Conflict of the Heart
by Lucie Pagé
(David Philip)
At first I thought this was going to be a profoundly irritating book. I thought it was going to be another ‘my role in the struggle’ book by a foreigner. I was happily surprised to find this was not the case, that in fact this is an intensely personal story about the attempt to live a normal life in the chaotic-euphoric period of South Africa’s transition and the Mandela presidency.
Lucie Pagé came to South Africa shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela to cover the transition for Radio-Canada. She met Jay Naidoo, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and they fell in love. Their decision to marry was clouded by the fact that she had a young son, Leandre, in Canada and her ex-partner was unwilling for him to stay in South Africa with her. From the start of her life in South Africa, then, she and her husband were involved in what amounted to a custody battle, one that was resolved initially by an agreement that Leandre would spend part of the year in Canada and part in South Africa.
This was by no means the only challenge they faced. Jay Naidoo was a prominent political figure in the transition process and then a minister in Mandela’s cabinet. He was often away from home, first Johannesburg and later Cape Town. As a Canadian, a white woman and a professional journalist, Lucie was also faced with the challenges of fitting into a number of cultures. South African culture was extremely different at first: more patriarchal than she was used to, filled with an undercurrent of race, and extremely violent. She chose to continue working as a freelance journalist for Radio-Canada, produced a powerful documentary on rape in South Africa and taught journalism at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism.
Yet, despite the busy-ness of the life she led and all the famous people she came to meet, the book is first of all about trying to be normal in an abnormal situation, about two people trying to raise a family together. It is these images of the stresses of privacy in an intensely public life that gives the book its interest. We see how public events like the Hani assassination in 1993 affected Jay and Lucie personally – loss, grief and fear, full in the knowledge that Jay himself was a potential target himself. And we see how they negotiated a resolution over Lucie’s custody battle, while raising a family, how a public figure with a reputation for being a fearsome speaker becomes an ordinary dad. Most of all two we see the ongoing struggle of a family for privacy in a situation where the demands of work demand long periods of separation.
It is this aspect of the book that most merits our attention. Cynics might say that the author was rather naïve thinking that marriage to so public a figure as Jay Naidoo could be otherwise. But perhaps what we need to recognise is that everyone deserves privacy. Pagé’s book is an eloquent plea for this basic human right and a testimony to the hard work of making a marriage in such a situation.