Let+us+judge+them+on+the+now,+The+Star,+Gillian+Slovo



=Let us judge them on the 'now'=

Gillian Slovo, The Star, 25 October 2007
Everybody's talking about heroes in England. By which I don't mean the heroic (and hopeless) stand the English rugby team made against the might of South Africa, but the latest American TV blockbuster to hit our TV screens.

Called Heroes, it's an everyday tale of folk with superhuman powers whose mission is to save the world. Amongst the cast of increasingly bizarre characters are a cheerleader who can heal herself, and a Japanese failure who has the ability, over which he keeps losing control, to freeze or turn back time.

I was thinking about the singularly unheroic freezing and fast forwarding of time as I stood last week outside what had once been the London home of Oliver and Adelaide Tambo.

We were there to witness the unveiling of a plaque and later of a statue of OR in a nearby park. Coming as this did within a month of the unveiling of the statue of Madiba, it felt as if South Africa was going to monopolise all of the London spaces reserved for heroes.

Muswell Hill, the site of these celebrations, had the look of the focal point of a benign coup. Cheery police manned a succession of roadblocks to stop the uninvited getting through as we, the privileged, were bussed from one venue to the next.

Part of the security overkill was an overenthusiastic Haringey council claiming for itself the hero who had lived within its boundaries, but partly it was because an English minister of state, Jack Straw, was due.

And there, at last, and after we had waited for an hour and more in the chilly autumnal day, the minister and his entourage rolled up and the speechifying that was to accompany the unveiling could begin.

Jack Straw's was the main speech. Blinking benignly from behind contact lenses in which he never seems quite comfortable, he talked about OR as a man who had fought for freedom and for peace not only in his own country but throughout the world. It was an enthusiastic tribute and yet, as the speech wore on, I began to think how much it reflected the changes in the world since OR's death.

Jack Straw's place on this podium was a result of his party's support for the anti-apartheid movement during the dark years of South Africa's past and, coincidentally, of the Labour Party's long wanderings in the desert of opposition. And now Jack Straw is a minister of state in a government that in the post-9/11 world has moved as ruthlessly as George Bush to curb civil rights in the name of security.

Was it because of this, I began to wonder, that the picture of OR that Jack Straw drew was so much the man of peace - which he was - without a single mention of the way that OR had also presided over the exiled ANC during the periods of mass revolt and of the armed struggle? Jack Straw might still want to be associated with OR, and he would most likely, if so required, defend the ANC's tactics, but armed struggle has been erased from the new Labour lexicon.

Now a hero must be a man of peace, or else risk being tarred as a terrorist.

In between the specifying, I talked to a friend about the house in Sandhurst that Tiny Rowlands had loaned to the Tambo family. Everything, I commented, was oversize there, including huge vases even taller than me.

This prompted my friend, who had been very close to OR, to tell me how one day, waiting for Oliver to finish a meeting, he had roamed that same living room examining the objects in the glass cabinets that lined the walls. Amongst the array of glistening silver and oversize Ming, he spotted a small, thin, cup: the kind given out as consolation prizes at school sports days. His interest piqued, my friend took out the cup to find that engraved on it were the words: "To OR Tambo, with love from the people of Benoni."

We both agreed that this touching symbol of belonging to a real community, rather than the overblown wealth that surrounded him, was the true indicator of OR Tambo's greatness. His heroism was firmly embedded in the community that had made him leader.

Times have changed and Oliver Tambo's solidity, his calm confidence, and his consideration and awareness of others stands in stark contrast to the furore surrounding the unending Manto affair.

Claim and counter claim seem to billow up around cartoon-like caricatures. Manto is either a hero of the movement or a disreputable drunk. The Sunday Times is either standing up for press freedom or attacking an unimpeachable heroine. Medical records have either been dastardly stolen or are the very life blood of public interest.

Where in this frenzied storm are the people of Benoni and their like? Why is there not a public debate, even half as passionate, about whether state expenditure on healthcare (given financial constraints) is as effective as it could be? Why do reports of hospitals in crisis end up in a clash of personalities and of the past, rather than a debate about present policy and practice?

We all make, and as Jack Straw's speech illustrated, also remake, our own heroes. OR was one of mine and, in the months before his death, I met him. His heroism was not, as in the TV series, the kind that could heal his own wounds: his communication was circumscribed by the strokes that had attacked him. And yet it was still clear that the essence of a man who cared so much for the lives of others, and who had given his to improve theirs, remained.

Which makes it appropriate that his statue should be erected in a park in Muswell Hill. Not because of what anybody said about him, but because of what he did. Because a committed Christian could see the need for an armed struggle and a leader of an armed struggle could see the need for peace.

So can we not, in OR Tambo's name, let the battleground in South Africa be policy and delivery rather than gossip and personality? Let ministers be judged not on what they may or may not have done 30 years ago, but on what they are doing now.


 * //Gillian Slovo is an award-winning author and playwright and part of the South African diaspora in London//


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4096442**

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