December 20, 2013
In December 1989, two months before Nelson Mandela was
released, I took the redoubtable activist Helen Joseph out to visit him in his
house at the Victor Verster Prison, in Paarl. It was the first visit she had
been allowed since Mandela had been jailed, 27 years earlier. Resistance Art in South Africa had just
been published, and as Helen climbed out of my ancient Combi, I asked her to
take an inscribed copy in to Madiba, so he could see what the artists of the
country had been up to through the worst years of apartheid.
A few months after his release, I was working in my old
studio, the Graphic Workshop in Obz, when the phone rang to say that Madiba
wanted to meet the people who had worked against the demolition of District
Six, and we were to meet there in half an hour. I was on deadline with some
stupid job, which had to be finished that afternoon, so I frustratedly declined,
thinking there would be many other opportunities.
Of course, there never was. I was in the great man’s
presence many times, from that extraordinary day that we all stood on the Grand
Parade in Cape Town to greet him, to numerous other occasions, but I never met
him face to face.
I could have been at the opening of the ‘Colours’ exhibition
in Berlin, curated by Sabine Vogel, an occasion when Wayne Barker got Madiba to
sign his painting, pushing the price into the stratosphere. But I wasn’t.
And ultimately, it didn’t matter, As Cape Town mourned and
celebrated in the Cape Town Stadium last week, as we watched the streams of
television programmes which recapped so many examples of his almost unearthly
grace and humanity, his lesson to all of us was so clear.
If only we can remember it as we go forwards into 2014 and for
the rest of our lives.
