11/4/2016 First of 7 Sea days to Cape Verde Islands

This is the longest stretch we have ever been at sea without port stops, so we'll make sure we keep busy and plan our leisure activities and our education.  There are two art classes a day, two craft classes, two visiting speakers, several health and beauty presentations and four different types of light entertainment. And while Khachik is still going into the gym every day,  I do like a bit of telly too

This afternoon there was also a most distressing, totally necessary, illuminating talk by Chris Lubbe, former body guard of Nelson Mandela. He lived through apartheid and in today's talk he reflected on his childhood and the realisation of what apartheid meant through the things he saw around him in his own life.  He gave a bit of background to his own heritage, and how he came to be legally (in apartheid) classified as coloured. His grandmother was a maid who was raped by her white employer.  When he was born he had a lighter brown skin colour than "black" classification allowed, and blond curly hair. As an infant he went through various bizarre racist tests like measurement of the breadth of his nose, thickness of his lips using a ruler, and famously the "pencil test" where a pencil was put through his hair.  The determining factor was if it the pencil sticks in the person's curls, the person is classified as "coloured", if it drops straight through to the floor the classification is "white".  Apparently white children in black families just weren't allowed, so if a child was classified as white they were either placed for adoption or sent to an orphanage.  Chris's father said "luckily the pencil got stuck", but for Chris it meant he was not classified as black like his dad and as a result experienced many different kinds of discrimination and feelings of not belonging anywhere.

Chris then spoke about his recent work for Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. He has several anecdotes of the fun had by Nelson Mandela denying celebrity, and imploring him to do the same. He also told us of his responsibility to tell things they way they were. He even has a piece of limestone from Robben Island, given to him by Nelson Mandela for him to use as a visual aid, so that future generations would know what their forefathers went through.  He then went on to tell several very powerful stories.  I am going to try to remember some of them.

First when he was six his family was living in port St John which I think is in the Eastern Cape on their own inherited land, farming animals.  One day two white government officials appeared on their land to give them 7 days notice to pack and leave for Durban, as the land they owned had been reclaimed as "whites only" land.  They moved without possessions to a squatter camp, and became homeless and destitute, with no system of justice to protect them.  Their former land became a whites-only holiday resort.

Next at the age of 8, on his 8th birthday in fact, his mother took him on a bus ride by way of celebration.  He became aware of  "non-white" buses, benches, toilets, hospital, areas in towns.  During the bus ride his diabetic mother became ill. The driver was unable to stop the bus to let them off. When they were let off the bus the only seat available was white only. She sat there waiting for emergency aid. A white woman agreed to make a phone call in a white only phone kiosk to avoid a black passer by being arrested.  Chris described how two policemen came and physically threw his mother from the bench to the floor, where she hit her head on the ground and was knocked unconscious. The two policemen just walked away, leaving Chris screaming for help.  Luckily it came. Some women came, reassured Chris and helped until the ambulance arrived.  This began a 3 month hospital stay, where she slowly recovered and returned home.



The final and for me most painful of all stories he explained that he had largely educated himself.  Schools were very poor.  Possibly 60 to a class, explaining he thinks the current high levels of illiteracy.  He said there were volunteers who came in to the squatter camps with feeding programmes and extra lessons.  He said one of those was a student, named Steve Biko.



Of course with the help of Peter Gabriel's haunting song Biko, his tragic story is now famous, but in the earlier days before his incarceration and untimely death in custody in 1977,  he taught Chris. Chris described searching dumps for disposed books, reading under the bedclothes with the one family torch, and always running down the batteries.



These were clear moments which inspired Chris to become an equal rights activist, and along with that came his own inevitable imprisonment for 4 months with hardened criminals.  His crime was leading a demonstration.

Following his imprisonment he decided to reply to an advertisement for trainee aeroplane pilots, only to be rejected because he wasn't white. He was bitterly disappointed and with the help of his uncle took a job on the railways. During this time he helped a black man not miss his train by allowing him onto a white-only carriage, and then walking with him through white-only carriages to reach the black-only 3rd class carriages.  Here they were both beaten up by two white police officers.  Chris was thrown to floor and sustained a severe beating and a broken arm. As the other white passengers looked on, the man he was helping was then thrown out of a moving carriage to his death.

This was the end of his talk, a cliff-hanger. Chris vividly gave an account of his devastation, how he was left to cope with this without counselling...... to be continued on 13th. Oh my word. He is still here,  having gone on to be Nelson Mandela's body guard, and has so much more to tell us about Truth and Reconciliation. This is a miracle in itself and we feel really privileged to be here with him.

 I am not going to be able to write about anything else today.
 xx

Since coming home I have been listening and watching many documentaries like this on you tube if you would like to get a bit more background to Apartheid and Nelson Mandela's family today, and a somewhat negative flip side of the Truth and Reconciliation process.