After the Miracle, page 28
In contrast to her previous international tours, it was clear from the start that her mission this time was more explicitly political. She was determined to do something to help South Africa’s “native” population—the term she used to describe Black South Africans. As always when a subject captured her imagination, she threw herself into learning more. She read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country—a poignant novel about the country’s racial tensions set in the days leading up to apartheid. After that, she read two books about Gandhi—a braille edition of his autobiography and a book about his sojourn in South Africa as a young lawyer, when he was thrown off a train for refusing to give up his seat in the first-class compartment reserved for whites. “Gandhi knew well the racial problems of South Africa, and the sturdy philosophy and fraternal love that infuses these extraordinarily inspiring books braced me for the peculiar difficulties I was to encounter,” she later recalled.14
She was experienced enough in international affairs to know that her efforts could be jeopardized if she wasn’t cautious. She probed a variety of sources about how best to approach her advocacy work. “I realize the tensions which prejudice and exasperation have created between the various races,” she wrote Blaxall, “and one requires skill and tact as well as enthusiasm to obtain the right help for the colored blind who, owing to their handicap, are more subject to the arbitrary will of white society than their seeing fellows.”15
Shortly before her departure to South Africa, Helen arranged to attend the Colored Debutantes’ Cotillion in Harlem at the invitation of her old friend, Dr. Clilan Powell, editor of the influential African American newspaper, the Amsterdam News. Although it may have seemed an unlikely gathering to find an elderly white woman, Helen was anxious to attend the ball so that she could consult with the guest of honor, one of America’s most famous diplomats, about her upcoming tour. Ralph Bunche had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier for his part in mediating an armistice between Israel and Egypt—making him the first-ever Black Nobel laureate. Helen had first met with him at the United Nations in 1949 and described him as one of her “heroes” while Bunche told her that she had been one of his “inspirations” since he was a little boy.16 Having spent significant time traveling through the African continent, Bunche took time off from the festivities of the ball to apprise Helen in detail about what he knew of current conditions in South Africa. In addition to briefing her about the new racial laws, he talked passionately about the deplorable conditions facing the country’s Black workers.
“He told me that he had found the native workers in mines, factories and on the land more than a century behind the progress of the workers in Britain after the industrial reform legislation of 1832,” she wrote Jo Davidson after the meeting. “From what Dr. Bunche said, I fear that it will be a long while yet before an enlightened attitude is adopted towards the native workers in Africa.”17
En route to South Africa with Polly, Helen stopped in London where she met with John Wilson, secretary of Britain’s Empire Society for the Blind, who had recently written offering a cautionary tale about a trip he had taken to East Africa where he openly expressed his disapproval of racial discrimination with “disastrous” results: “The Africans were embarrassed, the Europeans were appalled, the Indians and ‘Coloured’ (a mixture of white and black) were distressed. The problem is much more subtle than you at first realize, and you can do far more harm than good by inflaming racial controversy. The rule I follow nowadays is quite simple. Never start a racial controversy but be quite honest about it if someone else does.”18
If she had intended to heed Wilson’s advice, the reality of what she encountered when she arrived in the country was shocking enough that she would soon disregard his caution. The schedule was ambitious, with visits to more than twenty-five schools planned during the two-and-a-half-month duration of her tour along with countless ceremonial and civic engagements. The sheer scale of the itinerary, she later complained, was driven primarily by the segregation that forced separate meetings with different races. The initial media coverage was mostly laudatory, as Helen shared platitudes with reporters about how much she was enjoying her visit, but in private correspondence with friends, she confided her mounting frustration. In the midst of her travels, she wrote back to John Wilson about the challenge of following his advice to hold her tongue. “I too find it difficult not to blurt out my indignation at the blindness and cruelty of racial prejudice,” she confessed.19
Finally, she appears to have reached her breaking point. At the end of March, the Cape Argus reported remarks that she shared with a reporter as she left Capetown under a headline announcing, “Miss Helen Keller is Saddened.” “I have been very impressed with the work being done for the blind and the deaf, but how much more needs doing!” she exclaimed. One thing that had “saddened” her a great deal, the reporter noted, was the fact that “non-Europeans” were always segregated from Europeans. “It hurts me indeed to see one group served first and the other waiting in darkness and silence,” she lamented, once again making use of the common figurative refrain around the isolation of blindness and deafness. “God was never for any special group among the unfortunate.” The reporter added that Helen had been “appalled” to learn that in some Black townships—where the incidence of blindness was as high as one in seven or eight people—there were virtually no facilities to serve them.20
There is no record whether her explicit criticism caused the kind of racial controversy that Wilson had told her he once encountered. It could not have escaped notice to have such a beloved figure publicly disparage the system. The AFB had sent its assistant director, Alfred Allen—a white South African expatriate—to chaperone Helen and Polly on the tour, and it is very possible that it was Allen who counseled Helen to tone down her criticism. Nella hinted as much when she later recorded Helen’s thoughts about the trip in her journal, writing that “Alfred Allen was a thorn in their side almost from the moment they got on the boat. This was not the fault of P & H. He is indeed an obnoxious little man… A most odd-looking creature who rather fancies himself as an authority on South Africa where he lived for some time but which he has not seen for 30 years.”21
It seems likely that she had, in fact, been advised to temper her public criticism following her remarks in the Cape Argus, because it was the last time she explicitly criticized racial segregation during the course of her visit. In her private correspondence, however, she did not hold back. “Johannesburg is a truly astonishing city, considering the fact that it has been in existence only 67 years,” she wrote Jo. “We did not like it at all on account of its bitter racialism, its ugliness in many sections and its ‘gold fever,’ but I believe there is a nobler spirit growing up that will direct its wealth ultimately towards the well-being, education and brotherhood of all races within the city.”22
Racial segregation wasn’t the only aspect of South African society that troubled her. Since the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike decades earlier, Helen had been immensely concerned with the plight of oppressed workers of all races. A visit to the Kimberley diamond mine—nicknamed the Big Hole because of its claim to being the deepest hole ever excavated by hand—left a lasting impression and confirmed what Ralph Bunche had told her about the deplorable conditions faced by Black South African miners. “I was fascinated as I felt diamonds in the natural state and learned of their amazingly varied colors,” she wrote Jo, “but oh the desolation that swept over me as I considered the Big Hole (mine)—an immeasurable symbol of misery, ill-paid labor, and wasted lives.”23
Decades earlier, she had no compunction about calling out the industrialists she held responsible for such conditions, but now she decided discretion was in order when she was invited for tea at the home of the country’s most prominent mining magnate, Ernest Oppenheimer, whose company De Beers owned the Big Hole mine. “He entertained us pleasantly, and Lady Oppenheimer was very sweet indeed,” she wrote Jo after the trip. “That was one of many occasions for us to keep watch over our mutinous lips.”24
As she spoke at more than forty-eight meetings—addressing an estimated fifty thousand people in total25—she kept those mutinous lips in check time and time again while sharing her true thoughts in private correspondence to friends. In her journal, Nella noted Helen’s candid assessment of the trip: “They did not like SA; as a group they cared less for the Afrikaners than any other, but the racial tensions made them unhappy in every way.”26
On occasion during the rest of her two-and-a-half-month tour, she would gently allude to her disapproval of the system, as when she told a local newspaper in Bloemfontein that it was important to make blind people self-reliant instead of a burden to their families. “And that applies to natives as well as Europeans,” she added.27 She told the same newspaper that her tour was “very strenuous” because of the separate meetings required for the multiracial population.28 Finally, on the eve of her departure back to America in May, she was asked by a reporter from the Cape Argus whether there were aspects of South Africa that had disturbed her. “South Africa has terrible racial problems, and it is always depressing when such disturbing elements keep the country tense,” she responded, without explicitly criticizing segregation as she had done to the same newspaper two months earlier.29
The trip was grueling for the seventy-year-old visitor, who at each stop was feted by a wide assortment of local dignitaries eager to meet the famous American. She complained to a friend that the sheer number of events forced her to work on new speeches until her head was “in a whirl.” She welcomed the opportunity for a brief respite at South Africa’s famed Kruger Park, where she spent two days on safari encountering wildlife, including herds of lions, giraffes, zebras, and even a hippopotamus—an excursion that she described as “one of the most thrilling experiences imaginable.”30 Although she was forced to rely on Polly for descriptions of the wildlife, she felt the tall grasses rustle around her and “drank with delight the clean air of the jungle and the sense of freedom in which the animals could roam.”31
One of the stops on her itinerary that she had been looking forward to most was a visit to the city of Durban, where Mohandas Gandhi had lived for more than a decade at the beginning of the twentieth century before eventually returning to India to lead the fight for independence from British rule. It was in South Africa, in fact, that Gandhi first acquired the honorific Mahatma, Sanskrit for “great soul,” in recognition of his work on behalf of the poor.32 Helen had closely followed his later struggle for independence with great interest. In 1936, she recorded in her journal her admiration for his recent declaration that he was “prepared to be hanged” in his campaign against British colonialism. But characteristically, she took notice at the same time of another issue that she considered “equally fraught with tragic significance”—the plight of those victimized by the country’s deeply entrenched caste system. “The untouchables of India do not appear to desire national independence while their human rights are denied—and why should they?”33
In 1951, three years after the mahatma’s assassination in India by a Hindu extremist, Helen stood before a large gathering at Durban’s Gandhi Hall and invoked his memory. “Somehow, I feel his presence, though unseen, as I speak to you,” she told the audience. “My own work for the blind and the deaf has given me experiences that vividly recall Gandhi’s passive resistance principles. I have observed that if we struggle uselessly against deafness or blindness or succumb, our defeat is inevitable.”34
Before her talk, she had been informed that the family of the mahatma’s son Manilal Gandhi were in attendance, though Manilal himself could not attend because he was staging a well-publicized fast to protest apartheid. Long overshadowed by his father, Gandhi’s second son had lived in South Africa as a child and worked for a time at the Phoenix Settlement—a cooperative community founded by Mohandas—before eventually returning to India. In 1918, Manilal traveled again to South Africa where he spent the rest of his life operating the Indian Opinion newspaper as a vehicle for carrying on his father’s legacy of nonviolence and social justice, which included periodic fasts—a form of hunger strike—to protest discriminatory apartheid laws.
Midway through her speech, Helen acknowledged the presence of the Gandhi family and offered a message meant for Manilal: “I send good wishes to you whose father’s teachings I have held affectionately in my heart. I pray that the good cause for which you now suffer may eventually triumph.”35 At this, Manilal’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Sita, spontaneously rushed forward and embraced her, saying that she would bring the message back to her father.
Manilal Gandhi’s younger daughter Ela was eleven years old at the time, but remembers Helen’s visit as if it were yesterday. “I didn’t know very much about her politics, but she was very famous and I remember thinking how amazing it was that somebody who couldn’t see or hear could do all that she did, writing books and traveling the world,” she recalls. 36 Ela, who remembers spending time at her grandfather Mohandas’s ashram on a visit to India as a child, would grow up to become a prominent anti-apartheid campaigner. She served nine years under house arrest for her underground resistance to the South African regime. After the fall of apartheid, she would serve as an African National Congress MP for more than a decade and was a close ally of Nelson Mandela.
“Looking back, it’s so important that somebody as famous as Helen Keller spoke out against apartheid and highlighted the terrible racial laws,” observes Ela, who today chairs the Durban-based Gandhi Development Trust.37 Although she was too young to comprehend the American political landscape at the time of Helen’s visit, she would later come to understand that what the famous visitor experienced on her South African tour was not altogether different from the situation in her home state of Alabama, where Jim Crow laws also enforced racial segregation and deprived most African Americans of the vote. Why, then, was Helen so shaken by apartheid?
“I suspect that, like many people later on, she was struck by the fact that in South Africa at that time, a vast Black majority was being oppressed by a tiny white minority. That would have been the major difference between our country and the American South in 1951,” Ela explains.
Ela’s brother, Arun Gandhi, was seventeen at the time of Helen’s visit, but he was not present when his siblings attended her speech at Gandhi Hall. Instead, he was back home at the Phoenix Settlement supporting his father during his fast and running the Opinion newspaper in Manilal’s absence. He recollects that Helen had already caused something of a ruckus before arriving in Durban. “I remember it was reported in the newspapers that she annoyed the apartheid regime to no end because of her outspoken criticism, but there was nothing the authorities could do about it without creating a scandal,” recalls Arun, who today runs the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in Rochester, New York, carrying on the legacy of his grandfather, whom he fondly remembers from visiting India during his youth.38
Although Arun wasn’t present to hear Helen’s message of support for his father’s protest, he recalls meeting her when she and Polly came to visit the family for tea at their home later that day. “I had so many questions I wanted to ask her, but I thought it would be intrusive.” He remembers Helen passionately criticizing apartheid when she met with Manilal and his mother, Sushila, that afternoon. “I think she did a great service in speaking out and making people aware of the evils of the system. It also helped bring attention to my father’s cause. It was very unusual for people, especially Americans, to speak out at that time. She was very famous and admired. Her support was so important.”39
A few days later, Helen received a message from Manilal thanking her for publicly endorsing his protest. “I wish to express my profound sense of gratitude to you for the most inspiring message I received from you during my fast,” he wrote. “I value it more than all the messages I have received. I regard it as your very kind blessings in the great task that lies before me.”40
She found at least one additional way to signal her disapproval of the system during her tour when she accepted an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, one of only two integrated institutions remaining in the country despite apartheid prohibitions on race mixing.41 It was a symbolic gesture, and she refrained from explicitly criticizing apartheid in her acceptance speech, but she left no doubt about her intentions when she wrote about the trip upon her return to America. “I observed that segregation was practiced everywhere in schools and colleges. The one noble exception I came across was the admission of white and colored to the University of Witwatersrand. Every fibre within me revolted against circumstances that threaten the minds of handicapped human beings and narrow their chances of well-being.”42
Although she had toned down her criticism of apartheid early on, news had spread rapidly by the time she was welcomed at a Zulu gathering weeks after her arrival in the country where the organizers bestowed on her the honorary name of Homvuselelo Matsoseletso—translated as “You have aroused the conscience of many.”43
Despite this recognition, she often wondered whether her efforts had actually made any difference, or whether her undiplomatic criticism had in fact jeopardized her mission. After she returned home, she wrote a letter to the blind Kobe University professor Takeo Iwahashi, who had hosted her and Polly on their visit to Japan in 1937 and who was sometimes referred to as the “Japanese Helen Keller.”
“Friends kept assuring us that my appeals stirred the hearts of the people, and I trust that some real good will result from our visit to South Africa,” she wrote. “But you know about the racial antagonisms which prevail there, and I cannot escape the fear that they may compromise the welfare of the native blind and the deaf.”44
