Interview with Coco Cachalia, 30 November 2023

My time at SACHED solidified my commitment to social justice. I made friendships with people from different political persuasions and SACHED provided an opportunity to interact and with people who came from different political traditions. I learnt that labelling wasn’t necessarily helpful and in the eighties labelling was awash  –  if you weren’t a charterist, you were a problem, if you were a workerist then you were a problem but SACHED brought all sorts together and provided a safe ground to discuss and debate.

I think my two biggest contributions in Lacom were the publications that we did. The one was a history of Moss Mayekiso which I did with NUMSA and the other one was with SACCAWU which was on parental rights and the role unions can and should play in promoting parental rights. Both publications drew heavily on oral interviews and I focused much more on these non-formal education projects.

Laurence Stewart: On the recorder so I do I have your consent for the interview

Coco Cachalia: Yes, you do.

Laurence Stewart: Okay today’s the 30th of November. So we’re kind of doing life history interviews and of course you in as much detail as you like can give different moments but I just wanted to start perhaps in your early life it’s a bit. A bit about your parents, where you grew up, your schooling and influences when you were young. 

Coco Cachalia: I grew up in the context very much of the heart of apartheid days and very much in a political family. So, both my parents were very involved politically, my father in the 40s and the 50s, until he was banned in the 60s and my mother as well. So, it was very much in that context that I grew up. It was times of arrests, times of raids. We were young, I was born in 1957, so I don’t remember much of the 50s, but I do remember my father in the 60s, in the 90-day and 180-day detention. And both my parents were banned when they were released. So, my mother was banned and my father was house arrested for many years. So, we kind of grew up in the context of quite a repressive regime. And the one thing that my parents were quite clear on was that they didn’t really want us to go to racially segregated schools. 

Both my parents were brought up in the Gandhian tradition. They belonged to the Transvaal Indian Congress and were heavily influenced by their respective parents who were close associates of Gandhi when he was in South Africa.  They were heavily influenced by the early passive resistance struggles , they brought this form of resistance into ANC thinking. 

My parents were strong non racialists and the notion that we would go to racially segregated schools was a little bit abhorrent. So, from a very early age, my brother went first and then I followed, we went to Waterford, which was in Swaziland, and it was started as a non-racial school, and we were sent there, to boarding school. There was a bit of a wrench, I think I must have been about 11 or 12, which is quite young to kind of leave your family, but in the end, it was a fabulous school. I wasn’t there for very long. I was there for exactly about a year, a year and a bit maybe because the authorities refused our passports so we couldn’t travel across the border to Swaziland. 

My aunt, who’s my mother’s sister, and uncle and two children who were also very politically involved, left South Africa on an exit permit to go to the UK. They left to go into exile for political reasons. I was very close to my aunt and her family who lived next door to us for many years. So there was a decision to send us to the UK. I went first and my brother, Ghaleb, followed after he finished his O-Levels. 

I lived in the UK until I finished my A-Levels in 1976. 1976 was a tumultuous year in South Africa and as I had finishes schooling, I was very keen to return home. My parents were still here and I wanted to come back. So I returned in towards the end of 1976 and started at Wits in 1977. 

Laurence Stewart: Did you grow up… Before you went to Swaziland were you based in Johannesburg? 

Coco Cachalia: Yes, I grew up in Johannesburg and went to the local primary school. I then went to Gandhi Hall for my first year of high school. After that I went to Waterford and then on to the UK. 

Laurence Stewart: Just a bit on your parents, did they ever impart any kind of educational focus with regards to justice?

[05:00 Minutes]

Coco Cachalia: Yeah, we grew up in a household where we were very clear about what was just and what was wrong and unjust. My parents were very involved in the liberation politics of the 1950’s and were banned throughout the 1960’s  and much of the 1970’s. So we were very aware of the injustices of Apartheid. Our home was raided, my father was jailed under the 90 and 180 detention act and my parents were required to report to the local police station regularly.

Laurence Stewart: And your time in the UK, what kind of, it was quite formative, late teens…

Coco Cachalia: Yeah, it was very formative. Essentially I grew up with my aunt and uncle as my parents. In the end, I was given a passport so I did come home once a year – this wasn’t the case for my brother who wasn’t given a passport and consequently didn’t see my parents at all for almost 5 years. But I left home when I was 13, and I came back when I was 18. My aunt and uncle were my second parents in lots of ways. I lived with them until they divorced in 1974 – I think the pressures of exile, the fact that my aunt was always very unhappy in the UK put much strain on their relationship.

But it was a very loving and supporting home and I always knew that I’d come home to South Africa; the UK was a kind of sojourn in our lives but I went to school I made really good friends and London was a second home.

I did O-levels and A-levels I was going to go to university there as I say finished A-levels in 1976 and then decided I was coming home. I came home in ‘76 I went to work at a school in Botswana for a short period of time and then stopped and went to Wits in 1977. 

Laurence Stewart: When you came back in, when you came back in ‘76 and then you went to Wits in ‘77, what did you study? 

Coco Cachalia: I went to Wits in the beginning of ’77. It was strange to be back after all that time spent in UK and I didn’t know many people here. At Wits the only person I knew was my cousin Azhar, who’s now was a judge in the SC, who started at the same time. He was the only person I knew. 

When I had to register, I discovered this corridor at Wits – I knew I was going to do arts and at the top of the corridor was politics department, then there was African studies, then there was anthropology, and if you went round the corner you found philosophy. So, I registered for those subjects [laughs]. 

[10:00 Minutes]

Laurence Stewart: [laughs] I know that corridor. 

Coco Cachalia: That’s literally how I decided what I was going to do. I never really crossed the concourse to get to the history department. So those were the subjects that I did and that’s what I studied. And then I did an honours degree and then was very influenced by those Peter Delius, Charles Van Onselen, all in History Workshop in the early days and I did split honours between politics and history because I wanted to work with Charles in particular. And then I went to the UK after I worked for a while as an archivist at the Institute of Race Relations on an oral history project and an archive project at the Institute of Race Relations and then I went and studied with a guy called Paul Thompson at Essex University and that’s what formed my kind of interest in social history, oral histories, histories from below, all the stuff that you guys sort of know about. 

Laurence Stewart: And you, I read online I did a bit of research, had an opportunity to go underground, is that right? No? Or into exile? 

Coco Cachalia: No. So, what had happened was my kind of social justice input was actually all in the work that I’ve done all my life, very much so. I kind of shied away from much more formal politics. I did get involved in the Black Students’ Society at Wits, when I first joined, but it was, my parents’ involvement almost made me feel quite strongly that I didn’t want to be in formal political organisation. I remember meeting Janet Love on campus and she did try to recruit me but although I was infused with all these political issues, it was really, it wasn’t something that I wanted to follow. I didn’t want to be in a formal political organisation and to this day, I mean I obviously joined the ANC and voted for the first elections and stuff like that, but formal politics or formal organisation was never what I wanted to do. 

Laurence Stewart: I don’t know, could you just tell me a bit more about that? Sort of just maybe a reason why that why you felt that way? 

Coco Cachalia: I think it was a reaction you know I think if you’ve got parents who were that involved and I mean and you know having been sent away so young then gone to England, although our parents were very involved in our lives, I never felt that I was being displaced in any way. I did, as a young kid, you did feel, you know, who’s more important? Was it the country or was it me? There was that tension and that tension continued and it was kind of almost associated with politics and with organised politics. So, I think it was never a conscious thing but it’s the sort of thing that I kind of just I moulded something that was quite different from myself. 

Laurence Stewart: And so, working through organisation it was a bit it was more sort of organised and structured in a way you have you have a set job with work…? 

Coco Cachalia: Yeah so firstly my honours degree was on the Transvaal Indian Congress. I was very influenced by what my parents were doing. When I finished university, the first job which wasn’t even a paid job, was with the General and Allied Workers Union, working with a man called Sidney Mufamadi, who is still very much around, Rita Ndzanga and Samson Ndou. I knew that that was what I wanted to do, and the unions were really an interesting space for me, and so that’s what I started doing, and it wasn’t a paid job at all. And then I applied for this job at the Institute of Race Relations, which was an archivist and an oral history position. I worked with Andy Manson and Tina Sideris and my project was to interview anyone that was still alive and who was active politically in the ’50. I worked closely with Phil Bonner putting the 

[15:00 Minutes]

Interviews together. I then did an oral history project on flower-sellers in Johannesburg, exploring how their backgrounds and unpacking class issues. These were all working class people – I wanted to understand the class dynamics in the South African Indian community. 

My job at SACHED was a natural extension of the work I’d been doing but we can talk about a bit later. Because it was really an opportunity to put my interest in social justice into practice through my work. 

Laurence Stewart: I would like you to talk about that, but I just want to find out at Race Relations and the Allied, General and Allied Workers’ Union, was there any education focus?

Coco Cachalia: So, at Race Relations, I mean Race Relations was oral history… What do you mean? Ya…

Laurence Stewart: A focus on, so for example with the General, you were a volunteer…

Coco Cachalia: I was a volunteer, we did everything. 

Laurence Stewart: Everything, ok so it wasn’t a…

Coco Cachalia: No, that came later in SACHED…

Laurence Stewart: Ok.

Coco Cachalia: Ya it was everything. We trapsed off to the West Rand, we helped, I was a skivvy basically. Helping anywhere possible. The Institute of Race Relations was a proper job, I mean I was paid. I got paid to work there. We archived the liberal party documents which were in Peter Brown’s farm in the Midlands and Tina and I went and put that entire collection onto micro-fish. We did the archiving as well as oral history projects which involved interviewing political people and trade unionists from the 1950’s and the project on flower sellers which was published.

Laurence Stewart: So, before you joined SACHED, did you have anything which… Was it SACHED that prompted your focus on education specifically?

Coco Cachalia: So, SACHED was broadly always involved in education, it’s the South African Committee for Higher Education. I worked on what was the LACOM project which was the Labour and Community Project. And in that Labour and Community Project we worked very closely with NUMSA, and the unions that were the precursor to formation of  COSATU. So, it was a lot of NUMSA work and SACCAWU, the two unions that we worked with quite extensively. We worked very closely with the education committees within the unions. We assisted with developing manuals that were aimed at shop-steward training – we worked with Adrienne Bird and Alec Erwin.

But I was almost much more drawn to the kind of non-formal history side of stuff. So very early on, even in LACOM, my two biggest contributions were the publications that we did. The one was a history of Moss Mayekiso which I did with NUMSA and the other was, the other one was with SACCAWU which was on parental rights and the unions role play in parental rights. Again, they drew heavily on oral interviews and I focused much more on these non-formal education projects. 

Laurence Stewart: Could you tell me a bit more about that work? So, you, you started in?

Coco Cachalia: In SACHED?

Laurence Stewart: Ya.

Coco Cachalia: So I was, I finished my honours in 1981, then worked at Race Relations, then I went to the UK in ’84, to do a Masters and started working at SACHED from the end of ’86, until ’89.

Laurence Stewart: Ok. So, you were working on LACOM…

Coco Cachalia: Ya.

Laurence Stewart: Did you do the same kind of work in the non-formal or union education for eight to ten years?

Coco Cachalia: No, it wasn’t for eight to ten years, I worked at LACOM, I worked at SACHED. I left SACHED in ’89 maybe [thinking about it…] ’86, ’89, ’90 maybe then I went back overseas because my husband was at Khanya College, much more formal education stuff at SACHED. He did a Masters at Stanford, so I went there. And then when I came back, I worked at a place called

[20:00 Minutes]

Learn and Teach Publications. Learn and Teach focused on non-formal education, producing a magazine and other publications for second language English speakers. I was involved in the publishing side and worked closely with Marc Suttner, who started Learn and Teach. In 1993, I was pregnant with my first child so I left Learn and Teach and started consulting. My first big project was the abridged version of the Long Walk to Freedom, which I did together with Marc. I continued to consult for a while and then towards the end of 1996 I joined And Kagiso Educational Television and I continued to work there on social impact, social justice work to this day. 

Laurence Stewart: So, I just want to get a bit of a sense of your role at SACHED, but even day-to-day or some of the projects you were involved in…

Coco Cachalia: The 2 big projects I undertook with the unions was the publication of the life and times of Moss Mayekiso and a book on Parental Rights for SACCAWU. In between, we worked regularly with the education committee in Numsa where we assisted with developing accessible training materials for shop-stewards as well as assisting with training. We worked through those manuals with them, we inputted from an accessible point of view, we worked very closely with shop stewards, formations in the unions. A lot of it was around the history of the unions, around the political education in that education format. We were kind of seen as a support to what the unions wanted. So, if they, if Adrienne needed us to do an edit on something, we did that. If we were needed in a seminar to give an input around it, that’s what – so we were very reactive to what we were doing at that point.

My colleague Judy Favish stayed on and got seconded to work in the unions. This was much more structured way. Then Judy went on got seconded and worked much more strategically on stuff. By that stage, I had already left. Ya, so mine was really around continuing that kind of producing materials that were useful for the union. That’s really where I worked. 

Laurence Stewart: Did you – did you get a sense of what the culture of SACHED was? What was the culture…

Coco Cachalia: I think what was really nice about SACHED was that everyone from all sorts of political persuasions worked there. In Lacom, we were a motley bunch ranging from dedicated charterists to the extreme left. It was a melting pot where we debated, fought and learnt from each other. In that way it was really special. 

Lacom was always considered the ‘naughty children’ of SACHED. We worked in a much more non formal education environment whereas the other SACHED project tended to be more formal. Sometimes this led to real friction. One example was our view that we shouldn’t take individual credit on publications.  Helene Perold who ran the kind of formal publishing side of SACHED thought this was ridiculous…These were the healthy contestations we had and nobody ever made you feel that your own opinion and your own way of thinking was necessarily wrong. Which was I think a culture that is worth thinking about today. 

[25:00 Minutes]

Laurence Stewart: And some of these tensions and tussles were, do you remember any of them? 

Coco Cachalia: Oh, lots of them. I remember one complete explosion where we were all, LACOM was called in and out to account and Enver Motala who headed LACOM in Durban had to fly down and we were accused of being ultra-leftist and of being, not being kind of part of… You know taking kind of formalist of the organisation more seriously. And so, there were those kinds of issues which I don’t think went anywhere, nobody was ever fired, nobody ever had, there were never any consequences around it. But there were, there were political, there were differences, I mean there were differences in the way people saw things. A lot was felt that SACHED was becoming too professionalised, too formal you know whereas there were others who felt that it needed to be more in tune with kind of communities and workers, not that professionalised. 

Laurence Stewart: I wanted to ask, I know you have mentioned the two books, the book on parental rights and Moss Mayekiso. But what, what were some of the highlights while being at SACHED. If, other than those two – or including them…

Coco Cachalia: In terms of my work, in terms of what I did?

Laurence Stewart: Yeah, in terms of your work. 

Coco Cachalia: No, I do think there were definitely highlights but I do think that initial work in the education structures were a big eye opener in terms of how the unions were being organised at that point. The level of kind of involvement with the shop-stewards, the kind of work that was being done with the shop-stewards. At both an educational and at a political level, these were really interesting parts of our lives and we learned a lot from that. It actually framed a lot of how I continue to work going forward. So that kind of union, you know the democracy element of it, how you actually came to decisions around things were important. Were very important. 

Laurence Stewart: So, you say you worked in LACOM until about 19… 1990… 

Coco Cachalia: Yes.

Laurence Stewart: And then – sorry, your involvement with SACHED after that? I know you had your first child…

Coco Cachalia: No, no I never went back to SACHED. 

Laurence Stewart: You never went back and you didn’t do any work for them?

Coco Cachalia: No, I then joined Learn and Teach… 

Laurence Stewart: And Learn and Teach is separate from…

Coco Cachalia: It’s completely separate. Learn and Teach was a separate organisation, it was a kind of fraternal organisation, I think it had very close links particularly with – what’s the SACHED magazine that Harriet Perlman was were involved in? 

Laurence Stewart: Upbeat.

Coco Cachalia: Upbeat. So, it was kind of a sister magazine to Upbeat. Upbeat was more for young people, Learn and Teach was more for adult education thing. So, there was a connection but it was very different. I just ran a book project at Learn and Teach and I didn’t go back to SACHED.

Laurence Stewart: Why did you leave SACHED?

Coco Cachalia: I think I felt it was time to leave and because I  wanted to spend some time in the US because my husband had gone to study at Stanford, it all fell into place.  

Laurence Stewart: And you didn’t want to occupy, did you want to have a different role within SACHED? Would that have…?

Coco Cachalia: No I didn’t…

Laurence Stewart: You just had outgrown the organisation.

Coco Cachalia: Ya, then I was done. Ya, ya. So, I never went back to SACHED. I went, I then went to Learn and Teach and then I was a kind of consultant for a bit because I was having children and then I went and worked in the place that I still work at today. 

Laurence Stewart: I just wanted to ask a bit about, because I read your biography and lots of it speaks about where you work now and it being largely women-run, you are the director. What were, were there any particular gender dynamics in SACHED which were notable?

Coco Cachalia: No, I mean there were strong women at SACHED which probably influenced me, so

[30:00 Minutes]

Jennie Glennie was one that was very senior, Helene, and there were strong women so that probably did influence me. And it also showed that you could also work full-time, have families, you know those quite practical role models for somebody who was relatively young at that stage were important and I think that they did influence how I went on to see my life. At SACHED we were, there was Judy, Shireen, there was Tammy and there was me and then there was… Gosh that one guy that I can’t remember his name now he was [unclear word]. We never felt that the women were being subsumed, it wasn’t an issue. I don’t think John Samuel, who headed SACHED, ever, as a leader, ever gave that kind of impression. 

Laurence Stewart: So, after Learn and Teach you founded the or…

Coco Cachalia: Ya, no so then I worked as a consultant – I had my first child in 1993 and my second one in 1995 and by the time I had had my second child a year later I went into what I am doing now. But from  1993 to 1995  I worked with Leila Patel who was working on a big project for the World Bank. And I wrote parts of it for her, edited parts of it for her. I did, I did The Long Walk to Freedom in that time where we did the abridged version of Mandela’s book. Which was quite a big job, I think it was about a six-month job that we did. So, I did consultancy work. Ya, in various bits and pieces, I sort of…

Laurence Stewart: And your the media company you work at today… It’s educational?

Coco Cachalia: So, it started off as something called Kagiso Educational Television. We were part of the Kagiso group which had its origins in the Kagiso Trust, a non-profit that was formed in the ‘80s and ‘90s by church men like Beyers Naude. The Kagiso Trust was firmly anti apartheid and funded the liberation movements.  Once the new democratic government came into being, there was no role for the Trust in its original form. So, led by  Eric Molobi , Kagiso Trust Investments was set up and the idea of buying into or setting up businesses and the profit from those businesses would fund social justice projects. And that was the theory. 

I responded to an advert in the newspaper looking for an educationalist to be part of the  television project.  

Two of us were brought on board; myself as an educationalist and Leora Rajak, who came from a television background. We run the company jointly under the auspices of KTI. We were given small shareholding which then grew over the years and then about ten years into the project, Leora left and I continued to run the company. Essentially it’s a social impact marketing and communications company and we do work in the sort of big content areas which I think are kind of quite important. So, we work in financial education, we work in health education, public education, we now work in climate change. All our work is designed to give people information and education to make better informed choices in their lives. So a lot of social impact work, working with communities on the ground and using appropriate media channels. 

Laurence Stewart: I don’t know if it’s a bit contrived but just to ask, what did you learn in SACHED? In relation maybe to what you did after…

Coco Cachalia: I think I learned a lot about working with organisations that had an impact more broadly in society and I think I continued to do 

[35:00 Minutes]

that all the way through. I learned to work with people from different political persuasions and I learned to work well with people. I made real friendships with people from different political [persuasions]. I learned that labelling wasn’t necessarily the best way to look at things and in the eighties, there was a lot of labelling. If you were, if you weren’t a charterist, you were a problem, if you were a workerist you were this but SACHED kind of provided a safe ground for all of that. I just learned to hone my skills in doing what I do today, I mean it started then you know. I keep true to a lot of that. I’m still passionate about social history  and it still comes up from time to time with the work that I do.

Laurence Stewart: Would you say that, if you think about the relevance of SACHED for the present that perhaps it was more in the culture of the organisation…

Coco Cachalia: No, I think it was also in the work of the organisation. There was a lot of important work that was being done. The Distance Learning Project was a forerunner to UNISA and Khanya College was an innovative higher education project that had real impact. Helene’s publishing project produced excelleng publications, which I think have still got a relevance today. SACHED did a lot and the LACOM which was a labour and community project, assisted unions and community organisations nationally. I think SACHED’s relevance today is much broader than what I can give, I think that you can pick that up from a whole lot of people who worked on the different projects. 

Laurence Stewart: You are quite succinct, so I don’t have that many more questions. , you were based here in Johannesburg right? 

Coco Cachalia: Yes.

Laurence Stewart: I guess I don’t want to push it, but in terms of your focus on education in your later life, it doesn’t seem like you had that focus before SACHED…

Coco Cachalia: When you say education, you must define it for me.

Laurence Stewart: I guess teaching, teaching materials and that kind of… Is that not? Or working within education I guess?

Coco Cachalia: Ok, I have never been in formal education. I have never worked in formal education. And my role in adult education was much more on the materials side of stuff. So it was either developing materials for the, for union use or the kind of more general, social, social history stuff. And even in the work that we do currently today when I talk about health education, I am talking about campaigns in health education. I am not talking about actually being sort of in any sense formal…

Laurence Stewart: Ok, so I see that. Ya, I think I was looking for a sort of more formal education thread but even doing social [history] it links also to social history, oral history work that you did.

Coco Cachalia: Ya.

Laurence Stewart: The work you did in LACOM…

Coco Cachalia: Yes, yes absolutely. 

Laurence Stewart: Ok, I see that.

Coco Cachalia: Ya, so that’s really the way… So, whereas somebody like Judy, I think went into kind of more formal education stuff. Even Shireen Motala went in EPU and that was kind of much more based in a university environment. I never went either of those two routes, I stuck much more in the materials in the broader stuff around it.

[40:00 Minutes]

So that’s what I think is the difference. 

Laurence Stewart: Good to clarify. 

Coco Cachalia: Ya.

Laurence Stewart: I don’t really have any more questions, if you have anything else to add?

Coco Cachalia: No, I don’t know how useful I have been for you but anyway, that’s fine [laughs]

Laurence Stewart: Everybody has a story…

Coco Cachalia:  I think everything that we did in LACOM was really to help build strong democratic unions and that was a lot of the work that was done at the time. And even if you were writing the story of Moss Mayekiso it was to show his role in building strong democratic unions. Some of it was more formal, others less so but it was all designed to build and strengthen democracy and democratic traditions.

Laurence Stewart: Yeah. The thing is it’s interviewing different people and some people have a much more formal connection to education.

Coco Cachalia: Yes, and I never did. 

Laurence Stewart: I was just trying to…

Coco Cachalia: Ok.

Laurence Stewart: You are the first person who has got a slightly different trajectory. 

Coco Cachalia: Ok!

Laurence Stewart: Let me turn off the recorder. 

Coco Cachalia: Ok, that’s fine.

[End]