My Father Died for This. Lukhanyo Calata
not on this side of eternity.
I usually console myself by telling myself that I am the man God intended me to be. And just like any other person on this earth, I am shaped by my lived experiences to be the unique, beautiful soul that I am. Those lived experiences are what led me to Abigail, the second daughter born to Brian and Mary Isaacs. A beautiful young woman from Stellenbosch whom I fell in love with the very instant I laid my eyes on her in late January 2008. We were both younger journalists then, she a parliamentary reporter for the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld, and I a general news and sports reporter with eNews, as eNCA was still called then. We were sent to cover an ANC meeting in Philippi, a township just outside Cape Town. Mathews Phosa, who was elected treasurer general at the ANC’s 52nd National Conference in Polokwane in December 2007, was in Cape Town to deliver the movement’s birthday or its January 8th statement, as it’s more commonly referred to.
I remember that Sunday morning like it was yesterday. Abigail first caught my eye as she walked towards the area where a group of us reporters were chatting, while idly waiting for Phosa to arrive. At the time, both of us had been working as journalists in Cape Town for around five years, but that morning was the first time we’d met. I remember asking my colleague, Nawaal Deane, the cameraperson I was assigned with that day, who that beautiful woman was. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I knew I had to speak to her, so I waited for an opportunity when I could go over and at least introduce myself to her when she was alone. That opportunity never came, so I went over while she stood talking to Chantall Presence, a fellow journalist. I’m sure Chantall must’ve thought me very rude for interrupting them. Abigail later shared with me that she thought I was quite forward to intrude on their conversation like that. I introduced myself to Abigail and made sure that I complimented her beauty. She was then, and remains to this day, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.
Back in 2008, I was sharing a flat with my friend Koketso Sachane. He still teases me about that day when I returned home from work and couldn’t stop talking about this woman I’d met and whom I was convinced I would marry. Mind you, I knew very little about her. I had no idea if she was married, in a relationship, or gay – all I knew was that if there was any chance at all, she would become my wife. How this would happen was inconsequential. I had it bad. After our first meeting, I saw Abigail again a few weeks later. This time it was during the melee that followed the 2008 State of the Nation Address. The second encounter confirmed just how completely enchanted I was by her. A few days later, she gave me her business card. I don’t think I waited a day before I called to ask her out for dinner. I was more relieved than happy when she agreed. I remember telling anyone who cared to listen that I had scored myself a date with the prettiest girl. Abigail and I eventually married three years later on 24 September 2011. Over a year later, on 21 December 2012 she gave me arguably the greatest gift a woman can give a man, when she gave birth to our son, Kwezi Mikah Calata.
Our son’s birth that Friday afternoon brought me full circle. I, now, was the father to a little boy with all the responsibility that fatherhood and parenting carry with it. Although Kwezi’s birth in our flat in Mowbray remains the singular highlight of my life, I was then, and continue to be, daunted by the prospect of fathering him. How do I become the best father I can be when my father was not there to model what fatherhood is for me. My frame of reference for what fatherhood is, is largely pieced together from the odds and ends my mother has relayed to me over the years about the kind of man my father was.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any memories of the brief three years I spent with my father before he was murdered. Instead, my first and only memory of him is of his funeral.
I’ve since come to find out that the date of his funeral was 20 July 1985. On that Saturday, I was just three years, eight months, and two days old. I remember it being bitterly cold. I remember the many, many buses and the thousands of people, some of whom had spent several days camped outside my great-grandfather’s home. My mother, elder sister, and I moved there at my father’s family’s insistence after his and Matthew Goniwe’s bodies were found five days after their disappearance in thick bushes just outside Bluewater Bay, a suburb of Port Elizabeth. I remember a moment when I clutched my mother’s dress so tightly as she sat sobbing in the back of a slow-moving, blue Mitsubishi kombi. Its rear sliding door was open and it was surrounded by thousands of people. I also remember being terrified at the gravesite that the ground underneath me would cave in and that I would fall through it as it shook from the force of toyi-toyiing comrades. I remember the choking dust. The red coffins.
Despite many desperate attempts over the years to conjure up memories of my father alive, I just don’t seem to have any. My most fervent wish is that I will remember something about him – irrespective of what that memory is, just as long as it is of him alive. I know it would be a memory I’d treasure forever.
An estimated 60 000 people from all around South Africa, and including diplomats from France, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Australia and Sweden, defied a government ban and travelled to Cradock to pay their last respects to my father and his comrades. The funeral is said to have been one of the biggest political funerals in the Eastern Cape, at least since that of the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, Bantu Stephen Biko, in 1977.
Mourners had made their way to Cradock in trains, at least 160 buses, even more minibus taxis, and private cars. Newspaper reports and personal accounts claimed that many more people were stopped at roadblocks as far afield as Worcester in the Western Cape and ordered to return home.
ANC president Oliver Tambo called all the way from Lusaka, Zambia, to pass on his and the movement’s condolences to the people of Cradock. Zuko Vabaza was the one tasked to deliver the message from the ANC president to those attending the funeral. My sister Dorothy recalls how uBhut’ Zuko always joked he would never again wash his left ear because that was the ear he had pressed against the telephone when he spoke to OR Tambo.
On that afternoon, the mourners who had gathered in my hometown of Cradock in the Karoo – which was already such a thorn in the side of the apartheid government – sent PW Botha and his cabinet a message, louder and clearer than anything they had ever heard before. In a supreme act of defiance, those present at the funeral hoisted two massive liberation movement flags. One displayed the black, green, and gold of the ANC, while the other, almost one and a half times bigger, was red with a yellow hammer and sickle neatly painted onto it. In 1985, both the ANC and the South African Communist Party had been banned for well over 20 years. It was inconceivable at the time that these two flags would be hoisted inside the republic, never mind that they would be hoisted in a relative backwater like Cradock.
I guess it was inevitable that, just a few hours after my father’s coffin and those of Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto, and Sicelo Mhlawuli were lowered into their final resting places, ‘Die Groot Krokodil’, President PW Botha, would go on SABC radio and television to declare the country’s first (partial) State of Emergency in 25 years. The last State of Emergency had been declared after the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, a day that would prove one of the darkest in the country’s history. Sixty-nine black people were shot and killed during a protest march against apartheid-era pass laws. An estimated 180 others were injured in the senseless and wanton violence meted out by the police.
The 1985 State of Emergency started in 36 of the country’s 260 magisterial districts. The vast majority of the districts were in the Eastern Cape and included Cradock and its surrounding towns, Cookhouse, Somerset East, Graaff-Reinet, Steytlerville, Hofmeyr, Grahamstown, Port Alfred, Tarkastad, Bedford, and Adelaide. It included districts in the Witwatersrand and the Vaal Triangle (these areas are now part of Gauteng).
So, who was Fort Calata? What was it about his death alongside that of Matthew Goniwe, Sparro Mkonto, and Sicelo Mhlawuli that led to such anger, militancy, and large-scale defiance of the brutal apartheid government from South Africa’s oppressed people?
ABIGAIL
As much as this book is an attempt to tell Fort Calata’s story, it’s also an attempt to get to know the man. In my quest to uncover my father-in-law’s history, I listened intently to all the stories that would give insight into what kind of person he was. The longing Lukhanyo and I share to know the sound of his voice, how his singing voice differed from his speaking voice, what he smelled