Member-only story
Celebrating Sixty Years of Marriage
A Legacy that will be hard to match
In the photo, my Dad and Mom sit fourth and fifth from the left respectively. Theirs is a story for Hollywood. Michael B Jordan would play my young dad, Morgan Freeman my old dad; Lupita Nyong’o could play my young mom, and Rita Moreno, my old mom.
Picture it: Kimberley, South Africa, 1950. A thirteen-year-old boy is smitten by an eleven-year-old girl. As they play hide-and-seek, the two always hide together. Well, the boy makes sure that they do. That was when they first met. My dad lived in Kimberley and every year my mom’s family would visit relatives and the kids would play together.
They didn’t get serious until they saw each other at the University of Fort Hare eight years later. Dad was studying there while Mom was visiting her dad, ZK Matthews, who was a lecturer. By that time, Dad was aware of the injustices of apartheid and had purposed to do his part to eradicate it. It wasn’t long before he was branded an agitator and became a target of the police. In 1960, he crossed the border into Botswana as a refugee.
Meanwhile, Mom completed Nursing at Lovedale College and made her way to England to complete her studies. Dad's travels found him studying in Russia and in 1963 he somehow heard that Mom was in England. He mailed his marriage…