Veteran remembers Madiba
AS A young activist in the underground, Swaminathan Gounden was among a small group in Durban assigned to carry messages to Nelson Mandela when he was in the city secretly.
Now 90, the Struggle veteran paid tribute to Mandela on his birth centenary on Wednesday, remembering some of the times their paths had crossed.
Gounden recalled that one of Mandela’s hiding places was a flat belonging to a doctor in Old Dutch Road.
“His surgery was near the Ahmedia School. The doctor was a communist,” he said. “MP Naicker, our secretary, carried the message into the house while I waited outside.”
In a speech for delivery at the Phoenix Settlement, where Mahatma Gandhi had once lived and worked, Gounden said the second incident he remembered was when Mandela was having dinner at the home of then Drum journalist, GR Naidoo.
“Very few people were allowed into that. I was not one of those joining Madiba in the dinner. There was GR and his wife, and I think IC Meer and Dr Monty Naicker.
“The third occasion was 20 years ago. The ANC invited my late wife and I to Madiba’s 80th birthday and sent us tickets. That was very special to be at close quarters with him.”
Gounden said: “Whatever our race, class, faith, ethnic or geographic origins, we share a common love and reverence for Madiba.
“Our country could so easily have been engulfed in flames, our people could so easily have been torn apart. Madiba and the golden generation he represents welded a nation out of a deeply divided country. We owe them as a collective, a deep debt of gratitude.”
Gounden, who as a young man was also tasked with buying lunch for noted ANC president Albert Luthuli, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, whenever he was in Durban, said that just as Gandhi “was an imperfect man seeking to perfect the human condition”, Mandela himself had said he was not a saint, but a sinner who kept on trying.
“At the heart of that ultimate perfection lies the quest for peace,” he said. “Without peace there is no progress.”
And at a time when society is being threatened by racism, he urged people to heed Mandela’s words and actions.
“Through activism we must destroy greed, thoughtlessness, selfishness, racism and such negative values. There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”