Making connection is hard. Breaking it, not so.
There are scores of tired but happy women heading home as I write this on Sunday.
These are the Granny Grommets who have journeyed farther than we know to reach their place bouncing along on a hi-tech board on a wave and forging friendship and love.
It’s also been devastating to watch the anti-African immigration marches and violence, as politically orchestrated as they are, also finding so much easy traction from the underclass — the impoverished and unemployed.
More of a contradiction is hard to find — the filthy rich hooking up with the poor and downtrodden.
It’s always good to find something you feel is intrinsically good.
For example, I fled SA in 1986 to avoid a call-up to do a camp. I made my way to recently-liberated Zimbabwe.
It was an angry, post-war country, but rarely did I feel unwelcome.
This was a country which had shielded young black militants fleeing the apartheid regime.
Frontline states took up our war, and they died in defence of our anti-apartheid alliance.
Those 1976 exiles, in fact, the vast majority, were undocumented immigrants.
Now look at us, a few decades on, being disgraceful and full of manufactured hatred against so-called undocumented immigrants.
I was asked to attend a talk at a senior village in Gonubie last week.
Lo and behold, there was a semi-retired reverend giving a talk on his 16 years of getting on a boat every week and making a rocking crossing to Robben Island to deliver the Sunday service to Nelson Mandela and his leadership group among the prisoners.
Mandela, raised Methodist, was more of an ubuntu philosopher, but he told Rev Colin Chambers that his sermons gave them hope.
In his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela spent 18 years on the island, from 1964 to 1982, and Chambers has busied himself exploring that period, showing bleak images of Mandela’s rough mat and blankets on the floor, overnight toilet bin and a roughshod bedside structure.
He showed the audience of about 40 people images of the quarry where political prisoners would mindlessly smash limestone into grit which was used for the warders’ driveways — and sprinkled on the prison floors so that the crunching of the warders’ shoes would serve as an alarm to stop the cross-cell revolutionary discussions.
Amid a picture of a warm, engaging future president of an apartheid-free SA and revered global leader, there are pictures of Madiba in smart clothes with a hat and dark glasses, thin as a rake and leaning on a spade, his mouth down turned in displeasure.
This was the infamous 1977 media visit by 20 SA journalists, five foreign correspondents, and two photographers.
It was such a propaganda stunt that Mandela and the other prisoners wrote a stinging rebuke of the fake picture being propagated for the world.
But one of the saddest and sickest aspects was how the dark glasses were desperately needed — years of blinding light in the quarry had hurt their eyes, and for the rest of their lives, many of the former island prisoners would wear dark glasses to stave off the pain.
Also, the journalists had to submit their stories and pictures to the apartheid government for scrutiny and approval.
One of the images shown to us by Rev Chambers, now in his 80s, was upsetting — it showed thick black lines through the letters ‘home’ and ‘from home’, making sure the prisoners suffered the maximum degree of emotional and psychological punishment.
I quickly looked up the wording of one of those censorial whips of the time.
Penned on September 4 1986, and signed by law and order minister Louis le Grange, it prohibited the banned journalist from “preparing, compiling, publishing or disseminating in any manner whatsoever any publication as defined in the Internal Security Act of 1972”. It was a real mouthful.
Here’s another whiplash. The journalist was prohibited from “contributing, preparing, compiling or transmitting in any manner whatsoever any material for publication”.
The final kick in the guts is more than revealing. It bars the hack from “attending any gathering at which any action or contemplated action by the Government [sic] of the Republic of South Africa is attacked or criticised”.
We have come from a dark, dreadful place. Not just pre-1994 but post-1994 too.
In fact, it’s still bleak. So bleak that we are still waiting for the official metro unemployment rate, outrageously missing from a statement from our mayor about how many percentage points it has fallen in the latest labour statistics.
Those of us who knew what a radiant time of hope and action we enjoyed for those few Mandela presidency years also know from first-hand experience what happens when dictators stalk the country, pathologically happy to destroy all and everything in their power to attain wealth and power.
We watch in horror as the police go ahead of the marches rounding up Africans allegedly without papers, in a transparently cynical and fatuous attempt to show that the state is trying to get rid of undocumented illegals.
The big lie, of course, is that most of the so-called illegals would be legal if the state had done its job in the first place.
In this time of deep unhappiness, moments of genuine happiness where people break out of suffering, sorrow, loss, marginalisation or banishment of any kind and find each other to celebrate common desires and friendship, in any quarter of SA, are cause to celebrate.
And when we know the moment is good, I encourage us all to rejoice with every ounce of our being!
Resistance to evil, to corruption, public manipulation, by embracing the sun, and the goodness in all humans who created society for a very simple reason, for love and compassion, is a magnificent endeavour in these venal times.
I want to pay tribute to all those South Africans who have stood against the repression of Africans who have done only good in their time here.
When the law is an ass, when corruption and power mongering hide behind the law in a bid to push for a right-wing, autocratic state, then every act of kindness should be rewarded.
If you helped a soul escape from the vile cauldron of the mob, no matter who you are, I am full of gratitude at your courage.
I pray that South Africans who still believe in the innate goodness in our democratic constitution will punish those evil politicians who have betrayed Mandela’s trust at the polls.
At the end of Rev Chambers’ talk, in itself a memoir to his sister Marion, wife of my devastated friend Rob Henderson, one Sandy Brown stood up.
She wished the country could again be led by a wonderful president like Mandela and his compadres.
But her next words were profound and startling. She said those who were still among the unforgiven, who wished to poison the minds of their opponents, were the first to swallow that poison.
It’s time to head out to the beach again on a glorious day.
But I have good news for Le Grange, whose name was given to a miserable police station where detainees were killed, beaten and deprived; those journalists and democrats survived your regime.
I also have a message to all the dreadful tjoms who seek to feed on the people and rule with a whip.
I am still here bud. We are all still here.
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