I wanted to wait until later on when I'd had some time to reflect on what it meant to me that Mandela had died.
I was raised by a very socially conscious mother, and it's only now that I begin to realise why she is the way she is and was the way she was. I didn't know she grew up poor, and that her parents and older brother picked strawberries in the Fraser Valley as day workers when she was a child, and she was left to look after her 7 year old sister. Mom was 12. Our house boycotted South African wines, California grapes...I was a really voracious and precocious reader/devourer of information about the world as a kid. When my mother informed a waiter that no, thank you, they would NOT like one of the special bottles of genuine Johannesburg Riesling that the restaurant had acquired, I needed to know why. My mother told me about apartheid, and about Nelson Mandela. It made me cry, because I was THAT kid.
I remember when the Sun City concerts were attracting such controversy in the 80s, and I remember the boycott song that was recorded, too, by artists who "ain't gonna play Sun City!" I don't remember where I was, but I remember the fierce joy I felt in hearing the news that he was walking away from Robben Island a free man, who preached reconciliation and peaceful, EQUAL coexistence after 27 years of oppression and imprisonment. I reflected today while I was talking to the woman next to me at the pedicure barn. (Because yes, I'm that woman; I talk to strangers. On buses, in bank lineups, at the grocery store...) There are generational defining moments, I know..
Where were you when you heard the war (whichever one it was that impacted YOUR life somehow) was over?
Where were you when you heard that JFK/MLK/Bobby Kennedy/Ronald Reagan/John Lennon had been shot?
Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down?
Where were you when the Twin Towers came down?
Where were you when you heard Pope John Paul II had died?
And now...where were you when you heard that Nelson Mandela had died?
