Two Bits: Away with the fairies?
There have been many times that people have warned the end is nigh, that all is lost for South Africa and that only the foolish will be left behind.
Imagine being paid to watch other people do what they do, from silly and absurd things to everyday getting on with their lives, to some events that make the history books.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the past 50 years and as I get closer to the end of my working career I ask, was it all worth it?
Well hell yes! My career has extended from writing stories about boy scout camps to interviews with prime ministers, from tenderly picking my way through scattered body parts at awful accident scenes to having front row views of royal weddings. From the gritty to the frivolous.
In the mid-70s I was sent to live in Umtata, what many would consider a low point in a career chart.
In fact it was quite the opposite. I was 23, in charge of a small office, and my job was to record the Transkei’s path to independence, that sham chapter in the apartheid government’s grand plan of a federation of states where the majority of the population would be conveniently shoved out of SA into tiny backyards and everybody would live happily ever after – yadda, yadda, yadda.
It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the reality of practical politics, of the realisation for a young man raised in the liberal mould of English-speaking Natal that what people say and what people do are entirely different matters.
That people will tell the most enormous lies in the pursuance of money, sex and power. Greed.
There was Kaiser Matanzima, nephew (though older) of Nelson Mandela but conservative to the core.
No revolutionary blood ran in his veins, but a vice-like determination to do anything to hold onto power.
At his side, like Gollum, his brother George, who was just into vice.
He had his hand permanently out for a payoff and an insatiable appetite for underage girls.
Anyhow, my job was to track developments leading up to the granting of independence in October 1976, the first of nine black homelands to become independent from the Republic of South Africa.
It was a sham and a failure, as a look over our shoulders back into history tells us, but it seemed real enough at the time.
It was real in that there was plenty of fiery talk of retribution, of payback for apartheid, as this was happening hard on the heels of the Soweto riots when schoolchildren rampaged through the streets, Hector Pietersen was shot by police and more, because they rejected the medium of Afrikaans in the classrooms.
I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of the new Transkei constitution and the big surprise was that there was no Afrikaans translation.
Was this a hint of defiance, even from the Matanzimas?
In the days and weeks before independence, whites left town in droves.
Most elected to stay, though a couple of people boarded up their houses and stocked up with canned foods in anticipation of sieges, who knows what? Tensions ran high.
Come Independence Day, it was happiness all round as bands marched triumphantly around the town stadium, politicians handed out food parcels and bored everybody to tears with endless speeches.
There was not a single incidence of violence, not even public drunkenness, and the guys came out from behind their shuttered doors looking a little sheepish.
I learned an important lesson from all that, to quote Franklin Roosevelt: that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
And there have been many times over the years that people have warned the end is nigh, that all is lost for South Africa and that only the foolish will be left behind.
I’ve had the privilege of living and working in the UK and Europe and of travelling for more than a year through South America and the Middle East.
Life elsewhere looks wonderful until you actually have to live there and pay your way, then it’s not all Wimbledon and holidays in Spain.
When you jump through all the hoops of getting a Schengen visa you realise they actually didn’t want another African there in the first place!
Don’t kid yourself, SA is actually a very nice place to live. Julius might be very loud and grab an undue amount of media space, but the Cyril Ramaphosa’s are actually in the majority. There are more moderates looking for a peaceful life out there than radicals.
I am convinced that the problems of the Public Protector and Ace Magashulas will be solved, they just don’t know it yet.
I’d tell you I believe even the Eskom crisis will be sorted, but then you’ll know for sure that I’m away with the fairies. But let’s see what happens.
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Job interviewer: “And where would you see yourself in five years’ time, Mr. Jeffries?”
Me: “Personally I believe my biggest weakness is in listening.”
