February 8, 2000
They didn't understand; now they do

The Chronicle

They were not easy times for these sons and daughters of apartheid. The larger political climate was, for a person of color or a person sympathetic with persons of color, fraught with danger of arrest, abuse, death.

But because they were young, Nkosinathi Biko, and Somadoda Fikeni and Gillian Slovo couldn't have been expected to see the larger picture. All they knew is that their mothers and fathers too often failed to come home at night, or weren't there to collect them after school in Johannesburg or Soweto, or missed important birthday parties.

Their stories were the most gripping at a recent international human rights conference of the University of Connecticut-African National Partnership, an historic cooperative arrangement through which Connecticut scholars will work with their South African counterparts to collect and organize into archives the papers of the anti-apartheid movement in South.

Each speaker, in this most passionate of the day's workshops, raised the issue of private vs. public obligations, an issue most dramatic in an incident revealed to the hundreds at the conference by Slovo, whose mother, Ruth First, a prominent anti-apartheid activist, was killed by a letter bomb in 1982 and whose father, Joe Slovo, was the lone white man in Nelson Mandela's original cabinet.

During a condolence call to her home when her father died of cancer in 1995, Slovo said Mandela told her of his own daughter's comments to him when she was young.

"You are the father of all of us, but you never had time to be a father to me," Slovo quoted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner as saying.

That message, through the eyes of a child, was repeated in so many words by Nkosinathi Biko, whose father, Steve Biko, a leader of antiapartheid activists 30 years ago, was murdered in jail in 1971, when his son was just 6.

"When my father closed his eyes for the last time, my childhood evaporated," Nkosinathi Biko told the conference. Only years later did the larger impact of his father's death hit him, an impact so large that he has spent much of his adult life telling his father's story.

But on those special childhood days, "on my birthday, on my circumcision, on the day of my graduation," that larger impact was not good enough," he said.

The daughter of another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nontombi Naomi Tutu, was also a speaker at the conference, a well-planned, well-attended meeting that was the passion of UConn historian Amii Omara-Otunnu, who has devoted his own life to the cause of human rights.

Tutu recalled her parents waking her up when she was 7 to tell her of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "The way my parents looked, I thought it was someone in my family," she said. "Across the street, people were crying about a death across the ocean."

As far as her father and Steve Biko and Joe Slovo were concerned, it was someone in the family, and that is the fact of life that their blood descendents have had to wrestle with for so many years. Naomi Tutu acknowledged the benefits she inherited from being the daughter of Desmond Tutu, what the director of the Fisk University Race Relations Institute called "the protections and opportunities." But as clear in her mind as those privileges are, equally sharp is the memory of an obscene, racist phone call about her father, a call that left a little girl holding a phone, "frozen" in her tracks.

Slovo also recalled the good times of daily life with her parents, parties where people drank and laughed, and embraced each other and their cause, parties that security forces crashed to catch whites and blacks together. The downside: "the fear of the constant threat of losing our parents forever."

Like Tutu, she also recalled being frozen in fear during those rare times when she didn't want to get into her father's car because it might blow up, and being too afraid to tell him that.

At the time, their feelings were legitimate. They were kids. They wanted their parents at home, fixing their meals, helping with homework. They wanted dozens of other kids to come to their birthday parties. Perhaps in the case of another panelist, Meredeith Carlson Daly, whose attorney father, Joel Carlson, fought for human rights in South Africa and Namibia, as well as Gilian Slovo, both white, to have the offspring of the South African ruling party accept them in the same way their parents rejected the country's leaders.

Those of us who are parents, with a multitude of pulls on our lives, have told our children, countless times, "not now, maybe later." Harmless, innocent comments with no intention of inflicting pain.

But for many of the speakers this day, "later" was never to come. And they are left to carry on the struggle, to articulate the reasons why that which they resented so deeply as children has become their source of pride. "There it sits," said Slovo of the dilemma that separates young from old. "Knowledge of what our parents did for humanity clashing so badly with the needs of a child. The struggle for humanity can also contain evidence of inhumanity."

In this country, the issue was raised equally eloquently in the song "Easy to be Hard," from the American rock musical "Hair," when one of the characters asks, "How can people be so cruel ... especially people who care about evil and social injustice?"

The answer, equally eloquent, was also supplied by Slovo. "As stressful as my childhood was, what I gained outweighed this. ... That, in effect, there is nothing to forgive."