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To Show Your Best at Your Worst

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 peer deep into the souls of his fellow workers and learn the secrets of their worth. He was a payroll clerk but he knew he was worth more than that, so there came a time – I was still very young – when he left his job and did what I would one day aspire to do as well: he became an entrepreneur. I never found out the nature of the business he started, but I do know that it was a disaster. We romanticise failure in the lore of the entrepreneur, as if it is a test of strength, a trial by combat, a valley of darkness that must be crossed on the pathway to the promised land. ‘Fail again. Fail better!’ we say, quoting Samuel Beckett. Or Thomas Alva Edison, who said that he had not failed 10 000 times, he had just found 10 000 ways that did not work. But the truth is, there is no romance in failure. All the more so when you have mouths to feed, when you are already living a life of struggle, when you have given up your steady job to chase a dream, only to watch it slowly crashing to the ground.

I remember sitting at home, watching my father reading the newspaper, with a pen in his hand, making red circles on pages dense with type. It was only much later that I realised he was looking for a job in the classified ads. He had bonded our house to start his business, and one of the things he bought was a Nissan Skyline, a shining symbol, perhaps, of his belief that the sky was the limit to what he could achieve. He couldn’t keep up the payments, so the bank took the car. Then they wanted the house too. But my dad had a boss who wouldn’t let the sheriff in. He was called Boss, his massive German shepherd, who would bark and show his fangs whenever the officer of the law arrived at the gate, papers in hand. As a safety measure, Mom sent us to live with our grandmother. We were a house divided. My father, the protector, the provider, with his big, strong hands, was now, in effect, an exile from his own family. My mother forbade us to see him, but we would sneak across to visit on the way home from school.

Then, one day, my grandmother turned 60. We had a party at her house, and of course, my dad was invited. It was good to see him. He looked happy. I was thirteen and eager to show him some of the moves I’d been practising – the kicks, strikes, and blocks that make up the ritual of the kata, the physical and spiritual lexicon of karate. He wasn’t just my father. He was my Sensei, my teacher. We ate lunch, we sang ‘Happy Birthday’, we cut the cake. Then, because it had been a good party, the liquor ran out. My father offered to walk to the local tavern and pick some up. I knew his real motive. Even at the age of 41, he didn’t want to be seen smoking in front of his mother. She disapproved of his habit. So did he, to tell the truth, but out in the street, he could light up and puff away without feeling too bad about it.

My father was a walk-and-talk kind of guy. A simple stroll to the shop could take him half the day, because he would stop and talk to people he knew, and stop and talk to people he didn’t know, and wave at neighbours and at people in passing taxis. He wasn’t famous, he was better than that: he was known. So we didn’t worry when he took his time getting the liquor and making his way back to the house. Then we got worried. We called him on his cellphone. No answer. To this day, I don’t know the truth of what happened. Nobody does, least of all the police, who never opened a case, never filed a docket, never made an arrest.

But the story seems to be that he walked into the shop, and someone took his cellphone, and there was a scuffle. He knew how to fight, but during the scuffle he was stabbed in the back. When he turned around, he was shot, nine times at close range.

That is not how I wish to remember my father. The abiding image, the imprint that is fixed in my mind, is of him sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, not the Skyline, but a humble VW Golf, his hands gripping the wheel, as if he was ready to go on a journey, looking me in the eye and saying, ‘Look after your mother, okay?’

In 2017 my wife gave birth to a son, our third child and second boy. I held him in my arms, my grip tender yet strong, in the way a father learns to do, because children are so fragile. He cried to the heavens. His name is Um­nqobi; it means ‘conqueror’. The conqueror of my heart, the conqueror of my soul. The line that connects us is the line that connects me to my father, and him to his father, and all of us to each other, because we all make the same cry when we are born.

That day, I sat at the coffee table with Nelson Mandela at my side, and I asked him, finally, if I could ask him a question. He seemed a little surprised to hear me speak, but he leaned in closer. I had thought about my question a lot. It wasn’t the most original question in the world, nor was it the most profound. But I asked it anyway.

‘Mr Mandela,’ I said, ‘what is your dream for South Africa?’ He nodded to himself, his warm smile giving way to a look of deep, furrowed concentration. I had the feeling that he had thought a lot about this question too. And then he said, ‘South Africans need a little bit of faith. My hope is that they can have just a bit more faith, in themselves and in this country.’

He spoke of hope, because hope works harder than a dream, because hope rolls up its sleeves and gets down to business. But he spoke of faith too, because faith is the ability to trust the unknown, to believe in the impossible, to see the invisible. And faith is knowing, whatever or whoever you may believe in, wherever you may come from or where you are going to, that the invisible keeps an eye on us too.