Green Shoots: Ordinary heroes shape our resistance today

There’s been a lot of debate about how we view those high profile figures who fought against apartheid. An excellent reflection by a blogger called Nco Dube challenged me to be more nuanced in how I regard our struggle heroes. They are mortals who are neither saint nor sinner, and even Nelson Mandela insisted that his legacy be subject to hard scrutiny and interrogation after he had gone. 

We have heroes for a reason. They offer us a glimpse into what is possible. They awaken in us the drive to do better.

The sporting antics of Simbine and Siya, of Gerda and Dijana, touch something in us that sparks hope. We rise to share the glory of their victories, releasing all sorts of happy hormones (or something) that invigorate us for the challenges that face us in our lives, and we feel we can conquer.

In that moment, our heroes can do no wrong. We choose to not see their flaws lest they diminish the inspiration they bring that we so deeply need.

But political heroes are different from the sporting icons. I guess it’s because back then their heroism in resisting the brutality of the apartheid overlords often involved a risk so much greater than which colour medal would be won.

Those acts of heroism were rooted in something so fundamental to our very existence – the type of society and political system that would govern us.  I think we need to amplify all the other stories of heroism that ordinary people have lived. In regaling colleagues about my unceremonious removal at gunpoint from the town of Alice in the early nineties by soldiers of erstwhile homeland dictator Oupa Gqozo, I realised that we are failing to recognise our own heroism and how that shapes the way we show up in today’s challenging world.

It is the little acts of kindness we showed years ago that become the basis for a disposition of kindness today. It is the courage many showed to reject the apartheid status quo and its gradations of trappings that our refusal to accept rubbish politicians today is located.

We must recognise the hero in ourselves when we believe that something better is possible for our families and communities, in defiance of the doom and gloom of a system that tells us to accept that this is the way things are. We didn’t accept apartheid’s imposition of second class status then. That heroic refusal must find stronger expression today to inspire us to resist. 

So as I write this I am reminded of some the ordinary heroes I know and the things they did back then. My oldest friend at university in the eighties would have none of the endless stand-offs between students wanting to march off campus in protest against states of emergency and the like, and police who simply formed an impassable cordon of batons and shields on Jan Smuts Avenue.

I’d spot him weaving his way through the singing masses to the front of the phalanx from where he would hurl rocks at the police, prompting pandemonium as teargas guns were fired and we ran for our lives. Of course, he had strategically retreated to a sanctuary somewhere knowing what was coming.

I remember my brother who joined a protest march in Joburg, but after a night on the town. He sought refuge from the sun and went to lie down under a tree, but the comrades would have none of it and lifted him in solidarity to carry on the protest. All he wanted was a few minutes' respite from his revolutionary labours.

And my comrades in deep underground mode organising meetings of Soweto’s most wanted young lions in a school classroom. While these secret meetings were happening, other comrades who might have regarded themselves as men of action attacked the cops with stones, drawing a full-scale assault on the very school hosting the fugitive activists.

We realised then the importance of aligning strategy and tactics. There’s a hero in all of us who refuses to accept that things have to be this way. Let’s tell those stories of our past, and let’s share the stories of today that can inspire a different way of being.