Tell Me Your Story - Ruda Landman

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first response was to learn sympathy for the city. Because I came to understand how enormously difficult it is to deal with informal settlements on the scale we have them. And the kind of dinner-party conversation that the state was not . . .

      Ruda: Was useless . . .

      Anton: (Nods) . . . was useless, wasn’t delivering anything – it just wasn’t true. They weren’t delivering enough, but the realisation was that they could never deliver enough because the pace of demand was outstripping what they could possibly do. And it really struck home for me that here I was, a politically aware, engaged journalist, and I had no sense of the challenges facing cities like Johannesburg and how impossible they are.

      Ruda: On a more personal note, you’ve been married to Harriet for how long? Twenty-five years?

      Anton: Longer. More than thirty.

      Ruda: What keeps it going? What made you fall in love? Tell me that first.

      Anton: We met at university and we were together for some years before we got married. What made us fall in love? We . . . I mean . . . It was an unlikely connection, I think, because we were very different . . .

      Ruda: How is she different from you?

      Anton: I was a hard political activist, and she was a much softer, more rounded, different kind of person, and hopefully she’s taught me a bit of that. She’s taught me a tolerance for thinking differently that I don’t think I had when I was young. We got married because our lawyer told us we better get married.

      Ruda: (Surprised) Why? What did it have to do with him?

      Anton: Well, it was because I had been subpoenaed as a journalist to answer questions – to identify somebody I knew I couldn’t. So the lawyer said, “If that’s your attitude, the likelihood is you’re going to jail. So it’s quite a good idea to be married.”

      Ruda: Because Harriet needed to qualify as a visitor.

      Anton: Yes, as a visitor, and have the access that one needed. So on short notice we decided to get married. We also thought that giving a Jewish mother short notice would stymie her capacity to do the whole wedding. (His eyes crinkle up.) We were wrong. But in between us sending out invitations and getting married, the person I couldn’t name left the country.

      Ruda: So the reason fell away?

      Anton: The reason fell away but we went ahead and got married, and we’re still married some thirty years later, so it was maybe the best legal advice I ever had. It was maybe the only legal advice I ever followed.

      Ruda: What keeps your marriage going?

      Anton: We’re both in media – she’s a television producer. We have worked together, but we found that’s not a good idea. So we’ve led quite parallel but separate lives, both in media. And I suppose we’ve always had the understanding that when one is working very hard, the other one is more available. So we’ve managed it that way, because we’ve both had pretty busy, full lives.

      Ruda: And the kids? You have two children, right?

      Anton: Two children, ten years apart, which is a crazy thing to do. I would always advise against it.

      Ruda: Was it a decision? Or did it just happen like that?

      Anton: We had one kid, and I kept wanting another kid until, well, one day I said, “I’m having another kid. You can choose who it’s with!” It took ten years to get to that and we had another kid, and, of course, ten years apart is crazy. But in the end it’s great.

      Ruda: How did your kids change you?

      Anton: Children are what keep a marriage going, I think, under difficult times. I think they’re very often the glue.

      Ruda: A shared project.

      Anton: Exactly. So I think that is a critical factor.

      Ruda: And how did parenting change you? Being a dad?

      Anton: Having children is quite humbling, because when you’re first a parent, you think, “Here’s this thing I can mould in my image, who is going to listen to me and I can teach him . . .”

      Ruda: He will hang on to every word.

      Anton: Exactly. I can teach him to be a great chess player in the way I always wanted to be, you know. And of course you learn pretty quickly that they shape you more than you shape them. That’s the most striking lesson one learns, I think. You try to nudge them in a direction, but your influence doesn’t last.

      Dineo Ndlanzi (Gogo Dineo): “The healing practice requires huge responsibility”

      Dineo Ndlanzi, or Gogo Dineo as her students call her, lives on the fault line between tradition and the modern world, bringing her calling as a sangoma into boardrooms and training sessions where she works as a coach and facilitator. She has a lesson for every one of us who still believe that our view of the world is the only one that is valid. We talked in Johannesburg in August 2016.

      Ruda: Dineo, let’s go right back to the beginning. At school you wanted to be a chemical analyst. What did you study finally, and where did that take you for your first job?

      Dineo: Growing up in Alex [Alexandra township in Johannesburg], I knew that the only way out of that life was to study and work hard, but unfortunately I didn’t even study anything after high school because my calling started when I was at school. I got a scholarship to go to a private school, and my teachers actually came and spoke to my mum, saying that they were worried about me because I was taking it too far. I used to study the whole book in advance – by the time my teacher got there, I was, like, “No, that’s not how it works.”

      Ruda: You were every teacher’s nightmare.

      Dineo: Yes. They probably thought it was because of that that I was having episodes . . .

      Ruda: Episodes?

      Dineo: Yes, I would say, “I’m seeing things,” and I would be pro­phetic in class, but I don’t remember those episodes. When I went to the private school, it became worse because I was far away from home, from my family. I actually had to be sent off to an institution for six months in my matric year. Everybody thought I was crazy, I thought I was crazy, and at church they thought I was demonic or possessed, so it was really a difficult time.

      Ruda: Heavens, Dineo, how did you experience that, to be put in a psychiatric institution at age eighteen?

      Dineo: It was very difficult because you are in an institution with people who almost committed suicide, have heavy depression, anorexia and also, it was at a time when Satanism was rife. So I was caught between . . . I didn’t know: was I being called by something else or was I mentally sick? The psychiatrist could not find a thorough diagnosis for what was happening to me, because in conversation I sounded proper, and all the medical tests that they ran came out negative, so they gave me the closest diagnosis that they could think of.

      Ruda: Which was what?

      Dineo: Temporal lobe epilepsy. The medication they gave me actually made me worse, so they realised that was not it. And then one day [having left the institution and started in a job] I took a group of business people to Wits, to the Origins Centre, and we were speaking to a scientist about the birth of innovation and where we come from. He spoke about the role of healers and African shamans, and about how science fails to understand [the difference between] when you are birthing into the call and when you are psychotic. So I was sitting at the back of the room and I cried, because he said a lot of people find themselves in mental institutions and they should not be there.

      Ruda: And suddenly you thought, “I’m not mad, I’m not!”

      Dineo: Ja. But I was still experiencing extreme depression, extreme mood swings, so there was a part of me that knew that I was not mad, but . . . my schooling was all about logical thinking, and this was very illogical. So when I had those episodes,

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