ALIVE AND FREE — THIRTY YEARS LATER
A Reflection and Letter to Dr Joseph E. Marshall Jr.
Dear Dr Marshall,
I have wanted to write this letter for some time. Thirty years ago, I was a young man from Ladysmith, South Africa, who somehow found his way to the Omega Boys Club in San Francisco. For many years, I wondered whether you would remember me.
Recently, my dear friend Shamelda gave me the revised fourth edition of Street Soldier. As I opened the book and read your new preface, I came across words that stopped me in my tracks. You remembered. You wrote that you had never forgotten “the gentleman from South Africa who flew all the way to meet me.”
Thirty years later, I knew exactly who that gentleman was. Suddenly, an old story became very present again.
1996 — A Turning Point
1996 was a turning point in my life. The turmoil within me seemed almost to mirror the turmoil around me in my hometown of Ladysmith, South Africa.
Our town was going through a difficult period. Devastating floods, taxi wars and political violence between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party all formed part of the atmosphere that year. Closer to home, in my own community of Limit Hill, a small but worrying problem of gangsterism was developing and had attracted front-page attention in the local Ladysmith Gazette.
But another story was unfolding at the same time. There was a basketball court. On that court, young people from different races and communities around Ladysmith were discovering another way of relating to one another. Basketball became more than a game; it became a safe space.
Our weekly Friday-night youth programme also meant that many of the young people of Limit Hill were somewhere safe, known and accounted for.
Eventually, we in the Limit Hill Youth marched through town to the Town Hall and handed a memorandum to municipal officials. We wanted Ladysmith to know that we rejected the idea that our community was destined to become known for gangs and violence. We wanted a better future, and we were prepared to help build it.
Around this same time, my Methodist minister, Reverend Neville Griffin, nominated me to attend the Sesiyakha Manje Conference in Pietermaritzburg. For three intense days, we wrestled with practical ways in which the Church could live the Gospel of Jesus Christ and participate in transforming the communities around us.
Something was planted in me during those three days. I did not yet have a name for it. Years later, it would become Acts4Transformation, inspired by Acts 4:32–35 and that extraordinary description of the early Christian community:
“There were no needy persons among them.”
But 1996 still had another appointment waiting for me.
Street Soldier
On 28 September 1996, I boarded a flight to San Francisco to fulfil a lifelong dream of travelling to the United States. During a long stopover in Singapore, I wandered through the airport bookshops. One book immediately caught my eye: Street Soldier — One Man’s Struggle to Save a Generation, One Life at a Time.
The author was Dr Joseph Marshall. I began reading, and the conviction that there could be no work more vital than saving our children resonated deeply with what I had been trying to do back home.
Then I discovered something extraordinary: the Omega Boys Club was based in San Francisco. That was precisely where I was going.
I arrived in San Francisco at a particularly poignant moment. Tupac Shakur had died only fifteen days earlier after being shot in Las Vegas. His death was palpable; his music seemed to be everywhere. I remember hearing “Life Goes On”, with its haunting reflection on young men lost to the streets, and sensing that this was about much more than the death of a famous rapper. A generation was mourning.
Although I had travelled thousands of kilometres from Ladysmith, the questions behind that grief were strangely familiar.
There was another date that has troubled me as I look back thirty years later. Tupac died on 13 September 1996. Nineteen years earlier, on 12 September 1977, Steve Biko had died in police custody in South Africa.
Two September dates. Two powerful voices. Two very different expressions of the struggle of young Black people to understand dignity, identity, oppression and freedom.
Dr Marshall, I remember your great admiration for Malcolm X. In many respects, when I try to explain Steve Biko to someone in America, I think of him as something like South Africa’s Malcolm X—not because their lives or philosophies were identical, but because both challenged Black people to think deeply about identity, dignity, self-worth and liberation.
This leaves me with an uncomfortable reflection. I am sometimes embarrassed that many young South Africans can more readily quote lines from Tupac’s rap songs than they can quote the writings and ideas of Steve Biko. I do not say this to diminish Tupac. Perhaps it tells us something more important about ourselves.
Young people will listen to the voices that speak convincingly into their pain, anger, hopes and lived reality. If we want Biko’s ideas, our history, our faith and our values to speak to another generation, then we cannot simply complain about the voices they are listening to. We have to give them something worth listening to.
Why were so many young men dying? Why were violence, gangs and drugs claiming so many lives? And what could we actually do about it?
The day after arriving, I telephoned Omega. To my astonishment, you answered the telephone yourself and invited me in. I attended the three-day Omega Institute as well as the classes. I listened. I observed. I learned.
One piece of advice has remained particularly important to me. In essence, you told me:
“Take from Omega whatever is practical and useful to you, then adapt it to the reality of the programme and community you are returning home to.”
That gave me freedom. I did not have to reproduce San Francisco in Ladysmith. I had to understand the principles and then listen carefully to my own community.
Before I returned home, you entrusted me with something else which, looking back, seems almost unbelievable. You gave me two autographed copies of Street Soldier and asked me to present them personally to two South African leaders: President Nelson Mandela and King Goodwill Zwelithini.
For an ordinary young man from Ladysmith, neither assignment should have been easy. Yet, through what I can only describe as divine intervention, both tasks were accomplished. Those two books reached their intended recipients.
Even then, perhaps, the journey was teaching me what can happen when somebody trusts an ordinary young person with an extraordinary assignment.
Thirty Years Later
Yesterday morning, thirty years later, something happened that brought that lesson rushing back. I was driving to work through the morning traffic when I passed a young man named Siyanda.
Siyanda had played basketball for Steadville Magic, one of the main local rivals of our Panthers Basketball Club. He was never actually one of my club players, but I often coached him at Northern Natal representative level and developed a good relationship with him.
Today, he looks superb. He has developed a passion for marathon running, has stable employment with Defy and often travels overseas for races. His backcourt teammate in those years was Lucky, who I understand went on to become a chartered accountant.
As I drove past Siyanda, I felt a quiet sense of gratitude: alive and free.
Then I arrived at work. My first patient was a young man whom I did not immediately recognise. The first thing I noticed was his T-shirt. It carried an RIP message and the face of a young man I recognised. I asked whether he came from Steadville. He did.
As we spoke, he lifted his shirt to show me the painful blisters from shingles for which he had come seeking help. I noticed his “Thug Life” tattoo and other tattoos influenced by rap culture.
We began talking. I asked about the young man pictured on his shirt. That led to another name, then another, and another: young men we both knew who had died violently over the years—through gang violence, drugs, political violence and street violence.
By the time we stopped counting, we were approaching twenty names. Then I asked him something that had been troubling me since he walked in: “Why don’t I recognise you?”
His answer stopped me. He had spent almost fifteen years in prison.
Within the space of one morning, I had encountered two very different outcomes from the same community. Siyanda: alive, free, working, running marathons and travelling. And another young man emerging from nearly fifteen years behind bars, carrying on his body and clothing some of the scars and memories of the streets.
Suddenly, I was back in Street Soldier, back with that uncomfortable question you pose early in the book:
“If we believe we are doing such good work, why is another child still being claimed by the streets?”
Why do Siyanda and Lucky survive and thrive while so many others from the same community end up imprisoned or dead? Is it simply luck?
Thirty years later, I still do not have an easy answer. But I know that luck cannot be our youth-development strategy.
Taking Omega Home
You once gave me permission to take what was useful from Omega and adapt it to my own reality. That is essentially what I have spent thirty years trying to do.
My reality is Ladysmith. My roots are in the Methodist Church. My faith is in Jesus Christ. My community work grew out of basketball courts, Friday-night youth gatherings, churches, schools, workplaces, families and ordinary encounters with people in need.
Over time, these experiences evolved into Acts4Transformation and four simple words:
Believe. Pray. Love. Share.
Not as a replacement for the principles you taught at Omega, but as the language through which I learned to live them in my own context.
BELIEVE. Help a young person believe that another future is possible. In my Christian context, this begins with believing that every life has God-given value and purpose.
PRAY. For us, prayer must lead to presence. Know the child. Know the family. Notice when someone disappears. Intervene before the prison sentence, funeral or addiction forces everybody to ask why nobody saw it coming.
LOVE. Create belonging before the gang creates belonging. Sometimes the intervention is as simple as a basketball court where a child knows that every Friday night somebody will notice whether he arrived.
SHARE. Share opportunity, time, talent, knowledge, networks, resources, education and employment pathways. Let young people encounter worlds larger than the few streets surrounding them.
After thirty years, perhaps I would add one more word:
STAY.
Stay long enough to discover what happened to the children. Stay long enough to see Siyanda become a marathon runner. Stay long enough to hear that Lucky became a chartered accountant. And stay long enough to be there when another young man walks through your door after nearly fifteen years in prison.
Because he too is still alive. And therefore, his story is not finished.
What Surrounded the Child Who Made It?
Perhaps one of the questions we should ask after thirty years is not only why some young people fall. We should study very carefully those who made it.
What surrounded the child who survived? Who noticed him? Who coached him? Who corrected him? Who knew where he was on Friday night? Who gave him somewhere to belong?
Who introduced him to another world? Who helped him discover something he was good at? Who expected something better from him? Who opened a door? Who loved him enough not to give up on him?
And then comes the real challenge: how do we build those things deliberately around every child instead of leaving them to chance?
Perhaps that is the bridge between the Omega Boys Club I encountered in San Francisco in 1996 and Acts4Transformation in Ladysmith thirty years later.
The Gentleman from South Africa
There is one final reason that your words in the fourth edition of Street Soldier moved me so deeply. For thirty years, I remembered you.
I remembered the book in Singapore. I remembered making that telephone call and hearing your voice answer. I remembered walking into Omega. I remember Ms Norris, Coach, Uncle Jack, Corey, Paul and the rest of the Omega family. I remembered the Institute and the young people.
I remembered those two autographed copies of Street Soldier entrusted to me for President Mandela and King Goodwill Zwelithini. And I remembered your instruction to take what worked and adapt it to the reality back home.
What I never knew was that, somewhere in your own memory, you remembered me too: “the gentleman from South Africa.”
Well, Dr Marshall, that gentleman is writing back to you thirty years later.
The seed travelled home. It landed in African soil. It took its own shape. It became intertwined with my Christian faith, my community, basketball, young people, business, ministry and, eventually, Acts4Transformation.
Some of the young people made it. Some did not. Some are thriving. Some are dead. Some went to prison. And some, thank God, may still be reached.
So, thirty years later, the work continues. The question continues. And so does the conviction that first caught the attention of a young South African browsing through a book in Singapore:
“There can surely be no work more important than saving our children.”
Thank you, Dr Marshall, for answering the telephone. Thank you for opening the door. Thank you for trusting a young man from Ladysmith with two books destined for a President and a King. And thank you for remembering the gentleman from South Africa.
He certainly never forgot you.
With profound gratitude and brotherly respect,