1 Boring Old Man

It’s been quite a couple of weeks. The newshound I live with has had the Kennedy retrospectives and now the Mandela retrospectives running in the background almost constantly. It’s interesting to see so much footage of events that I was around for, and remember what those times felt like long before history had them organized. In my mind, the two stories run together because they were woven into the identity crisis of this young Southerner who was waking up in our Civil Rights Movement and seeing my own world more clearly. In those days, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country was as much a part of our reading as the speeches of MLK or JFK. It was a time when dichotomies like Segregation, Apartheid, Communism, were just the order of things. What I don’t recall then was knowing how anything was going to play out. If you had told me when Mandela was arrested and Kennedy was killed in 1963 that within fifty years, Mandela would be President of South Africa and we would have an African American President in the US, I can’t imagine what I might have thought. And yet both of those events were part of what followed.

There was a segment on the place of music in the story of South Africa’s liberation. That’s part of what I remember. In 1990, shortly around the time of Mandela’s release, Paul Simon’s Graceland tour came to town. I’m not much of a concert type, but we had the best seats in the house for that one. Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo stole the show – ending with Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika – an all time musical high point. Since then, I’ve been to Africa and seen the progress, and the many miles still ahead. For that matter, I don’t have to drive too far from home to see some of those same contrasts – less stark perhaps, but enough to still matter. Our history seems to guide us and haunt us simultaneously. JFK and Nelson Mandela were contemporaries, born a year apart and taken off the stage in the prime of life fifty years ago. Remarkably, one of them got to come back.