If you have a voice, you should use it for the good of society. With his career as an activist for the rights of blind individuals, William Rowland has done this. Many will know him as the former director of the SA National Council for the Blind (SANCB), for his role in founding the Southern Africa Federation of the Disabled and his time at the helm of the World Blind Union (WBU).
In Journey to Ithaca he outlines the steps that led from him being shot as a small child in a terrifying attack, to the leader on a world platform. It is also an insight into life as a blind person, while cataloguing the development of resources available to blind and other disabled individuals, and how awareness is steadily being raised.
Rowland was born in 1940, so the time span is considerable and this book, at about 190 pages, is not just an autobiography but also a social and political history of blindness in SA.
The first part is divided into two distinct sections: those chapters that deal with his childhood, full of amusing anecdotes one can relate to growing up in apartheid SA; and those that plot his subsequent studies, in London and SA, and his extraordinary career. A third part is dedicated to personal essays and magazine articles Rowland has had published.
He describes what he remembers from the incident that changed his life, when, at five years old, he went to play with neighbouring children in Sea Point, Cape Town. The block of flats was called Ithaca Mansions and the author links this to the epic journey made by ancient Greek mythical hero Odysseus. “Why ‘My journey to Ithaca’,” he writes. “Because of the lifelong journey from my childhood home … via many settings and adventures, until my return to those very spaces.”
He poignantly describes images from his “last day in the seeing world” — at nursery school earlier in the day watching the other children in the playground, and noticing how “a little girl’s school case flew open and a bottle of milk tumbled out with an assortment of coloured pencils”.
After the incident, in which a domestic worker shot her employer and others in the flat, including a baby, the young William is rushed to hospital unconscious. When he wakes, he asks: “Please put on the light — I can’t see.” His mother folds her arms around him and says, “I wish I could.”
Rowland is blessed with positive, caring and resourceful parents who try to ensure he doesn’t miss out on childhood experiences. Like any youngster at the time, he loves his Dinky Toys cars and Meccano set, and on a family holiday his father helps him to drive a tractor. They also take him for any treatment that looks promising, from an ophthalmologist whose elaborate treatment ignores that damaged optic nerves cannot be regenerated, to a faith healer. “Her prayers and laying on of hands … were to no avail,” he says wryly.
At eight he goes to the School for the Blind in Worcester, where he reveals a mischievous streak, becoming known as a practical joker who shows no mercy. A popular boy among the predominantly Afrikaans hostel inmates, he is not afraid to stand up for himself, and his first act of activism is instigating a “Mealie Uprising” to protest the rationing of pap.
The school is governed by the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, NG Kerk), and Rowland’s involvement and love affair with the Afrikaans language and culture begins. It is later, at an NG church, that he meets his wife to be, Hélène Scholtz, a gifted singer and dominee’s daughter.
Physiotherapy was one of the possible occupations for a blind person in the late 1950s, and after being granted a full bursary by the labour department’s Readjustment Board, he sets off to do the course at the Royal National Institute for the Blind in London. His pluckiness shows up as he conquers the Tube, dreams up more diabolical practical jokes and starts a rock band with a friend. He also explores evangelical religion and says that after meeting a pharmacist’s daughter at a Christian retreat in Scarborough, “the gates of passion were flung open wide”. This did not please his girlfriend at the time.
Returning to Cape Town to practise, he contributes to initiatives such as the Braille Trail at the Kirstenbosch Gardens. His home with Hélène is “filled with music” and he spends special time with their three children telling them stories he makes up. This time in Cape Town, he writes, “was characterised by a wider range of activities and interests than at any other time, before or since”.
Considering an academic career, he begins studies in systemic philosophy and the history of philosophy, but as any mature student will attest, full-time work and distance learning present a punishing schedule. When he wants to give up, he is encouraged to complete his PhD dissertation, later published as Being Blind in the World: A Philosophical Analysis of Blindness and a Formulation of New Objectives in Rehabilitation.
It is after this book that Rowland begins to make an impact on public life, founding a college and becoming the public relations officer for the SANCB. He describes his philosophy of seeing disability against the background of the liberation struggle, and how he is persuaded by members of Disabled People SA (DPSA) — made up largely of people who had been injured in the struggle — to become its chairperson. The book is well supplied with photographs; one shows him with Nelson Mandela and DPSA founder Friday Mavuso.
Rowland is by now entrenched in helping to forge the new SA, and a chapter called “Forcing open the doors of delivery” outlines his work in the 1990s. The DPSA is involved in political events, including drafting the constitution. Due to our labour legislation, he states, SA is today “the envy of disabled people in most developing countries”.
When asked to chair the first WBU human rights committee, he writes that “it would have been hard to find a task more rewarding”. To run for WBU president is to run a political campaign, he notes, and one feels by this time in the story one would not like to come up against his drive and passion as a fellow campaigner. He sets about implementing a strategic plan and in 2004 is gratified when a permanent office is established in Toronto, Canada.
He concludes by expressing his wish that the WBU become a well-resourced and irresistible force for progress and change, heralding a time “when being blind in the world means being whatever you choose to be”. Rowland achieved that and more.
As a formerly published writer, Rowland has an accessible style, though the middle part of the book, in which he describes his career, is more of a recording of events than a personal memoir. Family life fades from view and there is nothing on how he integrates a jet-setting professional life with family and friends. As a reader, one wants more information here as well as more personal honesty. Still, it is an engrossing and unusual book that is important for disabled individuals and for the education of society at large.
