Coming clean after an early devastating loss
BEING CHRIS HANI’S DAUGHTER Lindiwe Hani Loot.co.za (R208) MF Books Joburg
REVIEWER: SUE TOWNSEND
AS EASTER approaches, the memory of the assassination of Chris Hani in 1993 will be foremost in many South Africans’ minds. It had the nation trembling on the brink of civil war which, of course, was exactly the intention of the perpetrators. We held our breath: rage and fury on one side, deep despair and desperate pleas for calm on the other – it was truly a dramatic time.
Nelson Mandela had been out of prison for only three years and the country’s first democratic elections had yet to be held. South Africans were having to come to terms with the seismic change in the political landscape.
On another level, the Hani family had recently returned to South Africa from Maseru and embarked upon “normal life” in Dawn Park, Boksburg. Chris Hani was a revolutionary freedom fighter, a communist and highly respected in ANC circles and highly demonised in others.
His youngest daughter, Lindiwe, was just 12 years old and had always longed for the family life that was for her typified by the Huxtables in the Cosby Show… and in Dawn Park, with a swimming pool and a big kitchen, life was beginning to match that dream. Tragically, this ended when Janusz Walus, with a gun provided by Clive Darby-Lewis, shot Chris dead in the driveway of their home.
Lindiwe tells her story of “pain, rage anguish, denial”, and alcohol and drug abuse as she negotiates life after her beloved daddy is gone.
As time goes by, her relationship with her mother Limpho appears to disintegrate.
Limpho was (and still is) determined to protect the Hani name and Chris’s legacy at all costs, it would seem even the cost, at times, of losing her daughters.
Soon after the shooting, Lindiwe not only has to deal with the loss of her father but also her mother who takes up a seat in Parliament, Cape Town.
Her middle sister, Khwezi, also battles and eventually succumbs to alcohol and drugs, dying in curious circumstances of an asthma attack.
There is more pain to deal with when a love affair results in Lindiwe falling pregnant and deciding on an abortion and, pain on crushing pain, when her lover is killed in a car crash soon after.
It is hard to imagine how anyone deals with such tragic events, particularly when you are always identified as Chris Hani’s daughter with a legacy to uphold.
By the age of 23, with her life, “a mess… a blurry haze between the highs and the plummeting lows of coming down” she finds herself pregnant again.
Already having moved on from the father of this unborn child, she decides to go ahead with the pregnancy and her daughter Khaya is born.
The rock in her life is her older sister Ausi Neo (fondly called Momo) and her husband and children.
Lindiwe – with the help and encouragement of Melinda Ferguson, herself a recovering alcoholic and drug abuser – has written a harrowing account of her plunge to the depths and her determined climb back to sobriety and being clean.
At times, the language reads like that of a schoolgirl or like a woman at the end of her tether and yet, at other times, as a seriously together woman getting and staying on top of where she is.
There are a few strange anomalies in the factual information – mention is made of her years as a boarder at St Cyprian’s School in Cape Town but sites the school in Tamboerskloof not Oranjezicht and bunking out to smoke weed in Rhodes Park – where is that, if not in Joburg?
I worry that the few facts that I recognise as wrong might cloud my acceptance of those about which I do not have first-hand information.
But this is a quibble and the final few chapters are powerful, in which, with Melinda’s support, she contacts first Clive Derby-Lewis and then Janusz Walus and visits both to challenge them about their killing of her father.
Lindiwe’s brave determination to face both these men and try to come to terms with what they did, both to her and her family and to the nation, is amazing.
She finds Derby-Lewis and his wife Gaye very defensive and, quite frankly their behaviour is weird. Walus, on the other hand, whom she meets and has lunch with in prison, she finds curiously appealing in his acceptance and serving of his prison time “with quiet resolve and dignity”.
She writes: “I found myself having unexpected respect for his stoic attitude.”
Instead of ending this moving story admitting that she has changed significantly in her perception of herself in terms of what “being Chris Hani’s daughter” means to her, she lists pages of acknowledgements that are gushing and sentimental.
It is a pity as this is otherwise a brave book.
Her life ‘a mess a blurry haze between the highs and the plummeting lows’