Dr. Nesha Haniff

Small Things and Things Which Are Not Small at All

I sit here in Johannesburg before I  leave for the US and am indeed very exhausted. I think so more this year than the other years. there are many reasons for this but foremost is the fact that the POA of 2011 was emotionally draining. I think the center of this was the loss of my good Friend Robert Carr. When you are involved in a struggle as he was and I am in some way, these losses hit very hard. It was as though the heart and fire of the fight was extinguished. Who will fill this space and how long will it take. Can we recover from this loss. I remember how loving the students were to me, how sweet. I remember Jalynn saying to me when I was so upset “Professor can I say a prayer” and her prayer was so beautiful, with a voice so sincere and earnest that it touched my heart and comforted me.

Many of these students have said that they have been transformed. I hear it everytime and when they return they often revert to the old ways. But for me  this does not matter because a small part of the POA experience will always be with them. I see transformations in small things. Like Douglas Manigault III who wanted to try nothing new but over the weeks became a samosa connoisseur. Small things like the attachment of the entire group to Nando’s a Portuguese chicken franchise and Amanda’s love of Portuguese bread which I hope Robert and Jackie Dunlap had a chance to taste. Learning the difference between house music a and Kwaito. Mugg ands Bean PicknPay clothes not food,Empangeni and Richard’s Bay, The Unizul choir, the singing of Shosholooza. The wait staff asking them to sing Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror and they did while the cooks and the staff all came out and danced. The entire POA group doing a bollywood  dance choreographed by Mimi Singh. These small things  added up in the end to making these students into worldly sophisticated people, they are now citizens of the world.

On their T shirt this year they depicted a tree with the roots coming from the major figures iof the new South Africa. They being the branches that formed from those roots. When we were discussing this I made sure that women were named in this root system. The two that were on the T shirt were Fatima Meer and Albertina Sisulu. They knew that these women were important but not  as much as the men. In part this is because these women are written about in relation to their husbands who were stalwarts in the struggle but so were many women.

Mama Sisulu is a hero of the ant-apartheid movement in South Africa. While her husband was in Jail for 25 years she carried on the struggle on the outside. She was the president of the  Unite Democratic Front , which was the organization that many ANC activists could utlize since the ANC and its members were often banned. She became the first woman to be held under 90 day detention clause and as one detention would end another would begin. Meanwhile she was raising her five children alone. She once said when her husband turned 70 that of the 38 years they had been married they were together only five years. Both her husband and her children were involved in the fight to rid South Africa of apartheid.  It was both Walter and Albertina Sisulul who introduced Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela to the ANC and the struggle. They are the mother and father of this nation.She said in in 1982 “But with me, even if it means death I will fight apartheid and unjust laws to the bitter end and will rest only in a just and peaceful South Africa. Mama Sisulu died on the second of June. She was 92 years old.

In 2002 we met Walter and Albertina Sisuku at their home in Johannesburg. The group at the time learned the South African national anthem and sang it for them. They stood and  joined us. Mama Sisulu served us drinks, Mr. Sisulu who was very frail kept saying that he was soorry that he could not entertain us properly. It was a humbling experience to touch history. When I had her name written on the shirt it was to acknowledge her contribution to this great country. This year’s POA students can wear her name on their shirts for the rest of their lives and say that they knew who she was and that on the day she died they were in Pilanesburg South Africa and reflected on her importance. In this way they can tell their children a story about  this great woman on their  shirt. I thought it was a small gesture to name her, but it turned out that it was not a small thing at all.

My work in South Africa is an homage to the great heroes of the struggle for this new nation I dedicate this dispatch to Mama Albertina  Sisulu. We are slowly losing that generation who stood up.
hamba kahle (go well) Mama

Nesha Z. Haniff
Pedagogy of Action 2011