To Win Again - A Personal Story!

There are plenty contests that people with disabilities confront on a day-to-day basis which fashion one to becoming accustomed to prevailing circumstances which are themselves an anomaly. Chief among these is literature. Literature has the power to dislodge one’s sorry plight to a level of armour and courage to combat it all. The will to win again!

This is the lesson that I learnt from a total stranger!

Post my disposition (in medical jargon -sensory motor axonal neuropathy) as a person with a disability in 2002 after a successful career which was unceremoniously curtailed, I began to count my losses. I lost my job, I lost my wife, I lost a sizeable part of my family, I lost my peers, contemporaries and friends, and most importantly, I doubted my ability to be positive in my engagement with society again, for I was angry.

Angry at life for having dealt me such sudden poor cards when I would have been atop of it all! However, I was reduced by barriers and societal tendencies to a beggar: always admonishing the day I was born.

One rainy day, while I was scavenging in my beggary in downtown Pretoria, a man in a wheelchair beckoned for my attention to join with him in a makeshift shelter, noticing my dire straits. This fellow was ragged, untidy, his wheelchair had certainly seen many moons than mine, yet he called me in.

Despite my better judgement, I joined in. My host, without much ado pronounced his admiration for his ilk - a compatriot with a disability!

As a gesture of new-found camaraderie, he produced a many-bitten up loaf of bread and a pint of sour milk and encouraged me to join in the festivities of munching bread with milk!

I was rain-soaked, angry and hungry, so I joined in.

Then rain stopped.

With a filled stomach, I was certainly on my way. There was no way of cherishing any further enticement with this charitable host post my profuse admiration for the generosity.

Despite my eagerness to escape this situation with humility, my inquisitiveness got the better of me. Thence I asked him, “Meneer, do you always kin with all people like me?

Then came the answer: “No, I liken with anybody who needs better than I have”.

“But Meneer,” I implored, “You just shared with me what I think was your last?” I protested.

In silence, my friend encaged into his bulky luggage and, after a while of a gruntingly protracted search, retrieved, in a beaming romantic admiration from his treasure trove, handed me a piece of a worn out writing which read: “And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same to win again," Nelson Mandela.

To date, this is the mantra that I live by and thus continue to give, despite my limitations – inspired by the power of literature, which is equally matched by Dr Nelson Mandela’s indelible teachings, which transcended all racial boundaries to, amid challenges, trials and tribulations, win again!

- Edwin Sipho Rihlamvu