Guyana, South Africa, and a lesson being learnt!

Aug 17, 2014 News

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Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

By Dennis A. Nichols
In November 2000, a bus-full of broadcasters from several commonwealth countries cruised along serenely from

Cape Town International Airport to the heart of the South African city. A native guide kept up intermittent commentary on places of interest as we trundled along. But as it passed what looked like an enormous shantytown of flat, dilapidated, zinc shacks, he said nothing. In post-apartheid South Africa, it was a jarring contrast – a sprawl of poverty amidst transformational infrastructure and stunning natural landscape.
I was on that bus on my way to the Mt. Nelson Hotel where, the next day, I would receive a cheque as winner of the 2000 Short Story Competition sponsored by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corporation, at its 23rd Annual General Meeting. I would also learn the name of that sprawling blight – Khayelitsha, that it was an informal segregated settlement of a little over three hundred thousand people with almost no amenities including electricity, built in 1983 to relocate poor Blacks from other Cape townships, as part of the controversial Group Areas Act.
Guyana’s support for the liberation struggles of South and Southern Africa, especially the anti-apartheid fight led by Nelson Mandela et al, is fairly well-known here in Guyana. So I felt a sense of kinship with that country, but after several conversations with native South Africans, I was somewhat bewildered by the notion that six years after Mandela became president, many Blacks and ‘Coloureds’ there still felt marginalized, mocked, and discriminated against by some White South Africans. But things are changing.
South Africa is a nation in transition– that awareness of change, taken up by Mandela, former president F.W. de Klerk, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission among other agencies. The vestiges of apartheid are dimming and a new breed of South Africans is emerging. It comprises mostly ordinary and not-so-ordinary youths to whom race and ethnicity hardly seem to matter, except in addressing the country’s segregated history or in redressing the horror and shame of it. They are doing it simply, by the way they live their lives and by overcoming adversity.
Siyabuela Xuza started experimenting, mixing chemicals in his mother’s kitchen in a poor Eastern Cape community at age five. He went on to win a scholarship to a private school in Johannesburg, then was afforded the opportunity to study at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science in the U.S. In honour of his work in developing a record-breaking rocket, and creating safer, more energy-efficient rocket fuel, he had a minor planet named for him (23182 Siyaxuza) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory.

Nkosi Johnson, a Johannesburg child, born HIV-positive, rose to unaccustomed prominence as an activist after a school refused to accept him as a pupil. He made a powerful impact on the public’s perception of the disease and, with his adoptive White mother, founded Nkosi’s Haven, a refuge for HIV-positive mothers and their children. He travelled to the U.S, was interviewed by Peter Jennings and lunched with the late Robin Williams. He was the keynote speaker at the 13th International AIDS Conference, and was hailed by Nelson Mandela as ‘an icon of the struggle for life.’ Nkosi died from AIDS in 2001.
Like Nkosi Johnson, Hector Pieterson, died at the age of 12, but unlike him, he was cut down in the prime of childhood, a victim of the horrific Soweto massacre in 1976 when the South African police fired at schoolchildren protesting the use of Afrikaans (the language of the oppressor) in schools, killing many of them. A photograph of the dying child being carried by a friend became one of the iconic images of the anti-apartheid struggle. {Incidentally, this happened on June 16th, the same date (in 1948) as the police killing of our five sugar workers at Enmore}
Beautiful, shy and talented are words I would use to describe classical soprano Kimmy Skota, discovered and christened ‘The Black Diamond’ by Dutch violinist, Andre Rieu. With her emotive voice she has performed before huge audiences in South Africa, Holland, and Brazil, and often moves listeners to tears with her renditions of classics like the ‘Ave Maria’ and the ‘Vilja Song’. Her rendition of two popular native songs, ‘African Dream’ and the Zulu lullaby ‘Thula Baba’ drew rapturous ovations, and tears, from a mainly White South African audience, especially when she sung the latter in both her native tongue and in Afrikaans.
Finally, and incongruously, there’s Trevor Noah, a young man of mixed parentage. (Father Swiss; mother, South African) A former radio and film personality, actor, and TV host, he is now a stand-up comedian who uses his mixed heritage, his Soweto Township experiences and his observations about race, as themes for his hilarious routines, noting, for example, that as a Mixed baby, he was born ‘a crime’. He is the first such comedian to appear on the Tonight Show, and on The Late Show with David Letterman. A You Tube video of him at The Apollo in London, displaying his cosmopolitan charm, self-deprecating wit and connection with the audience, has gone viral.

These young South Africans seem to be a healthy and progressive extension of the efforts of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other initiatives which sought to claim restorative justice and dispense forgiveness to both victim and oppressor, following the abolition of apartheid. Heeding the exhortations and warnings from people like Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they, and other South Africans appear to be turning their backs on racism and revenge although (to me) they are in the minority, and still have a long and problematic way to go.
Back in 2000, just before I left South Africa to return home, I stood at the tip of the Cape Peninsula, and from a height at the southern edge of Mother Africa, watched the merging of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. An indescribable emotion welled up inside me as thoughts of my African heritage, slavery, and global interdependence mingled with images I had witnessed over the past week. One of the most poignant had been a visit to Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island, hosted by his close friend and fellow political prisoner, Ahmed Kathrada. Their differences in ethnicity meant nothing. The bond they shared as human beings fighting against an inhumane system meant everything.
In Guyana, where race and social issues still have a polarizing effect on many of us, we can learn from the South African ‘experiment’. Divisive distinctions in race, colour, class, and beliefs can be erased, or at least ameliorated by a common vision of what is best for us as human beings, and just learning how to get along. Trouble is in Guyana, most of us seem to learn such lessons very slowly.

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