Speaker Meeting - Mike Kehr 22-Mar-2012
"Getaway" Part 2 of 2 M W M
ichael began the second part of his
life story from 1936 to 1955 in a relatively re- laxed manner as he be- gan with a joke about possibly calling his story The M. Kehr Houdini Act rather than Escape.
hen his parents fled a Germany that was persecuting Jews, Michael was about to
grow up in a South Africa that had been a Tribal Society for hundreds of years. There were many different black tribes each with its own language and culture; but the white population was also tribal in nature. South Africa was not one racial mass and to further understand this Michael rec- ommended that we should read the book, Long Walk to Freedom, written by Nelson Mandela.
andela and his family lived in a territory near Port Elizabeth which is about the size
of Switzerland. It was inhabited mainly by mem- bers of the Xhosa tribe. When he went to college between 1937 and 1939 the student body and the staff was made up of people from many different tribes from all parts of South Africa. His lecturer in Zoology was a Sesoto speaker who was mar- ried to a Xhosa girl at a time when it was very unusual for people of different tribes to marry. He had a big influence on the young Mandela who had never before seen or heard of an inter- tribal marriage.
B
lack Africans were not the only ‘tribes’. There were also Afrikaners and many Eng-
lish speaking people. They all had their separate schools Most Jews went to English speaking schools and in this strange new country ‘Tribalism’ spread to other groups. For example not only did Jews not really mix with non-Jews, but they divided themselves into groups accord- ing to their country of origin. As an amusing il- lustration of the prevailing attitude towards peo- ple mixing with others from a different country or ‘race’ Michael told us of his cousin, a German Jew, who married a Jewish girl from Lithuania. This caused uproar in the family. As late as
1966 Michael’s mother-in-law thought that his marriage to Natalie would never work. So far, she appears to have been wrong!
M
ichael went to a state school and had friends of all faiths but none were black.
There was an ‘Apartheid” almost in existence before the actual declaration of that system due to a system of natural discrimination and separa- tion that was already in operation. Michael’s family had servants, albeit only a maid and a gar- dener, which was considered ‘natural’. Com- pared to their neighbours his family were rela- tively poor but it was not unusual to have black servants because these people were very much poorer and as a child Michael just didn’t ‘see it!’ The main difference between them and the black population was not their colour; it was their pov- erty. In 1945 he visited a district called So- phiatown and the sight of the conditions and the extreme poverty had a profound effect on him.
O
ne of Michael’s favourite subjects is the History of English Literature and it led him
to draw comparisons between the sights he saw in Sophiatown and the descriptions of the living conditions of the working class in the works of Charles Dickens. He also quoted Disraeli who talked of a country made up of two nations where there was ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’ be- tween the rich and the poor and was exactly the same between the white and nonwhite peoples in South Africa.
M
ichael reminded us too that we must not for- get the part that religion played in shaping
our thoughts. In Mrs. Alexander’s hymn for chil- dren All Things Bright and Beautiful, there is verse, always omitted nowadays
The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate,
w
He made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.
hich subconsciously reinforces the idea that being rich or being poor is ordained
from on high by God. 10
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