Writing about my Dickensian office in the wilds of what is now Namibia - see here - stirred the memory soup in my head sufficiently to read Alan Paton's "Cry, The Beloved Country, once read by all South African schoolchildren to delude them that they were racially progressive.
Perhaps the Afrikaner staff were right when behind my back they called me a 'kafferboetie' - look it up! - because I certainly abhorred apartheid and I left soon enough. It was the right thing to do! Of course, we all like to think that our decisions and our progress through time is like one of those handy images that illustrate The Ascent of Man. You know the type: diagrams that begin with the shaggy ape and his groundgrazing knuckles, moving on through slowly straightening and depilating - look that one up too, Des! - hominids, until we reach the clean-shaven Caucasian nudist proudly clutching the haft of his stone axe or spear.
We like to think that our life is an inevitable linear progression towards this brawny ideal, but real life isn't like that. Instead, it is a more riotous and disorganized reality, jumbled up, counterposed and repeated at random. When I think of all my own ups and downs, what I see is not a rollercoaster - a rollercoaster is too smooth a ride! - but rather a yo-yo, a yerking, spinning yo-yo in the hands of a maladroit child, trying too hard and too impatiently to learn how to operate it.
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make life appear interesting or humdrum. I like to think that my life was more on the extraordinary side and yet that the mistakes I made as a son, friend, and husband were the same mistakes we all make in our endless quest for a bit of happiness.
As for Alan Paton's novel, it ends with the prophetic words, "... but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret."
Well, the secret was out in 1994 with the end of apartheid.
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika! God bless Africa!
