The leaders of the African freedom struggle will always want the struggle to continue. For them, it means travelling around on first-class tickets and being given VIP treatment wherever they go. So when people talk to me about South Africa, I say:

“Our Heads of State, how do they dare talk about South Africa? South Africa? What? What about South Africa?”

We all agree that South Africa is a fascist, anti-Black, white supremacist régime. We all know that. But analyse the question well. Ask youself this: are the so-called independent states of Africa any better than the apartheid régime in South Africa?

And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

Some of you may have come across relatives or neighbors who have lost their memory, through either senility or a traumatic experience. They simply cannot connect anything to anything. They don’t even remember their own children and relatives or their past interactions with them. They have no stable reference point. To a smaller or greater degree, an entire people can also suffer the collective loss of memory. I am sure there are members of the young generation who don’t believe that soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, otherwise known as the Mau Mau, made guns in their factories in the mountains.

Colonial education and related practices tried to induce collective amnesia about Africa, about its technology and innovation.

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.

One morning Breyten spoke to us: “You need nobody’s permission to join the struggle. Guilt feelings and self-flagellation are self-indulgent sentiments, but understanding of responsibilities gets you moving. It is in walking that you learn how to walk. Watch out for the exultation of the camel-hair shirt. Clean out the cellars, watch out for the corruption of suffering, of self-pity. Don’t go and sell yourselves as brave warriors. To be against apartheid is not heroic, it’s normal.”