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Percy Yutar led the case against the anti'apartheid revolutionary. What did victory cost him?
"THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF COURSE IN h his childhood was the loss of his fingers when he was thirteen."
My friend David is telling me about his father, Percy Yutar. Were sitting in a sunny apartment in the neighborhood of Tamboerskloof, Cape Town. In the distance, through the window, a bright bank of clouds courses over Table Mountain.
Percy was the prosecutor who secured convictions against Nelson Mandela and seven others fifty years ago in what was called the Rivonia Trial-a pivotal moment in South African history-Mandela going off to his twenty-seven years in prison for fighting against the system of apartheid.
David is uncomfortable, I can tell. Throughout the conversations about his father we would have over the course of the next few weeks, I could sense his inner conflict as he tried to balance loyalty with a more critical viewpoint.
The reason I know David, and the reason I wanted to find out about his father, is because our family histories intertwine. I was born in South Africa and so were my parents. My mom and dad left for political reasons in 1986. Apartheid was still in place, and they didn't want to continue to benefit, as they and their friends had, from the cheap labor wrung out by such a system.
My grandparents lived in relative wealth in a suburb of Johannesburg. They had bridge games and servants and gin and tonics by the pool, the whole postcolonial deal. It doesn't account for the complexities of being human to judge them for not, at any point, apprising themselves of the injustice around them and trying to do something about it. There are many instances of the grace and kindness they exhibited in difficult lives that included, among other things, the loss of a son to a car accident. Yet there were people like them who, though also steeped in their own circumstances, did break away and work against apartheid.
My mom tells a story: We're hung up at the airport, on our way to the US. The grind of moving an entire young family across an ocean has been set in motion but some bureaucratic detail...