Tea and biscuits with Nelson Mandela;
the quest for the ultimate truth; and
the day my father walked to the tavern
I stood in the study, alone with the beating of my heart and the clink of a fine china teacup on a trembling saucer. I gazed out of the panoramic picture window at the rush of the fountain, and the fat koi in the fish pond, like darting rainbows in the ripple of the sun.
There were books all around me, an army of warriors bearing words that were mightier than the sword. I tilted my head up to read the titles. Tomes of the law, bound in leather and embossed with gold leaf; biographies of heroes, conquerors, world changers; classics of literature and philosophy; sacred handbooks of political and economic thought. But all I could think of at that moment was: I’m hungry.
I had caught a taxi from Wattville early in the morning and walked the five kilometres from Joburg to the mansion in this quiet garden suburb. On a side plate on a silver tray that rested on the coffee table was an artful arrangement of Eet-Sum-Mor biscuits. The little squares resembled petals waiting to be plucked. We were often short of bread at home, but we were never short of shortbread. That was the one culinary luxury of my childhood, a teatime treat whose very name seemed to echo my desire, on the brink of adulthood, to make something more, more, more out of my life.
I reached for an Eet-Sum-Mor and put it to my mouth. It hovered in my hand. My mother, who had insisted I wear my school uniform, even though it was a school holiday, had sent me off to my meeting with three very strict instructions: look smart; sound intelligent; don’t embarrass me.
Her great fear was that I would bring shame, not to myself, but to her as the head of the household and, by extension, to the street, the township, and the entire community with whom she had been sharing her motherly pride. If I crunched on the Eet-Sum-Mor, or even if I dipped it into my tea to soften it, there was a good chance that I would be caught with a spluttering mouthful of crumbs at the most inopportune moment, and I was already sweaty and nervous enough. So I put the biscuit back on the plate. I could hear footsteps coming down the corridor – a distinctive gait, sure and firm, with a slight after-shuffle. And then the voice, deep and rich, with a crackle of laughter as warm as a blazing log fire. He walked into the room. I knew from the photographs that he was a big man. I did not know that he was a giant. He stood and looked at me, and he opened his arms – they had the span of wings. ‘My son,’ he said. ‘Come here.’
I instinctively touched the knot of my tie – look smart, sound intelligent, don’t embarrass me – and I walked towards him with my hand outstretched. He brushed it away and embraced me in a hug. I could feel the tears welling up and it was too late to stop them streaming down my face. In that moment, he was my father, he was every father, he was the living link between a seventeen-year-old schoolboy and the history of his country, between the struggle and the dawn of freedom. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said, and in the study of his home in Houghton, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela gestured for me to take a seat at the coffee table.
I am a speaker. It’s a big part of what I do for a living. I can stand on a stage anywhere in the world, and I can play an audience like an orchestra. I can sway them into contemplative silence; I can stir them into gusts of laughter; I can dazzle them with facts and figures that will shift the way they look at the world. I am schooled in the canons of rhetoric, the template for persuasive speech proposed by the Roman orator Cicero: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. I am practised in the methods of persuasion, as elucidated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle: ethos, the appeal to ethics; pathos, the appeal to emotion; logos, the appeal to logic and reason. ‘Loquor, ergo sum’, as one might put it in Latin. I speak, therefore I am.
Once, I delivered a talk in Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, after which the then prime minister, John Howard, said to me, ‘You speak like a rock star.’ So I took that to heart, and with all due grace and humility, used it to promote my business: Vusi Thembekwayo, the Rock Star of Public Speaking.
But on that day, in that chair, in that room, I was speechless. I knew that I would never be as powerful, as eloquent, as persuasive a speaker as the old man sitting next to me. I pictured him as the young lawyer, standing in the well of the courtroom defending his clients before the judge. I pictured him as Accused Number 1, standing in the dock defending the ideal for which he hoped to live, and for which he was prepared to die. I pictured him standing on the steps of Cape Town City Hall, on that February day in 1990, declaring himself to be not a prophet, but a humble servant of the people. And here he was, by my side, free at last from the demands of the Presidency, lifting the plate and insisting that I help myself to another Eet-Sum-Mor. How could I refuse?
‘They tell me that you are a speaker,’ he said, looking me straight in the eye. ‘But you don’t do much speaking.’ He looked stern, disapproving, headmasterly. And then he chuckled, and he was Madiba once again. I had a question I wanted to ask him, just one question, so I could sound intelligent and justify my being in the same room as him, a schoolboy from Benoni High, whose only claim to fleeting celebrity was that he had won a prize at the World Championship of Public Speaking. It flattered me to know that Nelson Mandela knew of my achievement, that he knew I was a speaker, even if I was offering him very little evidence to prove it. But I wondered if he knew of my other story, and if that was the reason for the solace of the hug he had given me. I wondered if he knew the story of my father.
My father’s name was Vusumuzi Nathaniel Thembekwayo. I bear a variant of the first part of his name: Vusi. My brother bears the other part: Muzi. My father said we would be joined by his name, we would each be a pillar of strength for the other. To him, fatherhood was the power of presence. There were five of us in the house, three biological siblings and two cousins, whom I call my brother and sister. My father would be there for us, a giant of a man with big, strong hands, butcher’s hands, hands that would comfort you, pat you on the back, clasp your hand in his with a warmth and a force of life that could bind two hearts in one.
My father was a fighter. Not of the streets, but of the dojo, where he practised the Way of the Empty Hand, a form of full-contact karate called Kyokushin, which means ‘the quest for the ultimate truth’.
Kyokushin karate was founded by a man named Masutatsu Oyama, a Korean-Japanese Sosai, or Great Master, who introduced the practice of tameshiwari – stone-breaking – into modern karate. Oyama reasoned that if he could smash blocks of stone into fragments, using his hands as sledgehammers, he could find the strength of body, mind and spirit to not only defeat his opponents, but to rise above his own fears and failings.
I would go with my father to the dojo, where we would train together, me shadowing his movements, the slow, lyrical turns, the sharp, sudden strikes, like a sapling in the shade of an oak. We would listen to the legends of the Great Master, how at the age of 23 he had retreated into the mountains, where he would shatter trees into splinters, meditate for hours under icy waterfalls, press twice his body weight hundreds of times a day. In later years, when he had long proved himself invincible in competition, he became famous for his ability to kill a bull with a single blow, a feat that earned him the nickname of Kami no te: the Hand of God.
Like my father, I have a black belt in Kyokushin, and the lesson I have learnt, the maxim that has stayed with me, is show your best at your worst. Follow through. Make the blows land. Carry on fighting, even when you are wounded and tired.
My father was a fighter. He left school with nothing more than a Junior Certificate, what used to be called a Standard Six. His father, my grandfather, who ran a small spaza shop and shebeen, believed that was enough schooling to make him a man. My father grew up in a house with ten siblings. He was expected to go out and work. He found a job in a Kwikot factory, working on the production line, moulding metal into heat pumps and geysers. After work, he would go to the dojo, and then, when his father thought he was hanging out with friends, he would go to night school at St Anthony’s Education Centre in Boksburg to study for his matric. It was the opposite of playing hooky.
He got his Senior Certificate, and a better job at General Electric, where he was granted the power to