No easy walk to freedom

In 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, I was living in Lesotho as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching the methods of street theatre as pioneered by Augusto Boal to African students who would use theatre as a way to work for change, for health, for education. I watched Mandela’s inauguration with a group of Basotho people, crying and laughing and clapping our hands in wonder. This miracle! The South African Defense Force, which had so long enforced apartheid, suddenly was under the control of Nelson Mandela. When the jets flew over the inaugural stadium, streaming the new colors of the South African flag, we thought a new world had come. In the grip of global capitalism, Mandela could not do all he wanted to do, but he did what he could.

I decided during Mandela’s inauguration that I had to emigrate to South Africa and be part of the change that was about to come. By a miracle, I was hired for a professorship at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and I lived there for four years with M’e Mpho Nthunya, my daughters from Lesotho, and my son Seth (now Bella's father), who attended university while we were there.

Each Sunday night during those first years of freedom, we gathered around the TV and watched that week’s highlights of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  We watched as person after person told their story of suffering, torture, oppression, and violence under apartheid. Whites, Blacks, Indians, mixed-race people; old, young; each person in their own language; each person accompanied by another person whose job was to sit with them, to rest a hand on their back, to give them courage, so that while giving testimony it was never necessary to sit or speak alone.

Tuesday evening Sue and I attended a memorial for Nelson Mandela here in Portland that included this beautiful taped tribute to Mandela by Maya Angelou,  a four-minute poem. I hope you will have time to hear it and to be moved as we were. The speakers and organizers posed for a picture at the end of the program. I was one of the people who took their picture as a way of expressing my gratitude for that public act of love for Nelson Mandela.