It’s not something that dissipated into the ether. The apparent failure is not in fact a failure. There must have been people in Egypt who stood up for human rights, and it looked like they’d failed. There’s a lovely phrase in one of Paul’s epistles: “In the fullness of time.” Things are happening. Didn’t they look around and see other parts of Africa gaining freedom? How come they allowed it? But it’s an evolution. But people can survive only so much repression-look at Libya, which lived that way for 40 years. We also weren’t as political as later generations were. Life, to the extent that it could be, was fun. We were not sitting in the corner and weeping all the time-we were playing. We lived in a deprived setup, but we were not chafing at the bit. How did you find the patience?įor one thing, we didn’t walk around feeling sorry for ourselves. Overcoming apartheid took a remarkably long time. You were on totally unequal footing, and I don’t think I’d have wanted to frustrate myself to that extent. There was no way in which you could really become a serious rival to the main white shops. Probably the only kind of businessperson a black person could be was a storekeeper, and the restrictions were so severe: You couldn’t have your store in the white part of town you were restricted in what you could do you were restricted in terms of the customers you could serve. And in the South Africa in which I grew up, you knew there was always going to be a ceiling they wouldn’t let a black person really prosper, and you’d be doing business under very serious constraints. Did you ever consider a career in business? You aspired to become a physician, but instead became a teacher and then a clergyman.
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