There was a laneway that ran right next to the house where I grew up in Prospect, South Australia. Rusty corrugated iron and aged bitumen created a corridor we would tear up on our Malvern Stars. The laneway was our secret place – we’d use it for hide and seek and as a shortcut to the park.
One day, just like any other day, my little sister and I were walking back from the park through our laneway and found the walls covered with the words “ANC terrorists out” in heavy, black dripping ink.
Soon after, while an ANC meeting took place in our house, cars out the front were decorated with the same hate, this time in red. I think I was eight, my little sister six. We had heard the word terrorism before but couldn’t reconcile it with the peace our parents campaigned for in South Africa – the birthplace of my father. Surely, the terrorists were those perpetuating apartheid?
But the spray painters were calling my family terrorists. Two public school teachers and their small children, a couple of guinea pigs, a dog, a cat and some fish, living in a quiet suburb in Adelaide in the 1980s. I was shaken. I can remember feeling like we were being watched.
Inside the protective walls of our home I loved being part of the expat South African community – made up at that time of freedom campaigners who had found their way to Adelaide by false passports and other means. We danced to the music of Soweto. We ate bobotie, gnawed on biltong and sang along to Free Nelson Mandela by Jerry Dammers and the Specials. I knew even then that Mandela was a critical figure in my life and in the life of my family.
Who is he? The eight-year-old me asked.
A very brave man, someone who is fighting for justice, replied my parents.
I found out Mandela was locked in jail for having the wrong colour skin. My parents explained how apartheid worked and what racism does to people’s lives.
In 1989 we paid our first visit to South Africa as a family. I was 11 and my sister was nine. My parents had told me the story of how they had been trailed by South African police in an unmarked car when they returned for their honeymoon in the mid-seventies. I was scared.
But South Africa seemed a familiar place. My white family lived in big houses just like we did in Adelaide. The streets were lined with purple jacarandas set against red brick. People ate burgers in fast-food chains, they shopped in supermarkets and flocked to the rugged, beautiful coastline that looked just like South Australia’s.
One day we were shopping in Eshowe when we saw police arguing with a man on the street. The car was a hatchback and they opened the boot, violently pushed him in and held him down while the boot was closed. My parents tried to shield us.
From that point on something ominous hung over our trip. I began to see things, put it all together and understand what all those meeting at our house had been about.
When we got back to Adelaide my Dad showed us the film Cry Freedom and explained how we worked with Steve Biko when he was a student at Durban University as part of the anti-apartheid movement. After seeing the film I became overly sensitive, even touchy on the apartheid subject. I was overwhelmed with the injustice; angry.
In 2001, when I returned to the new democratic South Africa as an adult to work at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, the place was in transition. My white relatives were uncomfortable, a different form of violence had taken hold. Over six months I read through thousands of transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – harrowing accounts of mothers and children and sisters and brothers and what was done to them. I read the accounts of perpetrators – some sorry for what they had done, others unrepentant. I visited Robben Island and saw for the first time Mandela’s tiny, uncomfortable cell and the exercise yards pointed at the Port of Cape Town – close enough to see a city getting on with its life but far enough away to confirm ostracisation. I wondered what South Africa would become and how it was possible for any place to come out of this.
Thirteen years later I learned of Mandela’s death as I was driving to my job in Adelaide’s CBD. It is 27 years since my little sister and I discovered hatred in the laneway by our house. Yet as we, and the international community, mourn Mandela, the narrative of injustice and of persecution continues to be played in our own back yard and across the world.
Surely Mandela’s legacy must be a commitment from all of us to finally write a new one.
Vale Mandela. You have taught me so much.
Anika Johnstone was born in Adelaide to a South African father and Ukranian/Bosnian mother and grew up in a community of anti-apartheid activists in Australia. She wrote her honours thesis (politics) on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as part of an (unfinished) PhD on South Africa’s reconciliation process. She is now a Communications Manager in Adelaide.
