The dusty high-rise sits on a corner of Port Elizabeth’s ageing freeway network above the city’s taxi rank off Govan Mbeki Drive. (It’s vaguely across the former ”Main Road” from the old Sanlam building where Steve Biko’s brain was destroyed by the security branch on September 7 1976.)
The guard at the parking entrance at the back waves me through saying I can park next to ”Mkhuseli’s car”, a new traditional silver beemer.
The lift is in good working order, but it looks as if it has gone up and down for many a year. There’s only one way to go when you exit on the seventh floor, left and right down a passage past a closed-up suite to a security grille.
The grey buzzer does not appear to work, but I can hear voices coming from the office a few metres away. It’s clearly a routine business meeting with talk of money — 50 grand to one party, 12 clicks to another. I shout ”Hello!” and eventually a secretary opens the door and lets me into her office where I slump on to a chair.
Out in Madiba Bay lie one or two boats at anchor — one of them belonging to the man I’ve come to see. This is Mkhuseli ”Khusta” Jack’s world, in all its glorious laid-back unpretentiousness. I swear it has hardly changed in the 20 years since I first walked into these offices.
In those days the offices housed the Black Sash and a motor industry trade union run by a bloke called Dennis Neer, who had a funny Afro-American hairdo, but the offices were also used by African National Congress aligned civic leaders like Champion Galela before the state of emergency scattered everyone.
That was when Jack was a 27-year-old with an enormous gift of the gab. Scrawny, outrageous, incredibly sharp-tongued (sometimes delightfully loose-tongued!), he was a spokesperson at the helm of an angry, organised wave of resistance and rebellion to apartheid rule. The consumer boycotts started by the Port Elizabeth Youth Congress, whom he served, had turned the city into an empty, eerie wasteland.
In Jack panicked white businessmen found an eloquent, authentic, charismatic, but essentially easy spokesperson. Someone they could talk to. The friendships he generated broke boundaries that endure to this day.
It’s now history, but the politics generated in Port Elizabeth’s townships rolled out nationally and gave massive influence to the internal ANC and United Democratic Front politicians in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was a 26-year-old freelancer then, and Jack was a grand source. Imagine a whole day spent racing around in his borrowed blue Ford Sierra going from rally to funeral rally, from Hankey to New Brighton. Ghoulish, but politically tumultous.
These days Khusta and I compare each other’s boeps, talk seriously about physical training and our children — and natter about business and politics.Today he is casual in jeans, sandals and a grape-pastel striped shirt. It’s a muggy midday in December. He’s had a busy year and is feeling ”weary”. The day before he was invited to Pretoria to meet a minister to talk about tourism with visiting leaders.
He holds a number of directorships outside of his own company, Illinga Development Services, which seeks and gets government contracts to build infrastructure. They’ve built extensively in the city’s townships, starting ”ambitiously” with low-cost housing, but eventually ”running barefoot” from it. He’s also built bridges and offices for SABMiller.
The latest job is cabling for Telkom, which is giving work to about 100 people. Jack also has a deep interest in the local fishing industry (he is chairperson of Mast Fishing) and an interest in a media group. He looks out of the window and points out a trawler chugging into the harbour, saying: ”It’s one of ours.”
He deliberately departed from politics and prominence in 1990 when he went to Sussex University in England to obtain an honours degree in economic history. ”It’s not a fraud — it’s genuine!” he says laughing as I read the degree certificate mounted on his wall.
Not bad for a pikanini who was ”born on the banks of the Gamtoos river” and who was raised in the townships by his domestic worker mother Alice Namse Jack, now in her 80s. He never knew his father.
The scrawny state-of-emergency detainee, who was famously described in Dr Wendy Orr’s civil rights application as being one of the activists who was given the ”helicopter” — hung upside down, hands tied to feet on a bar and thrashed by the security police — has widened a bit around the jaw, and softened a lot on the inside.
His celebrity marriage to Karen Evans, daughter of the late Anglican Bishop Bruce Evans, has given him two children who he dotes on Cayla-Rose (7), and Thembaloxolo (10). Karen, a former journalist, runs the family home in ”leafy” Walmer, he says with a typically flamboyant sense of irony.
We spend a lot of time chatting about Africanisation and the black middle class. Wherever he travels, such as a recent trip to Trinidad, he feels a genuine established middle class provides a sense of security, prosperity and growth.
But we don’t have it yet.
Trade unions are there to fight for workers and to provide a sense of ”morality”, but he feels there should be many more than the handful of black people he knows who are living in his own suburb.
As he makes his way through the ”vicissitudes” of ”straight” business, he is finding that although it takes ”longer” it leaves him feeling ”steadier”.
”I’m miles away from being a successful businessman,” he says, citing distractions that emerge from his political past.
Aspects that worry him in majority-rule South Africa are the ”embarrassment” of continued white colonialism, the ruthless avarice and opportunistic racism of ascendant black people who use racism to ”oust a competitor”, unrepentant white racists who ”speak loosely” and black people who think it is a ”lesser sin” to discriminate against African refugees in South Africa. ”We need to learn how to speak to each other. We need to be educated about racism and discrimination.”
All of this apparently comes from being in touch with people. Because he has not abandoned the centre of town for renovated designer-chic offices up Cape Road, he is constantly visited by old struggle friends and connections and gets involved in their issues.
He is also the chairperson of the local St Francis Hospice, vice-chair of the city’s Business against Crime committee, chairperson of the PE College (a technikon) and sits on the council of Statistics South Africa as well as on the board of the Port Elizabeth beachfront, the Boardwalk Casino and Entertainment World complex.
He has just started playing golf and his office sports a photo of his mates — all black — on an upmarket course. His quiet passion is writing and he says he has written ”volumes”.
His hopes for the future? He looks at his amber children and ”never in his wildest dreams” would he have imagined that his life would pan out this way. ”I am absolutely happy with how things have turned out.”
His cellphone rings for the third time. He says he’s coming, lifts his feet off the desk and lets me find my own way out. — ECN