University of the Witwatersrand: Don’t let firm friendships from your youth fade away

The heartbreakingly sudden passing of my late teenage and undergraduate university period friend Nazeem Pather made me think of the critical importance of holding on to healthy friendships, when busy divergent career paths, family building and the artificial intimacy of technology often make it difficult to hold on to meaningful bonds forged early in life.

One’s focus on one’s own life, can often prevent one from staying actively in touch with those of the past. For another, many with life partners, often wrongly, disconnect with value-based friendships, as they only prioritise the friendship of their partners.

Yet, healthy friendships in which there are an alignment of values, help bring meaning, sense of belonging and love to life in an increasingly cut-throat, ever-changing, and complex world, 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 that enforced social isolation of Covid-19 lockdowns brought to many, damaging their physical and mental health, has underscored the importance of connectivity with friends, family, neighbours, and workplace colleagues. Regrettably, the past few years, I have only sporadically stayed in touch with Pather.

Although 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 fee powerless. It feels that a part of one’s past – an important part – have 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 on the face of it, 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.

In the early nineties he was among the first cohort of black journalists who joined the then predominantly white audience Radio South Africa, which was later renamed SAfm. Very few now remember, the personal struggles of this group as they were pilloried by white Radio South Africa 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 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, although not exclusively so. In segregated late 1980s, black the Galaxy and Base night clubs were for us, like for many black youngsters, firm favourites. The Showmax Cape Flats neo-noir murder mystery, Skemerdans, released last year, was filmed largely Galaxy, open in 1978, and the longest-running black club in Cape Town.

Our friendship was cemented because both of us, unusually 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 dealing 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 then 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, were increasingly imbibing the toxic culture of parts of the exile ANC, discouraging different views, demanding unquestionable ideological conformity, and electing leaders whose only competency were shouting “radical” slogans.

He was terribly distressed, not only for my sake, but because of rising intolerance in the late 80s and early 90s student movement, when some students at the University of the Western Cape, opposed to 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 then still to come post-apartheid South Africa 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 march against me to the offices of The Star newspaper, after I criticised mushrooming corruption, non-merit-based appointments to the public service and SOEs and poor policy decisions, by the new democratic government. Pather wondered aloud whether our worse fears, the ANC government silencing black critics, to silence them, covering the public sphere in a veil of silence, which would in turn allow corruption, appointment of individuals based on struggle credentials only and not competence, and the adoption of poorly thought policies were being realised.

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 R20million, 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, has initiated a private prosecution against journalist Karyn Maughan, alleging she made public his medical record, after she, he alleged was given it 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, political debate club about whether the ANC was adopting the appropriate policies or poetry reading.

Our next-door neighbour were then ANC deputy general secretary Cheryl Carolus and her partner the late academic Graeme Bloch. I still feel guilty about so regularly at the time for depriving them on occasions of a good night’s sleep.

Value-based friendships transforms us – for the good. Friendships that go across colour, religion, and the community own has grown up in, are rewarding, open one’s eyes to other cultures, religions, languages, and food. It engenders empathy for those who may on the face of it appear different, but who are not. It broadens 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, have resulted in many in these 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.

Many ANC and Africanist political party leaders, members and supporters are increasingly seeing South Africa’s diversity not as a strength, fount of ideas and resources, but as an obstacle. Living in the world’s most diverse country, and not have 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 closed but faded because of distant, time and busyness. I am grateful for having had Pather during an important part of my life.