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.)