The story of Nelson Mandela was one that accompanied my childhood. His dream of freedom and democracy echoed in the rooms and conversations of our family life.
So in 1997, a year after I had graduated from McGill University, I jumped at the chance to be a part of the building of the New South Africa, three years into Mandela’s presidency. I felt my family’s history was intertwined with the country and I wanted to be a part of its renewal, I wanted to help. I went to South Africa and worked in the townships over the course of two years.
My father had left South Africa in the early 1960’s to attend graduate school in Canada, encouraged by my grandfather to leave a country sickened by a toxic regime of constitutionalized racism. The news of Mandela’s arrest and life sentence in 1964 greatly upset my father – even though he was thousands of miles away. He had left his whole family behind, because he believed that as a non black South African he should get out of the way and let Mandela and the other anti apartheid activists fight to govern their own people, their land.
But even though he had renounced his South African citizenship and embraced life in Canada, he never let us - his children - forget where he came from and the fight that leaders like Nelson Mandela were continuing to fight from behind bars. He took us to see Athol Fugard plays whenever they came to town and insisted we see political films like Cry Freedom and Dry White Season.
In 1989, I was a teenager when we returned to Cape Town as a family for my uncle’s wedding. I remember being driven (illegally) through the black townships and seeing how the majority of the population was living. This was in contrast to the lush beauty of where we were staying. I was stunned by miles and miles of shacks made of cardboard and corrugated iron; mounds of garbage and ditches filled with stagnant water, and children wandering around without shoes. The images seared into my young brain – forcing me to ask: how can this be so?
The beauty of Mandela’s message was that apartheid was ultimately harmful to all - and that everyone was a victim of this hateful ideology. His ability to connect with all South Africans, regardless of skin color, was the key to his success.
We returned again to South Africa as a family in 1991 after Mandela had been released. We walked around Cape Town with my father, his mouth agape at the changes he saw. The country’s optimism was contagious and at moments during that trip he was almost giddy.
I never did meet Mandela but there’s an African word for abundance, love, and humanity that is much like the Hawaiian concept of Aloha, or the Hebrew word Shalom. The word is Ubuntu – and I believe that Mandela truly embodied that spirit.
