Achmat Dangor

Jansie Kotze and Ruth Harris

As director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, a member of a stalwart ANC family and a widely read author, one would assume that it must be fairly difficult for Achmat Dangor not to sound like he is name-dropping when talking about his life. Yet he manages to make his life sound remarkably low-key — even boring.

Our interview at his Northern Suburbs home is made awkward by circumstances beyond our control. Dangor had forgotten about the interview, arriving just as we had given up on him. His house is being renovated, and as he excuses himself after an interruption from his cellphone, we hear that his mother is sick in hospital.

He admits reluctantly (and calmly) to being passionate about life, language, humans, and politics. He is a small and shy man who lets one slowly and reluctantly into an Aladdin’s Cave about his ancestors. His history is a rich and dramatic one and in typical South African fashion the improbable facts are somewhat stranger than fiction.

Achmat’s seemingly diverse passion for politics and writing could be explained by his family’s chequered history. His father was born in Amsterdam on the border of the old Transvaal, the son of a Dutchman and a Cape Malay woman. His father could speak no less than 13 languages.

Dangor Jnr paints a romantic figure of a wily pirate. To survive the stark African war-torn landscape Dangor Snr became a black marketer during World War II. Ferrying white sugar and flour into Swaziland and selling it at inflated prices, he became a rich man but his children were never to enjoy the fruits of their father’s labour. He vowed that he would spend all his money before he was 50 — his children should make their own money. He was even more successful in reaching his goal when he managed to spend all his money by the time he was 40. The affection that which Dangor holds for his father, and the humour with which he portrays it are openly on display in a little chuckle that escapes from his chest. The emotional distance between this laughter bears witness to the likelihood that his father has become like a character in one of his own colourful tales.

He laughs indulgently at his father’s untimely but (as he seems to indicate with a mischievous expression) highly appropriate death. While walking home from his mistress’s house (“which one, I don’t know”) he was knocked over by an ambulance. Spurred on by his irreverent tone, we ask whether either he or any of his siblings has mistresses, to which he calmly replies: “Children seem to be more conservative than their parents — I see that in my children.”

Dangor’s life has always been informed by the politics of the country. His Cape Malay mother made her nine children acutely aware of the moral repugnance of apartheid in spite of his father’s impartial stance. The influence was not lost on Achmat and while he insists that he prefers to see South Africa without political cataracts, most of his life has been managed and decided by politics.

Although Achmat grew up in an Afrikaans home, he vowed never to use the language as a written medium again after the security police of the Afrikaans apartheid government burnt all of his work while he was being detained in 1977. (He recently wrote a part of his Writers’ Debate Contribution in Afrikaans at the request of Etienne van Heerden — his first attempt in more than 20 years.)

“I gave up (writing in Afrikaans) in 1977 for political reasons, or so I thought at the time,” he says, “but now it feels as though it was for other reasons. When I switched over to English a whole new world opened up as I did not have access to the Afrikaans publishing structures.”

Although Dangor was never forced into exile he was detained several times. In 1973 he was banned by the South African government which effectively meant he could not see more than two people at a time and he was forbidden to write. Dangor views this as an ironically positive step as he could concentrate on his writing without any disturbances and when the ban ended in 1979, he immediately set out to publish his work.

However, in 1983 he fell ill with Hodgkin disease. (The disease is currently in remission.) At the time he was employed at Revlon as a packaging engineer, designing lipstick cases even though he held a BA degree in literature from Rhodes.

“This was a perfect opportunity to continue writing since the security police would not dream of raiding Revlon’s offices for political documents.” Revlon sent him to London to be treated, after a South African hospital inserted a toxic injection into his tissue rather than into a vein.

This life-saving move on the part of Revlon might be part of the reason why Dangor refuses to be drawn into making light of designing packaging for make-up while his comrades were mapping the revolution. He claims to be uncertain whether he ever was a communist. “If I had any communist aspirations, Rhodes certainly cured me.”

Although lonely and cold in London, he considered emigrating from South Africa for the first and only time.

“I saw a different world. For the first time I lived in the open freely. I had to go for treatment every second day and wrote for about 12 hours per day. I couldn’t stop writing,” he reminisces.

It soon became clear to him by “both default and design” that he couldn’t remain in the UK permanently. “I came back for practical and emotional reasons. The British government wouldn’t have given me asylum as I was in London for economic rather than political reasons. And the politics of South Africa were starting to change — there was a different dynamic.”

And then there was the weather. As for many other South Africans, the dark enclaving light of London got to him. “I wouldn’t be able to live in that dark world. The light in Africa  ...” To illustrate his point, he recalls smilingly that he had to phone his wife who was recently visiting Scotland to describe the sunset from his Parktown stoep. “I never call it a verandah — it’s a stoep.”

There is tension when he compares his present home with the home he left behind in the township of Nuclear outside Johannesburg. He shrugs off the fact that some of his family members claim he has disowned them by living in a previously exclusively white suburb. “I miss the township, the colour, but it is a hard life, difficult, there is a lot of crime. It is easier to live in Parkview than in Nuclear. I don’t want to romanticise the township.”

His preoccupation with space could have stemmed from growing up as part of a big family in a small home. “As one of nine children, the moment you find space you grab it,” he explains.

Dangor seems to have made peace with his roots and his country. He shrugs when asked about allegations of corruption in the ANC and admits that our juvenile democracy has its faults. The South African system lends itself to corruption because we have a political system built on compromise.

He looks taken aback and slightly irritated when asked about allegations of corruption within the administration of the Nelson Mandela Children Fund. “I would speak out if money was being mismanaged. There is a vociferous, small minority that are closed-minded that has said: ’I will not give the new SA a chance.’”

Dangor seems to be convinced that everyone has the strength of character to resist illegal monetary gain when no-one is looking. He speaks of the secret police trying to buy him while he was a very poor student. He was working at the International Race Relations in Port Elizabeth while studying in Grahamstown. A policeman who knew of his involvement with the Black Thoughts Organisation approached him with a lucrative offer: if he became an informer, his university fees would be paid in full, and a governmental position would be guaranteed once he had completed his degree. The officer held a banning order threateningly in his face while making the offer. But for Dangor there was no hesitation in making the decision (“I can’t be bought”) and the banning order was summarily served.

Dangor claims that while “we” have achieved what we fought for, there still is a lot to be done. As the director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund he raises funds, designs programmes and distributes the money to the needy. His spare time is consumed almost solely by writing. His relationship with writing seems almost pathological “and very organic” as he claims: “I write because I love it and I have to.” Even his temperament seems to lend itself to that of an artist’s. He claims not to be moody and difficult per se, but often goes on lonely walks, or to the gym, and “I drink a lot  ... of tea,” he adds mischievously.

Compared to pre-1994, his problems now are dismal, trying to write as much as possible without neglecting his wife and family. He has two grown-up children from his first marriage. “When my family get together, we speak Afrikaans; the only problem is that my wife is Scottish and cannot understand Afrikaans. We met in Scotland.” But those are “personal struggles” — and he draws the curtain over his privacy.

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