Enemy of the People

With today’s vote on the Protection of State Information Bill, the ANC has declared itself an enemy of the people, and an enemy of democracy. Step by dishonourable step, the liberators are turning into the gang they replaced.

It is time to throw the bastards out.

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How to move a dishwasher

A woman from Soweto comes on Sunday to pick up the dishwasher. Rob has done a nice little trade, putting household things up for sale, sending a flyer around our townhouse complex, listing items on Gumtree. The proceeds will go into our ‘funny money’ stash, to be used on our holiday. Elizabeth, the Soweto lady, has called several times, and now she is here, at the gate, with her husband, to collect. She is well-groomed, good looking, charming. A big smile. A little girl, grinning, clambers out of the back of her father’s car and scampers around gleefully. The father, or husband, in jeans and a Cosatu teeshirt, shakes hands formally and drives up to our garage. He reverses and turns and parks facing the entrance. The car – an old Ford Telstar – creaks and squeaks like a pair of old bedsprings, and I notice that the rear bumper is hanging off, the bodywork is full of dents and scratches, the tyres are worn.

We go inside to inspect the dishwasher. They will take it, they immediately decide. My misgiving turns to concern. Where on earth do they think they are going to put it? No matter, the husband and I pick up the dishwasher and take it outside, down the few steps and out into the driveway. We set it down, and assess the situation. It is immediately apparent the dishwasher will go neither in the boot nor in the rear seat. ‘Where are you going to put it?’ I ask. ‘Don’t you know anyone who has a bakkie?’ ‘It is too far,’ the husband answers. He opens the front passenger-side door. ‘It will go here.’

I shake my head. Still, we pick up the dishwasher, and the husband reverses in, clambering over the seat and pulling the machine in after him. We push and heave and alter the angle of approach, but it won’t go. Out it comes, and we all stand around, scratching our heads. ‘I will take out the seat,’ the husband explains. He goes round to the boot and returns with a spanner. Wrong size. He comes back with another. He hunkers down in the rear of the car, grunting and sweating, undoing the bolts. Then he comes round to the front, and loosens another. One bolt turns, the nut won’t come loose. He stares, mutters something, attacks it again. No luck. ‘I need a hammer,’ he says.

At this point his wife intervenes. ‘How are you going to fix it,’ she asks, ‘later?’ He dismisses this comment airily, but hesitates. He is stumped. We all wait. I can’t see how this is ever going to work. But the husband climbs back into the car, into the driver’s seat, and calls for us to lift the dishwasher and angle it towards him, this time on its side. We comply, and this time we gain a little ground. A few more jiggles and scrapes, the sharp edges of the machine grating against the plastic dashboard and the roof-lining, the weight and pressure of it pushing down on the reclining, half-loosened passenger seat, and after a few minutes, surprisingly, the thing is in. Only the driver cannot manoeuvre the gear lever. More jostling, pushing, more creaking and scraping, and finally it is settled.

Some money changes hands, the woman smiles, the husband shakes hands with that double-clasp, the little girls gives a toothy grin, and that is that. They are off.

So that, I thought, as I turned back, alone, to the echoing house, is how you move a dishwasher.

Most of our boxes, on Saturday, were moved into storage. Eve, Shaun and Kathy came round and helped. Later on Sunday, Eve and Shaun came by again, and we loaded up stuff for Kathy’s house – a bookshelf, the firepit, the huge bedroom mirror. Our cookery books, and our vast supply of herbs, spices, vinegars, along with the remaining pastas, risotto rices, tins of chickpeas and beans, have all been divvied up. After a long, warm, funny, affectionate braai at Kathy’s charming little home, with Eve and Rob helping out in the kitchen and Shaun slaving away over the fire, Rob and I came home again, as it was growing cooler and the light was beginning to fade.

Now we could feel, for the first time, how empty the house is. The bare walls are cold and unfriendly, the spaces echo as we move about, talking, packing, preparing. We are all but on our way, now. You can feel it.

Packing up our world

Summer colds – raw throats, congestion – are dogging us both. We are both busy – Rob is counting the days at Soweto TV, and after completing one part of my current assignment for the Engineering Council, I must now focus on completing the other. It is hard to imagine that two weeks from now we will be packing up our little world, and putting it away for ever. Our first home, our first year together as a married couple – not Rob’s house, in Toronto, not mine, in Emmarentia, but ours, chosen and established together. I realised last night, for the first time, that I will be sad to leave it.

Back to School

The former head boy of my former high school, Camps Bay High, has decided to organise a 40th anniversary reunion for the matric class of ’71. Rob and I shan’t be there – it is taking place the day we pack up house – but we have all been asked to send through some photos and a short bio, so here is mine – written up like a good deputy head boy, which I was. I thought I might share it:

‘I visit Cape Town several times a year, and whenever I have time there is a route I follow, round the mountain from the City centre, past the old mill and the university, Kirstenbosch and Constantia Nek, down into Hout Bay and up again, past Llandudno tucked away below the road, and twisting my way back down toward the sea until, finally, I round a corner and there beyond the Oudekraal boulders is the Sphinx-like outline of Lions Head, and the shortened perspectives of Bakoven and Camps Bay, awash in a necklace of waves and foam.

The further I go from home the closer it seems, the more it is part of me, and I part of it. This is not some white South African version of ‘American Graffiti’ or – what was that movie, kids coming of age, endless summer nights, love and disappointment in the sand dunes? – in fact, I hardly ever think of school days, and when I do it is generally with a sense of how alien and remote it all is, how different I was – how different we all were, I suppose.

I don’t have to think of it – of school, I mean. The fact is, much of it has probably been so deeply absorbed, instilled, that it is part of me even when – especially when – I am not thinking of it. The lessons (understood only afterwards) about how not to be, as a human being; the conceptual and analytic discipline of analysing a sentence; the utter failure at maths and Latin; the difference that a teacher can make; the friends who – long gone from my life – marked and changed me when I was young and my shell was still forming.

I ended up, much to my surprise, teaching also – after a degree in English at UCT and English Honours at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (there was a girl involved, why else would I go there?) I was all set, so I thought, for literature at Oxbridge, or something like that, but by then it was 1976, and suddenly literature as a career seemed bizarrely unhelpful – you see how naïve and simple-minded I was – and the South African army distinctly alarming  and indefensible (if you’ll pardon the pun). So I found my way to the Transkei, became a teacher, evaded the military and if I did not exactly teach, hopefully did not do too much damage to quite a few young South Africans, blacker than I was but not much younger. I taught English at St Johns College in Umtata, became a very young deputy principal there, and at 27 or so was principal of Ngangelizwe Senior Secondary School in the Umtata township (the day I was appointed to the post was the day Diana married Prince Charmless).

I married, had three beautiful children, moved after eight years to Johannesburg where I helped set up Khanya College; moved back to Cape Town; worked on the National Education Policy Investigation; was given a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship to the Pennsylvania State University in the US; was – improbably – a visiting professor for six weeks at New York University – and came back home to a newly liberated South Africa, to take up a research post at the Education Policy Unit at UWC and work on the Higher Education Commission and the National Committee on Further Education. Heady days! In 1997 I joined the National Business Initiative in Johannesburg as education director, setting up a five year initiative to try to build the capacity of the new further education and training colleges sector, and helping to conceptualise and launch the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition, within the Mbeki Presidency.

And then, last year, after a long and bitter divorce, I (very happily – perhaps, late in life, I have learned something) remarried; I left the NBI and set out my stall as an independent consultant – and a couple of weeks ago, after more than a year of writing, I finally completed, all 58,000 words, the first draft of a novel.

In December, my Canadian wife, Rob(erta) Pazdro and I will be moving to Toronto, and over the next few years we will be exploring the possibilities of a two-country life. My eldest daughter, Kathy, has a Masters in neuropsychology, is newly married, productively employed and very happy; my son Jonathan has been living and working in London for five years and has just started a Masters in development management at Manchester University; and my youngest, Eve, after completing an M.Sc (where she got the maths and science from, I don’t know) is going hiking in Nepal with her boyfriend next month. I, meanwhile, am learning to change my priorities: much as the chattering monkey on my shoulder will likely continue sounding the alarm about employment and income, the task of becoming a writer seems – so long postponed – finally more interesting.’

glen fisher

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rob glen