TRANSCRIPT: I suppose I didn't have a chance. I was named Albert after Albert Nzula; African man, trade union leader, communist, who died shortly before I was born. My dad was General Secretary of the Garment Workers Union in Johannesburg. My mom had separated, come to Cape Town, we were living near Clifton Beach.
You can see a picture of the big boy next to my little brother, Johnny, on the beach with my mom, Ray. She'd say to me and my three-year-old younger brother, ‘Tidy up, tidy up, Uncle Moses is coming.’ And Uncle Moses wasn’t Moses Cantor, or Moses Cohen, it was Moses Kotane. He was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, and she was what was called his typist. ‘Tidy up, tidy up.’
I think of all the things my mom gave me – mother's milk, her values, her temperament – her admiration and affection and respect for an African man was the biggest gift in apartheid racist South Africa that I could have had. There he is. There's the younger me.
Part of me hated the idea that my parents expected me to follow in their footsteps. I wanted to be me, me, me, not them, them, them. Until my second year at university. I met a young crowd called the Modern Youth Society. They couldn't use the word socialist or anything touching on politics. That would have been too dangerous. The Suppression of Communist Act was very wide. People could be banned, thrown into jail, so we called ourselves modern, and it was a young crowd. I was the youngest there, full of energy, ideas, debates. We would have parties through the night, we would climb Table Mountain, we would imagine questions like, if God is all powerful, can God make a weight so heavy that even God can't lift it? Crazy ideas, but crazy ideas were just wonderful for us.
And some people remember their first kiss I remember the first time I went to jail, it was during the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign, and they were calling for volunteers. [Singing] ‘Volunteers obey the orders.’ And I said, ‘I want to join.’ ‘You can't.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you're white. It's a black struggle led by black people.’ But I was allowed to join at the end of the year – after I'd done my second-year law exams, age 17 – to lead a group of young white people into the General Post Office and sit on benches marked non-whites only. We were very brave, very enthusiastic.
Qnd it wasn't just the politics, it was the energy, the spirit, the idealism. Challenging the world, storming heaven, ideas, ideas, ideas. And culture played a very, very big role. Culture with a capital C. Culture with a lowercase c.
And we had a festival bringing in people from every part of Cape Town to express themselves through everything from weightlifting, gymnastics, boxing, football, singing, invented games. We were defying the Colour Bar. So that was so political in itself. But doing so not simply in a sloganistic way, but through expression, through doing things together.
I was amazed to discover this old film done by a friend of mine, Bubbles Thorne, using a camera in those days. And there's my mom, Ray, dancing around with other women. It was such a joyous feeling. It was like almost an image of a new South Africa, where people were just people, interacting and enjoying themselves. And there we did it.
The police would come arrest us in the end. Almost all of us went to jail. We were mostly young white people, many of Jewish background. Denis Goldberg, 22 years in jail, Ben Turok in jail, his wife Mary Butcher in jail. I'm in jail. Amy Thornton's in jail. Joseph Morolong in jail. George Peak in jail. That was just part and parcel of the project. But we knew, in the end, the whole system of apartheid was rotten, it was ugly, it was inhuman, it was degrading, it had to come down, we never, never, never lost that total, total conviction.
One of the most exciting things we did was to paint a mural. Lesley Cope, an artist a bit older than ourselves, had discovered the Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera – in the days when Frida Kahlo was the wife of Diego Rivera, now it's the other way around, he's the husband of Frida Kahlo – Orozco, Siqueiros. They took art out of the salons, out of the galleries, out of private homes, out of the cathedrals, into the street. And they painted scenes from Mexican life. And she [Lesley] said, ‘Let's do something… people's Cape Town.’ And it wasn't drinking gin and tonic on a balcony overlooking the sea, the tourist Cape Town. It was the Cape Town of the workers, of the prisoners. And we had such joy and excitement, painting, filling in the colours. The police came. They had us evicted from that building. The owner, I think, couldn't wait to get rid of what he would have seen as these ugly, ugly paintings, but it left something in my mind – the idea of public art.
