Arsenal’s chief executive recalls his parents’ battle for justice in his native South Africa, their personal heroism and the courageous sacrifices they made
Ivan Gazidis whose maternal grandparents were Cypriot is telling the remarkable story of his extraordinary father and the wonder is that it has taken fully 35 minutes before he displays the first outward sign of emotion.
“Sometimes it just catches me unawares, I well up and I can’t control it,” he explains. “It happened when I was flying out to Johannesburg for the World Cup. I was watching Invictus on the plane and I just started sobbing. It was a bit embarrassing actually.”
Gazidis is smiling again and his face is now a justifiable picture of pride. Like the rest of the world, Arsenal’s chief executive has been thinking a lot about South Africa during this past week. He has also been thinking about the rare courage his parents showed as white anti-apartheid activists during the decades of struggle in South Africa. With Nelson Mandela’s funeral taking place on Sunday, he feels that now is an appropriate moment to tell that story.
“When I was born in 1964 my father was in jail,” says Gazidis. “My dad, along with 12 others, were arrested and tried after the Rivonia trial in what was called the Bram Fischer trial. He was incarcerated with other white political prisoners.
“Blacks were put in other jails, notably Robben Island. He was there for just over two years. He was in solitary confinement for six months. He says that is the worst torture that you can put anyone through.
Gazidis’s dad, Costa, had made his first public stand against apartheid when he was a medical student at the same Wits University in Johannesburg that counts Mandela among its alumni.
“It is a story that highlights the absurdity of apartheid and also how my father began to get noticed,” says Gazidis. “When the students used to dissect a cadaver in an operating theatre, if it was a black body, all the students watched. When there was a white body, there would be a sign outside to say ‘whites’ only’. One day they had thought the body would be black and it turned out to be white. They asked all the black students to leave the room. My father also left the room.
“From that moment on, he got more and more involved with the ANC. Nelson Mandela had gone into exile and travelled to different countries raising support for the ANC. When he was smuggled back into South Africa, my father was one of a number of different people who met with him about the anti-apartheid movement.”
Like Mandela, Costa became a target for the South African secret police.
“One of the people at the ANC meetings was an informer,” says Gazidis. “My parents lived in a little mine house. They had a 5am raid. My mum said it was the most efficient search she had even seen but one thing they didn’t find was her typewriter with a wonky ‘T’. She had used it to type some of the materials they used. I would have been a prison baby if they had found that.”
Costa was represented at his trial by Mandela’s lawyer George Bizos – who was also to become Ivan’s godfather – but was ultimately jailed in Johannesburg and later Pretoria. “He is convinced that he was kept sane in solitary confinement by a code the prisoners developed,” says Gazidis. “At night, they would tap on the pipes that ran between the cells and you could only hear it if your ear was on the pipe. That was how they communicated.
“There was another time that they interrogated him and he had to stand in a circle on the floor. You had a good cop and bad cop interrogating him for 24 hours. At one point both of them walked out. There was a book on the shelf about Spartacus, the Roman slave. He ran over, got this book, shoved it into his pants. He thought: ‘If I can get this back to my cell, this would be sanity for me.’ It was 185 pages and he thought: ‘I’ll do a page each day.’ He read just the first page again and again. He hid the book under his bed and the next day they found it. He said: ‘You cannot imagine the devastation I felt.’ He can still recite passages of that one page.”
Costa also made two escape attempts, notably when he made a crowbar from part of a toilet and then attached it to a sheet in an effort to hook it over the outside yard’s fence. He was finally released in 1967 but placed under surveillance, prohibited from being in a room with more than two people and blacklisted as a doctor.
“Some of his friends were killed,” says Gazidis. “Parcels would come through the letterbox, one of his friend’s four-year-old child opened the parcel and it blew the family to smithereens. Anybody associated with you was at risk. Life was essentially made intolerable.”
Ivan was only five but can still vividly remember his family giving up their South African passports and arriving with “absolutely nothing” in the UK in 1969. The Gazidis family lived on council estates in Edinburgh and Portsmouth before Ivan and his mother, Dorothea, moved to Manchester.
He recalls attending Fratton Park to see his first professional football matches in the 1970s and he went on to become an Oxford Blue in the sport.
Costa did not return to South Africa until 1994, when apartheid had been overturned and Mandela had become the first democratically elected president. “I hadn’t appreciated how much he felt exiled,” says Gazidis. “The first chance to go back and contribute he went back.”
At the age of 77, Costa now lives in Cape Town and remains as passionate about tackling social injustice as he was in the apartheid years. He has campaigned for antiretroviral drugs to be more widely available to fight HIV and Aids and his past affiliation with the ANC did not deter him from calling for a previous health minister to be tried for manslaughter. “He was a civil servant and he was speaking out against government policy but everyone was asleep about this issue,” says Gazidis. “As a doctor, what is your duty when you know it is simple to save thousands and thousands of kids’ lives?”
Costa’s willingness to place what was right ahead of his own self-interest continues to leave Gazidis awestruck. When Ivan accompanied his father on a tour of Robben Island, the guide introduced Costa to other visitors as “a hero”.
“It is my mother as well,” says Gazidis. “She gave up everything. She came from a very well connected wealthy South African family. South Africa was a fantasy land for a white person in the mid-1960s, underpinned by this absolutely horrific moral injustice. Most people were completely blind to it. I give my parents massive, massive credit, first to have the moral clarity in that environment to see how pernicious that system was but, even more, to do something about it against all their own self-interests. I do ask myself: ‘Would I act in that way?’ I’m incredibly proud.”
Gazidis says he does not want to make “tacky comparisons” between his family’s story and the influence it has had on his work in football but he does argue strongly for sport’s social power. “I think what we do is more important than sport,” he says. “I know there are issues with racism in football and there is still a long way to go but I think football has been able to take a leadership position and, as I look forward, I think there will be other issues – homophobia for example – that football can take a leadership role in. I’m proud of the small part Arsenal has played.”
Gazidis also firmly believes that sporting sanctions were a major factor in apartheid’s demise.
So what of South Africa now in the wake of Mandela’s death? Like many, Gazidis has noted how history is in danger of being rewritten. “Although I get very emotional, my dad is very matter of fact,” he says. “He admires Mandela, loves him like many others do, but I don’t think he has this pedestal that others have built. There is a new narrative coming out about how we in the West all thought he’s a wonderful human being. That’s not what it was like.
“Its incredible how long this struggle went on – it really spanned an enormous range of people. I do think one of the incredible achievements was truth and reconciliation. Mandela is a symbol of all that but he is not the only hero. Desmond Tutu is my hero.
“There is a nice narrative where we all feel closure and we can move on but the reality of South Africa is massive poverty and huge public health issues that need to be addressed.
“The big challenge is: ‘How do you give people the opportunity to lift themselves out of that poverty?’ That’s actually an even more difficult task than getting rid of the moral crime of apartheid. I really think we are still towards the beginning for South Africa.”
Daily Telegraph
