I was first involved in the anti-apartheid movement in 1979 and increasingly after 1981 and protested regularly throughout the 1980's.
I met one of his daughters in a New York Cathedral back in the late 1980's. There was a huge inter-faith thing going on with Buddhists from Dharamsala and others. She was in her early twenties. Smart, passionate and eloquent. I was mid-twenties, a few years older.
I was passing through and Desmond was scheduled to make a speech so I made a point to to attend but he had, again, been arrested to stop him from travelling out of S. Africa and she was there in his stead.
She preluded his speech with an apology for his absence and the fact that we'd have to make do with her and quipped that, unfortunately, he couldn't be there because he'd been "unavoidably detained". Her humour was natural and well received.
She delivered his prepared speech and it was, as ever, profound, pointed, poignant, satirical, direct and incisive - and biting in its condemnation of the Apartheid regime and oppression and inequality wherever it occurs. She delivered it with aplomb.
Our meeting was brief and intense, an exchange of energy more than anything. We hugged and thanked each other sincerely.
Anyway, he's gone now. He was a good man.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
On the right, with fellow students on the editorial team of the student newspaper "Normalife", at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College in South Africa in the early 1950's. He graduated as a teacher in 1953.
Thank you for your contribution to this universe, Des!
Be nice to each other peeps.
Woof
