Russel Botman’s ethical legacy calls forth a time yet to come

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Aslam Fataar responds to Beryl Botman’s annual Russel Botman Memorial Lecture, 18 October 2023

Russel Botman’s ethical persona was based on an acute recognition of his time. Such recognition vested in him a virtues-infused life, based on dignity and fairness. He lived inside time’s brutality and trauma, always bearing witness. He was infused with a divinely inspired imagination, calling forth a life beyond suffering, war, division and ugliness. He danced to the rhythms that time imposed upon him, creating openings for co-living, sharing and caring.

Yet, time did not recognise him. He was ahead of his time. He lived and died struggling to endow time with a profoundly humane, dignified, divinely inspired quality. He lived to bring future time into the picture, where dignity would triumph over the present. He brought dignity and dignification into our presence.

His exemplary life is a moral beacon that allows us to imagine how to live “in time” and be responsive to our time’s challenges, to give time a palpable productive quality, and to be alert to the complexities of life’s perils, promises, pitfalls and possibilities. Within such a vision, time for Russel morphed from simple, linear, colonial clock time to time as a complex duration.

In one sense, the 70 years since his birth feel like they have passed in the wink of an eye. Yet, amid the earth-shattering complexity of these 70 years, their duration feels long and heart-wrenchingly devastating.

Russel’s life duration was twisted up in the mix of the optimism, solidarity and justice of decolonial and anti-apartheid freedom, and our collective desire to usher in a better world. How audacious a human being was Russel, to have led such an exemplary life – a life spawned by his associations and relations with his parents, family, peers, friends, colleagues and children. His educational, religious, academic and theological networks nurtured him, and he, in turn, nurtured them.

His marital relationship with Beryl was one of conversation and equal partnership – Beryl as the educationist teacher, language subject advisor, teacher trainer, author and published Paulo Freirean education academic. Russel’s and Beryl’s desire lines of life were pursued along different personal and professional paths. Yet, their paths evolved together in distinction, in love and joy, and in a kind of pedagogical and educational relationality; they were always learning – it was a life of learning, unlearning, imaging and creating. I muse that their mutually nurturing partnership can perhaps be captured by Kahlil Gibran’s poem called “On marriage”:

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
And, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Russel stepped into his ethical becoming as a human being, continually reimagining and reinventing his personal commitments and actions. Such a task of the imagination is founded on virtues acquired and practised throughout his life: patience, forbearance, critical engagement, compassion and attentive listening.

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Russel stepped into his ethical becoming as a human being, continually reimagining and reinventing his personal commitments and actions. Such a task of the imagination is founded on virtues acquired and practised throughout his life: patience, forbearance, critical engagement, compassion and attentive listening.

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He had to encounter the racism and violence of our pastness cooked into the edifices of our institutional lives. He witnessed 60 years of global and local apartheid brutality, ethnic cleansing, war, violence, asymmetrical warfare and collective punishment, forced removals, caged existences and skyrocketing inequality. Russel recognised what must be done to intervene in history and what role he needed to play to bring relief to excluded communities, those who were the victims of violence and erasure. The “pedagogy of hope” orientation of his rectorship was his attempt to tether the university to the moral good in service of humanity.

Ultimately, time could not contain him. Time failed him. He didn’t falter.

His recognition of the times we lived in was acute. His work prophesied a time of renewed possibility, courage and love. In the most tragically beautiful sense, he was a man who lived out of his time, who predicted a time yet to come. Time could not contain him. Portending a world yet to come, he bore witness to divine grace, love and generosity.

Russel asked how we might create an embracing, inclusive time horizon, irrespective of personal consequences, out of which we could serve humanity. Russel gifted us a type of human enfolding, based on recognition, intimacy and conviviality, a legacy for human and planetary co-existence.

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