72: Trek
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
From W.B. E.C., Chicago, and Public Radio International, it's this American life, I'm Harvard Glass. Today on our program, the story of two Americans who went to South Africa, one's white, one's black, and they went there because there's something about South Africa, for them and for many Americans, something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time in a way that makes it mesmerizing. Robert Kennedy described this congruence of nations as well as anybody. In 1966, he was visiting South Africa and he began a speech at the University of Cape Town this way. I come here because of my deep interest, an affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British and at last independent, a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued but relations with whom remain a problem to this day, a land which was once the importer of slaves and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that form of bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America. It's done pause, before the audience begins applauding, I think it's so beautiful. More than England or France or Israel, more than Canada or Japan. When we think of South Africa, it is a more interesting mirror of the United States than there would be any country, I think because we glimpse a distant echo of the most frightening parts of our own country and the most inspiring parts. In the 1950s and 60s, Black South Africans looked to the U.S. for inspiration. Louis Nicosie looked in Sophia Town, he remembers reading American literature like Langston Hughes's "Simple Speaks His Mind". We used to laugh so much about what he was saying because he found it to us like this was to a Hanister and I'm listening to the music, the films like Tommy Wether, were these before us speaking for us. Harlem was like our neighborhood, Louis Nicosie says. Black South Africans and Sophia Town listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, tried to dress and talk like Lena Horan and Cap Callaway. In Sophia Town, gang members modeled themselves after Hollywood movies, dressed in zoot suits, picked up phrases from tough guy films like "Street With No Name". We wanted to, you know, to sound like Americans, to relate to American culture and we wanted also to fantasize about being Black Americans rather than Black South Africans because, you know, the intensification of sufferings in South Africa was just too great. Americans, it was a country where you have Edward Marshall working to eliminate a lot of the civil rights abuses and getting through integrators and so on. So, you know, so this was a movement in the opposite direction to where we were moving. Nations like men often march to the beach of different drummers and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important, however, is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom, toward justice for all. You must do this not because it is economically advantageous, although it is, not because the laws of God command it, although they do. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do. I'm looking through America as a land of hope. This is a cliche now, but I think we really did believe that. Now, of course, the situation is reversed. Once Nelson Mandela got out of prison and especially after he entered the president's office, it has been black Americans who looked to South Africa for inspiration. A few years ago, I did a series of stories for National Public Radio with a South African
Transcription truncated.