Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Celebrating the woman who ‘smelt’ books
Sixty-seven years ago this week, Helen Keller, the famous blind and deaf American woman, visited South Africa. PATRICK COYNE, then a young student-teacher at the Wittebome School for the Deaf in Cape Town (later re-named Lourdes Dominican School for the D
HELEN Keller first turned her thoughts to South Africa in 1931 when she met well-known South African worker for the blind and the deaf, Rev Arthur Blaxall, on his visit to New York.
She wrote these prophetic words for him to take home: “Who can doubt that the people of South Africa will see to it that every handicapped fellowcreature is given a chance in life if they are shown the way? They are a strong, adventurous nation. Back of them is a past of difficulties splendidly overcome.
“I am familiar with the writings of Olive Schreiner, and they made me see and feel the spirit that developed a new country. I know it is a land with resources sufficient unto the building of a great future.
“Before it are ethical adventures as glorious and wonderful as any the pioneers wrought – the rehabilitation of human beings with broken faculties and hindered lives.”
Some 22 years later, Blaxall, then chairperson of the South African National Council for the Blind and of the National Council for the Deaf, was able to arrange Keller’s 1951 lecture tour of South Africa.
The tour was intended to raise funds and awareness regarding the deaf and blind of all races. Keller was well aware that a country three years into apartheid posed challenges.
She wrote after the tour: “All my life I had acted upon the conviction that humanity must be one, but how could I count with certainty on gratifying results in a country like South Africa, divided against itself ?
“A spur to my courage was reading Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography and the book Gandhi at Work, both of which I read in Braille. Gandhi knew well the problems of South Africa and the sturdy philosophy and fraternal love that infuses these extraordinarily inspiring books braced me for the peculiar difficulties I was to encounter.”
Keller’s Cape Town visit was extensive and successful. Her companion and interpreter, Polly Thompson, was always at hand to describe to Keller in lightning-fast finger spelling all that was happening around them. Everywhere she went huge crowds flocked to welcome her, many of whom were either blind or deaf.
She later wrote: “We had tea at the Dominican School for the white deaf. I loved the children’s joyous ways, their grace and freedom of movement and the rhythm with which they danced for me… The Sisters, whose progressive methods I appreciated, told me that at one time coloured pupils had been admitted, but as the numbers increased, a second school became necessary (Wittebome School for the Deaf).”
Keller also visited this school (where the writer was teaching at the time) and she later wrote: “We went to the Dominican School for the Coloured Deaf at Wittebome. The children were adorable in their welcome, and I sensed their eagerness for real education. Their teachers – the Sisters – seemed determined to lift the standard of living so that the pupils might have the material basis for a fuller life…
“On the morning of
March 21 we went to the Athlone School for the NonWhite Blind, where there is a long list of children waiting to be admitted from all parts of the country. The devotion of the teachers is unforgettable, despite scanty funds to supply the pupils with competent instruction…
“At Mowbray there was an oral class for white children with defective hearing… This group was a lively attractive one, 22 boys and girls whose speech, Polly declared, was a triumph of naturalness and who read the lips wonderfully…
“We spent the next few days at Worcester where the oldest school for the blind and schools for the deaf had been founded… The swift, generous response of the Worcester people to my talks is among the dearest memories of my South African tour… At the city of Grahamstown we visited the one library for the blind in South Africa.”
The Rev Blaxall said that when Helen Keller entered that library she stopped, inhaled, and exclaimed: “I smell books!”
Keller visited most parts of South Africa during their tour. She wrote: “On May 12, Polly and I lunched with Mr and
Mrs Blaxall in their house at Roodepoort (Transvaal) among the hills. There was a beautiful view right in front of the house where as Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country describes it, ‘the earth falls away from one’s feet to the valley’.
“The two institutions we saw were Ezenzeleni for the African Blind, and the Kutlwanong School for the African Deaf, the biggest of their kind in the country.”
While she was in South Africa, Keller was given the Zulu name “Nomvuselelo” meaning “You have aroused the consciences of many”.
At a public meeting in Pietermaritzburg, a questioner asked her: “Do you feel you have really achieved anything in your life?”
Blaxall later wrote in his book Helen Keller Under the Southern Cross: “This was one of the most difficult of the many questions the 70-year-old blind and deaf woman was asked. But the alert brain and eager spirit was quick with the reply: ‘I believe that all through these dark and silent years
God has been using my life for a purpose I do not know, but one day I shall understand, and then I shall be satisfied’.”
Coyne said: “She was staying at the Mount Nelson Hotel as an honoured guest of the hotel. I naturally felt a little nervous. But the worldrenowned lady greeted me as though I was someone special.
“When I finger-spelt out on to her hand what I hoped to do with my life, which was at that time to travel to England to be trained as a qualified teacher of the deaf, I conveyed, perhaps, something of my doubts and fears. Her answer radiated serenity and faith in the future. I left her presence stimulated and uplifted.”
As a baby of 19 months Keller lost all her sight and hearing through illness.
Fortunately her wise mother did not allow the devastating effect of her child’s loss to warp her own judgement. She knew that Keller, plunged into darkness and silence, had a life to live.
Keller’s fingers often wandered round the lips of those she loved, and it slowly dawned on her that the movements of those lips meant she was different from other people, and she did not know how. This caused violent outbursts of temper in which she would “throw herself in the grass and bury her burning face in its coolness”.
The turning point in her life was when, at age 6, a young teacher was found for her,
Anne Sullivan.
From the start, her teacher talked to her as though she were an ordinary child, except that she spelt sentences into her hand instead of speaking them.
The first words she learnt were ‘water’ and ‘doll’. For this intelligent yet frustrated child these words came as a miraculous revelation. She became aware of language.
From then on, Keller made rapid progress. When she was 10 she learned to speak, though her voice tones would always have the monotony of the totally deaf.
At 16 she enrolled at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, in Massachusetts and she began to master foreign languages. In 1904 she graduated with a BA degree.
After this she undertook lecture tours, wrote books and campaigned for the rights of the handicapped.
In 1968, nearly 50 years ago, Dr Helen Keller died peacefully at home, at the age of 88, after a life of incredible fulfilment.
● Coyne trained as a teacher of the deaf in Manchester, England and taught at St Vincent’s School for the Deaf in Johannesburg, and later became the first principal of Fulton School for the Deaf in Gillitts, KZN.