Every time I think of South Africa, I think of my father, who was a staunch activist against apartheid and one of the most intelligent and well-educated 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 every day, 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 topic without making you feel like a complete idiot, even though you knew you had no right to object intellectually.
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 would laugh at him with my adolescent arrogance and ask him why the latest issue of his “soapbox” should get 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 released represented something much deeper and more painful. It seemed almost too painful to argue with the same fervor and passion with which he discussed money, politics, and religion. He wanted to go to South Africa to fight firsthand alongside those he considered his brothers and sisters in the freedom movement. He told me of oppressive Bantu education and violent uprisings by students who refused to be taught any more servility.
I was recently 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 done to 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 talked about the roles that colonialism, hegemony and racism played in the structure of Apartheid, but I don’t think any of us could fully understand how this impacted the lives of people who live this experience on a daily basis.
Our study abroad in South Africa provided us with a snapshot of what it must be like to work within a system that has historically prevented all students from receiving access to the best possible education. We attended 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 individuals provided us with a lens through which to view 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 socioeconomic status of many black South Africans. The stratification that existed as part of apartheid was evident even though the apartheid system had ended for over a decade.
When I took pictures of little children in Soweto who were begging rands (South African money), I was most excited by the bridge that many of the educators were trying to build for those who had been historically 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, Colored and Black. I didn’t understand its racial categories, its monuments to Dutch settlers (Voortrekker), or how and why whites still maintained control of much of the business and real estate in the country.
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 tour guide took us into the kitchen and told us how, during their time living there, the Mandelas (both Nelson and Winnie) often had a lock on their fridge because they had been told 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 his release from prison, but he was only able to stay there for eleven days because reporters 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 were killed when fired upon by the police. The Hector Pieterson Museum is surrounded by vendors who tell you their stories in their deeds and words. Some are relatives of the deceased children, and they will tell you which one was theirs and how they were related to them. These family members 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 his bloody body after he was knocked down by the police. During the uprising, Soweto students chanted “Amandla”, which means power, to express their solidarity with the jailed Nelson Mandela and the activist organization African National Congress.
A few days into my trip we visited a place called god’s window in Mpumalamanga and was struck by the beauty and hope that still remained in a place ruled for so many years by fear, hate 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 years old when Paul Nakawa Sanders passed away in August 1988. Amiri Baraka praised my Baba in his book entitled praise noting that Nakawa moved from the black nationalism of 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 wrongly 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 continue on. his path. search for black liberation.