"Like Tumbleweed in the Wind"

It was Thursday 5th of December 2013 and I was trying to think about what to write about on my blog.  Outside the Cape Doctor was on its "best behaviour" as usual.  As it howled outside my office window, it reminded me of a time living in District Six ("D6").  I thought this would be a good subject but the event that occurred later swayed my thinking to pay tribute to a fallen hero.

The year was 1978 and we were preparing for Christmas.  At the time I did not realise that that would be our last Christmas at "Kildare", Windsor Street, Cape Town - "Kildare" the name of the street my grandmother was born and lived in, in Newlands before it was declared a white area - this was our address in D6.

The wind was blowing and I was walking about in the bare streets of D6 where once many houses and buildings stood, now all bulldozed to make way for white people.  Our house stood adjacent to our neighbours who refused to move until we were sorted with a house and area of my grandmother's choice.  She was a strong woman who stood her ground when the authorities (white men in suits) would show up and tell her that they have a house for her.  She refused them and they even went as far as to say that if she gave them her antique chairs they would give her a nice house.  Looking back on that occasion and witnessing their bribery tactics, it turned out quite ironic that way after my grandmother's death, that the antique chairs would end up in the hands of white people to my absolute dismay and heartache.  However I have come to terms with that "loss" of the antique chairs and have consoled myself with the fact it is a way of reconciling with the past and my acceptance of what happened then. I am happy to say that the "White" people are now family.

Anyway coming back to walking the streets of D6 on that windy Saturday, I came upon some tumbleweed blowing in the wind.  I immediately got an idea that it would make a wonderful Christmas tree as we did not have one.  So I chased after it across the rubble and gathered up the dried out ball of weed and returned home.

I started dusting it off and placed it in an old coffee tin with stones to support it and placed it on the old four-legged radio where once not too many years ago a regular Christmas tree once stood with many presents under it.

My mother stuck some cotton-wool on its little branches to make it look like snow and decorated it with some tinsel that we had from previous years.  Now our Christmas tree looked festive and there was a place for the presents.  What a memory the Cape Doctor stirred up in me.

Much later on the evening of 5 December 2013 we were faced with the sad news that our former President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela had passed away.

"Rolihlahla" meaning "pulling the branch of a tree" or "troublemaker".  To some he was a "troublemaker" to others he was "pulling the branch of a tree".  Just like the saying goes "Bend a tree while it is young" I would like to hold onto this meaning that Mandela did bend the tree (South Africans) in our thinking. 

His last speech before serving 27 years in jail he succeeded in bending the Magistrate's mind when he was faced with sentencing Mandela.  ".....My Lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."  That Magistrate must have thought, no way am I going to have you prove that I will have you executed and turned into a martyr, let me give you life imprisonment.  I'm sure Mandela must have had the same thought, and succeeded in his forward thinking when he made that speech.

Like an "irritating" weed you sprouted your roots,

In the "all white" garden of the Afrikaner's land.

No herbicide was strong enough to get rid of you,

even when you were uprooted and replanted,

on an island far from the main land.

Then the winds of change came up,

and you were released from the island,

to return home where you were hailed a hero.

A hero indeed, a father of a nation,

an icon to the world.

Now you are gone,

and the lessons you leave behind,

should be like tumbleweed in the wind,

that weed, when shrivelled up and lifeless,

can still look beautiful when all dressed up.

Let us not forget that we are beautiful and have a purpose to serve in our land, South Africa.