My Grandfather the Tzadik: Lessons from a Friendship with Mandela

“Don’t say or do anything that you don’t believe in,” my grandfather, Cecil Eprile, said the last time I ever spoke with him. 

I was in 10th grade and leaving the following morning for a Model United Nations conference in Chicago. He had traveled the world as a Jewish South African journalist in the 1960s, meeting Martin Luther King and traveling with Robert Kennedy. I figured he’d have a few words to share about diplomacy.

On the second day of the conference (in the days before cell phones), I was called to the front of the room and taken to a cubicle with a small rotary phone. My mom was on the other end of the line. Grandpa had died of a heart attack. I wasn’t coming back to Cleveland with my classmates. I’d be flying out to San Diego the next day for the funeral.

“Eat, drink and be merry,” one girl said before boarding the bus back home, leaving me alone in a hotel lobby. How can people be so insensitive? I wondered. Why couldn’t they be more like Grandpa?

My grandfather was steadfast in both his moral clarity and kindness. The founding editor of Golden City Post, the first widely circulated newspaper for people of color in South Africa, he was active in the anti-apartheid movement and a confidante of Nelson Mandela. He received regular briefings from the ANC (African National Congress) and published hard-hitting editorials critical of the hypocrisies of the apartheid government. While on the run from authorities, Mandela came to my grandparents’ house dressed as a chauffeur and, before being captured, had my grandfather escorted to his hiding place. 

In 1967, while imprisoned on Robben Island, Mandela penned a letter to my grandfather asking for money for his studies and for help with issues with his son Makgatho’s education. Makgatho had been expelled from school following a student strike and Mandela asked my grandfather for assistance getting him readmitted or enrolled in another boarding school, saying, “I leave the matter in your hands.” At the time, Mandela was only allowed to send two letters a year. My grandparents, whose home had been raided by the South African police, had already left the country. They never received the letter. 

Almost 25 years later, in January 1990, within days of being released from prison, Mandela embraced Yasser Arafat calling him “a comrade-in-arms.” While he may have felt the sting of betrayal, my grandfather did not expect loyalty from Mandela based on their friendship or his activism. In an open letter published in the Jerusalem Post, he appealed to Mandela’s sense of justice, saying:

“It comes naturally to you to champion the underdog, and your sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian refugees comes as no surprise. But before putting all the blame for that suffering on Israel, won’t you, in fairness, at least examine what part the cynical policies of Arab states over the years has played in the equation?”

Today, more than 30 years later, I wonder what my grandfather would have said about South Africa charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice. An ardent anti-Communist, he understood the influence that Russian and Chinese interests had on the ANC and would have seen through the veneer of moral high ground. 

Why, he might have asked, did South Africa take a neutral position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine yet such a strong stance on a war that more readily could be justified as self-defense? Could it be explained by a Russian oligarch’s major donation to the ANC? And was it just a coincidence that the news outlet that appeared sympathetic to South Africa’s position, chalking it up to a fine balancing act of diplomacy, was none other than Al Jazeera? 

Where was South Africa’s moral fortitude     denying — on multiple occasions — a visa to the Dalai Lama, who, along with tens of thousands of his people was forced into exile by China in an act of ethnic cleansing? And in the ultimate display of hypocrisy, when Omar al-Bashir, then-president of Sudan and the mastermind behind the genocide of over 300,000 people in Darfur, visited South Africa in 2015, why did they refuse to turn him over to the International Criminal Court?

What would he have thought of Mandela’s grandson, Mandla (son of Makgatho), welcoming Hamas leaders to lay wreaths on a statue of Mandela in Pretoria on Dec. 5, less than two months after slaughtering 1,200 Israelis? Might South Africa, plagued by the world’s highest unemployment rate and an ongoing energy crisis (with the average person experiencing nine blackouts a day), be motivated by Iranian money? What other reasons could there be for Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi’s scheduled visit to South Africa on Feb. 27?

And, as a journalist, he likely would have questioned the almost five billion dollars funneled to American universities by Qatar since 9/11 and the memorandum of understanding signed between Northwestern University’s journalism department and Qatar. At the same time, he likely would have been concerned with Netanyahu’s motivations and political maneuvering, and asked, At whose expense? 

But beyond these political questions, what might he have said I should do as an individual? Practical, but also guided by empathy, I think he would have cautioned me against tribalism, and encouraged me to be open to understanding the stories and pain of both Israelis and Palestinians. At the same time, I think he would have told me to never hide — to not cower in the face of antisemitism, to be proud of who I am as a Jew and raise my voice, especially in the name of the hostages who remain captive in Gaza.

As a child, I didn’t understand why my grandfather called out his friend Mandela     in a public forum. How might this choice hurt a friendship that once seemed so important? I now see his letter as a prescient message to a wider audience — those of us who hold fast to liberal ideas, who consider ourselves “allies” but refuse to bend to the rising tide of progressive virtue-signaling and tacit acceptance of, or worse yet support for, terror as a form of “resistance.”

In a letter asking for news of my grandfather, Mandela wrote, “In his office and home he kept a dialogue with those who repeatedly found themselves in disagreement on vital questions and he used his resources to narrow gaps and to caution against separatism.” 

Perhaps the clearest idea comes not in my grandfather’s words, but from those written about him. In a letter to journalist and mutual friend Joyce Sikhakhane, asking if she had news from my grandfather, Mandela wrote, “In his office and home he kept a dialogue with those who repeatedly found themselves in disagreement on vital questions and he used his resources to narrow gaps and to caution against separatism.” 

My grandfather believed in dialogue across boundaries, in bringing people together across the divide. “Character is how you treat those who can do nothing for you,” Mandela once said. This conviction, that you do what is right, not out of political expediency and not for transactional reasons, but because it is righteous, brought my grandfather and Nelson Mandela together. While my grandfather was not particularly observant, he held strongly to Jewish ideals. He was drawn to Pirkei Avot and lived his life by these words: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If not now, when?”

Vanya Green Assuied is a licensed psychotherapist, musician and educator living in Los Angeles. For a video inspired by this story, please visit www.vanyavoice.com