| CONTENTS Introduction
WTH = W. Thomas Huyck CM = Christopher Moore |
12 - Visitors & Friends: Wilby BagwaWTH: O.K. We're going to start by talking about a South African fellow named Wilby Bagwa, whose life was changed, you say, by his experience with the children's choir. CM: Wilby Bagwa was a visitor under the State Department program to show others America. And he came as a Methodist church musician from the black community of South Africa -- from Soweto. This, I think, was the spring of 1970. It had to be '69 or '70. In any case, he was on a several-weeks visit to the United States. He hit Chicago towards the end of that visit, and we were not on his itinerary. But he was visiting Circle Campus [University of Illinois at Chicago] on a day when Joseph Brewer had one of our concert teams doing something there at Circle, and Joe Brewer met Wilby Bagwa. In that encounter, Joe ascertained that Mr. Bagwa, in his several weeks in the United States, had really not met black musicians, had had very little contact with the black community -- it was almost as if our State Department did not know how to set this up. So Joe found out how to get in touch with him in that brief encounter and told him about the whole children's choir program and said, if you're here on Saturday, wouldn't you like to come and visit. Well, we planned something more extensive than that -- we created a breakfast that morning with all of our staff and with adjuncts, if you will, so that he would meet at least some black choral leaders in our community. And then we proceeded from breakfast over here to rehearsal. This was in the days when black young people were tempted to large Afro hair designs which bemused Bagwa no end because this had very different meaning for the people who were wearing it in this country and for him visiting here from South Africa. In any case, he spent the whole morning with us. Partway through the morning we sang Tina Singu, which is a genuine South African song - it's kind of a cheerleader's fight song for sporting events or for any other purpose for which you are building fervor and courage, etc. He told us some things about the song. And he shared, since he was able to speak off the record, he shared with the kids a few of his feelings of coming into our kind of group -- black, white, oriental -- everybody together, the complete mix, with tremendous openness. This had a tremendous impact on him. It was quite obvious in those moments when he spoke to the group, and he was saying, "I will carry in my heart this vision of what you're doing." He also pointed out to some of our participants that, you know, you may feel that you are fighting elements of severe racism in your country. It certainly isn't perfect. It has a way to go, but in effect for someone coming from my country, it's an amazing experience to be here and see what I have seen. Most particularly, to see you. To watch you. To just be with you. That you are here together singing. At the time several years later that we were singing at the Bismarck Hotel -- a project that Walter Laffer had worked out but that didn't turn out a large audience...it didn't turn out to be the showcase we had wanted it to be, but was an effort in the right direction...Wilby Bagwa was back and he spent some days with us. He sat with my wife at the Bismarck for this concert and afterwards, we went out to dinner together. And that was when we got the story. During the second visit, I'd heard Bagwa say several times, you know, they hadn't put Chicago on my itinerary and I insisted that they had to. I consider it my spiritual home. Well, I'd heard this reference go by a few times, so over dinner I asked him about it. And I got the whole story of what he'd been doing in the several years since. This time, by the way, his category for a State Department visitor was industrial relations expert. He had gone back to South Africa, completely overwhelmed with that morning with the Choir because, for the first time, he had seen a vision of what he thought his own country should and could be like some years down the track. And what gnawed at him when he got home was how in the impossible circumstances of a black professional in South Africa can I do anything that will in any way move some people toward that goal. And he had thought long and hard about the way -- the firm that he worked for, which was one of the largest construction firms in South Africa and a British-based firm -- operated. And he apparently had a combination of quiet, ingenious, low key chutzpah with significant backing in the moments that counted from upper management in this firm. But he did a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, and reading some of the British industrial relations journals, he realized that there was a way through industrial relations of paving the way for the training of skilled black workers, since they were running out of others with lighter skins to fill skilled jobs and they were having considerable problems doing what needed doing for lack of human resources. And so he saw a way in human relations management, quietly and unthreateningly called industrial relations in the British pattern, to bring this about. He got himself a couple of travel grants. He went to Brazil and a couple of other multiracial societies. He looked at what was going on in industrial teamwork. He came back and made some proposals and he became the head of a department of industrial relations for his firm. And it was that department that was the buffer zone between the new black workers being trained in higher skills, and the tensions that this created with the old Boers and others who were in these skilled trades. And he became an interface person for the turning around of this firm to the extent that it could be turned around in South Africa five, ten or fifteen years ago. But he made the anchor point of this effort on his part the morning with the choir. |