When my dad was 24 years old, he boarded a ship in Cape Town, South Africa, and sailed to England. At the time, he didn’t know how long he would be away or that he would never again return to South Africa to live.
“One of the things that struck me very powerfully was the change in the sky,” he told me when we sat down together for an interview in my backyard earlier this month.
“As the ship made its way along the west coast of Africa and headed up over the equator, the skies got darker and darker and greyer and greyer.”
John David Shingler was born in 1936 to Una and John Philip Shingler in Port Elizabeth, a city in Eastern Cape, a province of South Africa.
Though far from wealthy, his family was part of the dominant minority. White — with British and Scottish ancestry — he grew up, like many of the white South Africans around him, with a black nanny and domestic help from poor blacks who lived in the nearby townships.
My father was 12 when apartheid was adopted in South Africa. The institutionalized system of segregation and racial discrimination lasted for more than 40 years. The National Party’s laws governed virtually every aspect of daily life, including where non-white people could eat, live, work, travel and shop.
The racist policies gutted the country, breaking up families and scattering South Africans who fled the regime across the globe. As a young man, my father was a well-known student leader, a vocal anti-apartheid speaker and activist. And it was his opposition to the government and its discrimination that ultimately drove him from his homeland in 1961.
“People of my generation, regardless of whether they were in the Liberal circle, which I was a part of, or the African National Congress, or the Pan Africanist Congress or for that matter the Congress of Democrats … our generation all had something in common. We all agreed that the policy of apartheid … was completely unacceptable. The debate was not about that, the debate was about what would replace it.”
As an outspoken critic of the government, Shingler was becoming increasingly unwelcome at home in South Africa. When he was offered a scholarship to study at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., he left.
“I was one of the very first to go. There were a number who had gone in the 1950s, but when I left I was one of the first, white or black, to go. The real exodus started in the 1970s and 1980s.”
“When I left, like other people, we had thought that changes would come quickly and that we would go back fairly soon to South Africa. We did not anticipate the many years that we would spend abroad, and in my case – a permanent departure.”
As a graduate student at Yale and then later as a political science professor at McGill University, Shingler continued to speak out frequently and fiercely against the South African government and its apartheid system.
His South African passport was revoked, effectively rescinding his citizenship as well. He would not set foot back on South African soil for many years. When he was able to return twice in the mid-1970s to visit his parents, it was made possible only with the help of two acquaintances in government who gave him permission to enter the country for a brief period.
I remember coming home from high school in 1994 to the sight of my dad brandishing the South African passport he’d finally been reissued three decades later. My then 16-year-old self was unable to grasp the magnitude of the moment.
“Once apartheid came to an end, and South Africa came under majority rule, in a certain way the struggle was over. There were huge problems that were still in place. All the consequences of apartheid, the consequences of segregation, the poverty, poor quality of education, poor quality of health care, infrastructure all had to be addressed by the new majority government,” he said.
Addressing that gap and the lack of economic opportunity for so many in a post-apartheid era led Shingler to resign from his position at McGill and to start a consulting firm to help empower black South Africans economically.
“The goal was to contribute in however small a way to bringing capital to South Africa, bringing South Africa into the global economy, providing however few in number, jobs for black South Africans. So they could start the process of overcoming this long detour and sidetracking in which the whole country was involved in an argument about race and colour and culture and was not focusing on economic development and growth.”
My father turned 80 last fall and he has said to me that he doesn’t plan on making another trip to South Africa. I ache thinking that we won’t go together as adults and that I have missed the chance to see with him all the places that belonged to the life he led before us.
Occasionally, when it is warm outside, the sun is shining and the sky a cloudless blue, my dad will turn and say to me, “This is what it was like all the time, every day, where I grew up.”
That might be why during summer months in Canada, or when we would take infrequent holidays to warm places together, he would never unroll a towel or sprawl on a chaise longue on the beach to soak up the heat. Instead, he inevitably finds a table and a hard-backed chair in some quiet corner of a garden to read. In Florida, he took to hanging out in espresso bars while the rest of us lolled on the beach for hours. In Bermuda, he sat happily at a wrought iron table beneath a bougainvillea tree and read the afternoons away in the garden of friends we were visiting.
But, Canada, and really Montreal and Quebec are his home now. Here is where he has lived with my mother for more than 40 years, where he has raised his four children and where he bought his beloved cottage on a lake in the Laurentians.
When I ask him what he thinks Canadians sometimes take for granted, he laughs and says “almost everything.”
“Fresh water, which comes out of the tap without any serious or meaningful cost, electricity, the safety of the streets, the independence and integrity of the judiciary, the free press, the rule of law, competing political parties.”
“There are other countries like Canada but it is really unique, it is exceptional. I think often people who were born and raised here don’t quite realize where they’ve landed up.”
“For me, it is baffling to hear people complaining about things.”
As we celebrate another Father’s Day in our family, I am reflecting on the privilege of being raised by such a man. Having chosen to make Montreal his home, my father instilled in us a love for the city, and for Canada too, in a way that only an immigrant can. Now as adults, with families of our own, we four understand how lucky we were to have grown up here, together.