Legacy

It is really chilly here today and a good day for Remembrance & Reflection as the rain pours down and we get ready to trim the Christmas tree.

It's been a sad week with the death of Nelson Mandela.  I've done a lot of crying over the past few days as I've read the outpouring of emotion on Facebook, TV news and newspaper articles from around the world and in South Africa.

It aches to be so far away from home.

As I drove the kids to school on Friday morning, we were talking about Madiba and what he meant to all of us. The children have of course a fairly sanitized view of the whole thing and parrot off  about their hero whilst not having any real sense of the deep horrors of apartheid and the civil war waged to end it.

Like my father who reluctantly spoke about the Second World War, our generation doesn't talk much about 'The Struggle': Of Soweto 1976 and seeing children of one's own age being gunned down in the streets or witnessing families being forcibly removed from their homes in District 6 to be dumped in the sandy wastelands of the Cape Flats.

It was hard to explain to the boys the ludicrous concept of a "banned person" or how the majority of people in South Africa had absolutely no rights whatsoever and where laws institutionalized injustice and oppression.

As we talked in the car, I realized I was speaking Martian to the kids. Nothing can quite explain the traumatic experience of Neil Agget's funeral or the hauntingly, beautiful singing accompanying United Womans Organization's rallies or the terrifying knocks on doors in the middle of the night. It was a fearful, bloody rollercoaster ride of a time. It was our late teens and twenties and we were in the middle of it, with Mandela at the forefront.

Many years later, just after I returned to South Africa after 10 years of living in London, I was privileged to attend the opening of the Robben Island Museum. During the guided tour around the island, we stopped off to have cocktail snacks at the Old Prison Commanders House, an attractive sprawling Victorian manor with fabulous views over Table Bay towards Cape Town and Table Mountain.

It forcibly hit me as I sat there that this was the view that Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners must have looked at everyday for all those long years, which coincided with my own carefree years growing up in Cape Town.

Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island when I was 2 years old and released 28 years later, when I was already living in London. He and his fellow prisoners must have watched Cape Town grow from their island prison: the multiplying harbour, the growing smog, the mushrooming skyscrapers and looping Foreshore  flyovers. They must have seen Tableview sprawl and the apartheid madness of Atlantis all from that close distance.

How incredibly cruel that must have been: To see but be excluded from everyday, normal life: Your families. Your kids. Your aging parents. Your colleagues from work. Your friends. Your life.

It is so notable that whilst Mandela was a politician first and foremost, he spoke so profoundly and wisely about the importance of living: Of making the most of your life.  Of being the best one can be. Of never giving up.

I feel this legacy so keenly, sitting on my own island now: That life is important, that we need to have a legacy and that we have to make a difference.

Nkosi Sikele Nelson Mandela. Thank you for your life.