My Father Died for This. Lukhanyo Calata

      Picture: Colin Urquhart/The Herald.

      To our son, Kwezi,

      and the next generation

      of revolutionaries

      Foreword

      by Father Paul Verryn

      It was early in April 1984 when I received a phone call from Molly Blackburn. We had served together in the Port Elizabeth branch of the Detainees Parents Support Committee (DPSC). She told me that two comrades from Cradock had been detained under Section 28 of the Internal Security Act and were being held in what was known as Sun City in Johannesburg. They were Fort Calata and Mbulelo Goniwe, and they were leaders from the Cradock community.

      When I was transferred to a Methodist congregation in Witpoort­jie at the beginning of 1984, I had continued my association with both the DPSC and the South African Council of Churches (SACC).

      The good news about Section 28 was that visits were allowed and one of the small mercies of this incarceration was that few who were held under this section were tortured.

      I made my way to the prison in my clerical garb and, without much ado, I was granted access and met Fort and Mbulelo for the first time. Our first meeting was reasonably prosaic as we acquainted ourselves with our respective histories and, particularly in the case of Fort, with his immediate family – his wife and two children. I can distinctly remember his unambiguous pride in his most valued relationships. Just as a man in love, he did not seem to tire in remembering the finest detail of their uniqueness. I was left with a very clear picture of a family that carried an integrity in its relationships and commitment. The austerity of this unkind prison was a profound contrast to the tenderness and vulnerability of Fort’s family. I left Sun City with a very clear picture of an indomitable dignity which could not be contradicted by the cruel machinery of a system seeking to break the essence of a person’s humanity.

      I was permitted to visit on a few more occasions, and in those visits gleaned considerable information of the nuances of the struggle in Cradock, a rural Eastern Cape town I had never visited before. The awakening of the community’s conscience by a movement striving to give voice and rights to an oppressed people strangely became part of my own journey of awakening. The Machiavellian dispossession of people who were considered irrelevant by the powerful was not as successful as it was presumed. Paradoxically, the attempt to silence and intimidate people was a failure. As people, with very simple means, began to imagine an alternative narrative, a strange revolution was emerging.

      Ultimately, our conversations progressed on one of my visits to a discussion of Marx and Communism. Of course, a major focus of our discussion was on the distribution of resources and the injustice that marginalised 80% of South Africans, economically. I was not permitted to visit Fort and Mbulelo again, and I realised that ears had been eavesdropping on our conversation. It was bizarre to imagine that a conversation of this nature could be any threat to the status quo at all – but it was.

      Fort and Mbulelo were released from detention and returned to Cradock. Fort, however, was not allowed to return to his teaching position and was left unemployed. His main concern was the support of his family – Nomonde, his wife, and their two children, Dorothy and Lukha­nyo. Fort then came to stay with me in the Methodist manse, which was in Wilro Park. He’d decided to procure a heavy-duty driver’s licence, so that he could find employment to support his loved ones. I remember being amazed at his determination to pass the tests as efficiently as he could. Although he also spent time networking with people in the then-­Transvaal, his impatience to return home was obvious. His separation from his wife was a stone in his shoe. He returned to Cradock and we kept in touch from time to time concerning developments in his family as well as the wider context.

      As I read the book that Lukhanyo has written, there is a consistent theme which can be followed from the life of his great-grandfather, Canon James Arthur Calata, to Lukhanyo’s own understanding of his commitments. The creation of a family that carries the integrity of faithfulness is as much a part of the discourse of their life as is the vigour of their political commitment to the freedom of all people in South Africa. The willingness to hold ourselves accountable to those who are dear to us is as important as the rigorous accountability that secures the truth, which must be the hallmark of any political party of value. Of course, one cannot ignore the fact that Canon Calata’s faith in Christ meant a radical engagement with the human rights and dignity of all people. One senses a restlessness in his ministry as he imagined an end to repression and the formidable insecurities of the apartheid ideology. There is something strangely reminiscent of the gospel when one considers Cradock as the springboard for this kind of revolutionary imagination. Who could ever imagine that hope for humanity could come from Nazareth? It is true, though, that the paradigms of the new creation somehow are repetitive. Just as it would be impossible to imagine the secretary-general of the ANC functioning in isolation, so it would be impossible to imagine Canon Calata achieving anything without his love for, and the determined support of his wife, Miltha. One hears her moral compass in the guidance and strength of the family in Lukhanyo’s words. And so the book seems to weave a theme of honest personal relationships being congruent with the struggle for the freedom of a community and a country. The principles of truth with justice, of love with integrity, and of accountability with passion are threads that perpetuate themselves in all the lives described in this book. Our remembrance of them should not remain bland historical recollections, but should inspire our present interactions. For we are not yet free.

      In 2008, Canon Calata was awarded the Order of Luthuli (gold). In 2017, Miltha Mary Calata was awarded the Order of Luthuli (silver).

      It was again a phone call from Molly Blackburn that informed me of the disappearance of Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto, and Sicelo Mhlawuli. Sicelo and Sparro’s bodies were found near Bluewater Bay, and Fort and Matthew’s bodies near St George’s Strand. The pathologist’s report on the state of their bodies indicated a perversity and darkness that explained the depravity and alienation of the system in power at that time. That we could live in a society which ostensibly betrayed not the slightest indication of deviation was itself sick. This kind of cruelty and abuse of power must force us to be vigilant about the violence and deceit which we cover up today. To insist that the public should not see the effects of the anger of service delivery protests – but should somehow be protected from what our reality is – is a denial of our fundamental right to know.

      For me, the desecration of Fort’s body remains a devastating demolition of the image of God in the life of a person I respected. If his extermination could have this effect on me, I cannot begin to describe the effect that this invasion had on the lives of Lukhanyo, Dorothy, and Nomonde, who was pregnant with Tumani at the time of Fort’s death. I think that the perpetrators should meet this family face to face, make confession, and seek forgiveness now. No Truth Commission has the right to remove from them the dignity of seeing the eyes which saw their loved one last. Then forgiveness will carry integrity.

      More than 60 000 people attended the funeral in Cradock. Nothing could have mobilised people more effectively. According to Tertullian’s Apologeticus, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church and indeed the blood of these martyrs inspired a consciousness in the nation that had not been evidenced in such intensity before. There was an interesting dialogue between politics and religion at the funeral. They could not be divorced. The headline in the Sunday Times on the next day was ‘Priests March under the Red Flag’. There was also a deep sense of exhilaration coupled with the tragic sadness of loss. The community was robbed of four courageous, humble servants who had paid the ultimate price for their vision. What I do not think we could have anticipated was the resilience and hope that their deaths ignited in the minds of the masses. It was as if the evil deeds of the security apparatus