John Matshikiza
With The Lid Off
Maybe it’s the drugs, but I still get occasional waves of confusion, mixed with dj vu, in my day-to-day experience of South Africa. Just to remind you, I am one of those many hundreds of thousands who returned to this turf after long years of what we used to call “exile” – 32 years, in my case. Can “home” and “exile” have any real meaning after such a long stretch? I was a young child when my family left, and what they call “an ageing primate” when I was finally able to return. It wasn’t the same place, and I wasn’t the same person.
Those we had left behind, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the same people as before, and kind of expected us to be similar to what they remembered as well. Big surprises all round.
It’s a shame that we haven’t bothered to start an ex-exile’s club to share our experiences. I know I’m not alone, but nobody I know from exile talks. It’s like it’s that sinful thing we did in the folly of our youth, and the best policy is just to go quietly around these streets that are so strange to us and try not to look conspicuous.
And yet exile was where we spent a lot of pain. It’s also where we grew up. As Keorapetse Kgositsile says, we should “know each other by our bloodstains”. We shouldn’t forget the past.
In a funny way, the past has its claws into you anyway. Look at what the Jewish Report has done to Ronnie Kasrils. There he is, on the front page of the June 25 issue, being proudly described as the new (and one-and- only) “Jewish face in the Cabinet”.
I have known the so-called “boykie from Yeoville” for many years, going back to London days and anti-apartheid forays into Europe, singing freedom songs and reading some of Ronnie’s terrible struggle poetry, among others. (We all did what we could for the cause, and writing “poetry” was once regarded as an acceptable means to achieving a just end.)
The point I am making is that the processes of “struggle” and “exile” turned all of us into new people. Being Jewish long ceased to be Ronnie’s main reason for being. But you can’t get away from being who people like to think you are, and there’s an end to it.
I bumped into Ronnie’s wife Eleanor in Exclusive Books in Hyde Park the weekend after the inauguration. She was minding her own business, taking a visitor from struggle days in London around the sights of the New South Africa, when she was recognised by a clutch of ageing kugels, out doing what kugels of all ages do on a Saturday morning in Hyde Park, namely shopping. What a strange thing it was to see her mobbed by these crimplene ladies with loud decibels of congratulations for Ronnie’s new appointment. I wondered what these same ladies would have been thinking about Ronnie, and his wife, just a few years ago, during the precarious days of Operation Vula. The miracle of Madiba’s theme of reconciliation continually shows new and complex faces.
Eleanor’s visitor happened to be someone I also knew well in London days – one of those refreshingly unreconstructed lefties who helped to make Britain and the struggle bearable way back when. There was a sense of dj vu here, too, because a familiar face in an unfamiliar place is inevitably discombobulating (sorry, there’s that word again – I don’t know what it means either). It took a few moments for us to recognise each other. But when we had made the connection, it was as if no time had elapsed at all.
So we swopped stories about the present, the recent past and absent friends, and then chatted about Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration (which is why he was in town.) The inauguration had been like a festive gathering of old friends and royal strangers from far-off places. It was a strange, time-warp kind of feeling that it was all happening to us here, on the steps of the Union Buildings.
But John, our mutual friend, had a different take from me on part of the event. “It was really uplifting,” he said, “but I thought that Scottish bloke was a bit miserable.”
The “Scottish bloke” he was referring to was, of course, Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris, who does indeed have a fabulous and unreconstructed Glasgow accent, but who is, he assures us, not Scottish at all, but Jewish-just like Ronnie.
I must confess, I’ve always been a fan of Rabbi Cyril. He talks a lot of sense, and has a way of making his wisdom embracing rather than exclusive. So while the other vicars chose to give the new president a simple and cheerful blessing, the chief rabbi won my heart yet again by giving a sober message of caution to the giddy citizens of the republic. He called it a “Prayer of Confession,” and asked us not to forget how far we still have to go – how self-centred we are, how blind to the “tears of the oppressed”, how prone we are as a society to violence and crime, and how guilty of cynical despair.
It was an extraordinarily powerful message to the country. The great thing was that you didn’t have to be Ronnie Kasrils, or even remotely Jewish, to get it.
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