IN MEMORIAM : THE COURAGE TO BE ORDINARY - By Sandile Memela
For a 96-year-old actor, playwright, poet and mentor
We buried Bra Sol Rachilo at the Heroes Acre in Westpark cemetery on Tuesday.
There were more police, traffic officers and government officials than mourners.
Everything that needs to be said about Bra Sol has been. Anything said that will be said from now on will be repetition. There is nothing more to say.
Nothing that needs to be said has been left unsaid.
It will be difficult to find new words.
Steve Biko said: You are either alive and proud. Or you are dead. And when you are dead, you cannot care, anyway. And your method of death can be a politicising thing.
We were gathered at The Market Theater to remember a man who was alive and proud. He lived 96 years. But he is dead now. What we had to say will not make a difference to his life.
Life prepares us for Death. Death teaches us Life, how to Live.
Now that we are here, we must teach and relearn some things.
For me, Bra Sol was an image and definition of a truly liberated man. He was not a victim. He knew who he was. He knew what he was doing. And did not seek approval.
Rough and tough as life was, spending his last days in a lonely shack and a furnace of fire that burnt him to death, he survived. He kept on walking and working to sustain himself.
He was a multi-talented artist. A complex yet simple human being. A man with the courage to be ordinary. Yet do extra ordinary things.
If you met him once, you remember. Not because he smelled like good expensive perfume or wore stylish shirts and suits like Cat Matlala. You felt his aura. He spoke like a man who had read widely and thought deeply.
Above all, he carried himself like a man who was alive and proud. A man who knew that art was not entertainment, it was work. Serious, disciplined, spiritual work. National consciousness-raising.
One widely abused word to describe Bra Sol in this society, 'resilience.'
In this era of freedom and democracy, he lived a life that would have made many others bitter. And suicidal. He knew what it meant to work without support. He knew what it meant to create without funding. He knew what it meant to walk back home because there was no taxi fare.
Many artists and producers wait for funding and conditions to be conducive. They are immobilized and paralyzed. He never waited. He worked with what he had. And he had nothing.
But lack of material support never deterred him. In fact, it deepened his determination. He was not afraid to face his fate in an unequal cowntry where funding is by who you know.
His eyes were not on himself. His eyes were on the young. Who are the future.
He believed, truly believed, that the job of an elder over 65 years was not to complain to people who knew what the problem is.
From 1977, he wanted to draw youth away from drugs, alcoholism and hopelessness. And he did. For seven decades, especially the last 50 years.
How many young people between 25 and 40 are here today? How many young people did he inspire and guide to redirect their time and energies to creative work? To take responsibility for their fate and future?
He was more spirit than body. His body grew old, as all bodies must, 96 years is a long time to carry a black body, but his spirit never aged. It stayed curious. It stayed generous. It stayed committed to the idea that South Africa will be saved not by tenders, but by imagination. By self determination. By creative artists.
He understood something many have forgotten. That a country without poets is a country without memory. That a country without writers and playwrights is a country without a mirror. That a country without mentors for its children has no future.
We have seen democracy eat its children.
He refused to let that happen. So he mentored.
He did not coach for money. He did not mentor for fame. He coached and mentored because he knew that if he did not, the future was bleak and dark. And he was determined that the young would not die.
Today we say: Salute Bra SolRha! Rest, now. But I think he would ask us not to rest.
He would ask us: What are you doing to help the young to help themselves? Nobody is coming to save them.
Are you opening a door? Are you lending a book? Are you releasing those funds that he never had, so that the next veteran does not have to be so resilient just to survive?
96 years. What a gift. What a long, stubborn, beautiful act of resistance.
He lived through apartheid, through the return of exile, through democracy, through political betrayal and disappointment, through hope and heartbreak.
And through it all, he kept one thing intact: his commitment to inspire. To be true to himself.
So let us not just mourn him. Let us imitate him, do as he did, where we can. He was a truly liberated taxpayer who did not wait for government to make things happen. Or give him money.
Let us be resilient and do what we must do where we can do it. It is much easier to be cynical.
If we do what he did, then he will not have lived in vain. He will be in every young artists voice that finds courage because an old man once said, "This is your Life. Be true to Yourself."
Hamba kahle, Bra Sol.
Tata. Poet. Playwright. Actor. Mentor.
You have finished your shift. We will take it from here. Lala ngoxolo.
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