TRANSCRIPT: POETRY AND REVOLUTION
I must have been about 5 and Uncle Walter Cecilberg is going to take me to the bioscope. And Walter Cecilberg was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He’d been the manager for an acapella German choral group. He became very famous in America afterwards; The Harmony Melodias, I think was their name. Their music would be played a lot over the radio. He was stylish. He had a different sort of haircut. Tall, slightly accented voice, melodious. And we go to a place, it’s called the Colosseum, a very funny name for a building. And I’m astonished by the building. It’s all dark inside. And you’re walking up steps and people are sitting in rows. I’d never been in a building like that. The film was called Snow White. But the building made a bigger impact on me than the film. I’ve never quite forgotten that.
It was only in my second year at university that I became active. I became very interested in art. What is this about this modern art? And every Friday afternoon I would hitchhike down from the university campus and go to the ID Booksellers in Groote Kerk Gebou. They’d been the centre of the Nazis during World War Two. It’s not so long afterwards. But they loved art. They had beautiful art picture books. And they would let me – this young guy, so serious – turn over the pages and I’d read about Cubism or Impressionism and study and read and turn over the pages. And a week later I’d come back and slowly I began to make sense of the shapes. There had to be something there that people got so excited about it.
I did something similar with music and classical music. I used to listen to the concerts on Thursday night. And the sound I remembered the most was at the end of the music there’d be like hsshhhh [sound of white noise]. I didn’t realise that was applause. It would go on and on and on. And then the commentator would comment. And one year I’m on holiday in Johannesburg, staying with my cousins. Beethoven 5<sup>th</sup> Symphony. Five records, you’d put them on clop, clop, clop, they’d go down, the steel needle would pick it up. And slowly I make out: ‘da da da daaa, da da da daaa!’ Making sense of it but working hard at it. It didn’t come naturally and easily to me. Playing it over and over and over again, until somehow the music began to stick. And that theme ‘da da da daaaa!’, became one of the themes of my life.
Artists were important in our movement. And Uys Krige, the poet, owned a bungalow. My mom stayed in the basement for a while. And I was told he’s a poet. And I couldn’t understand what’s a poet. An engine driver, a pilot, a doctor, that I could understand. But a poet is someone who uses words. We all use words. I never quite got it or understood.
Years later, I’m in my second year at university, didn’t even know who to vote for in the student elections. And my mom says, ‘Uys Krige is going to give a lecture, you must go and listen. We stayed in his house once upon a time.’ I’m very interested in poetry. I used to go to the stack room at the university and just pick up books of poetry and read. And he’s speaking on a Spanish poet called Lorca. And I didn’t even know they had poets in Spain. Bullfights. He describes Lorca, the poetry he wrote, the plays and then the fascists under Franco capture him and they execute him at 5 in the afternoon [speaks Spanish]. And he walks up and down… Uys is telling the story. And the story of the life and of the poetry and he went on for about 3 hours non-stop, in English and Afrikaans and a bit of Spanish and a bit of French. It did something for me. It connected the inwardness, the soulfulness, the dreamings, the longings of the young Albie with the big public events of the world. Two weeks later I was in the Modern Youth Society, politically active.
And people asked me afterwards how come you introduced culture into politics – it was the other way round. It was culture that actually got me into politics. And in that period now – now we’re speaking about the early ‘50s – people like Picasso were politically very active. Pablo Neruda. The next week he was speaking about Neruda. And who would have imagined that in Latin America there were poets. Poets belonged to the English literary canon, and you learnt about rhyming pentameters and very formal stuff. And now suddenly poetry was life, it was revolution, it was volcanoes. It was love, it was passion, it was the leaves of his native land. I was ready.
Not long afterwards I’m at a meeting in the Salt River Town Hall, a small hall. It’s the 6<sup>th</sup> of April 1952, 300 years to the day after Jan van Riebeek came and put his flag down to establish the Dutch settlement. And as we learnt in school, ‘the beginnings of South African history.’ And we are there as the… the opposite.
People announce the Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign, calling for volunteers. I’m so enthusiastic and I say to my friend Wolfie Kodesh, who’d brought me there, ‘I want to volunteer!’. He says, ‘You can’t.’ I say, ‘Why not?’. ‘Because you’re white.’ I said, ‘But we’re fighting racism.’ He said_, ‘It’s a black struggle, led by black people.’_ I said_, ‘I want to join! I want to join!’_ And I’m hanging on to the seat. And it was like, you know, you call for people to come and be saved. It was that kind of emotion that I had. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell the leadership.’ And 9 months later, December, I become a volunteer. I’m actually leading a group of – there were four of us. Hymie Rochman, Arnold Harrison and Mary Butcher, she was Mary Turok. And she and Ben Turok became activists. And in between I’m getting my education, my political education.
I would go to the meetings of the ANC on the Grand Parade. Saturday afternoons, we’d get a truck, a lorry. We’d have a loudspeaker up there, maybe 50 people maybe 500, occasionally 5,000. ‘Comrade Albie, you must go, you must speak.’ I’m saying_, ‘No, no, I can’t speak. People won’t listen to me. I don’t live the lives that they lead. I’m privileged, I’m white.’_ And_: ‘No, we speak about non-racialism. It’s just a word it means nothing. If they see you on the platform then they’ll see it’s for real.’_ And I would go up and I remember once speaking against atomic warfare and saying it’s the armaments manufacturers who benefit from it, imperialism… want… are willing to risk destroying the world. And a guy called Archie Sibeko is translating. I give a short two sentence thing. And he goes on and on and people are laughing. And I say afterwards, ‘Comrade Archie, what… what’s that?’ He said, ‘Comrade Albie you’re saying we want world peace, but people don’t want peace. They think if there’s a war, they can get their freedom. So what I’m telling them is, the bomb that’s sent from Moscow to drop on the house of Dr Malan will blow him up. It will blow us all up as well. That’s why people laughed.’
I’d be very moved by the singing. It was amazing. Four-part harmony, new songs. And the songs were mostly sad, sad, sad songs, ‘Senzeni na, senzeni na… what have we done?’ [singing]. ‘Mayibuye, mayibuye, mayibuye iAfrika. Mayibuye, mayibuye, mayibuye iAfrika…’ [singing] And suddenly, ‘Volunteers obey the orders, volunteers obey the orders, volunteers obey the orders, be ready for the action now! Dr Moroka, Dr Dadoo, JB Marks, Kotane, le Bopape! Volunteers obey the orders, be ready for the action...’ [singing] And now I’m one of the volunteers. So, I’m beginning to be introduced into a movement.
The Defiance Campaign had a huge impact in South Africa. It represented the ANC moving from what Ruth First called ‘an annual general meeting’ that would take policy positions and elect its leadership and wait for December the next year, when they would change the policy and change the leadership… From that into a mass movement. It was now taking the initiative. It was defying unjust laws. It was based to some extent on Gandhi’s passive resistance. But it wasn’t called passive resistance. It was called Defiance of Unjust Laws, with the music and the mobilisation. And it brought ordinary people in. And what was significant was the leaders, the intellectuals like Nelson Mandela. He was volunteer number one. He went to jail together with ordinary poor, working people. That was a transformation.
And you know I’m learning to move away from abstractions, to see the world through the eyes of people in very concrete, real terms. I remember one day Johnson Ngwevela, one of the African leaders, he’d been the chairman of the Communist Party before it was banned in 1950. And he says, ‘And one day, comrades, the Red Sea will open up for us like it opened up for the Israelites and we will get our freedom.’ And I said, ‘Comrade Johnson, how can you use an image from the bible?’ And he said, ‘Comrade Albie, there’re some things that politics can reach and there’re some things that can’t be reached by politics.’
That was a shock for me – but a good shock. A shock in respecting the values and belief systems of others. And not saying, you’re obscurantist, it’s the opium of the masses, you’re backward. Johnson Ngwevela would give his life for freedom for the struggle. His children, grandchildren joined uMkhonto we Sizwe, became activists. But he believed in the bible, and I had to accept that fact. And it didn’t diminish him in the slightest as a comrade. It was accepting difference within the struggle. But I’m learning not through reading books and being persuaded philosophically, but by the lives of people.
