CONNECTIONS:MICHAEL O'KENNEDY phoned me the other week. He is a stranger to me, but we do share a family name. And of course I know the distinguished Irish politician by repute. He tells me he read a piece of mine here, in which I had mentioned a Tipperary IRA volunteer, Liam Hoolan, who was famous for the War of Independence attack on Borrisokane barracks. It seems that O'Kennedy's uncle, also Michael, had been part of that attack and had been killed in the battle.
I commiserated.
But it was all a long time ago.
So we went on to discuss our mutual name, and its worldwide implications. We mulled over whether the word Cinnéide meant “ugly head” or “helmeted head”, and we could not quite decide. Oh yes, that argument will continue, wherever we Kennedys gather.
A common enough name, and widely spread. We are a diverse breed. In modern times it is quite possible to meet someone with whom one has no discernible connection. But we are all no doubt connected in the dim Dalcassian past.
The phone conversation reminded me of something.
Somewhere in my ugly or indeed helmeted head it lurked, an understanding of the mysterious connections between family names and strangers. And particularly the connection between myself and another stranger, Bobby Kennedy. That’s him in the picture, in Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport. I would have liked a better quality photo to share, but events in the shape of the South African Bureau of State Security intervened. They slung a better photographer (me) through a plate glass window. It was around midnight on June 4th, 1966. It was a classic riot.
A crowd of us wishy-washy, pinko, liberal, terrorist-supporting kaffir boetieshad gone to greet Bobby on his visit to South Africa. A group from another faction went along too. A certain amount of aggravation developed. The police did their duty to restore law and order and waded in.
In those days, the South African police had a very defined view of law and order. This chiefly involved wading into crowds of wishy-washy, liberal kaffir boeties. Completely understandable, since our opposing faction was generally made up of their fellow policemen and security agents sent there to foment trouble in the first place. It is a classic totalitarian technique of impeccable historical pedigree.
Bashed and bloodied and bowed, I emerged from the wreckage of a ticket counter. I watched. A running battle was careering across the airport concourse. Much like an everyday queue for Ryanair in Dublin, I suppose, though with added club and sjambok.
With blood streaming out of me, I felt I had done my bit for racial equality and moved away from the riot. Kennedy had been invited by the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), to deliver the Annual Day of Affirmation speech at the University of Cape Town. I was connected to some kind of informal welcoming committee in Johannesburg and, since my fellow members were all busy being beaten up, I made my way to Bobby, and shook his hand. Not a tall man, he nonetheless had a certain presence, though perhaps with an underlay of aristocratic disdain for the chaos around. It was not an entirely appealing vibe. Vibe? Don’t ask. Old expression. Goes with floral bell bottoms. But I suppose Bobby had a compound in New England to go home to. And I didn’t. It makes a difference.
Bobby’s people hustled him into his car. His wife Ethel was already in there, somewhat in a daze. Still in hand-shaking mode, I reached through the window and shook her hand too. She was wearing white gloves. My arm was dripping blood. The car drove away. I saw her staring at the bloodstains on her glove.
It became a picture in my mind.
In Cape Town two days later, Kennedy gave his famous “ripples of hope” speech. In these hopeless times, it’s perhaps worthwhile to remember a paragraph.
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Exactly two years after that speech, two years to the day, he was assassinated.
By then I was living in another African country. I heard the news in Jimmy the Greek’s, a bar on the Zambian copperbelt. I sat there and thought of Ethel. And saw that picture of her in my mind, looking at my blood on her clothes.
Kennedy blood. Connections.