Branded Blog

Last weekend the barefoot man & I were in Joburg for a conference and insetad of my default car-hire, we used the Gautrain.  Twenty minutes including waiting time from ORT (Oliver Tambo International) to central Sandton in air-conditioned quiet with plush seats and almost sci-fi looking stations, and no hint of getting snarled up in Giloolly’s interchange or Grayston drive – what bliss!

We used the trains all weekend from Rosebank where we stayed up to Sandton, downtown to Park Station seeing the city I know so well from a new, pedestrian point of view. I do not know this city like this, it is a city of wheels and traffic lights and shopping nodes and underground parking lots to me. Not one of shadeless pavements, intimidatingly wide roads and  stupid un-sitable pseudo-benches in train stations . It’s funny how well I know the city, and how foreign it is to me all at the same time. I don’t know the walking, train-riding, taxi-catching Joburg, not many in my peer group do.

Waiting for a train on Sunday morning felt a bit like being in the Trainman’s realm in Matrix Revolutions – it was pristine, quiet and deserted. And apart from the red lettered countdown clocks above, time seems to stand still. The much imagined zombi apocalypse could happen outside and down there you’d never know.

I stood on the platform edge (well, as close as the alert station guards could bear), and peered down the darkened tunnel for the lights of the approaching train, it’s sound reverberating back at us from the opposite end of the station making it hard to know which direction the train was even coming from.  The sound grew and eventually the white spotlight announced it’s imminent arrival, growing larger and rounder every second, the sound of air brakes bouncing around the station space. I was expecting to hear the british voice tell me to “mind the gap” any second now, but no, this is not London. This is Joburg, we know about tunnels from mining, there is no gap.

As the train came rushing by me towards it’s stopping point at the far end of the platform, I felt that familiar whoosh as the air was swept aside by the train, washing over the platform like a wave, announcing it’s presence to all, creating an impression simply with it’s being, it’s mass. You can be in no doubt that something with gravitas has arrived in your space, or left it, when a train comes rushing by you as you hover on the edge of the platform.

And now, a week later,  as everyone here in South Africa, and the world it seems, is taking  time to reflect on the passing of Mr Mandela, it is obvious to us all that even fragile human beings can create waves with our coming and going.

On Saturday morning very early when the barefoot man told me that Madiba had died, I felt it again, that rush. It was as if all the air in the room had been sucked out around us and then swooshed back past us again, leaving us literally breathless. He has gone.

I did not have the privilege of ever meeting or knowing him, but the many thousands of stories tell of a man who made time for every person, great or small, that he ever met. He made time to really see them, to acknowledge their living, their being. To love them for a moment, just for who they are.

I did not know him, but I did have the utter privilege (as Nadine Gordimer said so eloquently) of living in his time – of being in my final year of school when the schools were de-segregated and dancing, in the heart of the conservative Free State goldfields, a waltz with a black friend at the year-end school concert; and being in the long, happy lines of voters for the first Democratic elections while I was at varsity; and working with people who ten years before would not have been allowed to apply for such jobs. I live in a world where the barefoot man’s eldest, at 8 years old, had to ask why the armies depicted in the museum at the Castle were all black on one side, and all white on the other;  and where a feisty gorgeous little girl whose birth I witnessed can have an English mum and an Indian South African dad, without knowing why that would have been a problem not so long ago.  These are the ripples that matter.

And the outpouring of utter wonder, love, affection and sadness at his passing is showing us all, yet again, how many ripples one person can leave on the world.

He lived a long life, a complex life, and I don’t think any of us can adequately express how grateful we are for what he did for us , but I hope that we can at least try and live so that one unexpected day, when it is our turn to get onto that last train, we leave behind even a fraction of the ripples that he has left on each of us & our world.

Thank-you Tata Madiba,

we salute you.