Powerful Memories of My Xhosa Teacher

Rhodes remembers beloved teacher Ally Weakley

This month Rhodes University renamed its major sports field The Ally Weakley Great Field in honour of its alumnus Alistair Weakley who was both a renowned rugby player and fighter for racial justice under apartheid. He was tragically killed in the wake of Chris Hani’s assassination. Hamilton Wende reflects on Ally’s legacy as a beloved Xhosa teacher.

Ally Weakley at Fish River Mouth. Image: Supplied

I was part of the first television news crew to arrive at the scene of Chris Hani’s murder. We rushed through the streets of Dawn Park as the autumn sun shone through the windows, arriving just as one of his bodyguards did. I remember him collapsing in grief on a car roof as the truth hit him.

And who can forget the vertigo of fear and the incandescent rage that swept the country as South Africa faced the abyss? Today, looking back, the events seem scarcely real. There was the single white woman, the neighbour who somehow remembered the licence plate of the killer’s car and reported it to the police. Then the police officers spotting the killer, Janus Walusz’s, car and arresting him. Nelson Mandela appearing live on SABC, taking real power for the first time, appealing for calm where another, lesser, leader might have demanded vengeance.

Three days later, far away at the peaceful coastal spot of Ntafufu on the Wild Coast, a white family and friends were coming back from a day’s fishing when they were gunned down inside their bakkie, two brothers, Alistair and Glen Weakley, died in the hail of bullets.

I was shocked at the news, for Alistair or “Ally” as he was known, was my Xhosa teacher at high school. I was devastated, both by his death and by the chaos that threatened to engulf our country.

Ally Weakley, captain, sits in the centre of this group portrait of Rhodes University’s team that played against the Welsh team Llanelli in 1979. Image: Supplied

It took me back decades to when I was a young teenager at boarding school in the Eastern Cape and my school offered us the chance to study Xhosa for the first time during the height of apartheid. I felt that it was a great opportunity to learn an African language and, as I was living in Africa, it was something I thought was both necessary and interesting.

In the event I signed up for the class and it turned out — this was the height of apartheid after all — that my teacher was a white guy called Ally Weakley who spoke fluent, idiomatic Xhosa. He was a staunch opponent of apartheid and a successful provincial rugby player. He made it his business to play rugby with black people and earned the wrath of the whites-only powers that be.

Weakley was also a human rights lawyer defending people from apartheid laws. He was a great inspiration to me and taught me not only the language of Xhosa but much of the culture of the people.

Years later, in 1998, his killers were testifying at the TRC asking for amnesty. Then, I had time to really think about him and what he meant to my life, and how his death had affected me.

Ally Weakley. Image: Supplied

Looking back with fondness

I wrote this piece which was broadcast on BBC’s Radio 4 and which I quote in part:

“There are few teachers who make a real difference to a child’s life. Alastair Weakley was one teacher who helped shape mine. At St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, he began the school’s first Xhosa class in those all-white days of 1975.

I remember so well the first day Alastair walked into our classroom. He was a powerful young man in his early 20s whose fashionably long brown hair and sideburns looked incongruous with his black teaching gown. “Ally” as we called him when he was out of earshot was a hero to us 14-year-olds. He was a brilliant rugby player, he was funny and he seemed to know all about things like women.

In that faraway South Africa, he was outwardly all that we white boys ever thought we wanted to be. But inwardly, Ally had one thing that made him different from so many of our role models. He spoke fluent Xhosa, and he had zero tolerance for the racism that was so common and so accepted in our world then.

Well, I began to think, if Ally doesn’t like it then it must be wrong. Sadly, despite Ally’s best efforts, my Xhosa today is not fluent, but what has remained with me over all those years is the fascination and respect he had for Xhosa culture that he communicated to us through his deep understanding of the language.

I’ll never forget him turning around to the blackboard with a flourish, his gown sweeping out behind him, and chalking up the word ithanga in vigorous, confident strokes. He then turned to face us. “Xhosa,” he told us, “is a very subtle language. Take this one word, depending on the way you say it, on the context, it can mean a pumpkin, or a thigh.” A thigh. Giggles broke out across the class. We hardly thought of anything else then, and Ally had, through his humour, begun to teach us the complex, wonderful nuances of Xhosa. In those hard, cold days of real apartheid, to be given even a small glimpse of the world of black people was a revelation to me.

Ally challenged the received prejudices of our white world, and got us to question them as well. With his gown, and his always-breaking chalk, and his untidy long hair, he opened a door for me and sent me on a journey both into the world and, ultimately, into my own heart.

I never saw him again since the day I left school, but when I heard the news of his killing I was surprised at the depth of my own reaction. It brought the bleakness of those days closer to me than I had ever expected. That a man who had set me on the road to believing in a nonracial future for South Africa, should have been one of those killed in revenge for Chris Hani — the irony of it was bitter.

Ally Weakley is in the middle of this group picture. Image: Supplied

I thought of him a few days later when I was standing outside the stadium in Soweto covering Chris Hani’s funeral, and watching the smoke from the fires of rage billow into the sky. I have covered 10 different wars as a journalist, but I have never been so terrified as I was that day. It is one thing to report on someone else’s chaos and suffering, but to watch my own country teeter on the brink of civil war drove me the closest I have ever been to cracking up. The memory of Ally Weakley and what he had taught me in that hot summer classroom so long ago was one reason I was able to look beyond my own despair, and to believe that there was another way for South Africa, that we would overcome those days that had brought us to the edge of horror.

Ally has been dead for more than five years. I wish he was alive but because he is not, I honour his memory and will do so for the rest of my life. I want his killers to know what kind of a man he was. At their amnesty hearing one of them, Mlulamisi Maxhayi, said of their actions at the time, “we decided to kill the white people because they were a symbol of apartheid”. But Fundisile Guleni, another of the killers, also said. “We are so sorry for the families and would like to apologise to all of those affected by our actions.”

I am angry, very angry, that they killed Ally, but, personally, I do forgive them. I say that in the full humility of knowing that it is easy for me to do so, and I do not wish to intrude on the grief of his family. I want to forgive them because one thing I have learnt from other people’s wars is that hatred is a choice — but so is forgiveness, and it is one I wish to make in my own life.

Above all, I want South Africa to know what kind of a man we lost in Ally Weakley. I want somehow to keep the lessons he taught me alive, because we still have a long way to go before we can truly say that, as black and white, we understand and trust each other. I want to say hamba kahle mfundisi wami. Go well, my teacher, go well”.

Ally acted on his principled convictions

In their motivation for the renaming of the field, Prof Steve Olivier, vice-chancellor of Robert Gordon University Scotland, judge Lex Mpati and Izak Smuts SC — all Rhodes alumni — point out that he was a staunch opponent of apartheid who was a successful provincial rugby player and also the longest-serving captain of the Rhodes 1st XV. He made it his business to play rugby with black people and earned the wrath of the whites-only powers that be while defying them and their racism.

“Ally,” they say, “was a man who understood right from wrong, and he acted on his principled convictions.”

He did indeed, and he taught me and other kids to do the same, and for that I will never forget him.

The story has come full circle. He fully deserves the honour Rhodes is doing him. And so, more than 40 years later, the meaning of Ally’s life and of the lessons he taught me, and other teenagers, reverberate still.