My Brushes with The Party

For a decade or so starting in my late teens I fancied myself a leftist – perhaps even a revolutionary. I might’ve been brought up in a bourgeois home, but I could transcend it, I believed. I would be tough, and unsentimental. I would be loyal to an idea. I would disown my Jewish family. I would go to the newly revolutionised Cuba and be assigned manual work. I even bought a “Teach Yourself” book and started learning Spanish.

Now, 60 years later, I wonder why this was such an attractive proposition for me. Recently reading “Shashenka” by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I found that the main character seems to have been similarly attracted, albeit 40 years earlier and on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution.  

One of the issues Montefiore addresses in the novel is one that has puzzled me for years: during all those purges of the Stalin era, why did loyal Party members confess their guilt? Ok, you could’ve put it down to the unbearable pain and humiliation of torture, the desperate need to escape it, the threats to loved ones and having no place or person to turn to. But why did the secret police and the dictators who ruled the Party want this particular script? It wasn’t as if the prisoners would be saving themselves – they knew they would be executed as traitors. Why did the state need them to confess?

The Unfolding of Memory

You could call me a hoarder but it seems that actually I am something of an archivist. I think I have kept almost every letter I have ever received before e-mails came and made letters redundant. But I also kept other kinds of souvenirs, like: a list of what my younger brother and I were planning to take on our voyage into outer space circa 1952!

Recently I decided it was time for a clear out. I've transported all this stuff across three continents without discarding almost anything. Going through my collection of papers, letters and photographs, I was at first disappointed at how little I felt I was able to throw out. But over time I've started to enjoy the process of discovering my younger selves. I contacted some old friends whom I'd forgotten, when I found information about them among my papers, and I managed to interest an archivist at the University of Cape Town Special Collections to take leaflets, newsletters and press cuttings from my undergraduate years.

The Scarf
I found a scarf I have had since I was at least a teenager and kept and can never remember wearing. It's a terrible colour for me! I was going to give it to the bric-a-brac shop at Oasis Recycling, when I decided to take a proper look at it i.e. unfold it. It has photos of movie stars from the 40's on it and some of their signatures, with a central photographic motif which says "Warners - Twentieth Anniversary of Talking Pictures". So, it was printed around 1949 then. 70 years ago!! I began to be curious about its origins. It was a bit like being at The Antiques Roadshow!

I had a feeling that it was perhaps the first "feminine" present I ever had and that was probably why I'd kept it. The most likely person to have given it to me was my Aunt Vera. She was beautiful, stylish, was great with presents and she liked me. There is another signature on it: Carli Gry. He started a fashion house in Denmark in the 40's. About two weeks later and not expecting much, I wrote to the company that bought the label some years ago, asking if they had any information about the scarf.

A Visit to Kings College, Cambridge

What a legacy I've received from my university friend Archie Mafeje! And it wasn't just his political mentoring I'm talking about.

I visited him twice in the 1960's at King's College, while he was studying there for his PhD. More than 50 years later, even though I'd invited myself, I was treated like an honored guest - all because of the photograph I have of him, which I'd scanned and sent to the University at the request of Tamsin Starr. She contacted me on behalf of The Black Cantabs Research Society, who wanted to have a photo exhibition of black graduates from Cambridge to counteract the mass of portraiture around the university, which is largely of white men and monarchs.

I was given my own personal guided tour by her, mischievously photographed on various illustrious senatorial thrones, interviewed for almost 2 hours by an academic in the Department of Social Anthropology and finally invited to High Table as the guest of the interviewer, who is a Fellow of the College.
It was an extraordinary day.




     

The Fellow who offered to host me was Dr Perveez Mody - a petite Indian woman who does research into love marriages in India. Even before I met her, when we were corresponding, I knew we would get on well. Why? Because she understood immediately that my big question about dining at High Table was sartorial. What was I going to wear? I was not going to spend days trying on dresses when I never wear them. Did I have to pack an extra pair of shoes? She reassured me - it was just before Easter so it would not be formal. Whew!

A Photograph of Archie

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My first post on this blog in 2011 was about an exhibition that Andrew Banks mounted of Archie Mafeje's university life in Cape Town. Because the article had photographs of him, I have been contacted ever since by people wanting to use them. This one below is hanging up at the Department of Social Anthropology at Kings College Cambridge!

Last year 3 different people wanted pictures. Some were even prepared to pay for them.

But I didn't take the photograph! I wonder if someone could tell me whom it might have been? There were pavement photographers in the city who took pictures of people walking - mostly in Adderley Street - although I think this one from 1961 of Archie with Welsh Makanda, was taken in Darling Street.  The photographer would give you a ticket and you could collect the pictures some days later after they were developed. You were not obligated to buy them.

Archie and I used to meet together between the stacks of Jagger library - the main campus library. There were not many places that a black man and a white woman could meet in those years! On one occasion I noticed he had one of those tickets. (I had perhaps a half-dozen street pictures of myself at that time that I had collected.)

A Big Thank You to the Frankel 8

Two of the Frankel 8

In a year in which public life has sunk so low, only a few beacons stand out. There have been some protests which served to lift our spirits temporarily, but in the end seemed to have very little effect. And then there has been the court case brought by the Frankel Eight, over 30 years after their alleged abuse as children, which provided a landmark ruling and which will have significant consequences for survivors of sexual abuse in South Africa both now and in the future. The proscription period of 20 years for charges of sexual abuse has been ruled unconstitutional by the High Court! If this judgement is confirmed in the Constitutional Court it will open the way to a change in the law.
Countries vary with regard to the proscription period or statute of limitations as it is sometimes called. For example, Canada and the UK have no time limitation for cases of child sexual abuse; whereas the US, Europe and Australia do.

Miranda Friedmann

Miranda Friedmann (From Women and Men Against Child Abuse) laid out in a recent radio interview how events in the life of a survivor may contribute to "late disclosure" and their only be ready to lay charges against a paedophile abuser after 30 or 40 years (as is the case with the Frankel 8). This happens for survivors who actually remember being assaulted. How much more likely is late disclosure when a survivor discovers in therapy that they have unknowingly dissociated an experience of assault, which then became occluded from their consciousness for many years. This is not an unusual occurrence in my 40 years of practicing psychotherapy.

If I think back to the patients for whom this was true, very few of them would have brought a case against their abuser anyway. However, the realization that one could, and what that would be like would certainly add a component of empowerment to the healing process. As an example, I know of one person, assaulted countless times by Catholic priests over thirty years ago, who, in trying to bring a case, has been met with delaying tactics, helplessness, inaction, derision and ridicule. He is now hugely encouraged by this ruling.

I was abused by anti-Semitic nuns while in St. Joseph's Hospital (now the Vincent Palotti), Pinelands

Cape Town in 1945 or 46. Since the High Court ruling I have had a few wonderful peer counselling sessions, imagining bringing a court case against a couple of dead Palatine nuns and a hospital that no longer exists! I can afford to be lighthearted about this now - I have had the benefit of hundreds of hours of attention over several decades for what happened to me in just a few days. For incest survivors and victims of paedophiles, for whom the abuse can extend over years, and for whom the effects are so long lasting and damaging, this ruling is a big milestone in their journey of recovery whether or not they choose to take legal action.

Sunday 26 July

Hello from the famous Hotel Mille Collines (featured in the film Hotel Rwanda and in the book A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche). This was the treat I planned for myself today. The first time I came to Kigali I thought this place was far too grand for me - and it kinduv is. But I've wanted a swim all week, and I figured a hot walk uphill to get to this pool was better than the uphill walk I would have after my swim if I went to the Circle Sportif. So I have had a great day here, taking advantage of the free WiFi and trying to catch up on the readings for the 2nd week which is all about peacemaking, keeping and building. This is a bit dreary for me - it doesn't have the adrenaline rush of trauma and conflict!

The outstanding features of the first week of the course which concentrated on causes and actors of genocide were of-course my fellow students, our lecturers, the way one is forced to think about genocide and perpetration, and a terrible but extraordinary movie that we only watched because our eminent history lecturer had an emergency meeting with his vice-chancellor. (More about these below)

One of my goals was to meet with my fellow mental health professionals and at my instigation we had a formal meeting after class on Wednesday when 5 of us met and introduced ourselves and the work that we do. We have two men who are facilitators of a form of Social Therapy which has networks all over the country. People are recruited (I don't know how) and they meet for a week. The groups are mixed - from different social classes and gender and most importantly victim/survivors and perpetrators or the children thereof. With the safety they are able to create, people hear about each others experiences and with the expression of feelings that occurs, some kind of reconciliation happens. Another man is a psychotherapist, spiritual healer and cultural activist. He has lots of stories about how breaking cultural taboos causes mental illness - the biggest taboo being the killings that have occurred in the post-colonial era. The other woman, besides myself is a clinical psychologist, who has studied at the University of Johannesburg. But she has done many other things including being a local councillor here in Rwanda.

I'm getting behind so I'll just mention the name of the movie so you won't be left too much in suspense. It was "The Act of Killing". Joshua Oppenheimer, a documentary filmmaker made it about killers of communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965. These perpetrators won that "dirty war" so they are proud and boastful about what they did and were happy to re-enact their modes of killing. It has won a lot of prizes and there are many interviews online with Joshua O. because it is so horrific and almost unbelievable. The most telling interview of him that I read tells the story of how he came to make this film. He had been working with some survivors on the rubber plantations and he didn't think what he was filming was all that interesting - the sites of mass graves etc. The survivors themselves suggested he film the killers and so he did!

Rwandan Vignettes contd

I don't know how to change the order of these posts on my new tablet, so read the one below first. To cut a long story short - I decided not to go to Tanzania this weekend but I did go on a motorbike taxi - Fred on one and me on another - to order my wedding outfit (iterero) in a little shop at the end of a whole floor of wedding shops. I also found out how the ritual goes for a traditional wedding - the one I'm going to miss. The brides' parents bring out the wrong sister to the groom's wedding party and they go through the ritual of saying, "No she is not the one we came for," until the correct one is brought out from her father's house. Only then does the groom come forward. The picture here is of Fred helping me to choose the material for my garment in the shop.