Benjamin Pogrund
COSTA GAZIDES has travelled a long political road from the days when, 32 years ago, he was charged alongside Braam Fischer with membership of the underground Communist Party, to last weekend when he was a delegate to the Pan Africanist Congress conference.
The Sharpeville killings in 1960 were a first turning point in his life. He was a medical student at the University of the Witwatersrand and felt he had to do ‘something’. So he joined the all-white Congress of Democrats, going from there to the Communist Party.
He spent more than two years in jail ‘ in solitary confinement, awaiting trial and serving his sentence. He was also charged with furthering the aims of the ANC. On his release he was banned and later left for Britain on an exit permit to study his medical speciality, public health.
The next turning point came in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. It left him ‘totally disillusioned’ with the Soviet Union, and he had rows with his party colleagues.
He drifted around the left, flitting between revolutionary movements, other exiles and ANC dissidents.
Eventually there was another turning point because while working in Nottingham he met a PAC man in exile, Bennie Bunsee.
‘I found out what PAC stood for. I saw some of the basic documents and came to realise they were not the racist organisation they were made out to be.
‘I wasn’t consciously looking for a political home but I wanted to continue the fight against apartheid. I was aware there were not many whites in the PAC but it didn’t bother me at all. I thought of the whole process in political terms.
‘There was some reticence among some PAC members because of my whiteness ‘ maybe they thought I was a spy. But I came across a great deal of warmth and political understanding that coincided with my own view.’
Gazides returned to South Africa and remained active in the PAC, in the health field, working in forums preparing for restructuring. He ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1994.
In November last year he was the victim of an outright racial attack, all the more ironic because it happened at the unveiling in Umtata of tombstones of five children murdered by the South African Defence Force. The PAC was involved in the ceremony. As Gazides stood, right palm upraised in the PAC salute, singing the national anthem, a young black man stabbed him three times, narrowly missing his heart.
PAC leaders told Gazides he had to lay charges. When the young man appeared in court the only explanation he gave was: ‘He is one of the oppressors.’ The man was jailed for five years.
In one of those ‘Believe it or not’ twists, it transpired that unknown to anyone at the time, the hospital nurse who attended to Gazides was the mother of the young man.
His belief in the PAC unshaken, Gazides continued his membership and went to last weekend’s conference as one of the ten delegates from Umtata, and one of a handful of white delegates. But his faith was dwindling when I met him on the first day of the conference.
He confessed to ‘believing less and less’ and was disillusioned because the PAC had not got its house in order.
On Monday morning, however, Gazides, who is now 60, was all smiles. After the election of Stanley Mogoba as president he said: ‘I’m an extremely happy man. PAC can now only go one way and become a real electoral force in 1999.’