Sankie Mthembi-Nkondo is a poet and writer and, more recently, minister of housing. Mark Gevisser met and read her
`DEAR Comrade Wife,” wrote ANC poet and diplomat Zinjiva Nkondo to his wife, Sankie, during their years of separation in exile, “I know you are not afraid/ of spears/ your thighs and breasts of humanhood/ have outgrown these pests.”
They are divorced now, and he lives in Zambia. But they were, in the 1980s, one of the ANC’s pre-eminent literary couples: both had volumes of poetry published by the Congress of South African Writers in 1990. While working in Lusaka, she wrote a story under her nom de guerre, Rebecca Matlou, entitled One Never Knows, which won special mention in a contentinental women’s writing competition and was published in a Swedish anthology.
Like her protagonist in this story, who becomes unwittingly involved in the ANC underground in the 1970s, Mthembi- Nkondo gives the impression of being rock-solid, a pillar of the struggle, “not afraid/ of spears”. But the story, as its title suggests, is about the impossibility of understanding the present and determining the future. This, up against the formidable revolutionary rationalism of the ANC. There’s a subtext to Mthembi-Nkondo’s genial strength, one which is found in her fiction: while her female hero radiates silent courage to those around her, the reader understands her alienation and insecurity.
In an interview this week, she returned repeatedly to the difficulties of exile and separation; and to the refuge that the movement provided. There is something quite incongruous about her willingness to spool randomly through her consciousness: “When I began to recieve multiparty South African delegations in Bonn (where she was ANC chief representative until late 1993), I began to understand that it was possible to return home, really to return home. And my mind wandered back to my childhood, to my friends and school and family, and I began to imagine how we all would function as a liberated people.” This is a poet’s way of being, one thinks. Not a politician’s.
And yet she likes to portray herself as tough: “You must remember,” she twinkles, “that I come from Soweto. The ghetto, the jungle. You learn to survive there. If you allow yourself to be bullied, you’ll spend the rest of your days paying off protection fees. And so you toughen up; you become a product of your environment.” One of the things she learnt in other parts of Africa, she says, “is that you don’t have to fight. You can disagree with someone, and argue for hours, like the Nigerians do. You don’t have to pull a knife out.”
Poet-intellectual she might be. But she must have the instincts of a politician to have become one of the very few women to have made it to the upper echelons of ANC power. Early on in her exile, as a journalist on Radio Freedom, she came to the attention of Thabo Mbeki, then head of ANC information. She later worked under him in the international affairs department — first in Lagos and then in Bonn.
Several sources in the ANC believe her appointment to be a direct result of her relationship with Mbeki: after her return to South Africa in 1993, she ran the department of international affairs for him. Others counter, however, that Mbeki frequently overlooked her — placing Aziz Pahad above her in the transitional executive committee’s foreign affairs subcommittee, for example. And that she caught Nelson Mandela’s eye in Bonn where she took over a particularly difficult and troublesome terrain — relations between the ANC and the German government were not good — and transformed it into one of the more effective missions of the movement.
Indeed, Mandela — along with Mbeki and Jacob Zuma — is believed to have supported her in the election for deputy secretary general at last month’s ANC congress, a battle she lost decisively to the far higher profile –and more leftwing — Cheryl Carolus.
Cabinet insiders suggest that her appointment was a combination of two key factors: Mandela’s desire to keep the housing ministry powered by Joe Slovo’s legacy — which would require a lower-profile minister both efficient and humble — and his wish to develop new, and particularly female, political leadership.
“I feel terribly uncomfortable here,” she says, on her second day in an office whose generic Pretoria drabness allows for no remembrance of its former occupant. “I kept on moving about this afternoon, looking for a different chair. I didn’t want to sit where Comrade Joe sat.”
She is of the 1976 generation — her classmates at Turfloop included Cyril Ramaphosa and Matthews Phosa, and she was to begin teaching in Soweto in the very year of the uprising. For her, Slovo was of the generation that “took responsiblity for bringing us up, both politically and literally, for we were little more than children when we left the country.”
It would be “dishonest”, she says, “to attempt to imitate him”. But running the ministry will be about “upholding his principles and making sure that what he has created is not destroyed.
There is something radically new she will bring to the housing sector: the sheer fact that she is a woman. She has a characteristically lyrical response to the suggestion that she has moved from the female realm of welfare to the male realm of housing: “It might be macho to see people building houses, putting brick on top of brick. But there’s another way of looking at it. Let’s look at households rather than empty houses. More than two thirds of all South African households are headed by women and the strength and the power of those households are dependent on women. The household is central to the sanity and harmony of society, and there’s a woman at the centre of that household.”
Mthembi-Nkondo did feel particularly judged as a woman in her last post, as deputy minister of welfare: “If you’re a woman, you’re expected to deliver, someties unfairly, in a very short space of time.” Her record as deputy minister of welfare was not wildly impressive: according to those in the welfare sector, very little happened at the ministry, but they blame this on the fact that the minister, Abe Williams, is a National Party appointment, who had little interest in transforming the department and who allowed his deputy very little room to manoeuvre.
Despite the fact that she was trained as a diplomat, she feels very comfortable in the field of service provision; welfare or housing. She articulates a dedication that is utterly credible. Listen, for example, to a story she relates, off the cuff:
“When I first started coming back to South Africa, whenever I’d go home to Meadowlands, I’d ask someone to come with me, because I couldn’t take the face of suffering that would confront me. There were twins across the road from us, who were born when I was about 12, and I used to look after them, I brought them up. Now, when I see them, I look at faces that look older than me, because of poverty, because of drink. When I first went home, I tried to find out what had happened to Ma Julia, to Ntati Simon, to Cookies. And the tape would unwind: he was stabbed when crossing from Dube station, she got shot outside the hostel, he’s a hobo now. I might be a cabinet minister now, but because the rest of them in Meadowlands didn’t have my opportunities, my achievement belongs to them.”
Her poetry, like her fiction, deals with the themes of commitment and trust. While she lionises the heroes of the struggle –from Ruth First, an early mentor, to Oliver Tambo– she agonises over the work expected of her as a “soldier-poet”: On the one hand, “I do not have the leisure/to wander along aimless paths/ to wallow in literary art creations”; on the other, “I cannot shelve my creative instincts/until peace time …”
Her anthology, Flames of Fury, has both the compelling rhythms and the overwrought imagery of South African struggle poetry, influenced in equal measure by the black consciousness movement of the 1970s and the Lusophone poet- revolutionaries; lines like “Flames fume fury and vengeance/ the falcon souls burn in haste” and “I know who I am/ I die in detention everyday/…/ I am my people/ my country.”
There is evidence in her verse of serious talent: she implores a mother, for example, to “show scorn … with the swoop of your backside”. Perhaps, in another place and another time, Mthembi-Nkondo might have gone down in history as a competent and respected poet; a minor literary celebrity on the world beat. But she is, so quintessentially, a product of this place and this time: out of the country in 1977; into power in 1994. She might yet go down in history as a major political figure: the woman who filled Joe Slovo’s shoes.
Arts
A knight of gay equality
British actor Sir Ian McKellen will be throwing his weight behind gay equality in South Africa with fund-raising performances of A Knight Out. Mark Gevisser reports
DURING his performance of A Knight Out, Sir Ian McKellen lobs two objects at the audience. The first is the Order awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth for his services to the theatre; the second is a clay pipe that he found on the site of Christopher Marlowe’s theatre on the banks of the Thames.
There’s a wonderful, and quite contemptuous, insouciance to the way he tosses his knighthood into the crowded house. His attitude towards the clay pipe, however, is thoroughly reverential. Surmising that it was Marlowe’s own personal property, he invites you to run your fingers over it, but informs you that, unlike the glinting emblem of the Queen’s approval that went before it, he wishes it back at all costs.
There is a link, you see, through the pipe, across the centuries, from that foppish Elizabethan to the compelling figure standing before you. It is a link far more important to McKellen than any regal acknowledgement: the fact that both he and Marlowe — in their lives and in their work — openly explored their homosexuality.
McKellen has been one of Britain’s foremost classical actors for three decades now; since his coming out five years ago, he has also become one of Britain’s most outspoken gay activists. A Knight Out is his chatty and informal exploration of the queerness in classical British theatre and the theatricality in modern British gay activism. It is remarkable not only for its easy intimacy, but also for the reclamations made by McKellen — an astonishingly homoerotic monologue from Coriolanus, for example, and a wonderfully camp reappropriation of Juliet’s “Romeo Oh Romeo”.
Starting on Monday, McKellen will do a three-week tour of South Africa, performing A Knight Out first at the Civic in Johannesburg, then at the Playhouse in Durban and at the Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town.
The tour will be a fundraiser to kickstart the newly-formed National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE), the primary objectives of which are to lobby for retention of the constitutional clause guaranteeing gay equality, and to begin to mount a campaign using this clause to challenge anti-gay discrimination.
Kevan Botha, the NCGLE executive member responsible for organising the McKellen tour, notes that “it will have a double effect. It will raise the money we need to employ full-time lobbyists and administrators and mount a public awareness campaign, while it will also put South Africans in touch with the concerns both of gay activism and gay theatre abroad.”
Botha says that “key decision-makers are being invited to performances, and McKellen will meet local lawmakers, to introduce them to the interest that has been raised internationally by South Africa’s world lead in human rights, including gay equality”.
The informal monologue style that McKellen has developed allows him to gossip about the theatre world from an armchair; to showcase some of his more popular performances (like his award-winning Salieri from Amadeus); and to tell the formative stories of his life as a gay man and an actor. His rendition of his investiture is hilarious, and his lengthy and gripping account of the British parliamentary debate over the homosexual age of consent — a debate in which he played a major role — will provide South Africans with some preparation for the parliamentary debates in this country which are bound to follow on the subject.
Most of all, he performs, during two hours on stage, the consciousness of a modern gay man, with the craft of a superlative actor. He does this with the assistance of texts ranging from William Wordsworth to Tennessee Williams; from an account by playright Martin Sherman of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion (when drag queens in Greenwich Village rioted after the police raided a gay bar) to the poison-pen sentiments of an anonymous hate-mail writer.
He does it with grace, sharing his celebrity with much humour but without the hint of a swagger. And he does it with generosity: you too can touch his precious clay pipe, whether you are gay or straight, and become part of a reforming and humanising process that ranges, over the centuries, from Marlowe to McKellen.
McKellen will be at the Civic from January 23 to 26; at the Playhouse on January 28 and 29, and at the Theatre on the Bay on February 5 and 6