Ode to Sylvana Simons | Love is not phony

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Somewhere in a small flat, between a package from the food bank and stacks of library books, I was sitting in front of the television when I first saw you: a presenter who seemed to really listen to the people she was interviewing. Someone who immediately made you feel like you were allowed to be heard.

Someone who, in the years that followed, showed people not just on television but across the country that they have the right to be heard. Having the right to exist. Having the right not just to survive, but to live happily.

Years later, as an adult, I got to experience this feeling in person. I saw how you fought hard for the descendants of the slavery past, for the colonial violence the Netherlands committed in countries like Indonesia, the violence it continues to commit through aircraft parts to contemporary colonies.

Syl, you are historical.

Your impact in this country is immeasurable, even for a historian like me. We may only realise that in 10, 20 years' time. I hope more and more people realise that criticism comes from attentiveness. That attentiveness is a form of love. That love, like a home, a city, a country, does not always guarantee security. But that love is the reason you work hard for a world that can be safe for everyone, no matter what you look like, who you love, what you believe in.

It is not easy to be historical. To take the hits of showing truths in a country that stubbornly continues to cloak itself in fairy-tale lies. The trigger points provoke so much violence, so much envy, that sometimes it seems to overshadow your combative love.

Syl, do you remember how you were sung to during your swearing-in? Did you realise how everyone in the building, from the security guard to the intern, talked to you as if you had known them for a lifetime? Did you hear how loud everyone cheered during your DJ set at that gritty festival where it was suddenly over 30 degrees? Do you see how the complexity of life can also give you so much beauty? How even the people inside militant movements, carrying grudges for conflicts that were never resolved, realise how much you have meant to our living conditions?

Sometimes life seems to consist only of suffering. Sufferings that we should one day learn something from, but whose lessons do not seem important enough to endure the pain. Lives in which, against all odds, we stay in anyway long enough to turn the lessons into dreams. Dreams that one day become real and touch other lives, so that those lives too, against all odds, become less suffering.

You didn't choose this life then, but this is it. This is your life. Your legacy will always be remembered, even if the history books in this country are still written from fiction.

You will be missed in the chamber, in the conversations on the aisles, in the pauses between debates where you managed to convince even a stubborn ex-premier.

But I think I speak for everyone when I say that rest is granted to you. You were granted that love of yours in being a grandmother, aunt, mother, neighbour.

The love that you continued to put radically into carrying us, people who can feel so unloved in this country, with love, lives on. It lurks among tents on campuses and handmade banners, finding its way from the protester who experiences police brutality for the first time to the politician who loudly opposes it.

On The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, you hear a child say, ‘Maybe sometimes they've never been loved before, or they never been in love before, or they never- they don't know what the feeling is to be loved.’

To which the teacher says: ‘We can end the conversation with that, right?’