Stephen Marais was born in Stellenbosch in 1956. My mother-tongue is English, my ouma-taal Afrikaans. He was nine when Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966 and afterwards it was his Ouma who told him no uncertain terms that Verwoerd and his Apartheid was a ‘reuse klomp kak’. His mother was Anglican and she and her church taught him that Apartheid was evil and unchristian. His father was a physicist and an agnostic and a civil servant most of his life but his upset with the disparities and inequalities of Apartheid made a huge impact on my outlook.His first act of civil disobedience was on 31 May 1971 at the age of 14 when in standard 7 at Paul Roos Gymnasium. School children from all over were bussed in to the Goodwood Showground for the 10 year celebration of the Republic of South Africa. When ‘Die Stem’ was sung he organised for a handful of us to remain sitting. When were quickly yanked away by some Voortrekkers and made to go and clean up the rubbish at the back of the stadium for the rest of the event, but it was such an embarrassment to the powers that be that no further action was taken against us.
His second act of civil disobedience was to refuse to go to the army. After attending Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT for four years, in 1979 he went to live in a remote village in the mountains of Lesotho with a group of fellow South Africans. In 1981 he joined the Environmental and Development Agency and lived and worked in villages in the Mount Fletcher district of Transkei for the next five years. His third act of civil disobedience was in 1983 when he joined the African National Congress(ANC) underground. That evening he went out to celebrate at a tavern on the outskirts of Maseru, and someone whom he only learned afterwards was a PAC member came over to his table and said, ‘I see the ANC is getting so desperate you are even recruiting hippies to do your dirty work for you’. After his arrest three years later in March 1986 and during the next five months of solitary confinement in John Vorster Square words to the same effect were repeated to me often. In September he was charged and sent to Sun City to await trial and was sentenced to 10 years for terrorism in October.
His life partner, Khethiwe, whom he met and fell in love with in 1985 when she was on the run from the Security Branch for ASAZO activities at Turfloop, got married in the garage of Pretoria Security Prison in 1989. After my release from prison in October 1990 Khethiwe and I and our two sons Mlungisi and Nkululeko lived in Yeoville where we were active in ANC branch activities and we both served as party agents in the 1994 elections. That two-day wait at Nasrec for the ballots to arrive was as nerve-racking as smuggling weapons across the border.In 1991 Khethiwe and he started Afrophone translation services in response to a demand from the ANC, Congress Of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU) and NGOs for reliable and efficient African language services. We had the honour of translating the first draft of the interim constitution into all our languages and we are still involved in the language service industry. One of my passions is organic vegetable gardening in our back garden where he have been growing an abundant variety of food for 24 years. His 29 year-old Uno with 414,000 km on the clock finally gave up the ghost recently, and being an unconvertible atheist, he do not believe that there was a pastor in Mzantsi who will be able to raise it from the dead.
In between running our small language service business from home and being a house-husband, tending to my vegetable garden, involvement in a support group called FOX (Friends of Xolobeni) and writing up my story, he have finally taken the plunge and done what he have been itching to do for a number of years. His heartfelt prayer was that it captures the social imagination of the younger generations before he really am too old for this shit.His one and only vice was my addiction to tobacco. he loved a glass or four of cheap red box wine after sunset every day going forwards into the evening and he enjoy cooking and preparing food, especially with veggies from the garden. And he was fairly sure that he does n’t have any small-nyana skeletons in his cupboard. he boil up his bones, bake them in the oven and then crush them up into a meal and mix it into my compost heap. Finnish en klaar.And he really do NOT have any ambition to be a politician. he had a book to complete and a garden to look after. And being a seasoned gardener he knew that, once one have planted a seed you commit to nurturing and watering the plant and taking care of its daily needs throughout its lifespan until it reached maturity and produces nutritious fruits and more seeds for next season.He also have an idea of what my next act of civil disobedience will be and he did suspect that it may well have something to do with vegetable seeds.