rover49 wrote:
SA was my first ever overseas place to visit in 1973, cannot remember much about it as I was 16 and only wanted to get pi$$ed or layed (or both !!). Going next year to Gansbai and south of Durban for a diving holiday, so am hoping to see something of the place and maybe at 56, remember more of it.
T'Other Half got back here in 1983 and wouldn't return until the end of apartheid. We went together then, in 1988 – my first real trip out of the country (I'm excluding four hours in Dieppe). We've been back together once since.
He still has family in Pietermaritzburg, so that was where we were based, although the first trip, we did quite a bit of travelling around.
It is very beautiful – but what I saw most of was also quite bonkers.
The Afrikaners are a right snotty lot in my experience – and stuck decades in the past. My faux pas on the first trip included buying a round when I considered it my shout and wearing football shirts. These are not things that respectable women do – in the case of the latter, that's the sport that the 'blecks' watch.
We had some really weird experiences – and I mean weird. On the second trip, the exchange rate meant that we could spend a week at a resort in the Drakensberg – which is an amazing area. It's a big, rather posh resort, and the majority of guests were Afrikaners, with a smattering of Europeans. The former will not talk to you – simple as.
The various Europeans chatted with each other, in a variety of pidgin tongues, and made that effort at informal pleasantries.
There were two bars. The cocktail one, which the Afrikaner guests used, we tried and then abandoned. Stilted, false, insanely quiet – the 'sports bar' was used by staff and almost entirely European guests and was a massively better place to be; sociable and with atmosphere.
After one trip, I read Tom Sharpe's first two novels –
Riotous Assembly and
Indecent Exposure. Sharpe had started writing shortly after being deported by the South African government of the day for sedition. Ex-Marines, he'd moved to SA in 1951 and was a teacher in Maritzburg. The books are a kind of vicious, angry revenge on the apartheid regime, which he came to be appalled by.
The extraordinary thing is that all the years in between don't stop you recognising Maritzburg itself – and I swear I actually met one of two of the characters, including one ex-school acquaintance of The Other Half's with whom I developed what was clearly an entirely mutual dislike.
I met him and some of his other old friends at a
braai. They included the occasional religious fundamentalist, and – although none of them had ever supported apartheid, oh no – some of their comments suggested that, if they hadn't supported it, they'd certainly imbibed the core ideological point of superiority.
Mind, that
braai was an experience in its own right. We were guests of honour, but I was expected to sit with the female relatives and children at one end, with no booze and in silence. I presume that they didn't talk because I was a stranger.
As I said, weird on so many levels.
Mind, I hate the f**king cockroaches!
