| When I was a child, the chemical composition of sugar fascinated me. The ordinary white crystals that I so effortlessly added to my coffee, spoonful by spoonful, were in fact nothing more (and nothing less) than specific combinations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (C12H22O11). When my father explained that to me, I said "Oh". This saying of "Oh, so that's how it works" was an important link for me. The "Oh" exclamation in "Oh, okay, that's how things fit together" and the "O" that represents oxygen on the periodic table made it possible for me to breathe.
The same moments of clarity about my generation and its associated oxygen, or breathing space, I have never experienced, though.
A big friend of mine (and I really mean big - this guy is over six foot tall and must weigh around 120 kg) has the habit, after a big red-wine-and-red-meat night, of taking off all his clothes when - as he puts it - he goes to exercise his "circular muscle" (coincidentally another "O"). He would stride starkers down Bachelors (Wilgenhof men's residence's annexe for seniors) and ascend the porcelain throne like the thinker with his fist on his forehead. Veins would bulge in his neck as he strained to rid his body of all the rubbish with which he'd poisoned it. His explanation for crapping naked was that he couldn't bear the smell in his clothes.
Like Douw, I also want to take my clothes off when I have to go to the john, because the smell of my generation is clinging to them and I can't fucking take it. Because my generation - as I know them - are a bunch of racists (with the exceptions few and far between).
Brothers
prayer
with apologies to Koos du Plessis
may I never drive a fancy car,
may I never fight a language war
protect me from people
whose best friends are black or gay
protect me from the public broadcaster
and a generation that's never heard of uhuru
hold a motherly hand over brothers whose
fathers-in-law pray before meals but will only sit next to whites
lead me far from rushing waters where journalists
catch you and then hang you again with a belt
may this, Lord, be the last time.
One of my brothers' father-in-law is a "good Christian". The type of guy who will give you advice with fatherly gentleness and "in Jesus' name" entrust you to "the Lord your God". He's a good husband to his wife and a good father to his children. He's also an arch-racist who will not hesitate - directly after he's folded his pious little hands to thank the Lord for food and drink - to use the word kaffir continuously in one's presence.
My generation, I suspect, fell hook, line and sinker for the whole idea of respect for older people. Age implies that someone has lived, that someone has insight and wisdom. That one should have respect for that is a given, in my opinion. But to show respect automatically for some arsehole or other who talks through his backside about the realities of the country and relies on his age to ensure that "the children" listen is like listening to a Pommy in a pub solving the world's problems over a pint when he's never set foot outside his borough (or burrow) his whole life.
Along the same lines, I think there's an error of reasoning (and how I miss the late Prof Johan Combrink now) inherent in saying "He/she compels respect". If something is forced in this way, that's all it is. When someone does something really amazing, then it's the observer's decision whether or not to give his or her respect to that person.
Bachelors
Good, nice friends of the woman in my life and mine decided to tie the knot in Franschhoek. He is an information officer in the navy and she is a Boland girl from Slent (that n is really important if you're speaking Afrikaans!) near Paarl who works for an NGO in Pretoria.
A month or so before the wedding we heard there was a bachelor's and a bachelorette's. The men headed for a game farm somewhere in Northwest and the women to some lodge or other in Magalies. Neither my wife nor I am into strippers who jump out of cakes or sex tips about how to keep your man happy so his eye doesn't wander, but we really like the couple and so decided, despite ourselves, to join the "flippin' bachelor's". Both events included an overnight stay.
It's a nice bit of road to drive. Once out of Jozi you feel yourself leaving the city behind you as you drive into the bush. As a Bolander who is very aware of the fact that many Bolanders and Kaapenaars reckon "Darkest Africa" lies beyond the Du Toitskloof mountains, I am always surprised when I realise that I find this yellow grass and the veld and the little hills beautiful (and it's so far from the Boland with its easily assimilated chocolate box beauty!) Just over the Gauteng border into Northwest and a kilometre or so of dirt road and I reach the lodge.
The guys are already standing around the fire - as men invariably do. Each with a beer in hand and glancing around. Besides the prospective bridegroom I don't really know anyone. A few beers later and rum and coke for the poor bachelor, and everyone is chatting together over a bubbling potjie filled to the brim with mushrooms. All that the potjie chef is able to get past his lips every now and then as he downs a beer is the word ballas.
And then, probably just because I'm a whitey, and probably because I'm Afrikaans-speaking, it's apparently okay when one of the guys starts talking about "hotnots" when he's telling a story. "They" that do this or that. The "us and them" thing becomes a natural process, and it's clear which camp I fall into, because hey man, I'm white, male and Afrikaans. And another sentence starts with: "I'm not a racist, but …"
And from the dark night behind us comes one of those restless, somnolent, idling rumbles that emanate from deep inside a lion's throat and makes the hairs on your neck stand on end …
Cancer
Cancer is caused by unresolved dreams.
- Sting
What if nothing means anything? What if
nothing really matters? Or suppose everything
matters. Which will be worse?
- Calvin & Hobbes
All the men who stand farting around the fire and talk about "hot chicks"; all the men (black and white) who dress up in their Springbok jerseys and stand screaming in front of their children and the TV when a rugby test is on and reckon that Breyton is a good Bok wing for "a boy from Ceres"; all Christians who have never done a close reading of Ephesians - I wish cancer on you all and everyone like you. Not cancer as a metaphor, but the dark thing itself that comes and eats away at your body until your shoulder-blades poke through your skin and your hair starts to fall out after yet another session of chemo. Until you become colour-blind and the gender of the hands that feed you no longer matters.
On the farm Helderrant just outside Stellenbosch, and later in Still House (as in Habakkuk 3:18) in Somerset West, cancer wrought a radical change in my life. My mother, Elize, had cancer of the liver. Whereas the gender roles and dynamics between my father and mother, us three brothers and one sister constituted the normal maladjusted situation in which most Afrikaners grew up, and are probably still growing up today, cancer simply cut through to the bone and redefined everything (as she slowly deteriorated) - and I mean everything.
When my father - a much-loved husband and lecturer, a WP referee and quite well known in his time - got home in the evening, he'd get busy at the stove. In the beginning he just experimented with stews, but as the months became years he learned to produce a full-on chicken dinner in the oven and to make a mean vegetable soup that would put hair on your chest. During the day he was a respected academic and curt with a fiery temper. On his desk you could read the motto: "Be brief. Be to the point. Be gone." In the evenings and long nights he was a mother, a comforter, a nurse, and simply a heart-sore husband who followed my mother shortly after her death - just because he missed her.
But gender and race roles would never be the same again for me. Things that housewives traditionally did (like cooking, washing, making school lunches, making sure the garden service arrived, etc) were never caught up in a gender for me as a child. And when the "coloured" domestic worker didn't pitch up, the man of the house, Hoover in hand, was transformed into a domestic worker.
An aside on gender
In anthropology there are four so-called "invariables" that are observed between the sexes (particularly in "traditional societies"): males impregnate females; females bear children; the seat of authority lies with males; and close relations do not mate with one another. The first two are a given (for me, at any rate) and, depending on your predisposition, and if you are not a royal, the last one also makes sense. But the "seat of authority", and everything that goes with it, has - thank heavens - changed for good. The remote is no longer your domain alone, my brother!
Another country
I'm getting as bored with dying as everything
else, he thought.
- From Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Is it the same old theme of a generation's search for identity? A so-called "outsidership" because we know where we've been, but the future is another country? Does language become simply language and the manipulation of words more and more a game of Russian roulette (apologies to Breyten B and Johann Johl)?
In a Beeld column earlier this year (January 6th) I wrote the following (freely translated):
Malaria.
Or as people who have already felt this parasite surging feverishly through their veins sometimes say: mal-aria.
A few years ago I was sitting in Kampala (the capital of Uganda), arguing with two local students.
"You can't be an African - you're white," says one and takes a deep swig of his Port Bell beer.
Besides my white skin, my sunglasses and the fact that I can't speak any of the local languages, the fact that I have not yet been exposed to an illness like malaria is apparently part of the problem.
"Why?" I ask. "Do I have to fall prey to some disease or other in order to declare myself an African?"
I try to explain that it's not a crime to live in a country with relatively good medical care. That malaria is not something I have to think about every day.
A woman joins us. Her skin and that of the three-year-old child in her arms glisten with fever. Above us, Marabou storks hover …
"Our problems are simply not your problems," says one student, pointing to the woman. "You make medicines for diseases that affect you, for those who can pay for them."
Armed with Larium against malaria, 18 travel companions and I travel slowly through Africa back to South Africa in our converted 13/13 Mercedes truck.
As soon as we get back, each of us is tested for bilharzia and malaria. The Larium apparently worked.
Three months later in Stellenbosch I dream one night that the ceiling above me has become liquid - that yellow-wood drops are falling on my skin.
I get up tired, but feel fine. The night's dreams are gone and the daylight is somehow sharper than before.
On my way out to the street I think, "That's strange, I can hear every leaf rustling." The trees are talking to me. Drops of rain become fine, plummeting little screams and I hear my own heart beating and the breathing of a woman on a bike.
Two days later and the dreams change into demons that gnaw at the sinews in my back. Something tears at my other muscles - just small bites at a time.
My skin is wet, but feels like fire. With only a red Masai cloth around my body and a Xhosa kierie I go hunting ghosts in the streets at night. A concerned friend asks if everything's okay. I'm apparently looking dreadfully pale. No, I say, I'm fine - daylight brings new hope anyway.
But every evening, when the darkness comes to claim me, there's a war in my head. Dark monsters compete for the moisture in my brain. Fever-hyenas gobble greedily at my body.
And then … someone breaks down the door of my room and throws me over a shoulder.
Two days later I wake up with a familiar hospital smell in my nostrils. Someone says they pumped me full of the malaria antidote quinine. Grateful, I drink lukewarm rooibos tea and think back to the shadow of a stork over a three-year-old child in her mother's arms. The simplicity of it all hits me: while two young Ugandans were unable to get through to me, a mosquito succeeded in one moment in communicating a continent's need.
Only when we become feverish about this country and this continent will we understand that racism in any form whatsoever is a septic, gangrenous leg that must be amputated from this generation.
And when one of the characters asks the writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro: "If you have to go away, is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?", I want to say: "If this (racism) is what you leave behind, kill off everything!"
|
Jo Prins was first published under the name Johannes
Prins in 2001, together with 15 other poets, in Tafelberg's
Nuwe Stemme 2. In 2002 he contributed to Protea Boekehuis's
As die son kom oogknip and the poetry journal Karapaks.
He works as a journalist for Beeld in Johannesburg
and is a regular member of the editorial committee of Krit,
the festival publication of KKNK.
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