Whenever I think of South Africa, I think of my father, who was a staunch anti-apartheid activist and one of the smartest and most cultured people I have ever met. His library included the works of Baraka, Lenin, Marx, and Stalin. He had street cred because he could do numbers with the best, smoked a pack of menthol cigarettes daily, and pulled women like he was picking apples from a tree. He would talk to everyone about what was happening in South Africa on the street or in the classroom. His intelligence was unmatched, and he could debate for hours on any subject without making you feel like a complete idiot, although you knew you didn’t have to try to intellectually oppose him.
In my family, we often call our parents and uncles “Baba”, which is a Swahili word denoting our ancestral relationship with them and a term of respect. I still remember Baba’s red, black and green hat that said “Free Mandela” and his use of the word “Amandla”. Sometimes I laughed at him with my teenage arrogance and asked him why his latest “soap box” problem should attract my attention. And with sadness in his voice, he told me that until Nelson Mandela was released, the world would not seem right to him. For some reason, I understood that this was not one of his typical radical arguments. This personal quest to see Nelson Mandela free represented something much deeper and more painful. It seemed almost too painful for him to argue with the same fervor and passion with which he argued about money, politics, and religion. He wanted to go to South Africa to fight first hand alongside those he considered his brothers and sisters in the freedom movement. He told me about the oppressive Bantu upbringing and the violent uprisings of students who refused to be taught further serfdom.
Recently, I was able to study abroad in South Africa as part of a PhD program focused on education policy. We traveled there to study the educational system and the country’s efforts to repair the damage that years of oppression had on its educational institutions. Our biggest challenge as students was trying to conceptualize what this meant for the millions of South Africans who wanted to pursue higher education. We constantly talk about the roles that colonialism, hegemony and racism played in the structure of Apartheid, but I don’t think any of us can fully understand how this impacted the lives of people who live this experience on a daily basis.
Our study abroad of South Africa provided us with a snapshot of what it must mean to work within a system that has historically prevented all students from receiving the best education possible. We attend lectures at the University of Pretoria, the University of the Witwatersrand, and Tshwane North College for FET. At these conferences, there were administrators, teachers, and students. Each of these people gave us a lens to see the transformation of South Africa’s higher education system into a post-apartheid system. I saw the influence that the apartheid regime had on the socio-economic status of many black South Africans. The stratification that existed as part of apartheid was evident, even though the apartheid system had ended more than a decade earlier.
When I took pictures of young children in Soweto asking Rand (South African money), I was more excited about the bridge that many of the educators were trying to build for those who had historically been disadvantaged in their country. I wondered aloud how these educators could achieve their goal of achieving integration in schools that were historically categorized by the four races in South Africa: white, Indian, mixed race, and black. He didn’t understand its racial categories, its monuments to the Dutch settlers (Voortrekker), or how and why whites still held control of much of the country’s businesses and real estate.
I visited Nelson Mandela’s former home, which is located in a small area in Soweto, not far from the Hector Pieterson Museum. Mandela’s former home has been turned into a museum where a person can walk through the home of the man who was imprisoned for 27 years on Robbin Island. At this Mandela Family Museum, the guide took us into the kitchen and told us how, during the time they lived there, the Mandelas (both Nelson and Winnie) used to have a lock on the refrigerator because they had been told that their food would be poisoned. The tour guide took us through the small house and explained that Mandela tried to return to this house after being released from prison, but was only able to stay there for eleven days because journalists from all over the world camped outside the house.
Later that day, I visited the Hector Pieterson Museum. I saw photos of the students (many of them children) who protested during the Soweto student uprising, some of whom lost their lives when the police shot them. The Hector Pieterson Museum is surrounded by vendors who tell you their stories with their deeds and words. Some are related to the deceased children, and they will tell you which one was theirs and how they were related to them. These relatives wanted to see if we appreciate what happened at this historic site when Hector Pieterson and many others gave their lives in the name of freedom. Hecter Pieterson is the dead 12-year-old student in the famous photo of two boys in school uniforms carrying their bloody body after being shot down by police. During the uprising, Soweto students shouted “Amandla” which means power to signify their solidarity with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the activist organization, the African National Congress.
A few days after my trip, we visited a place called God’s Window in Mpumalamanga and I was struck by the beauty and hope that still remained in a place governed for so many years by fear, hatred and pain. While standing at God’s Window, I no longer focused on the hegemonic practices of European countries that colonized third world countries around the world. Instead, I thought of my father and remembered his energy and spirit.
I was eighteen when Paul Nakawa Sanders passed away in August 1988. Amiri Baraka praised my Baba in his book, entitled Panegyric and noted that Nakawa moved from black nationalism in the 1960s to a better understanding of the need for global activism or internationalism in his later years. My father never lived to see the man he admired, who was wrongfully imprisoned for twenty-seven years, become President Nelson Mandela. Their “Abolish Apartheid” T-shirts were faded and torn when apartheid was abolished. But I saw all these things for him. I stood on top of the mountain at God’s Window and saw that the beauty of South Africa is that it still exists. It stands in all its glory as a symbol of all that can happen when people – ordinary citizens, some children, some adults, some ex-revolutionaries, and even their skeptical daughters – believe enough to ignore those who would oppress them and they would continue on their way. search for black liberation.