A life-changing handshake
"Sadly, I missed my chance to meet him, I thought. I came so close yet so far. After the performance, Graca Machel comes over to me and asks if I would like to go to their home to meet Tata.
Visual artist, John Adams from Bosmont shares his Mandela experience with us. Samsung Electronics Africa worked on the rebuilding Mandela’s mom’s church in his hometown, in Qunu, Eastern Cape in 2011, which was wonderfully renovated into a community centre.
Adams shares: “At the opening of this centre I painted a portrait. Almost shaking of excitement and so tearful of joy I was looking out for Tata but he was ill and couldn’t leave home.
“Sadly, I missed my chance to meet him, I thought. I came so close yet so far. After the performance, Graca Machel comes over to me and asks if I would like to go to their home to meet Tata.
“Spellbound I nodded and had the most massive smile ever on my face. There was about fifteen to eighteen of us that were invited back to the house in Qunu to meet Mandela and I was like a little kid in a candy store, full of excitement.
“I was driving in the bus, I had all of my questions in the back of my head and we walked into the house and the first thing that greeted me when I came into the house was that it was a very simple home.”
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“One of the first things that greeted me was the smell of Garam masala, apparently Mandela had this chef that use to cook a real home-style curry and local stews and it was just the most comforting embrace to hit me. It felt like my mum’s home on a Sunday morning. He’s pile on the carpet was so thick I watched all of the footprints on it and the softness of it.
“There was this wonderful huge table with huge proteas in a vase and then we went through to his room but I could not see him because of all the people but the only way I can describe it is if I was in a lion’s den and it was pitch black, I would be able to sense the lion and that’s what it felt like in that room.”
“Finally, it was my turn to shake his hand and I had all of these questions and I just leaned forward and said ‘Tata, thank you for everything you’ve done for me’, I just burst into tears and Graca was there explaining who I was.
- WATCH: This is John Adams _ He’s a visual artist from Bosmont – [related content]
“The one thing that stuck out was that when I took his hand, I touched a mans hand, it was so real and this was a man that had a vision and he put his life on the line, he sacrificed so much to fulfil his personal vision and also the vision he had for this country, him together with our fathers of freedom.”
“It was just a sobering moment in thinking about the extent that he went through to fulfil his vision. We often put these folks into demigods and they are not that, they just sheer human beings and that encouraged me, if this man, an incredible legend can do it so can I and that really was like a rocket booster too to start pursuing my art on a greater scale so now when I do performance paintings I often put my hand there just to remind myself of the moment in meeting him.”
“What I took away from the experience is that impossible is really nothing and I read some of his quotes daily but the one that stuck out for me was his drive and the importance that he put on education and he said that ‘education is the most powerful tool’ that you can put in the hands of anybody’ by educating yourself on a daily basis is one of the most incredible way to arm yourself to reach for your goals.”
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