Monday, February 26, 2007. Mark Mathabane. "Leadership from my Mother."

MS. BRIZENDINE: Good morning. I'm Bodie Brizendine. It's my honor to introduce our next speaker. Mark Mathabane touched the hearts of millions with his sensational autobiography, Kaffir Boy, the first of several gripping works of candor, complexity, and compassion, all speaking truth to power, telling the true story of his coming of age under apartheid in South Africa. The book made the New York Times and Washington Post bestseller list and was translated into several languages. Today, it is used in classrooms across the country to explore concepts of global and social justice.

Born of destitute parents whose $10-a-week wage could not pay for the rent for the shack or the food put on the table, Mathabane spent the first 18 years of his life as the eldest of seven children in a one-square-mile ghetto that was home to more than 200,000.

Mark did what no Kaffir from the mean streets of Alexandra was supposed to do. He escaped to tell about it. Tennis was his passport to freedom. In 1978, with the help of the 1972 Wimbledon champion, Stan Smith, he left South Africa to attend Dowling College in Oakdale, New York, where he earned his degree in economics.

Mark's accomplishments since are legion. He's appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "Today," CNN, NPR, "The Charlie Rose Show," and others. He has published articles in publications such as the New York Times, Newsday, US News and World Report. He has been featured in Time, Newsweek, and People Magazine. He was nominated for Speaker of the Year by the National Association of Campus Activities, and served as a White House fellow in the Department of Education in D.C., where he helped implement several educational initiatives.

It is our pleasure to have him speak today about his mother and leadership from her. Mark's fourth book, African Women: Three Generations, describes the struggles, friendships, and triumphs of three South African women, his grandmother, his mother, and his sister, Florah, and it is in that vein that he speaks to us today.

Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Mark as he tells of leadership learned by the side of his mother, who in the words of Audre Lorde, the poet, said, "You cannot tear down the master's house with the master's tools."

Mark.

MR. MATHABANE: Thank you very much for those gentle words of introduction on a day that is as beautiful as the one that we are blessed with. I say "gentle," because the word hearkens back to what my mother would always remind us to be, though we found ourselves in hell. She would always say, "Children, be gentle. Be kind. Be caring. Be human." And so there are certain words that are evocative of that admonition.

I deeply appreciate your presence to hear me and also your coming as representatives of schools that feature very prominently, in my estimation, in answering the question: Where will tomorrow's leaders come from? We look everywhere but at girls' schools, which is ironic, because I'm alive today because a woman who, when she was a girl, because she was denied the opportunity to go to school simply because of her gender, fought heroically to save the life of her first-born through education. And I do not exaggerate when I say that my mother, unschooled, illiterate though she was, was the best teacher I ever had, because not only did she save me from the raging flames of poverty and suffering, but more importantly, the gentleness of her soul saved my spirit. Because there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that had I been forged in my father's image, I would be dead, because my father, a complicated man, had unfortunately an inability to imagine a future, because as he was being emasculated every day, arrested and thrown in jail for the crime of being unemployed or of living with his family under the same roof, he became so bitter, so filled with hatred, that as he blindly lashed out, unable to confront "the man," as we described white people, he turned on those he loved most.

Though Mom bore the brunt of that violent pain inflicted by my father, she never ceased to love him. It befuddled me. There was a time when I thought; maybe my mother is demented, because how can you bear so much pain? "Why don't you leave?" I would plead with her.

And she would turn around and say, "Child, I'm not someone who is unaware of the bad things your father does. It's just that I know, having married him by force" -- because she was sold to my father when she was 16 -- "that even though I was determined to embark on a different path, that of liberating myself through education, but finding myself in a marriage to a man twice my age, I learned to understand him and found in him a moiety of goodness. There is some good in your father. It is just overlaid with so much pain, and it is my hope that if I continue to love him, someday, God willing, he will be compelled to reclaim his true self."

That is astonishing wisdom, particularly when you consider where it was forged. I want you to hold this thought in mind, because you are at places that are like crucibles. A different kind of leadership must arise from your schools that will pick up the responsibility, as my mother bore it, of not only saving, as she did, her children and their souls, but your pupils are part of the generation that must save the world from itself.

I say that because we live in such soul-trying times, times that make our children so restless, some so self-destructive, others so pathetic, that it behooves your schools to create kind environments that nurture the human soul. I say this because there is a belief current -- and it's a destructive one -- that human beings are so different and our differences so irreconcilable that we are doomed to inflict or suffer pain, to hate or be hated, to oppress or be oppressed, and to kill or be killed, all in the name of a selfish survival.

My mother would categorically reject such a belief because to her, humanity is indivisible. In fact, she would always tell me, "Child, even white people -- who are the police that invade and oppress and emasculate and deprive our people of their God-given right -- even they are human, and you must learn to give them the benefit of the doubt and, if possible, to have the courage to love them, too."

Now, we as a world are at the juncture where we must choose between two weapons, that of power and that of love. But I would caution all of us that power does not make right. Because in South Africa, those who lorded it over black people, who created the ghettos like Alexandra, where hope died, constituted the most powerful group of people on the African continent. But that power did not make apartheid right. Rather, the right could be found in a shack such as the one in which I was born, without running water or electricity, a shack made of cardboard, corrugated iron, plastic, where children slept on pieces of cardboard because there were no beds; where their thin raggedy blankets were reinforced by pieces of newspaper during the winter; where food was so scarce that this family had to scavenge at garbage dumps; where the children celebrated no birthdays, where they hardly received toys throughout their childhood; where many a time, a child like myself would curse the day he was born, and ask, "What crime have I committed to deserve such a life?"

But in this shack there was right. There was right because a mother recognized that even though she barely survived giving birth to seven children -- because each delivery, lacking maternity care and access to hospitals, meant that she risked her life -- she had borne seven children and she loved them, just as all mothers everywhere love their children. And it is important for us to understand that mothers everywhere love their children, even in places with which we are at war, because there is no womb on this planet of a mother that gives birth to a terrorist. Mothers give birth to children whom they hope to see grow to be good people. This is universal and incontrovertible.

The question then becomes: How does a human child capable of good become the instrument of murderous hate? Some of the answers can be found in this shack in which I grew up. As I described in the opening scene to my book, I'm sleeping. It's the middle of the night. I'm in the grip of a nightmare, the rats squeaking in the cupboard. And then there is this tremendous din outside. Children are screaming. Windows are being broken. Doors are being busted. There are gunshots, footfalls, as half-naked black men and women flee their own homes, leap over fences and ditches, chased by the police.

This ocean of terror is headed my way. I'm awake now, and know and dread what I have to do. I have to barricade the flimsy door of the shack, which has three latches, with my body, trembling, to give my parents enough time to crawl out the back window and escape. It is dark. I frantically look, search the darkness for just one thing, the eyes of my mother, to reassure me that I'm not alone. But I also know that she ought not to be found, because she will be arrested for the crime of living with my father.

And as I shake in terror, my little sister is now awake and screaming hysterically because the door is now being kicked viciously by a steel-toed boot and a stentorian voice is demanding, "Open up. Open up. This is the police. Open up."

And my one-year-old brother, left alone on the twin bed he shares with my father and mother, is awake and bawling. I know I'm alone. I remember being told, the night before, that should the police come, I should be strong. I should take care of my three-year-old sister and one-year-old brother, and I'm just five. And I remember the door crashing in and these policemen storming into the shack, clutching torches. My sister and I are cowering in a corner. I'm in front of her, vainly trying to protect her.

The policeman comes straight at me, grabs me by the neck, jerks me up and shakes me and bellows in my face, "Where are your parents hiding? Speak." But he's choking me. Just gurgling sounds. And then he whacks me across the cheek with a torch. "Speak."

My little sister runs to the bedroom door and rattles the knob, but it's locked from inside. The police realize that there must be somebody in there, so they fling me across the shack and I crash against the far wall and crumble to the floor and my little sister runs up to me, peeing all over the place, and we hold each other and watch.

That is the moment when I began to hate. I can pinpoint it with mathematical precision. That is when, if someone had given me a knife or a gun, I could have plunged that knife into another human being without remorse and perhaps with glee. Because as I looked at the police, they weren't human. Human beings don't do this to other human beings.

Imagine similar education in hate taking place in countless places around this world, where a child sees those he or she loves suffering in pain and then the object that inflicts that suffering and that pain is personified. It could be a soldier toting a gun, because when you have that gun, you cannot shake a hand. It could be any other personification of inhumanity, indifference.

So I say this because we must find the antidote to this poison that will destroy us. We will perish if we do not recognize the importance of empathy, of putting ourselves in the shoes of others. This is what my mother would implore me to do, to say, "Child, yes, I know what the police did to you, but not all white people are like that."

But absent that different white person, how can I be convinced? And how many children in this world go through childhood seeing the same image of the other? You don't have to go to distant lands. You just have to get to know America to know that that place is where we seldom or hardly go, places where innocence dies young, where children cannot afford to be children and live, where the rites of passage are not graduation ceremonies or proms, but gangs and teenage motherhood. These places are not on Mars or in another solar system. They're in the richest, most powerful nation on earth. These are not children of aliens. These are human children, part of America's future and destiny. But oh, their education and the price that we will pay.

And that's why your schools are vital, because if you can't bathe the hearts of your children in the salubrious waters of a common humanity, to make them understand that just as their brethren suffer from the corrosive effects of poverty, racism, and oppression, they, too, if they fail to grasp this important concept of a common humanity, will suffer from the corrosive effects of power and privilege.

Therefore, teach them to subvert their privilege for the common good. Teach them to understand what my mother so instinctively understood and taught me, which is that no one can be free until we are all free, that no one can be secure until there is justice for all. But no one can be human until there is a humane world to imbue us with a collective humanity.

We Africans have a word. It's "ubuntu." U-B-U-N-T-U. It's hard to translate, but it basically says that you are not human by yourself. Your humanity is derivative. As you treat others with kindness and empathy and love, you become human. You have ubuntu. That's where the word Bantu people come from. This is the spirit that under girds the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So I want your schools to teach about ubuntu, because just as my mother was filled with the spirit, I am convinced the leaders that will be forged in those crucibles that are your schools, if they are imbued with ubuntu, will begin to lead the world in the right direction, because they will be guided by the most powerful weapon a human being can possess: Unconditional love.

That is the weapon that we must have to save ourselves from ourselves, because it is the Promethean spark from the sacred fire. It is what began us. Without it, we are nothing, just mere bubbles, coughed up by chaos to froth a moment on its murky surface and then sink into the oblivion of nothingness. Without love, there is no future; just the moment, as some of our children are saying. There's no God, just man, solitary, selfish, scared, and self-destructive.

But with love, our odyssey is a different story. It is heroic. We become capable of transcending the limitations of our mortality to do the eternal work of God. With love, there is beauty, there is truth, there is goodness in life, despite the fever and the fret that Keats laments. With love, we are capable of creating that better world of our heart's desire, the world in which the flames of hatred no longer blind us to the beauty of the loveliness of each different human face. A world in which the din of war no longer deafens us to the symphony of our diverse cultures. A world where the anodyne of materialism no longer deadens our hearts to cries for justice from the poor, the powerless, and the oppressed. And most importantly, a world where the silent song of religious fanaticism no longer seduces the hearts of those seeking salvation or paradise into fatally forgetting that no one, absolutely no one, who is incapable of loving their fellow human being can rightly claim to love God.

But this is the new world that our children must forge, because they know the truth. They can see things as they stand in the light of eternity, until we teach them otherwise. Because like I said, hatred is not innate in people. It is taught. It is time we taught our children different lessons. It's time we taught them about the power of love, because if God is anything, God is love. I cannot conceive of God as anything else but love. And if God is love, the only moral thing we can do with the priceless gift of life is to love one another.

So teach your children to love. Rather, let them recapture because it was always there, very much as Wordsworth remembers early childhood in a beautiful poem of his, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. The love capacity is always there. It just became overlaid with time and with our perverse lessons, but it is there.

You have inspiring teachers. Let them challenge young people to dream those impossible dreams that I dreamt when I was in the ghetto. That's how I got out. And to think that all it took was a book. After I had struggled to teach myself English, my sixth language, at age 13, I was given Treasure Island by my grandmother's employer, and oh, my goodness, what a transformation took place in me. Yes, I was still in the ghetto, but the ghetto was no longer in me. I could travel in imagination to distant lands. I was young Hawkins. I was aboard the Hispaniola, surrounded by those cutthroats. And I could hear that ditty over and over again, "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum."

While in the ghetto, I could be a child again. I could imagine a different reality. How much more so can our children, who have so much, imagine a different reality, imagine a nation united where there is a recognition that the strength of America is its diversity, where there is a recognition by all schools that our children must know who are the members of their extended family, but they must know that some came on the Mayflower and others through the Middle Passage, that some came through Ellis Island and others from Ancient Island, and that some went on the Oregon Trail and others on the Trail of Tears, but that everybody is American, that all of those experiences are what make us the world, capable of leading, not selfishly, but humanly, globally.

That's what makes every child in the American schools a potential leader, because there is so much they can work with to harness the power of one that was demonstrated by my mother, because that's all it takes to change the world: One person armed with the aegis of character, of conscience, of courage. Because remind our students that since time began, it was those who dared to be different, those who dared to stand alone, though vilified and crucified, to whom we owe our salvation and progress: From Moses, who led the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage into the Promised Land; from Socrates, who drank the hemlock rather than cease to seek for truth through reason; from Martin Luther who nailed those 95 theses on that door to ignite the Protestant Reformation; from Rosa Parks, who refused to give up that seat in that bus, to usher in the civil rights movement; from Nelson Mandela, who abjured revenge even after being wrongfully imprisoned for 27 years in order to save his beloved country from the flames of civil war.

So teach them about this power of one that is so exemplified in my mother, and make them aware that what we do for ourselves, what we acquire, be it fame or wealth or power, dies with us. But what we do to make the world a better place is immortal because after we are gone, after our song is sung, what remains is a memory, and let those who are left behind, as they hear with aching hearts and moist eyes the soft breeze of memory whisper our names across the fields of solitude, say they miss us, because that is what makes life worth living, that those whose lives we've touched will miss us. Thank you.

MR. LYMAN: We have time for questions.

MR. GALBRAITH: Mr. Mathabane's books are available and he'll be signing them here at the table afterwards. They're $15. Thank you for doing that.

MR. DAVISON: I'm Ralph Davison, formerly head of Greensboro Day School in North Carolina, where you worked with the faculty. And currently I'm a consultant with Carney, Sandoe & Associates. Four months ago, my wife and I spent several weeks in South Africa. A good portion of the time was in Soweto, in the company of a man who also had grown up in Alexandra. That country is merely some 14 years away from the prebrutality of apartheid and yet it was our sense that even though there's a huge amount of poverty still existing in the townships and elsewhere, there's a remarkable, remarkable amount of optimism and turnaround in the social structure and the economic structure and just in the spirit of the place. And my question to you is: Are we on target in our perception?

MR. MATHABANE: Oh, yes. You're dead on. You're very correct. That's what astounds a lot of people, myself included, because I had forebodings about the country being plunged into civil war and there being much bloodshed. But remarkably, there came a different cadre of leaders, of selfless leaders, mindful that this is something that the world must remember -- Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu, Beyers Naude on the other side -- everybody who came together to basically say we must find it in ourselves to forgive. They were fully aware of what they had suffered. It's just that Nelson Mandela, while he was on that bleak island, had an epiphany. In it, he realized that in order to induce the Africans to do something seldom done. And they have to be given credit for this. To give up power voluntarily, it's not an easy thing. Once you have acquired and tasted power, it's hard to give up. But to induce them to give it up for the greater good and the unknown, we must be empathetic to what they went through. We must understand that though what came out of their pain was apartheid, that we ought not to ascribe to them the categorical evil that often is ascribed to groups that perpetrate wrong. And it's funny, because that foresight was crucial, to say that there is a way to still get the Afrikaaners separated from apartheid, so that they could redeem their own humanity in a new South Africa.

That's a powerful lesson for all who aspire to believe. We are plunged, as a world, into a crisis at the moment simply because some leaders were unable to clearly make that distinction, that those 19 terrorists who piloted those hate-filled jumbo jets into those buildings, though they came from a culture and a religion, they are not that culture and that religion and, therefore, we ought to separate them and their deeds from that culture and that religion. Nelson Mandela could have said, "My suffering on Robben Island and what was done to my family and the enormity of what was suffered by the black people puts me at the vanguard of this army that will reclaim South Africa through the barrel of a gun" -- we were ready. There was a generation ready to pick up that gauntlet. In fact, they were demanding that he lead that kind of an Army. But he had the courage a leader must have to basically say, "No, there is a better way."

So what you have described in your soul is the yearning of a people mindful of the realities of the devastation that AIDS is wreaking, of the poverty that is the legacy of apartheid, of some of the violence that is associated with desperate people. They're able to still believe passionately in a better future, and to strive to realize it, which is why you were able to see such examples of that yearning. And then you must have, upon returning, made a contrast between what you saw and felt there and what you see and feel here.

And one area where there is the greatest of contrasts -- and please correct me, if I'm wrong -- is in the absence here of the spirit that you felt in South Africa. And I tell people, I say, you know, America is rich materially and poor spiritually. And then you go to places like South Africa, where much of it still remains poor materially, but the richness of the spirit is overwhelming. And I ask you, cognizant, aware of history, what is it that has enabled a people to survive when the Jews were being led into the gas chambers, the concentration camps? What is it that they sought to preserve even in death? When Christians were led by the emperors into the arenas with the lions, what did their singing and their joy seek to preserve? The spirit. The spirit. Because that no oppressor, no oppression can take away, but you can give away.

And the danger I see is that east, west, south, and north, many of us are giving our spirits up in return for what? I guess it's the proverbial Faustian bargain, but I would say, let's remember, what profited it for a peasant to gain the whole world but lose his soul?

MS. CREEDEN: My name is Debbie Creeden, and I am a former teacher, wife of a head, but I consider myself mainly a mother. I'm extremely moved by your story, and I wonder if you could give us some insight into your mother, maybe your maternal grandmother, some inspirational people that influenced her.

MR. MATHABANE: My mother had, I think, incredible foresight, and I think you will see from this little story where it's derived from. She knew what awaited her five daughters if she didn't educate me. She knew it because it is what she had undergone when her mother was unable to educate her, because her husband had left her with four children in a city where she could not get a job except through her husband. And thus she had to sell my mother to an older man in order to get some money so she thought to educate the boys so they could take care of her.

But as fate would have it, the boys chose to become gangsters, so you can understand the experiences that informed her judgment, which is why she was insistent that I go to school. I mean, you will recall, those who read Kaffir Boy, how she and Grandma literally dragged me, bound and gagged, to school. I mean, that was the scene. I was kicking and screaming, and these two women here are saying, "You are going." And then they plopped me in front of the principal and said, "Principal, that stick on the door -- use it on him and make sure he learns."

My mother was not a masochist. It's that she knew that unless she succeeded with me, there was no hope for her girls. That was her goal. The girls would not be able to break the cycle without an education. And you know, she was so prescient about that, because when she succeeded -- and the odds were almost insuperable -- the first responsibility I had was to my siblings. I brought all of them over to the United States to put them through school. A couple of them attended schools headed by some of you. You know, Tom Farquhar took one of my sisters in, and I can tell you that she not only blossomed at Westtown, she went on to college and became one of three of my sisters who went to college. When Mom didn't go, when Dad didn't go, she now had four college graduates.

Not only that, but she herself, when I brought her to the States at age 59, the first thing she told me was that she wanted to go back to school, because it was not too late. So she would learn to read and write. And we were living in Kernersville, North Carolina, then. There was a night program that was run by a Catholic church where returning students went to learn to read and write, and she was the most diligent of students, I was told. Then two years later she was finally able to read and write. And I remember the glow, the joy on her face when she was for the first time able to read her favorite book, the Bible. Because that was one of her dreams, to be able to read the Bible, instead of, "Mom, I have read this verse, you know, billions of times."

"Read it one more time, son."

And you know by now what it must be. Corinthians 13. But she just knew that you should never give up hope. And that's what we all should remember. We should never give up hope where our children are concerned. There are people who say, "Well some kids are beyond reclaiming." I beg to differ. A kid that knows that one person cares becomes an invincible partner. They will fight. They'll never give up. But a kid who realizes that no one cares is a most destructive force. So I would say that, you know, my mother was able to understand that if I show these children that I care, then they will do their utmost. It doesn't mean that it's guaranteed. She said, "Son, you have a fighting chance."

And as I look back and realize that most of my friends are dead and six feet under, and that I'm one of the survivors simply because I took that road less taken -- it wasn't easy. Your students will attest, if you hear their stories, to the power of peer pressure. The peer pressure that I had to deal with was that at six years old I was a gang member, and that I had a father who disdained education, and on top of that, who constantly beat my mother for frivolous things and who fought to shape me in his image to the extent that he and Mom would get into these battles over my crying, because Dad would insist that no son of his cried, and Mom would say, "But you know, it's human to cry."

And I had to make the choice. And as I look back, that choice made the difference, because I chose to cry. And it is not easy for a boy with a father as domineering to get in touch with his humanity, but it was that deliberate choice, that making myself vulnerable to feeling the pain of others, because that's what tears provoke. And I remember, because even that fateful transformation that took place in me when my mother was dragging me to the police station and to the clinic, begging for the piece of paper to register me in school. You remember the horrible ordeal where she would get up at 3:00 in the morning, stand in a long line, come up to the window, be told by the superintendent that "We cannot give you the paper without a birth certificate."

But I didn't have one. So she was told, "Go get a copy from the clinic."

She goes to the clinic, stands in another long line under the blazing sun. Afternoons she's at the window, she's told, "No, we cannot give you a copy of the birth certificate without the permit first."

She goes back. She did this for about six months. I mean, what is it that was driving her to do the impossible? What was driving her was revealed on that day that changed my life, as she was sitting on that flight of steps singing, as she always did, a tribal song about her misfortunes and I was just impatient and hungry and just saying, "We need to go home. Dad is going to come back, and if there's no food in the house, you'll fight again."

She says, "No, son, I'm waiting."

And then that nun came, and I remember, because I was scared of her, because the police sometimes came in disguises, and I thought that with the habit and the wimple, that was a policeman and she'd whip out the gun or a truncheon. And I remember when Mom accosted her and I watched from behind, her face. I always scrutinized the face to see what emotions there are. And for the first time in my life, I saw a white person cry. It was a revolutionary occurrence, seeing those tears streak a white face, because up until that point I didn't believe that whites were capable of tears, because the police never cried.

And so those tears told me, as I look back, that she cares, that she's human after all, and her caring was demonstrated when she grabbed my mom by the hand and they stormed into that office and in a jiffy she was called to the window and given a copy of my birth certificate.

Why was that transformative? Because after that episode, each time I met a white person, I didn't say, "Here is a policeman." I said, "This could possibly be the nun," and it is that word, "This could possibly be somebody else." Different.

Let's remember, with those who have hurt us, when we meet others like them, let's not say, "These are the people who have hurt us." Let's say, "This could possibly be someone different."

The question then becomes, do we avail ourselves, do we provide our students with opportunities to know a different person so that they can cultivate the habit of giving others the benefit of the doubt? Thank you.

MR. LYMAN: Mark, thank you so much for reminding us that really the ultimate end of education is love and empathy. We need to remind ourselves of that every day, and I thank you for coming and sharing that with us. Safe travels.

Mark will be signing books back there. So if you want to go back and get in line, that's great. They're $15.

The Jeep will leave at 1:00 p.m. from the ballroom foyer for the Jeep rides. The Sabino trip is at 1:30 in the lobby, and we'll see you tonight at 6:30. We are adjourned.