My Madiba Moment - Part 9

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

"Amandla!" Thundered Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

"Awethu!" Roared the teeming crowd of several thousand spectators and traders who had come to cash in on the Mandela phenomenon. There must have been at least five-thousand spectators on the sports field of Brooklyn's Boys' and Girls' High School. The largely table-top traders retailed Mandela memorabilia ranging from books to T-shirts and buttons bearing the images of "The Couple of the Moment."

In our kind of hard-nosed capitalist society of New York City, you can always count on this at once seamy and sordid aspect of inordinate commercialism or petty capitalism. After all, wasn't the inhumane and lurid trade in African flesh and humanity for centuries the major going concern of these United States of America?

The sweltering midday sun of early summer did not the least bit seem to deter the crowd that had gathered in this sprawling inner-city vicinity. Mandela incense and prayer candles were also on open display. The incense was being delightfully burned and sold by African-American traders dressed in brightly colored and resplendent Muslim garbs. In case the prospective buyer wanted to smell as fragrant and successful as Nelson and Winnie.

I had gone down on the A-train with a small team of camera-and-sound men from City College's Audiovisual Department. I was to provide extensive commentaries on videographed events and activities, and Orlando McAllister was the leader of our group. The trip down to the Boys' and Girls' High School had not been very eventful until two or three stops before Utica Avenue, where the school is located, the now heavily loaded train looked as if it was about to burst at the seams and violently discharge its human cargo.

The Audiovisual Department at City College operated separately from the Keating-run Department of Communication Film and Video (CFV). At the time that I was enrolled into the CFV department as a matriculated student, Professor Michael Keating taught nearly half of all the courses in the program package; these courses were largely in the sub-discipline of Print Journalism, for although his last professional job in the media had been as a news director in the New York City studious of CBS-TV, Professor Keating had spent quite a considerable amount of his career with one or two of the globally renowned "news wires," namely, the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI) and Reuters. That was way before the advent of the almighty Google and the Internet revolution.

"Amandla!" (Power!) Winnie Mandela, once again, exploded, shooting up the clenched fist of her right hand into the open air. No, she was actually stabbing and poking at something seemingly palpable but whose emanation or physical identity could not be readily placed or located.

"Awethu!" The sea of spectators roared in return. I preferred the more indigenous and "full-blooded" response of "Ngawethu!" loosely translated as "Power Belongs to the People."

On this particular day, I felt indescribably deeply South African to the very marrows of my bones, and regreted the fact that I wasn't in any romantic relationship with one of the South African student ladies on campus. The fact of the matter was that I wasn't in any romantic relationship with any woman of any nationality. At any rate, it would have been quite a humongous task - for the South African men on campus appeared to far outnumber their women counterparts by a ratio of at least 2:1 or even 3:1. What was more, the handful of women available were actually not conjugally available at all. They were, almost all of them, either legally already spoken for, as it were, or they were engaged in serious relationships with their fellow countrymen. I quietly resented this clearly "incestuous" arrangement.

One sad incident was to prove to me that the very universally sanctioned convention of marriage could be extremely treacherous and even untrustworthy sometimes. Marriage, even longstanding ones, was a much more delicate facade than most married couples seemed either willing or prepared to grant. All a determined interloper had to do was simply to bravely and courageously push the proverbial envelope until it literally fell off the edge of the table, and that brave and courageous intruder got pleasantly staggered by the lofty contents therein.

The allusion here, of course, is to my dear married friend and sister Llethoyo Thinane. I may have inadvertently misspelled her first name. We both wrote for the African-American newspaper on campus. I forget the name of the latter presently, but I strongly suspect that it was called The Paper. I preferred writing for the mainstream City College paper, The Campus, because when I joined the latter paper, it had just begun running as a weekly newspaper, instead of the three or four times that it got published per semester when I first enrolled as a student of CCNY in the fall of 1986. I was actually a part of the team that decided to have The Campus operate as a weekly.

I also preferred writing for The Campus because it had an "ancient" history, with the first issue having come out in 1907, or thereabouts. It was also the better edited of the two main campus newspaper. I would be briefly listed on the masthead of The Campus as Opinions Editor, briefly because I preferred to work from behind the scenes; and so I pleaded with my editors, either Darlene Jackson or Charita Jackson, the two women were not related, or it could even have been Cindy Rodriguez, to remove my name from the masthead. My team of The Campus writers would go on to win three awards for good community reporting from the Columbia University School of Journalism. I often do not mention this fact, because I sincerely don't want to claim any individual credit for a purely team work.

Evidently, Llethoyo, who already had two or three children by her fellow South African student-husband, was in an abusive relationship. I personally knew her husband and had had a few occasions to briefly chat with him. I don't remember his name presently, though, for it has been more than twenty years of separation, but Llethoyo's husband came off to me, back then, as a very quiet young man, and not quite the meanspirited bully that I learned through the rumour mill.

Anyway, from the look of things, Llethoyo may well have begun her allegedly adulterous affair well before I left CCNY for graduate school at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1990, with the father of one of my good friends and comrade in the 1989 CUNY-shutdown revolution, Malik. The last time that we met and briefly socialized, Malik was on the staff of the New York City Public Library system. I would also learn that Malik's father, whose name I cannot remember and whom I also personally did not know, was a lecturer in one of the social science departments. Rumor had it that Llethoyo and her children were living with Malik's father, who appeared to have adopted the children as his own.

I am also inclined to believe that economic strain on foreign-student existence in New York City, in particular, and America in general, may well have exacerbated whatever conjugal problems the couple may have had. Anyway, I learned about the preceding sad story when I visited the CCNY campus in the fall of 1990. Perhaps it was my good friend Johnny Pugh, who had also become the editor of The Paper, who told me the story.

I also don't know whether I did the right thing or not, but I confronted my good friend and dear sister, Llethoyo, and gently prodded her to either deny or confirm what until then had been largely a rumor to me. Her creditable writing skills had won Llethoyo a media studies scholarship to New York University (NYU). I heartily congratulated my dear sister with a hug. But when I asked her to regale me with the story of her new-found love, Llethoyo offered me her trademark broad smile, chuckled and then scurried away with a wave of the hand. I did not press this purely personal business any further, even as sad as I felt for both Llethoyo's husband and my hitherto great affection and respect for her and her integrity.

"Amandla!"

"Ngawethu!"

The speech of the Boys' and Girls' High School's Mandela did not go as well as expected. But this was not because The Madiba was not a fiery orator; it was predictably because 27 years of incarceration had tragically removed him from the equally wretched state of American political culture. For instance, when the 72-year-old Mandela, standing on a structure that looked like the make-shift flat-bed podium of a truck, declared in his deliberate and sonorous voice to the spectators that: "Most native South Africans live under very poor and inhumane conditions, and have been denied the basic necessities of life and justice," many in the heavily packed audience shouted back, "Here too!" It was almost as if time had decided to rain a wicked joke on The Madiba's parade, as it were.

It was quite obvious that The Madiba knew too little about the seedy realities of American racism and the merciless exploitation of the colored and poor; or he had simply been deceptively fed the textbook version of American idealism. In the end, though, the very historical presence of the globally celebrated South African political legend was all that mattered.

Inside the press pen by the barricades separating the podium from the living legend and his spectators, I couldn't have been more than 15 feet from the celebrated couple. I believe it was Trinbago's musical maestro and genius, The Mighty Sparrow, who was the main artistic attraction on this occasion, rocking the audience with the heavily accented rhythmic African sounds bobbing and pulsating out of the impressive big-band ensemble of horns, guitars and congas.

And then, rather reluctantly, we had to run after the famous Mandela-Mobile, that concrete-wall-thick transparent bullet-proof canopy mounted on the golf-cart-looking automobile. If memory serves me accurately, the only personality of global status who had ridden in this heavily protected vehicle before was Pope John Paul II, hence the vehicle's original nickname of Pope-Mobile.

The ride back to Manhattan, and to City Hall, where the dapper first African-American ever to be elected Mayor of New York City, David Dinkins, was fervidly preparing to welcome The Madiba, was anything but easy. The entrance to almost all trains in downtown Brooklyn had been blocked by an impenetrable throng. And so had road traffic been temporarily banned in most of downtown Manhattan. We had no other choice but to jog closely behind the Mandela-Mobile. How we made it in time to City Hall remains a miracle to me to this day.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 14, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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