1976 Revisited

We all know that 1976 was the year that the Soweto uprisings started. The children, or as they are now known ‘learners’ (where on earth did that word come from?), refused to take instruction in Afrikaans. That was the start of the trouble.

Well, here we are in 2009 and those of us who speak what used once upon a time to be known as English, are now being subjected to similar and equally demeaning treatment – only that to which we are being subjected is more subtle, more insidious.

SABC TV’s channel no 3 has traditionally been reserved for English; from time to time there have been some fairly horrendous mistakes in pronunciation (but then you have to expect that when most of our continuity announcers come from another language background), and there have been a few times when programming left much to be desired. We have borne all those things with a certain amount of equanimity; after all, you can always turn off the TV if it gets too much or too bad.

However, in the last two weeks a new and worrying trend has, silently and almost imperceptibly, appeared. On Thursday nights we are now being treated to a really awful piece of programming entirely in (you guessed it) Afrikaans, and on Fridays we have the slightly more palatable De Kat (also in Afrikaans).

I would assume, therefore, that channel no 3 is no longer exclusively in English.
Come all you payers of licences and critics of the SABC, gird your loins, pluck up your courage, and in true South African fashion, lets burn down every government building we can find; lets lay waste to every school, every electrical appliance shop; lets turn over every police vehicle and march against the guns of the SABC. We have as much right to our language and heritage as those who demonstrated against Afrikaans in 1976!!!

Our rights are being violated. In popular terminology, we are ‘suffering’. Our language, our heritage, our very culture is being assaulted and belittled by those very people who found the enforced teaching in Afrikaans so unsavoury. We have a major bus strike in Johannesburg, the threat of a nation-wide strike of doctors, taxi operators threatening hellfire and brimstone if the bus rapid-transport system is introduced, political figures shouting unpleasant and defamatory epithets at our new administrator of the Cape (Helen Zille), and threats of legal action because a certain body does not recognise her right to choose her own cabinet as she sees fit – so lets do our bit and demonstrate against those in power at Auckland Park who see fit to quietly drop the occasional Afrikaans programme into our hallowed English station. GO GET THEM – VRYSTAAT!!

The Zuma Inauguration

I swore that I wouldn't listen to the radio or watch this spectacle on TV because I am heartily sick of the fanfare and noise that this whole thing has caused in this country. However, I was amused to read just now that the whole thing was marred by a downpour of rain, causing all the hallowed guests to run for cover. Serves them all right!!
One thing, however, has to be said: the stupendous amount of money that has been lavished on this ceremony leaves one speechless. For a humble man who was voted into power by the great unwashed masses of this country, Zuma has excelled himself in hypocrisy; whilst his supporters take shelter in their shacks, watching this amazing sight on their TVs (very often stolen), powered by electricity which is illegally re-routed from legal connections, they are no doubt cheering and drinking the health of the new president.
However, they would not know the taste of French Champagne at R100+- per bottle; theirs will be a diet of Black Label or cheap whisky. They are unconcerned that the cost of such an undertaking would have provided them with many many homes, or could have been used to good ends in elevating the poor. No, for some reason they regard Zuma as some kind of hero, to be addressed only as "Comrade". I rather fear that they may receive their just desserts when he drives his new administration into top gear and forgets all those who voted for him.
It is interesting to note, also, that while South Africa has taken a 'holier than thou' attitude to King Mswati of Swaziland and has banned him from receiving any of the good things of this country, someone like Mugabe, whose litany of human rights abuse can never be covered by a simple article like this one, has been present at this 'do'. Makes you think, doesn't it?

WHERE WILL YOU BE WHEN JZ BECOMES PRESIDENT?

(I wrote this article in September 2006, but it is interesting to look back now on things as they were then.....)

I must appeal to all your readers, as ordinary Sethafricans, many of whom no doubt think that ‘circumstance’ is spelt ‘sirCUMstance’, to help us get rid of the self-servers in our government who invariably put themselves above both the law and the will of the people. While I must take off my proverbial hat to our financial moguls, who alone seem to be doing the right thing and keeping their noses clean into the bargain, I am thinking of the likes of our Ministress of Health who insists on spouting absurdities publicly (and looks like some sort of a smiling root tuber beneath an acrylic tea-cosy), her predecessor who is now Ministress of Foreign Affairs (please note most of these ladies have given themselves hyphenated names to announce their importance), our good Ms Fraser-Moleketi (hyphenated, of course) who manages to use a great many words in saying very little (bullshit baffles brains), the ridiculous antics of one Tony Yengeni who is enjoying the luxury of prison just 20 kms from myself, and the frightening (if not laughable) Jacob Zuma with his perennial rent-a-crowd and endless court appearances. Not only does he spout inanities publicly – not his fault, I suppose, because he was somewhere else when education was being dished out – but he has the nerve to invent wicked little ditties about machine guns and the lack of shame to actually get up and sing these songs in public.

Does he realise what will actually happen if he manages to make the Supreme Court go away, enters the race for State President, and finally gets elected?

I can tell you: the majority of Sethafricans will pack up and go to New Zealand, or somewhere far enough away that they will not have to witness the catastrophe that this country will rapidly become. While graft and corruption in high places is a problem at the moment, it will, under his presidency, become the norm; we shall be able to achieve nothing unless the right palm is greased with the correct amount of cash. To this end we are probably doing the right thing to keep our famous Ministress of Health because all we shall need in order to guarantee our safety after sex is a shower to wash away any little viruses we may have contracted. We will safely be able to do away with the judiciary (they will in any case have left, if they have any sense) because, with large enough crowds in the streets, we shall be able to disregard their findings with impunity.

You think that things are bad at the moment? Baby, you haven’t lived.

I can assure you of one thing: if Cde Zuma becomes the next president, my bags will be packed and I will be joining the queues at the airports (we don’t know what they will be called because they keep changing their names to remind us of various little political upheavals) for any flight, anywhere but here. His ascendancy to the presidency will herald the commencement of a new era in this country: the Age of the Comrade. Any old Tom, Dick, or Themba, will be able to seat himself in a palatial office and become a millionaire overnight, whilst the poor and dispossessed throng the streets with their begging bowls, if they haven’t died of AIDS, that is.

When P.W.Botha warned us of a future ‘too terrible to contemplate’ I think he must have meant just this; lucky man, dishonoured and forgotten in his house in Wilderness, he will probably have had the good fortune to die before his awful prediction comes true.

But seriously, before it’s too late, lets get rid of these mamparas from our halls of government; lets show the rest of the world that we are indeed a thinking and responsible people (even though we live in Africa), and, for pity’s sake, lets try to shut the stable door BEFORE the horse has bolted.

Otherwise, our future will be too terrible to contemplate.

The End of Innocence

Where Was I on June 16th 1976? The End of Innocence.

On that fateful day in 1976 I was living in the Northern suburbs of Johannesburg and working as a medical rep in the Jeppe St area, calling on all the specialists up and down the street. I had been living in Johannesburg since 1968, when I arrived on holiday from UK and simply never went home! In fact South Africa was such a wonderful place in those days that the thoughts of going back to the dreariness of suburban England with its memories of Harold Wilson creeping onto our television screens like some ante-deluvian mollusc and delivering a speech through his nose were too awful to contemplate.

Although my generation, who had never been further than the boundaries of their own towns, decried South Africa as a police state and were all consummately knowledgeable about our every misdemeanour, often refused even to discuss this country with me, and although we lived here in the shadow of Apartheid, South Africa was a wonderful place to be. I can hear the murmurs off-stage of ‘only if you were white’ and the echoes of today’s trades unionists warbling about ‘The Struggle’ and about how dreadfully the blacks suffered at the time, but let me tell you: unemployment was much lower than it is today and relatively few people ever went to bed hungry.

Anyway, the purpose of this article is not to raise the issue of the unfairness of the system or the behind-the-scenes brutality of the Bureau of State Security (the head of which was an erstwhile client of mine); it is perhaps to debunk some of the outpouring of white guilt that we have seen in the last ten years, and to give the lie to those who mistakenly equate Apartheid with the Holocaust. We were not afraid to speak our minds (although only those of us who courted disaster on a regular basis would have shot off our mouths too loudly or too publicly) nor were we afraid to live our lives as we thought best.

Coming from a relatively liberal background, I had always seen and treated people as people and not judged them purely by the colour of their skins; for the first couple of years in this country we even had maids – until we became tired of being constantly ripped off by them and their families. I personally had many friends who were ‘not the right colour’ and was a frequent illegal visitor to Soweto where I enjoyed a freedom of spirit and a generosity which was certainly lacking in the white areas. The same people often came to my house unhindered, joined in our merrymaking, and were free to come and go as they chose.

However, all that came to an end from June 16th 1976 onward. By the end of that day my house had become more of a refugee centre than a home as cousins and siblings of friends arrived begging for asylum from the madness which had gripped Soweto. They were not politicos; they were simply children who ran away from what was beginning to look more and more like a war-zone; they were running to somewhere where they would be safe.

Perhaps June 16th 1976 was really the end of innocence for so many of us; almost overnight everything became politicised, from the language you spoke at home to the colour of your skin. Although the Apartheid system had imposed a whole raft of legislation about where you could and could not go, depending on what colour you were, we had always been relatively free to go where we chose and associate with whom we chose – provided, of course, we didn’t fornicate with them in the streets! I soon learned that public fornication was limited to the pillars of society of the day who would run across the border to Swaziland every few weeks to assuage their wicked desires! Let any visitor to Mantenga Falls show me a car with a registration number that did not belong in Randfontein, Pretoria, Krugersdorp, or Ventersdorp, and I would truly be surprised.

My decision to leave Johannesburg permanently (and never to this day to go back) was made first thing in the morning on June 17th 1976 when I had to duck into several doorways to avoid volleys of rifle fire in the central city. I made up my mind there and then that nowhere was worth that kind of sacrifice and so, very shortly afterward, I flung a few things in the car and left permanently for Cape Town. It was the civilised thing to do.

Since that time, despite whatever has happened over the years, we as a society have become more and more politicised; we have grown further and further apart; we have been divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yes, for the sake of peace and the future of this country, those of us with any sense voted ‘yes’ in the referendum of 1992, and peace reigned, but it turned out to be a peace which allowed a small group to rise and become super-rich while their compatriots (they would say ‘comrades’) continued to suffer; it was a peace which heralded the dreaded ‘affirmative action’ whereby those with the knowledge and experience were forced into early retirement or exile whilst those without either of the former rose to prominence in our country; it was a peace which paved the way for crime to blossom and corruption to flourish, a peace which turned our South African world on its ear; the age of innocence ended for all of us on June 16th 1976 and that is why the day should be remembered with sadness – nostalgia for values which have now become lost and totally forgotten.

Freedom was certainly anything but free.

Tribal Customs and the Spread of Aids

At last someone has managed to hit the nail on the head (Why AIDS cases are so high in Africa – Mukaronda). A great deal of hot air and paper have been expended on various campaigns which hope to do something to arrest the spread of this terrible virus, and so far without success. It is heartening to read that someone has indeed tried to tell us that one of the main reasons these campaigns have failed is because African men are supposed to enjoy more than one partner at a time and that the use of condoms is strictly against cultural principles.

So now we have the main reason that these campaigns have failed; we have the cause but seem to be far away from any kind of solution. If you look back in history you will see just how short-sighted and foolish many of these customs are (the story of Nongause is a perfect example) and how they are at total odds with life as it is today. However, changing the beliefs and mindset of an entire continent is going to be very difficult indeed.

We have been regaled on a daily basis with the events of the Zuma rape trial and, while I have no axe to grind for either side, the incredible ignorance of both Zuma and the complainant is staggering. The judge has tried to apply European thinking to both parties, but I feel this is wrong. The complainant was probably utterly unaware that unprotected sex with any partner could expose her to a fresh infection because there are many forms of the virus; she probably thought that, once infected, she had nothing further to lose; Zuma’s attempt at hiding within cultural norms and thinking is also completely foolish, although he would not be at such risk as the complainant, unless the activity in which he indulged was so strenuous as to cause him injury. In any case, he had the good sense to shower afterwards! Ho hum!

In a country where the erstwhile Minister of Health advocated a diet of beetroot and African potato in preference to anti-retrovirals, despite the fact that the latter have been proven to be beneficial in lengthening the life-span of those infected with the virus, while the former is nothing more than a home remedy, speaks for itself.

We Europeans have learned, over many centuries, that certain behaviour is not only highly dangerous but also total anathema to today’s way of life. Once upon a time we also engaged in sacrifices and believed in appeasing our ancestors; the ancient Egyptians were always buried with their most treasured possessions and they even had food in their sarcophagi in the belief that they would need it to sustain them on their journey to the afterlife. We have come a long way, but it has taken us thousands of years to do so, and to believe that a people who were not exposed to the same history as ourselves could change their customs literally overnight is absurd.

As with the people who followed Nongause’s advice and slaughtered their cattle, bringing upon themselves terrible consequences, so with tribal custom and modern medicine. The one simply serves to negate the other and will continue to do so until a sufficient number of people have died, the race is decimated and people begin to wake up and see that perhaps a change in custom and behaviour is necessary in order to solve the problem.

Hopefully, Mukaronda can show the way and start to effect the changes in thinking that are long overdue. Only when one has had the misfortune to watch someone close die of this terrible syndrome can you begin to urge the living to do something positive to save themselves, and that something, unfortunately, consists of a great deal more than merely resorting to home remedies and ‘boereraat’. There is no place for ignorance in these enlightened times of 2006.

The Wild West in South Africa

Democracy notwithstanding, we still live in the Wild West.

For those of you who have read and who remember your history lessons The Great Trek took place in the early part of the 19th century. As I understand it, the Trek took place because the stout patriarchal Afrikaner was loath to live under the unwanted yoke of British law and order, so in order to continue his lifestyle of bible in one hand and gun in the other, he upped stumps and sought pastures new out of reach of the stifling authorities of the day.

Despite many intervening years which should have acted as a poultice on this wound of unruliness, it would seem that old habits do indeed die hard.

The story I am about to tell all took place, in the Cape, between February and May this year.

On two occasions since my arrival here in 1968 I have had the somewhat chilling experience of driving along and seeing one of my rear wheels overtaking me. The first time I had this experience was in Durban on a late afternoon in spring when I had just fetched my car from the garage which had repaired the rear brakes. I was in the usual heavy traffic in West St when suddenly I saw one of my rear wheels pass me on the left and flatten a queue of people waiting for a bus.

The second occurrence was in February this year; I had just retrieved my vehicle from the garage which had repaired the rear brakes and was on my way home. Suddenly, in the middle of the N7, the left rear wheel and half-shaft of the vehicle bounced past me, crossed the road and sailed over a fence into a field of ostriches.

That was on a Friday; the towing service was called and the vehicle was returned to the garage responsible. However, they refused to accept delivery and instead instructed that the car be sent to an engineering shop a few blocks away. The engineering shop refused to accept the vehicle and so, when I went in search of same on the Monday morning, I found the car in the yard belonging to the local scrap dealers who are also the towing service. I paid for the tow and returned to the garage responsible for the repairs and suggested that they sort the matter out.

The following morning I learned that the car had been taken back to the engineering shop and, when I asked for an estimate for the repairs, I was told that these had already been finished, although I had given no authorisation for any work to proceed. However, because of other damage which occurred when the wheel parted from the vehicle, the car could not be started.

We now jump about six weeks to just before Easter when I once more retrieved the repaired vehicle from the garage. After driving the 22 kms back home, I discovered that the other rear wheel was overheating and that there seemed to be a problem with the gear linkage and the brakes on that side.

Another mechanic was called and ten days later the matter was sorted out. Although I had paid for the original repairs and the towing, no invoice had been received from the engineers.

At the end of April I received a phone call from the engineers asking why they had not been paid. I asked them to fax me an invoice and promised payment in due course. The invoice arrived almost immediately and was so enormous as to warrant further investigation. I immediately faxed a letter to the engineers asking them to explain how they could charge me more than three times the amount that the final garage had been paid for the same work to the opposite rear wheel. There was no reply.

Once more, last week the engineers phoned and asked when they could expect payment; I referred them to my letter, which they claimed not to have received. When I checked the fax number in the phone book with them, it appeared that this number was incorrect and I was given another number to which I immediately faxed the letter. Their invoice bore no phone numbers at all. I then made an appointment to go in and discuss the matter with the owner of the engineering business last Friday.

When I arrived there was no owner in sight; however, after a phone call he duly appeared. It was abundantly clear that he had not read the letter (he probably couldn’t read English anyway) and soon became even clearer that he had no interest in its contents whatsoever. His only interest was in being paid the full amount immediately.

When I attempted to discuss the matter he simply walked away, shouting over his shoulder that he had parked directly behind my vehicle in his yard and that I could not leave his premises until the amount had been settled in full. Any attempt to discuss the matter further or to remonstrate with him was in vain.

So there I stood, in a cold and windy shed at the end of the industrial area, without any means of departure, unable to offer him a cheque because he had made it quite plain that this was not acceptable, unable to pay with a credit card because he had no facilities with which to accept this, and with a mere R40 in my pocket.

I should be grateful, of course, that he didn’t hold me at gunpoint; I quite expected he would. Eventually I was able to talk my way out of the situation with one of his employees, who kindly removed the vehicle blocking my exit and allowed me to leave.

It seems that the old saying ‘The more things change the more they stay the same’ applies here. I am now laying charges of extortion and demanding money with menaces with the local police. It seems we are still living in the Wild West and that the old story about only those who couldn’t read crossing the Orange River was just that: only a story.

South African Elections

Well, here we are, the other side of the elections (I haven't heard them referred to yet on the radio as "erections', but I'm sure it will happen before the week is up! Well, congratulations to the South African electorate for managing yet another peaceful election; despite long queues at polling stations and some mysterious bundles of voting papers found in strange places and on the occasional person, the whole thing went off well.
Except for the result: ANC yet again.
I can't understand why a thinking and intgelligent populace would want to appoint as president a person who has so many question marks hanging over his head as to his probity. It seems that, not satisfied with the amount of corruption and nepotism that we have come to regard as normal, South Africans would want to continue in this vein. However, it seems clear to me that Zuma is about to rape this country for all it's worth!
You ain't seen nothing yet!!