A Tribute: Conrad Sidego (1946-2020), a true brother By Wilmot James
Conrad Sidego was upset– possibly angry – with me. His wife Amy probably remembers his true reaction. It was sometime towards the end of 1994 that Frederick van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine took me to Norway, Sweden and Denmark, as an introduction to the key donor personalities that so generously funded the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa , an organisation I took over from Boraine as executive director in August of that year.
I tell this story because Conrad Sidego who passed away last week was no ordinary acquaintance of mine. I first met him sometime in the mid-1960s when he joined Hewat Training College in Athlone as student teachers. My parents, Pat and Shelma James, were the house parents of the student residence. My father was the woodwork master at Hewat and my mother gave up her primary school job to look after the 65 students placed in their care.
Seven years my senior, Conrad was and remained, much like the late Jakes Gerwel, an older brother to me. Over the years he looked out for me and, by virtue of age, had the authority – with my mother’s blessing – to pull me into line when required. As with all older brothers, whether biological or not, the younger sibling typically had to go to them rather than them come to you. Respect flowed both ways but arched upwards.
What was the political culture – the formal and informal anthropology – of the DA like, he wondered? What was it like to work with Helen Zille, he probed? Were coloured people respected in the DA, he asked? I had a lot to share with him and we spent many hours over tea in discussion. Stellenbosch was a deeply divided town by race. The historian Hermann Giliomee documented how apartheid brutalised its coloured residents including my grandmother Deborah Newman who with her family and friends were removed like pieces of dirt from the centre of town. My mother’s sister Josephine, beautiful and dark-skinned, took her opera lessons from a Stellenbosch University diva who insisted she enter and exit her house through the back door.
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