Keller’s Durban visit
Patrick Coyne writes about the historic day the famous deaf and blind celebrity met Mahatma Gandhi’s granddaughter in the city
SIXTY-SEVEN years ago, Helen Keller, the famous American blind and deaf woman, visited KwaZulu-Natal.
She wrote afterwards: “At Durban I sensed the heartthrobs of devoted effort to brighten the lives of the sightless. I found an active body of women whose exertions keep going the workshop for both European and coloured blind that we visited, and who try to awaken public interest in measures of preventing blindness... I addressed a very progressive, cultivated group, the Indian Society for the Blind, and they gladdened me by saying they would soon start a school for their children without sight.
“As we drove through the soft hills and rich vegetation of sub-tropical Natal, I was gratified to see how the influence of the women was making itself felt everywhere and the friendship and co-operative spirit which enabled establishments like the Institute of Bantu Blind at Westville.”
Speaking at the Gandhi Memorial Hall on April 18, 1951, Helen sent a special message to Manilal Gandhi, who was fasting at his home in Phoenix as a protest against the South African government’s apartheid laws.
She said: “I send good wishes to you whose father’s teachings I have held affectionately in my heart. I pray that the good cause for which you now suffer may eventually triumph.”
Manilal’s 22-year-old daughter, Sita, came up from the audience on to the platform and promised to take the message personally to her father.
The two embraced, the famous elderly, deaf-blind American lady and the young granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi. This was one of the many moving moments of the tour. Sadly, Sita has since passed away, but her sister, Ela, now Dr Ela Gandhi, remembers the occasion well.
Helen Keller first turned her thoughts to South Africa in 1931, when she met the South African Rev Arthur Blaxall during his visit to New York, and she wrote the following prophetic words for him to take home with him: “Who can doubt that the people of South Africa will see to it that every handicapped fellow-creature 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.
Future
“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.”
Twenty years later, Blaxall, chairman of both the South African National Councils for the Blind and 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 for her.
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 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.”
When Keller spoke at the Durban City Hall to an audience of 2000, 14-year-old Dawn Mansell was so inspired by Keller’s appeal for help for similarly handicapped people that she made her mother take her home and collect her expensive “walkie-talkie” doll.
Returning to the City Hall, she presented her precious toy to Keller in the hope that it could be sold and the money used for the blind and deaf.
Keller said: “It is the most touching gift I’ve ever encountered. The doll came right from the little girl’s heart.”
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 during the tour, an audience member 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: “We were halfway through a tiring tour, and this was one of the most difficult of the many questions the 70-year-old blind and deaf woman was asked.
“For a moment I feared that Helen would not be able to give an adequate answer. 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’.”
Baby
As a baby of 19 months, Keller had suddenly lost all her sight and hearing because of illness. Fortunately, her mother was a wise woman who did not allow the devastating effect of her child’s terrible loss to warp her own judgement.
Mrs Keller knew that Helen, now 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 during which she would “throw herself in the grass and bury her burning face in its coolness”.
The turning point in Keller’s life was when, at the age of six, a young teacher was found for her, Anne Sullivan.
From the very start, her teacher talked to Keller 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 W-A-TE-R and D-O-L-L. 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 very indistinctly at first, and her voice-tones would naturally always have the monotony of the totally deaf. She later said that learning to speak had been the most difficult thing she had ever done in her life.
At the age of 16 she enrolled at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, in Massachusetts. Here she began to master foreign languages.
In 1897 she passed her entrance examinations to Radcliffe College, Harvard, in English, German, French, Latin, Greek and Roman history, with honours in German and English. Sullivan had attended all her lectures, interpreting them by finger-spelling them into her hand, and reading and translating any books which could not be obtained in Braille. Halfway through her degree course, Keller wrote her first book, The Story of my Life, which was published in more than 50 languages and became a classic. In 1904, Keller graduated with her BA degree.
After this she undertook lecture tours and wrote more books. She became a campaigner for the rights of the handicapped, and travelled widely with Sullivan, doing her best to open up more opportunities for the blind and deaf.
When Sullivan became ill, Keller trained Polly Thomson to take her place, and it was Thomson who accompanied Keller to South Africa in 1951.
Almost exactly 50 years ago, in 1968, Dr Helen Keller died peacefully at home, at the age of 88, having had a life of incredible fulfilment.
Patrick Coyne had the privilege of personally meeting Helen Keller when she toured South Africa in 1951. He was at the time teaching at the Wittebome School for the Deaf in Cape Town. When Keller toured South Africa, she visited the Kutlwanong School for the Deaf, Roodepoort, whose principal was his mother, Winifred M Coyne, and whose boys Patrick Coyne organised into a scout troop. Coyne had had much to do with blind people in 1946 at the Ezenzeleni Blind Institute, Roodepoort, while he and his family were staying with the Rev and Mrs AW Blaxall. Here he read a book to a blind basket-making instructor, Chris Kruger. After he and his wife, Helen, moved to Natal in 1958 Kruger became a voluntary reader at Tape Aids for the Blind, Durban, where he read a total of 54 books until 2014.