusuf did not; everything was not about his immediate interests, but a social impact that touched even the lives of strangers who knew nothing about him or who will never even know.
His spirit yearned always to touch the lives of others, as far as the horizons of his heart could reach. In the Muslim Student’s Association, in the Student Representative Council, in the Progressive Youth Alliance, in the Workers Solidarity Committee, as well as in the boycott movement against the apartheid state of Israel.
Relentless in seeking a better world
Talia was often in and out of hospital, and each time it would be as if he will not return. Many would declare him gone and kindly ask us not to expect too much of him, as he was suffering so much already. They sought to pamper him into rest, into a sickly life of being bedridden.
But he would come back, as though he had been resurrected, and back to the picket lines to seek a better world, and do so with the full force of praxis. The fire, I believe, that burned in his spirit, is what would allow him to fight over and over again and come back to the life of making a change.
His condition could have limited him to the arms of his wheelchair and the distance it can travel, and only to the paths provided it. But he pushed all these limits, and sought for his actions to reach much further, and into a beyond; that beyond only reached by selflessness. I salute his spirit, it was indeed an old spirit, perhaps only trapped in a young body.
Yes, the body we are is but dust and tonight they will put his into ashes – it is, after all, only the vessel of a spirit. Indeed his spirit will move on, perhaps continue into other echelons of existence beyond what the brains of his vessel could ever imagine. That is the path of the spirit; often leaving us completely devastated in pain when it departs from so young a body; so young a vessel. We cry and mourn in anguish for Yusuf Talia – how painful is the death of a young person.
To live is to embrace
At the risk of increasing this pain, I would suggest that there is a different message his passing carries. Under the dark cloud of sorrow there is actually a window of light kept open that Talia lived, and to live is not to grow old, neither is it to live long, but to live is precisely to embrace the contingency of our existence, that it can end today, or even tomorrow. This means now is always the time to live; Talia never wasted it, he lived for as long as the breath of God flowed in his body – he lived.
His passing tells a lot as well about South Africa. Indeed, our country today is trapped in a fundamental generational crisis and a general crisis of age. Often – at least in a ordinary society – the death of so young a man should leave us with deep pain, pained by the potential we attribute to this time we call youth, for we have accepted youth to mean incomplete. To be a youth is that experience we have since called “incomplete” or that goes by the name “incomplete”.
Youth is the only way of life
But Talia’s life cannot be categorised as incomplete, not when the old among us have made it so unattractive to live long. His is the life the old should emulate, they must live as Talia did, not the other way around; they must live like young people. They must live with the urgency to bring change now, which is what moved Talia into action.
Therefore, if we dare utter this anguish of loss by saying “it is sad that a young person has died”, we must be equally prepared to also indicate as to where is the evidence that a long life is a good life; that it is a meaningful life, better to be desired than a youthful life. Yes, so much so, that a young life ending must be rejected.
The crisis of age in our country lies exactly on this paradox of existence; when the old make it unattractive to live long. Therefore, here we realise how mediocre such a cry may after all be, that he, Yusuf Talia, should have lived long. Lived long to be like who? Like Steve Biko? Like Chris Hani? Like Frans Fanon? Like Malcolm X? Like Dr King? Like Ché Guevara?
All of these, with not exception, counted when they were youth. You could not have asked them to live one more day, because they made a thousand days in an hour. Youth, therefore, is not the opposite of being old for people like Talia, it is the only way of life.
He was not young because of his flesh and blood. He was young in that being a youth was a way of life to him. That way of life where you live with absolute urgency of now; no preparedness to postpone anything, and everything that should be done now and to the best of its quality. Here you are only patient with all that does not postpone what can be done now. The bravery to challenge tradition and ask for change in the face of injustice; ask for that change now, even if it may come tomorrow, but it must be asked and worked on now.
Talia’s soul must rest I say; and ours must not. May his find a perfect peace, and may we find no peace until we have accepted that to be a youth is the only meaningful way of life; as the life of Yusuf Talia was. Long live, Yusuf Talia; Aluta continua.