From growing up in Apartheid South Africa to helping write the country's constitution, Louisa Zondo's life story is nothing short of extraordinary. We talk about her experiences as a young mother, her high-profile career, and the heartbreaking loss of her son Rikhado to suicide in 2022. Louisa shares openly about her grief and how she’s finding healing.
You can learn more about Louisa’s amazing life and follow her on Instagram @louisazondo.
Her book, “Dearest MaRiky: A Mother’s Journey through Grief, Trauma and Healing,” can be purchased on Amazon, here: https://www.amazon.com/Dearest-MaRiky-Mothers-Journey-through-ebook/dp/B0C81LH954
This podcast is produced by Larj Media.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: Hi, I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode, we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page.
My guest today is Louisa Zondo. She's an incredible human being who has led a very remarkable life. She grew up in apartheid South Africa, helped write the country's constitution, and went on to become chief executive of the South African Human Rights Commission. We're going to touch on her amazing political career, but really focus our conversation on her personal life, which is full of joy and sorrow, devastating loss, and some healing.
We're going to talk about her childhood and relationships with her parents, how she raised four children while working on the national stage, and the loss of her son, Rikhado.
Oh, it is so lovely to see you again.
[00:01:22] Louisa Zondo: Oh, it's beautiful. It really is wonderful to see you.
[00:01:26] Sarah Cavanaugh: As we begin, I just want to acknowledge you have lived such an extraordinary life and we're only going to be able to scratch the surface. But in Peaceful Exit, we talk a lot about how our life experiences, our childhood and then our growing up, really impacts how we approach death and how we think about mortality.
And you say that writing this book was a source of healing. Does that feel true? It feels very true.
[00:01:59] Louisa Zondo: And the peculiar thing about it is that it continues to feel true from the time when the writing actually started happening, because it took a lot for it to start, to the time when the book was already available, and the speaking about the book, about the story was happening. It continued to give me different forms of healing, different forms of review, and a lot continues to come up for me just from the process of having written the book.
[00:02:43] Sarah Cavanaugh: So having written it and putting out there and then talking about it keeps unfolding your healing.
Louisa Zondo: Exactly.
Sarah Cavanaugh: Rikhado wanted to share your life story with him and you say you weren't able to do so while he was alive. Does it feel now that in writing this book and telling the story that you've fulfilled your promise to him?
[00:03:06] Louisa Zondo: So it's taken me a journey to come to a place where I can say it does feel like Rikhado is smiling because he is receiving some of the healing potions that he needed, which were hidden away from him. It feels like he is receiving it now. And this is my sense of how it is all working out. I do have a real connection to Rikhado's presence, even in this time when his physical body beautiful as it was is no longer something I can relate to in the way that I did when he was alive.
Does feel like he is saying, there you go, mom. That's what I needed. You did it at last.
[00:04:08] Sarah Cavanaugh: I want to start your story as you did in the book in childhood. And you grew up in apartheid South Africa, and I'm struck by sort of your sweet, average memories of details of your childhood and looking forward to your dad's business trips, which I resonate with because my dad traveled a lot on business.
And so the times that we had just with our mother were very sweet. You got to sleep in her bed and the, the sort of the themes that shaped who you are because of your environment. And there were also, it sounds like, strict rules your parents had for you and your siblings. And how do you hold those things now from that childhood?
[00:04:52] Louisa Zondo: I was impacted by the rules from that early age, pleasing, using the rules to give me a semblance of being loved because I complied with the rules, but at the same time, feeling a sense of real oppression from the rules. Let me give you an example of a rule, which for some may not seem like a strange thing, but it was absolutely strange for us living in a township in Apartheid, South Africa, where the language just generally spoken is Zulu. In our home, there was a language rule where we must speak English. And the basis of that was that our father had been raised in a white missionary's home. and had been raised as a son of the minister and spoke English.
He worked in an administration office in the township. So they would laugh because they would say he spoke like a white man. And so he had this idea in his mind that in order to protect his children and his family from the tyranny of apartheid, he would expose his family, raise his children in an awareness of what white life was like, so he had the language rule, we must speak English at home.
From as early as you could eat on your own without being fed. You're sitting at table which is properly set in an English style way and you are eating with the fork and knife and that was the way we were raised. And these were the rules and I, I did everything perfectly. I complied. I always made sure that my sisters were also in order because, um, when one goes off the approach at that time was that you correct all of them for them to know that it, there's no benefit in going off the mark.
[00:07:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: Your father died unexpectedly when you were young, and how did that change your life?
[00:07:07] Louisa Zondo: It took me a long time to actually, um, go into what it meant to lose my father at that time. And again, there is this interplay of the, contradictions or paradoxes of being afraid and concerned that I've lost a parent and therefore life might change and that I might be in danger as well as, and I'm sad to put it this way, but it did feel like that, like there's a new thing.
Life is new and there might be an opportunity for something else, which is different from the restrictions of being a daughter to my father, who was there to be a father to me. I'm saddened by the fact that I had not been able to go back to time of the passing of my father and hold the grief, just the grief of it and, and relate to, to, to him as a loved one who has left.
My mother though must have made it possible for me to continue not sleeping into deep worry and anxiety because she made sure that nothing changed as a result of our father passing away. Our lives were not adversely affected. We continued at the education institutions that we were in and she continued to support us into university.
[00:09:04] Sarah Cavanaugh: So in, in university, you met your first husband and you got pregnant with your first son, Sheikani. Yes. Uh, and I love how you write about motherhood and those first very sweet days.
[00:09:18] Louisa Zondo: I just wanted to be with this baby, uh, going to class because I was in the third year of university when Sheikani was born.
Going to class was like, Let's just do that quickly and get done with it. I'm going back to, to my baby after this. And raising Sheikani was a beautiful experience. And yet, because I did not have the depth of awareness and experience and skill, I write about it in the book that there was a lot that I could have paid attention to.
And I watch some young people in their parenting patterns now and I realized that there's a difference between being a parent at 19 and being a parent at 30. The priorities, the determination, the plans are very, very different. And so, um, I know that we do have to repair things that were not done to best effect at the time, and I am not in the place where I dwell on if only it had been so, but I do look back and I say on the one hand he benefited from a young mother, but on the other hand It could have benefited from a more focused and one who understands how to support a young one through the lessons that they must learn and through the strengths that they must develop in order for them to really fully enjoy life much more easier.
[00:11:19] Sarah Cavanaugh: That's so insightful. And I think they have an exceptional mother, I just want to say to you.
[00:11:25] Louisa Zondo: Thank you very much. But I realized that writing the book was for me the starting of the pathways towards repairing a lot. Repairing a lot in my life. repairing a lot with my family broadly and directly with my children, with my partner, my current partner and husband now.
And it just, it became a platform from which I could start conversations. And I, throughout my life have not been accustomed to speaking openly about things that truly matter. And those are the troubling things, the difficult things. I can speak openly about a lot of huge things outside of, of us that seem to be less of a threat to me being loved, but speaking about what's going on in our lives.
That's very hard for me. It has been not been something I was accustomed to doing at all.
[00:12:38] Sarah Cavanaugh: I get that. Your life is so incredible. There's so much of your life I wanna talk about, but for the sake of time, I'm just going to give a few highlights here and jump ahead. You finished university, you became a lawyer, you had two sons, Sheikani and Rikhado, with your first husband, but then your marriage came to an end about a year after Rikhado was born. And then you were off to London, School of Economics, you received a master's degree, and you came back. All this time, your mother was an incredible support system, and she continued to be after your third son, Themba, was born.
What was the trajectory that brought you to the national stage?
[00:13:21] Louisa Zondo: For me, it really starts with acknowledging the opportunities that the adversity and the tyranny of apartheid provided for us. So when I finished my second law degree and I'm working as a fellow in a public interest law firm, the legal resources center, I get to be awarded a British Council Fellowship to study for the master's for the LLM in London at the London School of Economics.
That's my first experience of international travel. And, uh, It's my first experience of so many people from all over the world, so much engagement, so many debates about everything in the world. I'm exposed to the struggles in South America. I am exposed to the rest of the continent and there's so much vibrance and the ANC is there and I get exposed directly to the workings of the ANC and that deepens my awareness of the opportunities for participation in the struggle for our liberation. But just being in that environment for one year was a huge awakening to me to the opportunities that were available for deepening participation in the struggle.
And also it was at a time where the conversation about a post-apartheid South Africa was vibrant. We were on the cusp of change in South Africa. So I go back home and really get deeply involved in organizing. And when the ANC is unbanned, it is about reorganizing for the reentry of ANC in South Africa.
And that is what led to a lot of developments that are linked to my career as well, because I then participate in the transitional structures from apartheid South Africa to a new constitutional democracy. And one huge structure was the constitutional assembly, which wrote the South African constitution.
And I was one of the deputy executive directors for the secretariat that held that work. It was indeed a momentous period in South Africa's life, and I had little children at that point. When I joined the Constitutional Assembly, I had three children. Themba, number three, was two years old. And, um, Ntobeko got to be born in the process of the writing of the constitution.
So his middle name is Bill for two reasons. One being the child of the Bill of Rights and two, Bill was my father's name as well. So yeah, I think this is an, in, in a long-winded way, an expression of how it was not about doing it. By myself, through my own vision, through my own brilliance, it was about being exposed to a time when the opportunities were available for participation and growth in the participation.
So I became part of the system of change in the country and I was allocated roles which I embraced and worked on and I had the support. Family with my mother being a center of that support. She moved around with me as I was moving along with life.
[00:17:51] Sarah Cavanaugh: And the story of creating life, new life, not only in your own life with your son, but also in the country.
[00:18:00] Louisa Zondo: Yes, yes. That's a huge metaphor. Yeah.
[00:18:03] Sarah Cavanaugh: So was it around that time that you met Kumi?
[00:18:08] Louisa Zondo: Oh, the story of Kumi. We met in London. He was in exile and he had a Rhodes scholarship to study in Oxford. And in the vibrancy of the time, there were seminars on all sorts of topics that would be held in London and he had come for this particular seminar on this occasion and this boy with loads of hair on his face and his hair and with long arms and hands flying all over as he speaks just catches my attention.
[00:18:43] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love your description because I've met him and I, he does speak with his, with his hands, which is lovely. Like it's, he has so much charisma and it's all. It's all in the arms, you know? It sounds like he really loved your children. Yes.
[00:18:58] Louisa Zondo: Yes. Kumi has one biological daughter and when she was five, our children met and they have brothers and sisters and we became parents to all of them.
And he, he's just got this capacity to love deeply. He And very, very generously and very openly too, which for a person who, as I've explained myself, who has got this streak of being closed in is sometimes very difficult dealing with openness and with people who are vulnerable and open and would be open at all times.
It's not a stance that they put on is not that easy. So I learned a lot about loving from Kumi. And he loved the children, and he loves the children to bits.
[00:19:59] Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk about Rikhado, if you're comfortable with that. So it was when he was a teenager that you learned about his addiction and his struggles, and I imagine it was, as a mom, it was very hard to wrap your head around that.
[00:20:15] Louisa Zondo: It was very hard to wrap my head around Rikhado's addiction because In our family, it had not been something that had ever, ever been spoken about. And yet, addiction ran through the family, both on my mother's side and on my father's side. I was devastated, but quickly got into action mode. action of getting Rikhado to heal.
And I use that word heal very deliberately because that's, that's what it was to me. Um, it took quite some time for me to be aware that addiction is something that we probably don't heal from, but we constantly attend to and treat.
[00:21:19] Sarah Cavanaugh: Oh, it sounds like you really showed up for him.
[00:21:23] Louisa Zondo: He sings in a number of his songs about mama being there, mama saying this.
Mama being there for him all the time. And for my sake, I want to take that literally, or there are parts which I don't take literally, but I want to take that literally. I want to take it as an acknowledgement that it was very difficult and unfamiliar ground, but I had a commitment and that commitment was to see him through it.
And I was going to be there through the relapses, through the financial challenges of attending to his well-being. I was determined and I had friends who were there standing by me. It's such a huge thing for me that I had people that I could confide in. I could share how difficult it was to look at my child and see that he was suffering, that he wanted this to end, but he did not know how to end it, and that he was trying, and yet, it was not something that he had overcome.
And to then see him start shaping his life, his music career started taking off at a point where he was in outpatient management of his addiction and had stayed constant in treatment in that way and his career then takes off and I see him blossoming, he becomes a star and you know what's happening at the back of my mind? Is, Oh God, Oh God, help him through. Let him shine, let him shine, but let him always have the protection from the addiction in the space where stardom was such a huge trigger for everything that goes with alcohol and drugs and all sorts of addictive behaviors.
[00:23:56] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's abundantly available in his line of work. Yeah?
Louisa Zondo: Yeah…yeah.
Sarah Cavanaugh: How did he manage?
[00:24:08] Louisa Zondo: He found love and he very quickly started a family. He had a family that he loved. And it seemed to me the things that were at the center of his desires were in place. And he really, really thrived. And actually, it's his only album, which became quite well loved and quite successful is called Family Values.
And he has a lot of songs which are around how central to his existence family is. And he was very happy and he thrived. But the life of gigging, as they called it, is difficult. It is very, very hard. It removes you from family. And it is in this process that he, at some point, announced that the music life was too hard on him.
He is retiring from it. He has to attend to his mental health. And this is a very important part of his life. What shapes Rikhado. It's this hustle between being in family and wanting that and needing to fulfill the career obligations and going out and being completely pulled away from family and doing things that make no sense at the time.
So as this is happening, there's also, um, he goes into a sense of depression. And I learned this now from his wife, Bianca, that on the occasions that he is able to speak about what he is going through, a big feature of what was also pulling him down was his sense of how his mother is disconnected from him.
He is remembering of how his mother, um, at some point would come back from work, close the front door behind her, go straight up to, to her bedroom, close the door behind her. And many occasions would just not reappear. At times when he tried to come in, I would not be available. Um, just wanting to, to sleep, want to lie down, just wanting to be alone.
And he found that this was a huge pain in his life because he never understood why his mother did not want him. For him, that's the story. His mother, that, that resulted in an interpretation that his mother does not want him. And he asked, what is my story? What, what was my life? I never shared my life and the life story.
I shared anecdotal things and experiences that never gave him a full sense of what was your life, what were your aspirations, what was met, what was an unmet dream in your life. I could never share that with him. And he was very curious. He was a very sensitive person. He wanted to know, and he was always seeking to be informed.
And so when I was unable to share my story with him, and when Bianca tells me that one of the things that he holds in a place of deep significance and pain right now, as he goes through, uh, depressive times in his life, is how his mother didn't want him. And I then realized that I have to speak to Rikhado.
And in our speaking, I promised him that I will spend time sharing the story of my life with him. I try and I realize that I cannot do it because it seems that I don't know how to tell the story of my life. And then I promised that I'll write letters to him. Bianca will attest to the fact that I would sit in their family home and there would be stacks of papers on my side because I was trying to write letters and tell him about me and so on, but I just couldn't.
I couldn't even write the stories of my growing up. I just couldn't. I couldn't. It's for this reason, therefore, when I write the book, I do say that I was unable to tell my son the story of my life and now I'm able to tell it. And my hope is that it will heal the past, it will heal us now, and it will heal the relations with the rest of the family.
[00:29:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for sharing that. So, in February of 2022, Rikhado died by suicide.
[00:29:50] Louisa Zondo: Yeah. [pause] So, um, I had been spending a lot of time in their family home before Rikhado died because of these attempts to share story and to be present and to just hold things together and he was looking generally good. We would have conversations.
And on the 21st, I said goodbye to him. I remember it was just shortly before two o'clock. I said goodbye to him in his home because I was going to be collected from my home to a strategic session that was being held by the Oxfam South Africa team. And in the morning while I'm at the venue of our strategy session, I get a call shortly before eight at about quarter to eight from his wife, Bianca, who is really sounding scared and distraught saying she's worried because he had not come home and the car was outside at his studio and they couldn't access the studio.
Um, this time I'm on my way to the studio because Bianca has asked me to come and then on the way I get information that they had accessed the studio and they had found him hanging from the rafters.
So, um, the experience from that moment to the moment when I'm told that he's been taken to the hospital, to the moment where I actually get to this resuscitation room and I see him on this metal surface is something that I wish on no parent. So when I see my son he's dressed in white and it's him. He's wearing his white tracksuit, but he is no longer breathing.
I remember doing two things at the same time, crying and praying out loud. And I found myself moving around his whole body and touching all of him, touching all of him and praying to all of my son's being and just calling on everything to just be with him, to just be with him.
And, it was an unexpected experience, but it felt like I was breathing at that time. It felt like I was connecting to what was needed at the time. It was such a necessary connection to my son being on this hard surface, no longer breathing. Rikhado was a huge, huge lesson for me. Touching him like that on that day felt so natural.
Of course, it wasn't too many hours after his passing, so even the temperature was almost normal. But preparing him for the funeral, that was a huge gift because we went to the funeral home and we had support of a friend who is very knowledgeable in things, spiritual, natural oils and plants and um, she had prepared a beautiful embalming oil for us and going to the home and rubbing the whole body with these oils was, oh, I'm shivering even as I bring it back into my recollection.
It was the deepest blessing of connection and expression of lasting existence, even in the face of a body that is now very, very, very, very cold, very cold. I, I hold that as a huge treasure because for me, that was the beginning. Of me making sense of Rikhado's mantra, which he left for his fans and for all of us, it says, we never die, we multiply.
This is a mantra that is all over because he left it for us and his body, the human body, the physical body, is gone. It decays, it's perished, it's no longer in existence. But his many, many forms of body are with us. And from that moment, I really, really saw how I had been given something that changes me deeply.
[00:35:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for sharing that. Do you mind if I read a few beautiful words you wrote at the funeral?
[00:35:30] Louisa Zondo: Please do.
[00:35:31] Sarah Cavanaugh: As a mother, this really resonates and it's so beautiful.
Since the day your spirit and body parted, facets of your life I previously had no appreciation for have been revealed to me. You established relationships for us in ways I would never have imagined.
For this I am thankful. I am thankful for the honor of being your mother. Even in the most troubled and disoriented periods of your life, your essential being still shone through and you honored and loved people. For this, I am deeply thankful. MaRiky, I am thankful because through your battling with the troubles of this world, including addiction, you taught me lasting lessons in equanimity.
I learned the grace of no judgment and openness to loving fully.
[00:36:28] Louisa Zondo: Rikhado's death is very hard. It's still hard to bear today. I still steal moments when my body wants to do nothing other than to weep. But the gifts and the growth and the beauty and the opportunities that have come from the fact of Rikhado having lived and having shown me the opportunity to live are immense, they are immeasurable.
I do say in the book as a conclusion that at the age of 34, Rikhado, died and I started living because I had died at the age of 34.
My death had been as a result of an experience of brutal assault and rape at the hands of people who had invaded our home and I had blocked away that memory. And yet, I was living a troubled life, and it seems to me, in hindsight, that because of his depth of sensitivity, Rikhado may have sensed that there was something wrong with this mother of his. Even though I tried to make life beautiful and meaningful, and that's why I say I had died at the age of 34 and he's dead at the age of 34 gave me life again, because I now am ready to, to encounter all life in its fullest.
And I'm ready to befriend the things that I have been running away from and being afraid of and shutting them away from my awareness, I'm ready to encounter, befriend and walk with them so that I grow from them. So I would say that growth has been one of the most beautiful gifts I have received, even as I continue to live with the grief of losing my beautiful son.
[00:39:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: I am so, so grateful for your vulnerability in sharing these stories and the fact that his death really cracked open the healing for you. Yeah. So my last question really is about you. What a peaceful exit might mean to you.
[00:39:42] Louisa Zondo: It actually is something I've been thinking about quite a lot. I believe a peaceful exit is an exit in which my loved ones have an understanding that I regard life and death as two parts of a beautiful gift.
And that, as Rikhado says, we never die, we multiply. In fact, it's a transition or a transformation to die is to be transformed so that I'm no longer seen in this way, but seen I am, I no longer continue in this physical form, but perhaps even in them, in my loved ones, I continue. And I continue in all sorts of forms with life.
And so if my loved ones. in that kind of relationship and understanding of death. That for me is where the peaceful exit is.
[00:40:58] Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you so much. Thank you for today. Thank you for your new friendship and uh, to be continued.
Louisa Zondo: Thank you. Thank you for this conversation.
Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram @APeacefulExit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
This episode was produced by the amazing team at Larj Media. You can find them at www.larjmedia.com. The Peaceful Exit Team includes my producer Katy Klein, and editor Corine Kuehlthau. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Tina Nole is our senior producer, and Syd Gladu provides additional production and social media support.
Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.