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She worked up to 20 hours a day as a nurse to support her family, and still managed to be a mother to young ANC students in London
Adelaide Tambo was a doughty mother who served the struggle for liberation, writes Chris Barron.
Soon after arriving in London in 1960 to join her husband Oliver, who had left South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre to lead the ANC in exile, Adelaide Tambo began house-hunting.
She and her three young children had been hastily put up in an empty barn of a house — “this miserable house”, she called it — in Finchley; it had clearly not been occupied since at least World War Two .
It was early winter and too cold to sleep or bath upstairs. Instead, Adelaide and the children washed in a basin and bedded down on the floor in the lounge, which at least had the advantage of a fireplace. There was so much damp around, however, that when she got the fire going, water would ooze from the walls.
Her need for more suitable accommodation was dire. W ithout Oliver to help her, she scanned the newspapers for advertisements and made calls from the corner telephone booth.
She quickly established that racism was not confined to South Africa.
“In England in those days, where there were empty flats there were notices on the window: ‘To let — no Irish, no blacks, no dogs,’ ” she said 40 years later.
She saw a flat advertised in Golders Green and the agent arranged for someone to show her around.
“I thought it was the answer. I phoned the agent. She hadn’t seen me but had been told I wasn’t white.
“She pushed up the price from £7 to £12 a week.” Adelaide said she still wanted it.
“Are you coloured?” she was asked.
“No,” she replied. “I’m an African.”
The agent persisted. “Are you black?”
“Yes,” said Adelaide. “Very black.”
“Are you black like a West Indian, or have you got more of an olive colour? Can you pass as someone from the Continent?”
“No,” replied Adelaide. “I’m very black.”
“I’m sorry,” said the agent. “I can’t help you.”
Adelaide Tambo was a determined, obstinate, take-no-prisoners kind of person who refused to feel sorry for herself or allow circumstances to get on top of her. She was guided by what she believed was right and never wavered from the direction given by her unerring moral compass.
An example of this was in 1995 when she led 11 members out of the ANC Women’s League because she had moral qualms about the leadership of its president — and her one-time friend — Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
Adelaide was 30 when she left South Africa for Swaziland in July 1960, disguised as a Swazi peasant . From there she and the children were taken to Botswana and then flown to Katanga province in the Congo. Katanga leader Moise Tshombe had seceded from Patrice Lumumba’s Congo republic, and as her Dakota landed, it was surrounded by soldiers .
Typically, she was keen to confront them, but the pilot pleaded with her to let him handle the situation. “Anything can happen. You can be shot, bayoneted, stabbed with a knife. Whatever happens, please do not fight back.”
She and the children were placed under arrest until Tshombe decided what to do with them. At 3am she was told she could continue her journey to Ghana.
She’d been told that Oliver would be waiting for her there, but when she arrived she was told he had left for London. When she got to London she was told he had gone to the United Nations in New York.
For the next 30 years she saw very little of him, and even on the rare and hurried occasions he was able to pop in, the constant presence of his entourage and demands on his attention made it virtually impossible for them to be alone as a family.
In a rare fit of anger she told him that he must rather stay at a hotel than at home because his visits were disruptive.
She worked anything from 12 to 20 hours a day as a nurse to support her family, and still managed to be a mother to young ANC students — the future President Thabo Mbeki among them — passing through London, needing to be fed, comforted and advised.
After a Peeping Tom broke into her property while she was on night shift, she decided that her children needed more care than she could give them, and approached the British Defence and Aid Fund for money to send them to expensive boarding schools.
The fund was reluctant, but she insisted. “I was damned if my children would have anything but the best in this country,” she told Oliver’s biographer, Luli Callinicos.
She was equally damned if she would let them be the butt of racial insults.
When her son Dali phoned her in a state after a racial incident at school, she went straight from her night shift to confront the headmaster and didn’t let the matter drop until he had made a public apology at school assembly, with her looking on.
Another incident that demonstrated her sometimes impulsive, derring- do attitude to misfortune was when there was a fire at her home. She immediately knotted some sheets and jumped out of the window. The knots didn’t hold and she fell to the ground, suffering fractures to her legs and hip.
She had to undergo serious surgery and her injuries contributed to the rheumatoid arthritis that plagued her in later life.
By the time she got to England, Adelaide was already a seasoned fighter.
Born in Vereeniging on July 18 1929, she was 10 when she witnessed her frail grandfather being roughly manhandled by white policemen after a riot in which a policeman had been killed.
She vowed then that she would do whatever it took to overthrow apartheid.
At the age of 15 she tried to join the ANC, but was told she was too young. Instead she made herself useful as a courier.
As a 17-year-old schoolgirl at Orlando High in Soweto, she was chosen to be a speaker at the launch of a new branch of the ANC Youth League. Her fellow speaker got an attack of nerves and withdrew, but Adelaide, remembered even at that age as being confident, assertive and determined, made a great impression on the president of the ANCYL, Oliver Tambo.
They met and began a long correspondence that eventually led to them going out together . On their first date Adelaide laid down the ground rules of exactly what Oliver could and couldn’t do with her.
In 1956 they married, but it was touch and go because, a couple of weeks before the wedding, Oliver was arrested along with other ANC leaders on charges of high treason.
After school Adelaide went to a teaching hospital in Pretoria to train as a nurse, and started a branch of the ANCYL at a nursing home.
In 1989, in London, Adelaide was called to the phone; it was Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, saying that Oliver had had a stroke and would be flown to London in mining magnate Tiny Rowland’s jet. She must have an ambulance ready to rush him to hospital, Kaunda said .
Rowland was a great friend of Kaunda’s and through him became a friend of the Tambos. When they returned to South Africa in December 1990, he made them a present of his mansion in Sandhurst, Johannesburg, which is where Adelaide lived until her death. Oliver died in 1993.
Adelaide became a member of the National Assembly in 1994, resigning after her first five-year term.
She continued her life of public service , however, working with the aged and with physically handicapped children — the “differently abled”, as she called them — in Soweto.
She was given the Order of the Baobab in Gold in 2002, and the Order of Simon of Cyrene, the highest order in the Anglican church for distinguished service by lay people.
Adelaide dressed regally — celebrated Derber’s couturier Eric Pugin made her dresses — but never let her huge fame and stature go to her head.
The only thing that went there were the flamboyant headdresses that she loved so much and carried off so easily at charity events where her presence was always considered a great coup by the organisers.
She remained gracious, dignified, warm, friendly, approachable and generous (she seldom allowed visitors, even journalists, to leave her home without a gift) to the end.
Adelaide Tambo died at home on Wednesday evening of a suspected heart attack. She was 77 years old.
1 comment:
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callie
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