The heartbreakingly sudden passing of my teenage and university friend Nazeem Pather made me think of the importance of holding on to healthy friendships while navigating busy divergent careers, family life and the artificial intimacy of technology. This often makes it difficult to hold on to meaningful bonds forged early in life.
A focus on your own life can easily prevent you from staying in touch with those from the past. Others, many with life partners, often wrongly disconnect with value-based friendships, prioritising the friendship of their partners.
Yet, healthy friendships in which there are an alignment of values, help bring meaning, a sense of belonging and love to life in an increasingly cut-throat, ever-changing and complex world. This is a life where individuals are increasingly isolated, traditional community bonds fractured, and where challenges, whether at personal, workplace or society level, often cannot be solved with the old received beliefs we grew up with. Value-based friendships are therefore to be prized.
The loneliness of Covid-19 lockdowns, often damaging physical and mental health, has underscored the importance of connectivity with friends, family, neighbours, and workplace colleagues. Regrettably, in the past few years, I have only sporadically stayed in touch with Pather.
Though death is part of the natural cycle of life, when it happens, especially of someone in the full bloom of life, it always feels unfair, and makes one feel powerless. It feels that a part of one’s past — an important part — has been abruptly severed. This how I felt with the passing of Pather, the former journalist, trade unionist and youth activist, and my former flatmate.
We shared a friendship in my late teens, during the dying years of apartheid, under the 1980s State of Emergencies, when it felt to us that the National Party government was impregnable. Pather was one of a group of youth activists of the mid-to-late 1980s, which included the likes of the late Sandile Dikeni and Karima Brown, who did not at the time appear to have any interest in journalism, but after the end of formal apartheid, successfully changed career course into mainstream journalism.
We shared a friendship, in my late teens, during the dying years of apartheid, under the 1980s State of Emergencies, when it felt to us that the National Party government was impregnable.
In the early nineties he was among the first cohort of black journalists who joined the then predominantly white audience Radio South Africa, later renamed SAfm. Very few now remember the personal struggles of this group as they were pilloried by white Radio SA listeners and commentators and letter writers in the English liberal media for their diverse “black” English accents — insinuating that because they did not speak “white” English, their journalism was somehow below standard. Pather was dispirited by this.
Beyond the teargas, rubber bullets and protest marches, we also had “normal” joys, such as attending live and jam sessions of bands formed by our peers, specifically, the “conscious” hip hop bands, Prophets of Da City, Black Noise, and the all-women group Yo Girls. The “conscious” reggae band Sons of Selassie, which we befriended, and who Pather in the early nineties helped with their marketing, was a particular favourite also.
We labelled these bands “conscious”, because their music, like “struggle” poetry, also dealt with “struggle” issues, though not exclusively so. In segregated late 1980s, the Galaxy and Base night clubs were for us firm favourites. The Showmax Cape Flats neo-noir murder mystery, Skemerdans, released last year, was filmed largely at Galaxy, open in 1978, and the longest-running black club in Cape Town.
Our friendship was cemented because both of us got involved in the trade union movement as teenagers. I was still in high school when I joined the General Workers Advice Office as a volunteer paralegal helping black workers deal with labour disputes, supporting trade unionists jailed for anti-apartheid activities and teaching basic labour law literacy.
Pather got involved early on, as a very young organiser, for the then Unemployed Workers Union. When the ANC, anti-apartheid movements and activists were unbanned by president FW De Klerk, Pather went to Peninsula Technikon, now the Cape University of Technology, to study journalism.
Pather also witnessed how the student movement, after the unbanning of the ANC, was increasingly imbibing the toxic culture of parts of the exiled ANC, discouraging different views, demanding unquestionable ideological conformity, and electing leaders whose only competence were shouting “radical” slogans.
Pather wondered aloud whether our worst fears, the ANC government silencing black critics, would in turn allow corruption, the appointment of individuals based on struggle credentials only and not competence, and the adoption of poorly-thought-out policies.
He was terribly distressed, not only for my sake, but because of rising intolerance within the movement, when some students at the University of the Western Cape, opposed the line I took as editor of the student community newspaper, Student Voice, marched against me, lit a bonfire of the paper and held a mass meeting to denounce me. He worried at the time that it may be a sign of intolerance to come in the post-apartheid SA that we, as activists, had to guard against.
A year into the new democracy, ANC members held a mass meeting at the Johannesburg Library Gardens and marched against me to the offices of The Star newspaper, after I criticised mushrooming corruption, non-merit-based appointments and poor policy decisions by the new democratic government. Pather wondered aloud whether our worst fears, the ANC government silencing black critics, would in turn allow corruption, the appointment of individuals based on struggle credentials only and not competence, and the adoption of poorly-thought-out policies.
The “lawfare” in which cabinet ministers, including former president Jacob Zuma, use taxpayers’ money to sue journalists, civil society activists and critics — not necessarily to win, but to deflect from wrongdoing and to silence critics, particularly alarmed him. I have been a victim of lawfare since 1990, being sued by individuals in the apartheid era, and then by cabinet ministers in the post-apartheid-era, including Zuma, who sued me for R20m for alleged defamation in 2004, after I persistently criticised him for reinventing new isiZulu “traditions”, solely for self-enrichment.
Zuma recently, as part of his lawfare, initiated a private prosecution against journalist Karyn Maughan, alleging she made public his medical records, alleging they had been given to her by public prosecutor Billy Downer.
After the 1994 elections we got a flat together in then trendy Yeoville, Johannesburg, where artists, journalists and newly returned political exiles made for an intoxicatingly vibrant community. Our flat often became an impromptu jam session, a political debate club about whether the ANC was adopting the appropriate policies, or a poetry reading.
Our next-door neighbours were then ANC deputy general secretary Cheryl Carolus and her partner the late academic Graeme Bloch. I still feel guilty about regularly disrupting their peace. Value-based friendships transform us — for the good. Friendships that go across colour, religion, and the community one has grown up in, are rewarding, open one’s eyes to other cultures, religions, and languages, engender empathy for those who may on the face of it appear different, but who are not, and broaden one’s knowledge.
The ANC’s exclusion of minorities within the party and government, the increasing attacks on minorities by new Africanist and populist parties such as the EFF, has resulted in those communities feeling they are under attack and therefore seeking refuge in tribal laagers for protection, or withdrawing from public life to concentrate on family and “their” communities — undermining social cohesion.
Many ANC and Africanist political party leaders, members and supporters are increasingly seeing SA’s diversity not as a strength, fountain of ideas and resources, but as an obstacle. Living in the world’s most diverse country, and not having friendships that cut across all communities, is to miss out on so much.
Nevertheless, it is crucial that we regularly check up, catch up or message up on friends, even those who are merely acquaintances, or those we see occasionally, or those who were once close but faded because of distance, time and business. I am grateful for having had Pather during an important part of my life.
William Gumede is Associate Professor, School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, and author of Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg)
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.