It didn’t come as much of a surprise. We are all so used to having our heroes brought low; finding out Mandela wasn’t the great leader he’d thought didn’t have all that much of an effect on him. He’d been here, in the rain of South African spring, for two weeks now and every morning the paper had new stories of corruption at one level or another of the government. The head of the national security force had been suspended by the president, with no clear charge. The health minister, all smiles and lacquered black curls, had shrugged off claims that she had stolen from her hospital and her patients, stolen from the sick, when she was a nurse so many years ago. She had shrugged them off, and now was still shrugging her shoulders about AIDS -- garlic and showers, that was her prescription.
My God, was this woman crazy!
The next in line for power in the ANC also seemed within a finger’s length of serious corruption charges -- which didn’t seem to affect his prospects for power.
It had to have gotten like this somehow. So much corruption doesn’t spring up all in one piece from one day to the next.
So it wasn’t such a surprise in the end, to find out Mandela wasn’t the man everyone made him out to be. He stood for something. Something wonderful. But in the end he hadn’t been able to protect it from his own party, and the hunger for power and control of the people that ran it, and ran into his place once he was gone. It’s important to have symbols though, and maybe one day memories of his smiling face would help bring some kind of change.
The wind picked up, tossing around the chuffed fronds dropped by the palms -- as big as a boy, big leaves here in
There is a family that lives near the intersection on the way to the center of town. The oldest often has his youngest sister hammocked onto his back in a beige towel, worn but clean. All in all there are five of them. Four kids and their mother. I haven’t seen the father. They probably haven’t either, not for a long while. Assuming there is one -- and not two…
The two girls, 7 and 8, run out into traffic while it is stopped at the light. Smiling and laughing at each other, one with a sign lettered with a bic on tattered brown cardboard that is showing its ribs, beige masking on one corner. Looking mischievously at us through the window she holds it up - backwards. Her sister laughs and she flips it around. But by then they are back to their conversation, she missed her moment. Opening her little mouth wide she begins to chant “donation… donation please… do..na..tion!” her red tongue darting out with every ’a’. The clean green Volkswagen pulls away and she darts back to her sister on the median. They resume a game, playing round the post of the traffic light. And briefly he felt a keen sense that he was living in their memories, his car a green speck in a landscape they would look back on. And he wanted very much to know where they were at this moment, where they were sitting when they remembered this day: Giving and taking - throwing their laughter back and forth at each other - brown eyes shining underneath the grey sky, streams of traffic flowing all around them.
