25 March 2008
A mirror to our own failings?
Yet another NRL/AFL/Super 14 season descends upon us blighted by numerous scandals involving young footballers running amok. Predictably this is followed by another outpouring of public outrage at the actions of these highly paid professionals crossing so-called moral boundaries.
It gives me reason to pause and consider the spotlight we place on these young footballers and the expectation we put upon them to be ‘role models”. Do we not all know of friends, relatives, children and nephews that indulge in similar behaviour without the full force of society’s outraged being pressed upon them? Yet we expect the best of men who have often been pulled directly out of high school, given a pay packet many times that of their peers and an abundance of time with little to occupy them?
We expect something from these men because they have been assigned the roles of “hero” in our society. These days there is a growing shortage of genuine heroes in many of the major institutions of our society. Who is there to inspire honour and emulate in some of our major institutions?
In politics the debate seems to focus upon the lies told by our leaders, the broken promises and the influence of major companies and interest groups. Where are the Wilberforces that doggedly sought after legislative change in the abolishment of the slave trade?
The institution of the church has been diluted by frequent scandal involving sexual and financial abuse and a growing lack of clarity in its message. Where are the great inspirational leaders such as Jesus Christ, whose teachings have shaped the world for the past 2000 years?
Where are the heroes like Luther that railed against the abuses of the church from within or the Wesleys that would inspire large crowds through the power of their oratory and the sacrificial example of their life? Are there any religious leaders of today that will inspire movies in the future?
Even our military heroes are besmirched by fighting wars of dubious distinction. So is it any wonder that we’ve grown to put on a pedestal those of excellence in the arena of athletic endeavour? The sporting field is one of the few places we can point out to our children to and show them the benefits of discipline, work ethic, team work and the rewards of excellence.
But here’s the catch. We want our heroes to be without flaw. Whilst most of us admire Shane Warne for his immense skill in leg spin bowling we generally loathe him as a person (even more so if he wasn’t “one of us”).
In League we applaud the on field exploits of Mason and Sonny Bill Williams but we hold no real affection for them because their flaws as human beings have been put in the spotlight for all to see.
Yet we probably all have acquaintances that frequent brothels, or go on drinking binges, or who give each other’s rumps the odd squeeze or, dare I say it, the odd finger poking. Quite a few of us would view their actions as unfortunate or damaging, but generally their actions are written off as “their choice” or part of the rites of passage of growing up as a male.
However, should a group of football players of the same age and demographic indulge in exactly the same form of behaviour they’re exposed to torrents of public hysteria, shock horror and outrage!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to excuse the behaviour. However, spend time in any university during orientation week and you’ll hear the messages of hedonism, promiscuity and indulgence. Every weekend you’ll rub shoulders with patrons in nite clubs drunk or high and will quite likely defend their right to a “good night out”
So why exactly are we shocked when these messages manifest themselves in our young men in these sporting competitions?
I contend that is we who have placed these men on a pedestal because of our need for heroes to emulate. Their sole qualification is the ability to play a high octane and brutal contact sport. Often they are placed there without adequate preparation and support.
The virulence of our reaction betrays the fact that their inevitable fall is reviled only because it holds up a mirror and reflects back to us much of our own society that is decaying and reprehensible.
18 March 2008
SMH - Where is thine mercy?
I am outraged by the bucket job the Sydney Morning Herald has done on Mercy Ministries. By “bucket job” I mean quite literally the bucket of toxic, raw sewage that this so-called “distinguished broadsheet” has dumped on a nationwide ministry to vulnerable women.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/they-prayed-to-cast-satan-from-my-body/2008/03/16/1205602195122.html
While I don't agree with all of their methods, I certainly don't think they deserve to be treated in the way they were yesterday and today - to the point where several major corporate sponsors have said they are considering withdrawing their monetary support for the ministry.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/corporates-move-quickly-to-cut-ties/2008/03/17/1205602293122.html
(*disclaimer disclaimer) My sister is heavily involved in Mercy Ministries. She had to do 2 years of intensive training to be of any use to them. I think many of you will have read about her trip to Zimbabwe that is partly inspired by the kind of program and ministry Mercy has with the sexually abused, pregnant teens etc. Read her updates and judge for yourself.
http://interact.cornerstone.edu.au/forum_viewtopic.php?30.4908
What makes me angry is that the SMH finds two disaffected people who have not been in the program for 3 years - and build their case entirely around their allegations.
No attempt seems to have been made to find the many hundreds of women that have found the program to be life-transforming.
No attempt is made to cynically question the claims made by the two women (who are quite likely to have mental issues of their own if they were in the program in the first place).
At the very least you would describe this as "sloppy" journalism.
But it's not that, because surely no journalist could possibly be so incompetent.
No, this is a callous and calculated attack.
The fact that there are currently up to a hundred young girls in care who may not know where next week's meal and care will come from because of the withdrawal of corporate support must surely heap like burning coals on the heads of all involved in this sorry little episode.
14 February 2008
The Marble Patch
The grounds of school provided many options of play for our lunch breaks. Now that we’d left the Kindergarten stream the Kindergarten playgrounds were closed to us, but this still left the majority of the school grounds to recklessly explore.
Several ovals were the scene for many pick-up games of soccer and rugby while we also spent time in the cricket nets and at a tennis hitting wall - a half tennis court with a large brick wall at one end with a horizontal paint line drawn across it at net height.
However, this was not so much a location for tennis as it was for vicious games of branding, tennis balls hurled as far and fast as we could propel them to thud painfully into young flesh, leaving bruises and lasting vendettas.
On the way to the tennis shed we’d pass by a large patch of dirt underneath the school flagpole and next to the main car park which was always a milling throng of bodies - the marble patch.
In our early years my recollection was that this area was treated with somewhat casual indifference until one of the regular trips “down south”, to South Africa, saw me emerging from one of their monstrous generic Hypermarkets clutching a large bag of 100 marbles, suitably equipped to enter this arena of dreams.
Soon casual indifference changed to burning obsession - a first introduction to the rough and tumble of a market economy that was to become a way of life.
When we first started frequenting the marble patch (in my recollection it must have been during Grade 4) our country was still under sanctions and therefore marbles were indeed rare commodities. They were not available for sale in Zimbabwe Rhodesia so fresh supplies were hard to come by. This lent a special edge to our endeavour as every marble lost was one closer to oblivion until the next trip to South Africa’s land of plenty.
We walked into a burgeoning marketplace with its own language, rules and codes of honour. Ours was not the marble within a ring approach that seemed to be the norm in the English literature we read, and in most of the countries where I’ve traveled (not that I have spent much time researching the marble habits of the world).
Somewhat in keeping with the national spirit, our approach to marbles was far more direct.
Each standard marble was considered one “unit” and each unit meant a step out from the target. Thus if you set up one marble, you would take one step out and drag a line in the dirt with your foot to denote the shooting line.
If you set up three marbles , three steps were taken, five steps for five marbles and so on. There was an intimate knowledge on how a combination of marbles would need to be set up. I presume that this had been worked out over many years in a method to provide fairness to those setting up their marbles and those shooting for the prize.
For instance a “fiver” stack of marbles had three across the back row, two and then one so the shooter was faced with an inverse pyramid. It meant there was something to aim at and depth of throw (accuracy being harder as distance increased) would be rewarded with a larger target.
Five marbles in a horizontal line would be easy pickings for the shooters while a vertical line would be snubbed by shooters. Similarly, there was a careful balance in attracting people to your particular pile. It was not good policy to take giant steps out from the target as people would be daunted at the distance and go elsewhere. Too close and it became too easy.
There was a careful balance that needed to be struck between attracting customers and making a “profit”.
Equally as important in the whole process was the marketing of one’s goods. At Henry Low the marble patch was a large patch of square dirt, bordered on two sides by waist high brick walls. People offering marbles for shooting would set up shop all along these walls and step out into the square.
By the time the marble patch was rocking and rolling there’d be up to fifty people offering a target for shots so calling out one’s goods became an essential part of the process. From an early age I’d been fingered as having the “voice of a preacher” and “one that would raise the dead” so this served me well in the maelstrom of the marble patch market place.
If a person had put up four marbles (a base of three topped by one) they would shout out “Roll up a fourer” at the top of their voice to attract the shooters circling around in the dust haze like a pack of bloodthirsty sharks.
This would raise a massive din that would be loudly punctuated by frenzied yells of “PACE!” the calling signal of a flushed shooter whose marble had collided with its target.
Sometimes a situation would arise (particularly with the larger groupings of marbles) where there were multiple shooters and the cries of “PACE!” would come from 3 or 4 excited children who would all careen into the disrupted bundle of marbles, pushing and clawing at each other and scrabbling through the dirt to grab as many of the hoard that they could. Sometimes fists would fly.
The marble patch was a very competitive fray and there were a group of boys that would circle the arena like a patch of piranhas, seeking the edge on each other, competing for the biggest bag and the rarest marbles to establish the current king of the block. However, when it came to the marble Queen I have to give special mention to Kerry Macdonald who had an eye as sure as the boys and would scrap and fight for top dog status with us.
One day she managed to “pace” fair and square one of the rarest marbles in the school, much to the mortification of my good mate Brendon Hitchcock who had put it up at a high number of steps, confident no one would bag it while collecting all the failed marbles.
Such was the blow to his pride I watched as he waited until Kerry’s bag was unattended and the marble expropriated. Never one to be backward in coming forward I blew the whistle and a melee ensued and witnesses called to determine the marbles rightful owner. Kerry prevailed - perhaps she still has the marble?
Marbles in this marketplace style catered to a wide range of characters. There were the defensive specialists - children that would only set up marbles for shooters in the hopes of gathering several more marbles than were in their offering before it was knocked over.
Then there were the aggressive offensive specialists. The children that always took to the shooting line and backed their eye and ability to knock over the castle with their first or second shot and therefore make a profit.
There were two major ways to shoot a marble. The standard way employed by most was to bend at the waist and to swing the right arm from between the legs, with the position of the arm and its straightness in delivery relied on to project the marble towards its target.
However, there was also the overhand style, called “dobbing“, where the marble would be held up to ones eye for aim and hurled towards the target with a downward motion. This method required a clear eye and was more often employed on smaller targets. Generally there was a “no dobbing” cry employed on targets of three marbles or less.
I fell into the group that mixed it up depending on mood and current marble numbers in their bag. Each of us must have harassed our mothers to make us our prized marble bags - material bags with a large mouth opening at the top which was closed with a drawstring.
Depending on one’s fortunes, the marble bag could be bulging or hanging limply with a few marbles jangling around in the bottom. It was a pretty obvious way to assess each other’s progress.
If I was getting low on marbles I would switch into defensive mode, setting up piles in an attempt to stock up my numbers.
I have a distinct memory of one day being down to my last marble. In desperation I set up a “oner” a very rare occurrence because children could hang over the line and virtually shoot at it from over the top.
I can only presume that the novelty value of this “oner” attracted the ensuing crowd and some very rash shooting that saw around ten marbles ping against the back wall before my prize was claimed. Some judicious shooting followed this windfall and my bag was restored to some decent size. One’s afternoon would generally depend very much on the day’s fortune in the marble patch.
The standard marble was the shooters staple - we always shot with these marbles. However, their was an entire language and value code that went with the various targets we could shoot at. A marble deemed as rarer was worth additional steps. This was enticing for the people setting up as people were shooting at a smaller target from further back, but there was also far more on the line. Some of these “special” marbles were special indeed.
There were the supersized marbles called “blundies”. Generally a blundy was taken out to three steps, though the larger size of the marble was quite an enticing shot.
In the size of the standard marbles and the blundies were what were called “goens” (pronounced with a short “ooh“ sound, similar to could or should). These were purely metallic and were ball bearings.
Our proximity to the railway workshops meant that many of the children had fathers that worked there and these “goens” were sourced from the railway workshops, presumably yet another expression of the Rhodesian urge for sanction busting.
A standard goen had the same nominal value of the marble and a blundie goen was nominally 
worth three steps. However, they were a fairly unattractive commodity and it was rare that people would shoot for them at those rates. Similarly it was frowned upon to use a goen for shooting. No one really wanted too many (if any) of them and occasionally their additional weight would chip the glass marbles.
The next marble up the tree was the “smokie”, a white marble that had its patterns on the outside. A single smokie was deemed to be the same value as three standard marbles and thus each smokie in a pile attracted three steps. Though rare, there were also blundie smokies, quite a mouthful to call out and their “value” being indeterminate. Technically they were 3x3 for 9 steps but noone was brave enough to have a crack at a single blundie sized marble from so far away, so the rare occasion they were put up for hitting the steps would range somewhere
between six to nine.
Though rated as a similar value to the smokie in terms of steps I used to place a far higher personal value on the clearie. This was a clear glass marble without blemish and I think I appreciated its pure aesthetic lines. It was a rare day that I’d shoot for a smokie from three steps but a clearie was irresistible bait.
Then there were the rare coloured clearies, pure glass marble with a coloured tinge to them. Their value was indeterminate and very much dictated by their beauty and if people were game to shoot for them. A coloured clearie would normally start at five steps but this could blow out if it was particularly rare or beautiful. However, it was a brave person that would put these up for action - normally they were stowed in the bottom of our bags and bought out for class admiration when we were lining up to return to class.
When it was a “slow” day at marbles there were other shenanigans for us to get up to. One day Brendon asked me to stand back to back with him to see which of us was taller. As soon as we did so he reached behind him and whipped down my school shorts to around my ankles, much to my mortification.
Once my dignity was restored I decided this was an excellent trick and cajoled Robert Goldie into the same position with me to determine the taller. But as I grabbed his shorts I also managed to take hold of his underpants (under rods as we called them) and bought down the whole castle.
Robert was exceedingly angry at this trick, though thankfully he’d been facing the school oval at the time (rather than the mob in the marble patch) so his modesty was largely retained.
The marble craze continued when I transferred schools to Whitestone Primary. Initially we were assigned a rectangular patch of dirt close to the bike sheds that was reminiscent of our Henry Low arena. However, several acts of vandalism on the bikes wore patience thin and the din of people yelling out their wares soon became too much for the boarding mistresses who were nearby serving morning tea to the Boarders.
My foghorn voice was particularly unpopular and there was one old dragon who was always beseeching me to move to the other side of the dirt square, as far as possible from her. I repaid her in gold coin in Grade Seven when I was handed the part of a dragon in the school play and could careen through the middle of the audience yelling and growling at the top of my voice. 
Poor old lady, she was lucky to still be alive after this effort. ---->
Eventually it was decided that our marble play must be moved and we were shifted to a little grove of trees and granite blocks close to the school Dining Room. This area lacked the clean lines of the rectangular square but it introduced an extra dimension of difficulty and skill because there were a number of large rocks in play from which we could bounce marbles off and onto the targets.
It also meant we were directly outside of the windows of the feared Grade Three teacher Mrs McIntosh (wife of a future Springbok coach). She would keep a beady eye on us and if trouble was brewing would step outside her classroom brandishing her feared “tackie”, a flexible and cheap Bata running shoe that stung like a hornet, beady eyes fixed with intent on arguing children.
Despite the ever-present threat of Mrs McIntosh passions would still run high. There was another time one of my classmates (Fuji Flop) became particularly animated in a dispute and told his antagonist to “piss off” just as our sadist Headmaster, Mr Harris, hove into view. That little indiscretion cost him three cuts (and Harris would quite literally make us bleed).
Passion, skill and street cunning. It took it all to survive the playground marble patch.
A very special thanks to my eldest son, 8 year old Joseph, who willingly allowed me to raid his own precious marble bag for the photos above.
Equally as important in the whole process was the marketing of one’s goods. At Henry Low the marble patch was a large patch of square dirt, bordered on two sides by waist high brick walls. People offering marbles for shooting would set up shop all along these walls and step out into the square.
By the time the marble patch was rocking and rolling there’d be up to fifty people offering a target for shots so calling out one’s goods became an essential part of the process. From an early age I’d been fingered as having the “voice of a preacher” and “one that would raise the dead” so this served me well in the maelstrom of the marble patch market place.
If a person had put up four marbles (a base of three topped by one) they would shout out “Roll up a fourer” at the top of their voice to attract the shooters circling around in the dust haze like a pack of bloodthirsty sharks.
This would raise a massive din that would be loudly punctuated by frenzied yells of “PACE!” the calling signal of a flushed shooter whose marble had collided with its target.
Sometimes a situation would arise (particularly with the larger groupings of marbles) where there were multiple shooters and the cries of “PACE!” would come from 3 or 4 excited children who would all careen into the disrupted bundle of marbles, pushing and clawing at each other and scrabbling through the dirt to grab as many of the hoard that they could. Sometimes fists would fly.
The marble patch was a very competitive fray and there were a group of boys that would circle the arena like a patch of piranhas, seeking the edge on each other, competing for the biggest bag and the rarest marbles to establish the current king of the block. However, when it came to the marble Queen I have to give special mention to Kerry Macdonald who had an eye as sure as the boys and would scrap and fight for top dog status with us.
One day she managed to “pace” fair and square one of the rarest marbles in the school, much to the mortification of my good mate Brendon Hitchcock who had put it up at a high number of steps, confident no one would bag it while collecting all the failed marbles.
Such was the blow to his pride I watched as he waited until Kerry’s bag was unattended and the marble expropriated. Never one to be backward in coming forward I blew the whistle and a melee ensued and witnesses called to determine the marbles rightful owner. Kerry prevailed - perhaps she still has the marble?
Marbles in this marketplace style catered to a wide range of characters. There were the defensive specialists - children that would only set up marbles for shooters in the hopes of gathering several more marbles than were in their offering before it was knocked over.
Then there were the aggressive offensive specialists. The children that always took to the shooting line and backed their eye and ability to knock over the castle with their first or second shot and therefore make a profit.
There were two major ways to shoot a marble. The standard way employed by most was to bend at the waist and to swing the right arm from between the legs, with the position of the arm and its straightness in delivery relied on to project the marble towards its target.
However, there was also the overhand style, called “dobbing“, where the marble would be held up to ones eye for aim and hurled towards the target with a downward motion. This method required a clear eye and was more often employed on smaller targets. Generally there was a “no dobbing” cry employed on targets of three marbles or less.
I fell into the group that mixed it up depending on mood and current marble numbers in their bag. Each of us must have harassed our mothers to make us our prized marble bags - material bags with a large mouth opening at the top which was closed with a drawstring.
Depending on one’s fortunes, the marble bag could be bulging or hanging limply with a few marbles jangling around in the bottom. It was a pretty obvious way to assess each other’s progress.
If I was getting low on marbles I would switch into defensive mode, setting up piles in an attempt to stock up my numbers.
I have a distinct memory of one day being down to my last marble. In desperation I set up a “oner” a very rare occurrence because children could hang over the line and virtually shoot at it from over the top.
I can only presume that the novelty value of this “oner” attracted the ensuing crowd and some very rash shooting that saw around ten marbles ping against the back wall before my prize was claimed. Some judicious shooting followed this windfall and my bag was restored to some decent size. One’s afternoon would generally depend very much on the day’s fortune in the marble patch.
The standard marble was the shooters staple - we always shot with these marbles. However, their was an entire language and value code that went with the various targets we could shoot at. A marble deemed as rarer was worth additional steps. This was enticing for the people setting up as people were shooting at a smaller target from further back, but there was also far more on the line. Some of these “special” marbles were special indeed.
There were the supersized marbles called “blundies”. Generally a blundy was taken out to three steps, though the larger size of the marble was quite an enticing shot.
In the size of the standard marbles and the blundies were what were called “goens” (pronounced with a short “ooh“ sound, similar to could or should). These were purely metallic and were ball bearings.
Our proximity to the railway workshops meant that many of the children had fathers that worked there and these “goens” were sourced from the railway workshops, presumably yet another expression of the Rhodesian urge for sanction busting.
A standard goen had the same nominal value of the marble and a blundie goen was nominally 
worth three steps. However, they were a fairly unattractive commodity and it was rare that people would shoot for them at those rates. Similarly it was frowned upon to use a goen for shooting. No one really wanted too many (if any) of them and occasionally their additional weight would chip the glass marbles.
The next marble up the tree was the “smokie”, a white marble that had its patterns on the outside. A single smokie was deemed to be the same value as three standard marbles and thus each smokie in a pile attracted three steps. Though rare, there were also blundie smokies, quite a mouthful to call out and their “value” being indeterminate. Technically they were 3x3 for 9 steps but noone was brave enough to have a crack at a single blundie sized marble from so far away, so the rare occasion they were put up for hitting the steps would range somewhere
between six to nine.
Though rated as a similar value to the smokie in terms of steps I used to place a far higher personal value on the clearie. This was a clear glass marble without blemish and I think I appreciated its pure aesthetic lines. It was a rare day that I’d shoot for a smokie from three steps but a clearie was irresistible bait.
Then there were the rare coloured clearies, pure glass marble with a coloured tinge to them. Their value was indeterminate and very much dictated by their beauty and if people were game to shoot for them. A coloured clearie would normally start at five steps but this could blow out if it was particularly rare or beautiful. However, it was a brave person that would put these up for action - normally they were stowed in the bottom of our bags and bought out for class admiration when we were lining up to return to class.
When it was a “slow” day at marbles there were other shenanigans for us to get up to. One day Brendon asked me to stand back to back with him to see which of us was taller. As soon as we did so he reached behind him and whipped down my school shorts to around my ankles, much to my mortification.
Once my dignity was restored I decided this was an excellent trick and cajoled Robert Goldie into the same position with me to determine the taller. But as I grabbed his shorts I also managed to take hold of his underpants (under rods as we called them) and bought down the whole castle.
Robert was exceedingly angry at this trick, though thankfully he’d been facing the school oval at the time (rather than the mob in the marble patch) so his modesty was largely retained.
The marble craze continued when I transferred schools to Whitestone Primary. Initially we were assigned a rectangular patch of dirt close to the bike sheds that was reminiscent of our Henry Low arena. However, several acts of vandalism on the bikes wore patience thin and the din of people yelling out their wares soon became too much for the boarding mistresses who were nearby serving morning tea to the Boarders.
My foghorn voice was particularly unpopular and there was one old dragon who was always beseeching me to move to the other side of the dirt square, as far as possible from her. I repaid her in gold coin in Grade Seven when I was handed the part of a dragon in the school play and could careen through the middle of the audience yelling and growling at the top of my voice. 
Poor old lady, she was lucky to still be alive after this effort. ---->
Eventually it was decided that our marble play must be moved and we were shifted to a little grove of trees and granite blocks close to the school Dining Room. This area lacked the clean lines of the rectangular square but it introduced an extra dimension of difficulty and skill because there were a number of large rocks in play from which we could bounce marbles off and onto the targets.
It also meant we were directly outside of the windows of the feared Grade Three teacher Mrs McIntosh (wife of a future Springbok coach). She would keep a beady eye on us and if trouble was brewing would step outside her classroom brandishing her feared “tackie”, a flexible and cheap Bata running shoe that stung like a hornet, beady eyes fixed with intent on arguing children.
Despite the ever-present threat of Mrs McIntosh passions would still run high. There was another time one of my classmates (Fuji Flop) became particularly animated in a dispute and told his antagonist to “piss off” just as our sadist Headmaster, Mr Harris, hove into view. That little indiscretion cost him three cuts (and Harris would quite literally make us bleed).
Passion, skill and street cunning. It took it all to survive the playground marble patch.
A very special thanks to my eldest son, 8 year old Joseph, who willingly allowed me to raid his own precious marble bag for the photos above.
The world's stolen generation
This is not a critique of the apology to the Stolen Generation. It was long overdue and it is to John Howard's ongoing shame that he was too small-minded to do it years ago.
But one of my Australian friends expressed some angst at, and I quote:
"when he sought to validate aboriginal culture by comparing their '1000 generations' of habitation in Australia with other Aussies as those who arrived 'only yesterday'. An unnecessary and distorting over-simplification. My ancestors included several 'stolen generations' who were exiled from England to Australia with little prospect of return for 'crimes' like stealing a loaf of bread or a pair of boots to survive the winter. Five or six generations later, if this land is not my home, where is?"
His distaste at being considered "yesterday's arrival" hit a nerve for me as being a second generation born and bred African I feel very much that African soil is my homeland but that we (Zimbabweans/Rhodesians) were dispossessed by the British and Australian (aka Commonwealth) policies of the 1960s and 1970s that handed power to the megalomaniac Mugabe in a rigged election in 1980. Perhaps we were too polite. Perhaps the history of southern Africa would have looked very different if the colonial invaders had followed the Australian lead and committed genocide on the indigenous population to subjugate them.
Instead we did our business by contract that was eventually over ruled by the political expediency of the po-faced Windsors and their cohorts in London, Canberra and elsewhere. It is particularly galling that the very thing we fought against has now happened, as we said it would. Many good friends of mine (both black and white) shed blood and were killed in the fight against the Eastern-bloc sponsored insurgents.
Now people who were raised as brothers to me are dead because of Zimbabwe’s AIDS pandemic.
And while there is some little bit of hand-wringing about the Mugabe situation there is no real political will to actually go and redress the wrongs.
Where are all the pompous, self-righteous, but very ignorant bleeding hearts who persisted on the downfall of Rhodesia in 1980 to apologise to the many millions of refugees from that once very prosperous country who have had to "bomb-shell" all over the world but still love and hanker after a home-land that is no more?So as one of the very many educated Diaspora of Rhodesians/Zimbabweans I have a high level of empathy for what it must have meant to the aborigines to receive official recognition of the wrongs and injustices of the past (and the present).
We Zimbabweans are similarly dispossessed, but worse our land has been handed to rack and ruin and seemingly no one but us cares.
I won’t be expecting a similar apology to that received by the stolen generation in my lifetime and it makes me sad and angry at the same time.
We, the Zimbabwean Diaspora, are the world's stolen generation, and the Western world will not do anything about it because they can't afford to lose us.
17 January 2008
1980
Our transition to Standard Two meant a short trip up the corridor to our new classroom at the other end of the northern block of Henry Low. I get the impression that the majority of my classmates were relieved to be free of the dragon-like clutches of Mrs Mcaninch, particularly as my memory of our Standard Two teacher is that she was of a far more benign nature!
Mrs Hounsell was a tall, willowy brunette, significantly younger than our teachers to that point and not given to raising her voice, though this is not to say that our academic rigour fell away at all during the year.
One of the landmarks of the year was that it signalled our transition from writing in pencil to writing in biro pen. However, this milestone could not be reached without a good demonstration of our commitment to neatness. Thus one could only transition to ink pen when consistent excellence was displayed.
Mrs Hounsell was the keeper of five "I am a tester" ink license badges which were given out to the first five students that achieved the standards required. These badges were pinned to the uniform of the five and they were then given input into the transition to ink of the rest of their peers. At the end of the year these badges were returned but somewhere in the system there must have been a sixth badge.
I know this because I was the recipient of the sixth badge, a soiled version of the others, and was allowed to keep it at year's end.
My recollection was that the first five badges were divvied out to five of the girls in the class and no doubt my budding activist instincts sensed an injustice and a comment had been made.
I do remember working very hard to get that license (goals were always a great motivator of mine) and it was presented to me late on a Friday afternoon. The weekend took an age to tick by as I couldn't wait to get to school on the Monday morning to proudly display the spoils of all that painstaking handwriting.
Another campaign of mine that year was a silkworm drive. Our yard had two gigantic mulberry trees that would be laden with fruit each spring. Many afternoons were spent lazing along a large horizontal branch, plucking jet black mulberries from above and feeding away till it was too dark to identify the ripe and unripe fruit. It would also result in a good scrubbing that evening, black stains proliferating all over my skin, particularly on the hands and mouth.
The leaves of the tree were also a constant supply for a burgeoning silkworm farm that we kept in our laundry. When the word went out that the school needed some fund-raising done I took it upon myself to bring the silkworms into school and to set up a trade in silkworms, cocoons, moths and even mulberry leaves.
Soon it must have seemed as though every Henry Low household was inundated with shoeboxes of worms munching their way through mulberry leaves and anxious children watching bright cocoons for signs of life.
By the end of my first foray into commerce $23 had been raised and I was the proud recipient of a "silkworm king" certificate from the school assembly.
School assembly was held each week and we'd file into the hall in our class groups and sit on the floor facing the elevated stage. The walls of the hall were adorned with large boards that listed prefects, head boys and girls and recipients of colours.
The Kindergarten kids were always at the front of the hall and were followed by each subsequent year with the Standard Fives at the back. We would always hope for assembly to be a quick affair as we were forced to sit cross-legged on the hardwood floors, our ankles digging into the tiles and legs becoming increasingly numb from lack of circulation.
Sometimes we'd stay on in the hall after assembly for "singing". These singing lessons always featured a flamboyant Mrs Pierce banging away on a piano. The most requested song, and the one that always received the most rousing rendition, was "we all live in a yellow submarine". I didn't like singing time.
1980 marked the twenty-fifth year of Henry Low's existence and this milestone was marked with a major Fete one Saturday afternoon. The quadrangle between the school buildings was a maze of various displays and games and my memory of the day was of a long afternoon of various delights, the highlights being:
However, the defining memory of the year occurred one Friday afternoon when Mrs Hounsell and a student teacher of the time announced to us that we would be receiving "very exciting news" on the Monday morning. Another long weekend followed until we filed into class that morning to be told that our day's task would be making passports for a "world trip" that we would be taking as a class.
This was not a real trip, but would be one where as a class we would "travel" to various locations around the world and learn about the different cultures we were to encounter. It seemed that for the majority of the year our learning was all interwoven around this theme of being somewhere in the world.
Some of the highlights of our journey included craning our necks to look at the skyscrapers in New York and paying a stratospheric $100 to stay the night in the "five star New York Hilton" hotel. Truly, paying $100 for a night's accommodation was the ultimate extravagance, especially as we all had colour TVs in our room.
Our travels also took us through Australia and our student teacher had recently been to Australia and spoke of a strange brand of rugby played called Australian Rules. She described it as rough with lots of kicking and catching. These days I know it as “aerial ping-pong”, a scrambling monstrosity that has somehow become a religion in four of Australia’s mainland states. Must be a convict thing.
It was at about this time that we all received a pen pal from Australia and we traded several letters over the course of the year. The letters would come to us in a big package and we'd all compare notes about what these strange children from Australia had said.
We found it highly amusing that they immediately assumed we lived in mud huts and asked if we had basic amenities like power and stoves. I know at least some of our classmates were guilty of perpetuating the myths by telling tall tales of pet lions and wrestling with snakes.
Actually, I did indeed have a pet lion! As we grew up we had very little daytime television (which meant we amused ourselves with constructive and imaginative outdoor games when we weren't participating in the school sport program) but for a while the evening's transmissions started with a locally produced children's show called "Thumbelina". At one point the show held a competition to name a young lioness that had just been born into the pride in Salisbury's Lion and Cheetah Park.
Mum came up with the brilliant idea of naming the lioness Shumbalina and it turned out that the cub's father was named Shumba, a trained lion who starred in the "Born Free" film. So the competition and the lion was mine - not that we were able to keep her, as much as I wanted to. She lived happily at the Lion and Cheetah Park but we visited and met her and her family. She was a very energetic lioness!
Our trip around the world resulted in many letters being written to friends and family from various locations around the globe and concluded with a giant Open Day where we all built displays covering various aspects of the American culture we'd encountered and invited our parents to visit the classroom to view the fruits of our endeavour.
I teamed up with a boy called Brian Wilson to make a display on the American Indians. We constructed a teepee and somehow we sourced a giant American headdress replete with eagle feathers. We padded out our display with a host of local carvings and drawings doctored to make them look Indian.
Politically 1980 was a very significant year for our country. A ceasefire was called on the civil war and elections were held on a "one man, one vote" basis. Our city started to crawl with United Nations Peace Keepers with their vehicles painted with white crosses and the kill count on the radio started to document the number of peacekeepers slain in misadventures such as helicopters crashing into powerlines or naïve tourists being feasted on by wild animals. It seemed more people were dying than ever!
Even as a nine-year old it was hard to miss the sense of foreboding that overcame society as the elections drew closer. It was widely hoped that the elections would endorse the ruling structure of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's African National Congress (ANC) but there were dark mutterings about vote rigging to get one of the Zimbabwe African National Unity (ZANU PF) or Zimbabwe African Peoples' Unity (ZAPU PF) over the line.
The majority of our fathers were on call up but rather than seeing action they were sitting bored in camps monitored by the Peacekeepers, all the while knowing that many of their former enemies from the ZANLA and ZIPRA armies were free to roam about the rural countryside intimidating the local population into voting against the ANC.
After the election they spoke of the plot that had been hatched to take up arms and slaughter the UN Peace Keepers in the event of a ZANU PF victory. It seemed there had been a strong intention to maintain the fight by upping the ante and slaughtering the UN Peace Keepers drawn from Britain, Australia and various other Commonwealth countries.
Postscript: My Dad now says they had some of the insurgents in “keeps” and that this is what "our" guys were there for. The whole week before the announcement of the election result our guys had been training at Brigade strength with the intention of going in and taking out the "keeps" and the U.N. monitoring force, which in his case he says were a bunch of Poms.
Our consciousness suddenly became aware of the once exiled leaders of these parties, Robert Mugabe (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo (ZAPU). A few years previously Nkomo had received some infamy after the Rhodesian forces had attacked his house in the Zambian capital Lusaka. He'd escaped certain death by climbing out of his small toilet window, a visual picture that had attracted much mirth as Mr Nkomo had a rather large frame.
Our sense of foreboding at the impending elections were heightened by our knowledge of what the fighting men of ZANLA and ZIPRA were capable of. Going around was a large hardback book that had graphic pictures of various massacres and atrocities committed by the invading armies. It began with the slaughter of nuns in the north of the country and then graphically catalogued ten years of horrific bloodshed and violence.
Page after page would be turned by young fingers to reveal piles of nuns casually thrown in piles with flies buzzing around the pooled blood, torched buildings, massacred villages and most horrifically victims that had had their lips and ears sliced off with razorblades after being fingered as informers. They were called "sell outs" This was not a pretty war.
The elections occurred over two days and long lines of people queued to put their cross next to the party of their choice, represented by symbols to help the illiterate choose correctly. ANC were a flame in a fist, ZANU, representing the majority Shona tribe, were a rooster (the jongwe) and ZAPU, representing the minority but previously dominant Matabele tribe, were an elephant (ndlovu).
Prior to voting the voter was required to receive a mark on their hand of ink that would indicate they had voted. This caused a problem when the traditional African greeting of a vigorous African handshake saw the ink transferred to those waiting to vote and chaos ensued.
With known rural intimidation and the chaos that arose from the ink debacle, the election closed in high farce and the country awaited the verdict. I still remember the widespread sense of shock when it was announced that Robert Mugabe's ZANU had won in a landslide, a strong second was ZAPU while Muzorewa's ANC garnered a pathetic three seats in the newly convened Parliament.
Ian Smith's Patriotic Front party swept the seats specifically set aside for the white population in the Lancaster House agreement, but Zimbabwe had a new government and internationally endorsed independence.
I vividly remember the day of the announcement. A pall rested over the school, and even us nine year olds were apprehensive about what all this meant. Would the new government be vindictive? Would we have to flee, or would we be slaughtered before we could get to Beit Bridge? What did the future hold?
That day we'd been asked to bring something to school that was "disgusting" (I don't think it was meant as a comment on the political situation or our state of mind). I'm not sure what the purpose of the exercise was, but I do remember our class trooping over to the Hall with our varying disgusting items and a group of us boys were discussing the momentous news of the day - the downfall of life as we know it.
And in the middle of that discussion Russell Smart procured his jam jar that had a festering blob of blackening meat inside, whipped of the lid and thrust the putrid contents under our noses. "This piece of meat is Robert Mugabe" he said as we all recoiled. For some reason this act of defiance is what will always stick in my mind as the defining comment on the day and the prevailing mood.
In reality, for us at least, life didn't change a great deal in the short term. I have read with interest the books written by my peers who were growing up in Harare and Mutare and their sense of immediate change as "black" children immediately flooded into the schools that had previously denied them entrance.
I don't recall this happening to us, my recollection being that our class didn't change in 1980 and the first few African children started to trickle in timidly the following year.
One thing that did change with international recognition of the new Zimbabwe's status was that we were readmitted into the sporting fold and a Zimbabwe team was hastily scratched together for the impending Moscow Olympics. The Moscow Olympics were to be widely boycotted by the majority of Western powers and became known as the "Red" games, dominated by the Russians, Baltic States and Chinese.
There was a certain irony in all of this as the Western nations expressed their outrage at the communist invasion of Afghanistan. The invading ZANLA and ZIPRA armies had been funded by China and Russia respectively and red money was suddenly pouring into Zimbabwe as they came looking for their payback with interest. There were a lot of enticing things to exploit in this newly open country.
Our headmaster's daughter, Brenda Phillips, was a member of the Zimbabwe hockey team and they marched through the games weakened without the traditional heavyweights of world hockey. Zimbabwe's first medal in Olympic competition was guaranteed when they won their final round robin game against Austria.
This final game must have been played early afternoon Moscow time as we were all in school when it was played out. I presume Mr Phillips (headmaster) had either a broadcast of the game on his wireless or was in receipt of updates by telex as we all sat expectantly for news in our classrooms and received periodic updates from runners coming down to us from the Head's office.
We erupted in joy when the final whistle blew and Zimbabwe had won its first gold medal in Olympic competition. A few weeks later Brenda came to our school with her precious gold medal and visited each classroom while we crowded around her and took our opportunity to touch the precious metal.
A closing piece of trivia is that the previously mentioned "Silkworm Certificate" was adorned with beautiful calligraphy inscribed by Brenda Phillips'. Now she was a gold medallist in the "new Zimbabwe".
We were about to hit double figures.
One of the landmarks of the year was that it signalled our transition from writing in pencil to writing in biro pen. However, this milestone could not be reached without a good demonstration of our commitment to neatness. Thus one could only transition to ink pen when consistent excellence was displayed.
Mrs Hounsell was the keeper of five "I am a tester" ink license badges which were given out to the first five students that achieved the standards required. These badges were pinned to the uniform of the five and they were then given input into the transition to ink of the rest of their peers. At the end of the year these badges were returned but somewhere in the system there must have been a sixth badge.
I know this because I was the recipient of the sixth badge, a soiled version of the others, and was allowed to keep it at year's end.
My recollection was that the first five badges were divvied out to five of the girls in the class and no doubt my budding activist instincts sensed an injustice and a comment had been made.
I do remember working very hard to get that license (goals were always a great motivator of mine) and it was presented to me late on a Friday afternoon. The weekend took an age to tick by as I couldn't wait to get to school on the Monday morning to proudly display the spoils of all that painstaking handwriting.
Another campaign of mine that year was a silkworm drive. Our yard had two gigantic mulberry trees that would be laden with fruit each spring. Many afternoons were spent lazing along a large horizontal branch, plucking jet black mulberries from above and feeding away till it was too dark to identify the ripe and unripe fruit. It would also result in a good scrubbing that evening, black stains proliferating all over my skin, particularly on the hands and mouth.
The leaves of the tree were also a constant supply for a burgeoning silkworm farm that we kept in our laundry. When the word went out that the school needed some fund-raising done I took it upon myself to bring the silkworms into school and to set up a trade in silkworms, cocoons, moths and even mulberry leaves.
Soon it must have seemed as though every Henry Low household was inundated with shoeboxes of worms munching their way through mulberry leaves and anxious children watching bright cocoons for signs of life.
By the end of my first foray into commerce $23 had been raised and I was the proud recipient of a "silkworm king" certificate from the school assembly.
School assembly was held each week and we'd file into the hall in our class groups and sit on the floor facing the elevated stage. The walls of the hall were adorned with large boards that listed prefects, head boys and girls and recipients of colours.
The Kindergarten kids were always at the front of the hall and were followed by each subsequent year with the Standard Fives at the back. We would always hope for assembly to be a quick affair as we were forced to sit cross-legged on the hardwood floors, our ankles digging into the tiles and legs becoming increasingly numb from lack of circulation.
Sometimes we'd stay on in the hall after assembly for "singing". These singing lessons always featured a flamboyant Mrs Pierce banging away on a piano. The most requested song, and the one that always received the most rousing rendition, was "we all live in a yellow submarine". I didn't like singing time.
1980 marked the twenty-fifth year of Henry Low's existence and this milestone was marked with a major Fete one Saturday afternoon. The quadrangle between the school buildings was a maze of various displays and games and my memory of the day was of a long afternoon of various delights, the highlights being:
- Guess the number of sweeties in a jar
- Guess the number of "landmines" buried in a sand pit atop a table (!)
- A dunking machine that the teachers bravely ventured into whilst we pelted a target with tennis balls in the hope of upending them
- An egg-throwing competition on the top oval that kept us enthralled for hours as people attempted to catch eggs in a baseball mitt and, if unsuccessful, were splattered with bright orange yolk.
However, the defining memory of the year occurred one Friday afternoon when Mrs Hounsell and a student teacher of the time announced to us that we would be receiving "very exciting news" on the Monday morning. Another long weekend followed until we filed into class that morning to be told that our day's task would be making passports for a "world trip" that we would be taking as a class.
This was not a real trip, but would be one where as a class we would "travel" to various locations around the world and learn about the different cultures we were to encounter. It seemed that for the majority of the year our learning was all interwoven around this theme of being somewhere in the world.
Some of the highlights of our journey included craning our necks to look at the skyscrapers in New York and paying a stratospheric $100 to stay the night in the "five star New York Hilton" hotel. Truly, paying $100 for a night's accommodation was the ultimate extravagance, especially as we all had colour TVs in our room.
Our travels also took us through Australia and our student teacher had recently been to Australia and spoke of a strange brand of rugby played called Australian Rules. She described it as rough with lots of kicking and catching. These days I know it as “aerial ping-pong”, a scrambling monstrosity that has somehow become a religion in four of Australia’s mainland states. Must be a convict thing.
It was at about this time that we all received a pen pal from Australia and we traded several letters over the course of the year. The letters would come to us in a big package and we'd all compare notes about what these strange children from Australia had said.
We found it highly amusing that they immediately assumed we lived in mud huts and asked if we had basic amenities like power and stoves. I know at least some of our classmates were guilty of perpetuating the myths by telling tall tales of pet lions and wrestling with snakes.
Actually, I did indeed have a pet lion! As we grew up we had very little daytime television (which meant we amused ourselves with constructive and imaginative outdoor games when we weren't participating in the school sport program) but for a while the evening's transmissions started with a locally produced children's show called "Thumbelina". At one point the show held a competition to name a young lioness that had just been born into the pride in Salisbury's Lion and Cheetah Park.
Mum came up with the brilliant idea of naming the lioness Shumbalina and it turned out that the cub's father was named Shumba, a trained lion who starred in the "Born Free" film. So the competition and the lion was mine - not that we were able to keep her, as much as I wanted to. She lived happily at the Lion and Cheetah Park but we visited and met her and her family. She was a very energetic lioness!
I teamed up with a boy called Brian Wilson to make a display on the American Indians. We constructed a teepee and somehow we sourced a giant American headdress replete with eagle feathers. We padded out our display with a host of local carvings and drawings doctored to make them look Indian.
Politically 1980 was a very significant year for our country. A ceasefire was called on the civil war and elections were held on a "one man, one vote" basis. Our city started to crawl with United Nations Peace Keepers with their vehicles painted with white crosses and the kill count on the radio started to document the number of peacekeepers slain in misadventures such as helicopters crashing into powerlines or naïve tourists being feasted on by wild animals. It seemed more people were dying than ever!
Even as a nine-year old it was hard to miss the sense of foreboding that overcame society as the elections drew closer. It was widely hoped that the elections would endorse the ruling structure of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's African National Congress (ANC) but there were dark mutterings about vote rigging to get one of the Zimbabwe African National Unity (ZANU PF) or Zimbabwe African Peoples' Unity (ZAPU PF) over the line.
The majority of our fathers were on call up but rather than seeing action they were sitting bored in camps monitored by the Peacekeepers, all the while knowing that many of their former enemies from the ZANLA and ZIPRA armies were free to roam about the rural countryside intimidating the local population into voting against the ANC.
After the election they spoke of the plot that had been hatched to take up arms and slaughter the UN Peace Keepers in the event of a ZANU PF victory. It seemed there had been a strong intention to maintain the fight by upping the ante and slaughtering the UN Peace Keepers drawn from Britain, Australia and various other Commonwealth countries.
Postscript: My Dad now says they had some of the insurgents in “keeps” and that this is what "our" guys were there for. The whole week before the announcement of the election result our guys had been training at Brigade strength with the intention of going in and taking out the "keeps" and the U.N. monitoring force, which in his case he says were a bunch of Poms.
Our consciousness suddenly became aware of the once exiled leaders of these parties, Robert Mugabe (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo (ZAPU). A few years previously Nkomo had received some infamy after the Rhodesian forces had attacked his house in the Zambian capital Lusaka. He'd escaped certain death by climbing out of his small toilet window, a visual picture that had attracted much mirth as Mr Nkomo had a rather large frame.
Our sense of foreboding at the impending elections were heightened by our knowledge of what the fighting men of ZANLA and ZIPRA were capable of. Going around was a large hardback book that had graphic pictures of various massacres and atrocities committed by the invading armies. It began with the slaughter of nuns in the north of the country and then graphically catalogued ten years of horrific bloodshed and violence.
Page after page would be turned by young fingers to reveal piles of nuns casually thrown in piles with flies buzzing around the pooled blood, torched buildings, massacred villages and most horrifically victims that had had their lips and ears sliced off with razorblades after being fingered as informers. They were called "sell outs" This was not a pretty war.
The elections occurred over two days and long lines of people queued to put their cross next to the party of their choice, represented by symbols to help the illiterate choose correctly. ANC were a flame in a fist, ZANU, representing the majority Shona tribe, were a rooster (the jongwe) and ZAPU, representing the minority but previously dominant Matabele tribe, were an elephant (ndlovu).
Prior to voting the voter was required to receive a mark on their hand of ink that would indicate they had voted. This caused a problem when the traditional African greeting of a vigorous African handshake saw the ink transferred to those waiting to vote and chaos ensued.
With known rural intimidation and the chaos that arose from the ink debacle, the election closed in high farce and the country awaited the verdict. I still remember the widespread sense of shock when it was announced that Robert Mugabe's ZANU had won in a landslide, a strong second was ZAPU while Muzorewa's ANC garnered a pathetic three seats in the newly convened Parliament.
Ian Smith's Patriotic Front party swept the seats specifically set aside for the white population in the Lancaster House agreement, but Zimbabwe had a new government and internationally endorsed independence.
I vividly remember the day of the announcement. A pall rested over the school, and even us nine year olds were apprehensive about what all this meant. Would the new government be vindictive? Would we have to flee, or would we be slaughtered before we could get to Beit Bridge? What did the future hold?
That day we'd been asked to bring something to school that was "disgusting" (I don't think it was meant as a comment on the political situation or our state of mind). I'm not sure what the purpose of the exercise was, but I do remember our class trooping over to the Hall with our varying disgusting items and a group of us boys were discussing the momentous news of the day - the downfall of life as we know it.
And in the middle of that discussion Russell Smart procured his jam jar that had a festering blob of blackening meat inside, whipped of the lid and thrust the putrid contents under our noses. "This piece of meat is Robert Mugabe" he said as we all recoiled. For some reason this act of defiance is what will always stick in my mind as the defining comment on the day and the prevailing mood.
In reality, for us at least, life didn't change a great deal in the short term. I have read with interest the books written by my peers who were growing up in Harare and Mutare and their sense of immediate change as "black" children immediately flooded into the schools that had previously denied them entrance.
I don't recall this happening to us, my recollection being that our class didn't change in 1980 and the first few African children started to trickle in timidly the following year.
One thing that did change with international recognition of the new Zimbabwe's status was that we were readmitted into the sporting fold and a Zimbabwe team was hastily scratched together for the impending Moscow Olympics. The Moscow Olympics were to be widely boycotted by the majority of Western powers and became known as the "Red" games, dominated by the Russians, Baltic States and Chinese.
There was a certain irony in all of this as the Western nations expressed their outrage at the communist invasion of Afghanistan. The invading ZANLA and ZIPRA armies had been funded by China and Russia respectively and red money was suddenly pouring into Zimbabwe as they came looking for their payback with interest. There were a lot of enticing things to exploit in this newly open country.
Our headmaster's daughter, Brenda Phillips, was a member of the Zimbabwe hockey team and they marched through the games weakened without the traditional heavyweights of world hockey. Zimbabwe's first medal in Olympic competition was guaranteed when they won their final round robin game against Austria.
This final game must have been played early afternoon Moscow time as we were all in school when it was played out. I presume Mr Phillips (headmaster) had either a broadcast of the game on his wireless or was in receipt of updates by telex as we all sat expectantly for news in our classrooms and received periodic updates from runners coming down to us from the Head's office.
We erupted in joy when the final whistle blew and Zimbabwe had won its first gold medal in Olympic competition. A few weeks later Brenda came to our school with her precious gold medal and visited each classroom while we crowded around her and took our opportunity to touch the precious metal.
A closing piece of trivia is that the previously mentioned "Silkworm Certificate" was adorned with beautiful calligraphy inscribed by Brenda Phillips'. Now she was a gold medallist in the "new Zimbabwe".
We were about to hit double figures.
24 November 2007
Centenary Park
Growing up in Bulawayo there was one particular avenue of childhood magic that transfixed us in our growing up years. Such was the plethora of delights it contained it is impossible for me to do it justice in one short session. One of its attractions, the National Museum, was such a wonderland that it will enjoy a chapter all of its own.
Selbourne Avenue was the main artery that sped traffic from Bulawayo's Central Business District to its sprawling eastern suburbs. Like most of the city's main boulevard's it was originally designed with the intent of allowing a wagon dragged by a full team of sixteen oxen to turn around within its confines.
Being a town planner in Bulawayo must have been a joyful occupation because the city was left with enormous thoroughfares that could cope with any amount of traffic. Selbourne Avenue was no exception, allowing for six lanes lined by a never-ending canopy of broad-spreading Jacaranda trees.
The trees provided always-shaded parking and in spring would erupt into a riot of purple flowers that would willow and wisp down to the ground and form immense swathes of bee-strewn carpet.
Driving east, the right side of Selbourne Avenue contained a massive garden area, gravel paths meandering through great groves of Jacaranda trees and their cousins and my personal favourites - the crimson topped Flamboyant Trees. The limbs on these trees would start spreading low and would be enormous - allowing for hours of adventurous climbing and exploring amongst the closely packed canopies.
The flamboyants also produced massive black pods that would crack open to reveal a row of carefully nurtured seeds. They would litter the surrounds of the trees and would be great for vivid young imaginations seeking swords and guns to slay dragons and communist terrorists.
The gardens were a magnet for the city's bridal parties - Saturday afternoons becoming a monotonous parade of blushing brides in stark white dresses posing with grooms sweating in suits completely unsuited to the tropical garden surrounds.
It was here that I had to pose through endless photographs as a page boy in kilt at my brother's wedding in 1977 followed by a gig as ring bearer in concert with Fiona Dewar at my sister's rushed wedding two years later.
Posing bridal parties would slowly work their way towards the centrepiece on this side of the road - the fountains, creating a traffic jam of hot and bothered citizens waiting for their turn in front of the splashing white jets spurting to the heavens.
No matter how hot it was though, no one ventured into the cooling waters. I presume this was something of a no-no and strictly enforced. The fizzing spires cascading into the crystal blue moat were certainly an inviting proposition.
On the pavement before the fountain was a large granite monolith bearing the city's coat of arms and in front of that were the obligatory ice-cream boys. The were astride a bicycle that propped up an ice box packed with smoking dry-ice and a plethora of ice-creams devoured by hungry children. They would add to the noise of the guffawing chatter and splashing water, with the peals of their bells, rung just in case you'd missed their presence.
If this side of the street was magical, the other side was a mystical wonderland, particularly for young boys. This was the main parklands and one entered through two austere stone pillars and into a ceaseless parade of attractions that saw families from all over the city flock to the park as often as possible.
Up on the right side were the obligatory parkland attractions - jungle-jims, see-saws, swings and roundabouts. However, what made this place particularly special was what seemed like an array of large weaponry that we were free to play on. There was a massive tank on large tracks with a huge turret that would swallow us in our multitudes and we'd peer forward through little slits in the metal at our parents, pretending that we were about to mow them down with top gun blazing shrapnel all around.
There was a sky-high globe of some description that was made from wrought-iron bars that encouraged us to climb all over it, inside, atop and throughout. Perhaps my sense of perspective is forever from childhood but it seemed that this structure was reasonably high off the ground and not something that you'd want to fall from. The occupational health and safety police obviously weren't a blight on our developmental years.
There was also a steam train, and with the paternal side being something of a railway family (Dad had been a fitter and turner in the Bulawayo rail workshops while his dad had retired after many years as a guard on the Umtali-Beira line) the train held special attraction.
Again we were allowed to climb all over it. The cabin still had a large gaping hole for fire and the coal trays behind, while empty, were still fuel for vivid imaginations as we pretended to stoke the engine's belly and in our longings prod it speeding down tracks winding through vast granite outcrops and spreading flat-topped acacia trees.
We could hang out wide from the stairs of the train and clamber onto the train’s barrel, peer down its smoke stack and jump off the front and stare at its impressive front guard intended to shift stray buffalo, rhino and elephants from its path.
In amongst these various amusements our parents would spread blankets over immaculate green lawns, unpack picnic hampers and gossip the afternoon away (probably majoring on kill-counts and the political situation) while we kids would speed from ride to ride, thoroughly entertained and exhausted by day's end.
As the shadows lengthened we would wind our way down the hill towards the hooting and barking of the duck pond which was enclosed by a miniature train track serviced by its very own station. While we could drive our imaginary engine up the slope, these little engines were the real deal - with steaming boilers and genuine chugging and steam-driven tooting.
This part of the park always had its distinctive smell. The acrid taint of roasting acacia wood and the particular pungency of heated metal. But it was not an unpleasant smell. It was one that made the nostrils flare with expectancy at what lay ahead.
There were several little trains and they were all named after the mythical heroes of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. I presume the idea for this came because they were housed in a brick shed that had a turntable out the front which would swing the trains onto the tracks ahead of waiting children.
The train that was used most often was King Arthur and Lady Guinevere would often get a run. Sometimes there would be so many clamoring children that they'd run both trains to cope with demand. There were several other engines but they seemed to enjoy a mystery status, hiding in the back of the shed and presumably only used when one of the main workhorses needed repair.
The trains would always run around the tracks in an anti-clockwise direction. After departing from the station the track would curve off to the left and continue that way. We would peer at the ducks slowly traversing the pond on the inside. Towards the end of the circuit the defining moment being where we would plunge through the blackness of a tunnel and the little train would toot its horn, something that was deafening in the confined space of the tunnel and sometimes completely unexpected.
Another memory of the train station was one day where there was a product launch for a new soap - Kel 77. Of course the year was 1977 and it was the era where everyone was wearing Trade Fair T-shirts with a similar 77 logo if they weren't wearing the obligatory shirts of a cartoon elephant holding a sign proclaiming "Rhodesia is super!"
We were all given free rides and at the end of our circuit would be handed a large bar of green soap. Instantly Kel 77 became one of the coolest commodities amongst us kids though in hindsight it was probably a nasty provision forced on us by sanctions. That one bar seemed to last in my shower for well over a year.
Perhaps another reason why Centenary Park seemed to have a particular kind of magic is because it was the centrepiece of the civic Christmas celebrations and it therefore enjoyed the rarified air that is Christmas anticipation for a child.
The park would come alive with a forest of twinkling lights strewn through the trees, great big neon candles would be erected and spinning stars would light up the night sky. One tree would become the Christmas Tree - a riot of sparkling fairy lights below a giant star perched at its top.
With Dad now the National director of Youth for Christ (YFC) it also meant that the YFC mob would descend on the park for the annual Christmas concert. YFC drew its ranks from nearly every teenager in every "alive" protestant church throughout the city and its numbers would rank in the hundreds.
November was always marked by the tech gurus, those strange animals with long hair and beady eyes, obsessing about the sound equipment required for the night's show. Chief amongst their concerns would always be the weather because the event was held in the outdoor amphitheatre, not far from the Centenary Park miniature train station.
The amphitheatre was essentially a large raised concrete stage at the bottom of a bowl of black tarmac that stretched up the surrounding hill. Along this ridge were long series of wooden benches that could hold a significant crowd.
And every year we'd take over the amphitheatre for a concert of some description and nervously peer up at the heavens at an encroaching thunderstorm of monolithic proportions.
Bulawayo had the knack of attracting the most frightening of thunderstorms, great big anvil-heads of cumulonimbus clouds billowing in and announcing their advance with cracks of lightening and long growls of thunder. And inevitably one of these monsters would roll in as we scurried around the amphitheatre preparing the annual show.
I remember one year the torrential rain managed to get into the box-like speakers, blowing them out and forcing us into watching an acoustic show under a canopy of raised umbrellas. The next year we came prepared and as the clouds rolled in and large drops of rain started to pelt around us we smiled knowingly, nodding approval towards a sound desk and speakers enveloped in bright yellow tarpaulins.
The show went on but at the end of the night show participants and audience alike (which would number in what seemed like their thousands despite the murderous weather) were drenched.
Thankfully it was warm and it didn't much seem like hardship. Inevitably the show would take place on Christmas Eve and we would wend our way out of the park, past trains, tanks, roundabouts and trees gaudily painted with flashing and flickering lights, unbelievably excited with the thrill of an impending Christmas morn.
Magic!
Selbourne Avenue was the main artery that sped traffic from Bulawayo's Central Business District to its sprawling eastern suburbs. Like most of the city's main boulevard's it was originally designed with the intent of allowing a wagon dragged by a full team of sixteen oxen to turn around within its confines.
Driving east, the right side of Selbourne Avenue contained a massive garden area, gravel paths meandering through great groves of Jacaranda trees and their cousins and my personal favourites - the crimson topped Flamboyant Trees. The limbs on these trees would start spreading low and would be enormous - allowing for hours of adventurous climbing and exploring amongst the closely packed canopies.
The flamboyants also produced massive black pods that would crack open to reveal a row of carefully nurtured seeds. They would litter the surrounds of the trees and would be great for vivid young imaginations seeking swords and guns to slay dragons and communist terrorists.
The gardens were a magnet for the city's bridal parties - Saturday afternoons becoming a monotonous parade of blushing brides in stark white dresses posing with grooms sweating in suits completely unsuited to the tropical garden surrounds.
It was here that I had to pose through endless photographs as a page boy in kilt at my brother's wedding in 1977 followed by a gig as ring bearer in concert with Fiona Dewar at my sister's rushed wedding two years later.
Posing bridal parties would slowly work their way towards the centrepiece on this side of the road - the fountains, creating a traffic jam of hot and bothered citizens waiting for their turn in front of the splashing white jets spurting to the heavens.
No matter how hot it was though, no one ventured into the cooling waters. I presume this was something of a no-no and strictly enforced. The fizzing spires cascading into the crystal blue moat were certainly an inviting proposition.
On the pavement before the fountain was a large granite monolith bearing the city's coat of arms and in front of that were the obligatory ice-cream boys. The were astride a bicycle that propped up an ice box packed with smoking dry-ice and a plethora of ice-creams devoured by hungry children. They would add to the noise of the guffawing chatter and splashing water, with the peals of their bells, rung just in case you'd missed their presence.
If this side of the street was magical, the other side was a mystical wonderland, particularly for young boys. This was the main parklands and one entered through two austere stone pillars and into a ceaseless parade of attractions that saw families from all over the city flock to the park as often as possible.
Up on the right side were the obligatory parkland attractions - jungle-jims, see-saws, swings and roundabouts. However, what made this place particularly special was what seemed like an array of large weaponry that we were free to play on. There was a massive tank on large tracks with a huge turret that would swallow us in our multitudes and we'd peer forward through little slits in the metal at our parents, pretending that we were about to mow them down with top gun blazing shrapnel all around.
There was a sky-high globe of some description that was made from wrought-iron bars that encouraged us to climb all over it, inside, atop and throughout. Perhaps my sense of perspective is forever from childhood but it seemed that this structure was reasonably high off the ground and not something that you'd want to fall from. The occupational health and safety police obviously weren't a blight on our developmental years.
There was also a steam train, and with the paternal side being something of a railway family (Dad had been a fitter and turner in the Bulawayo rail workshops while his dad had retired after many years as a guard on the Umtali-Beira line) the train held special attraction.
Again we were allowed to climb all over it. The cabin still had a large gaping hole for fire and the coal trays behind, while empty, were still fuel for vivid imaginations as we pretended to stoke the engine's belly and in our longings prod it speeding down tracks winding through vast granite outcrops and spreading flat-topped acacia trees.
We could hang out wide from the stairs of the train and clamber onto the train’s barrel, peer down its smoke stack and jump off the front and stare at its impressive front guard intended to shift stray buffalo, rhino and elephants from its path.
In amongst these various amusements our parents would spread blankets over immaculate green lawns, unpack picnic hampers and gossip the afternoon away (probably majoring on kill-counts and the political situation) while we kids would speed from ride to ride, thoroughly entertained and exhausted by day's end.
As the shadows lengthened we would wind our way down the hill towards the hooting and barking of the duck pond which was enclosed by a miniature train track serviced by its very own station. While we could drive our imaginary engine up the slope, these little engines were the real deal - with steaming boilers and genuine chugging and steam-driven tooting.
This part of the park always had its distinctive smell. The acrid taint of roasting acacia wood and the particular pungency of heated metal. But it was not an unpleasant smell. It was one that made the nostrils flare with expectancy at what lay ahead.
There were several little trains and they were all named after the mythical heroes of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. I presume the idea for this came because they were housed in a brick shed that had a turntable out the front which would swing the trains onto the tracks ahead of waiting children.
The train that was used most often was King Arthur and Lady Guinevere would often get a run. Sometimes there would be so many clamoring children that they'd run both trains to cope with demand. There were several other engines but they seemed to enjoy a mystery status, hiding in the back of the shed and presumably only used when one of the main workhorses needed repair.
The trains would always run around the tracks in an anti-clockwise direction. After departing from the station the track would curve off to the left and continue that way. We would peer at the ducks slowly traversing the pond on the inside. Towards the end of the circuit the defining moment being where we would plunge through the blackness of a tunnel and the little train would toot its horn, something that was deafening in the confined space of the tunnel and sometimes completely unexpected.
Another memory of the train station was one day where there was a product launch for a new soap - Kel 77. Of course the year was 1977 and it was the era where everyone was wearing Trade Fair T-shirts with a similar 77 logo if they weren't wearing the obligatory shirts of a cartoon elephant holding a sign proclaiming "Rhodesia is super!"
We were all given free rides and at the end of our circuit would be handed a large bar of green soap. Instantly Kel 77 became one of the coolest commodities amongst us kids though in hindsight it was probably a nasty provision forced on us by sanctions. That one bar seemed to last in my shower for well over a year.
Perhaps another reason why Centenary Park seemed to have a particular kind of magic is because it was the centrepiece of the civic Christmas celebrations and it therefore enjoyed the rarified air that is Christmas anticipation for a child.
The park would come alive with a forest of twinkling lights strewn through the trees, great big neon candles would be erected and spinning stars would light up the night sky. One tree would become the Christmas Tree - a riot of sparkling fairy lights below a giant star perched at its top.
With Dad now the National director of Youth for Christ (YFC) it also meant that the YFC mob would descend on the park for the annual Christmas concert. YFC drew its ranks from nearly every teenager in every "alive" protestant church throughout the city and its numbers would rank in the hundreds.
November was always marked by the tech gurus, those strange animals with long hair and beady eyes, obsessing about the sound equipment required for the night's show. Chief amongst their concerns would always be the weather because the event was held in the outdoor amphitheatre, not far from the Centenary Park miniature train station.
The amphitheatre was essentially a large raised concrete stage at the bottom of a bowl of black tarmac that stretched up the surrounding hill. Along this ridge were long series of wooden benches that could hold a significant crowd.
And every year we'd take over the amphitheatre for a concert of some description and nervously peer up at the heavens at an encroaching thunderstorm of monolithic proportions.
Bulawayo had the knack of attracting the most frightening of thunderstorms, great big anvil-heads of cumulonimbus clouds billowing in and announcing their advance with cracks of lightening and long growls of thunder. And inevitably one of these monsters would roll in as we scurried around the amphitheatre preparing the annual show.
I remember one year the torrential rain managed to get into the box-like speakers, blowing them out and forcing us into watching an acoustic show under a canopy of raised umbrellas. The next year we came prepared and as the clouds rolled in and large drops of rain started to pelt around us we smiled knowingly, nodding approval towards a sound desk and speakers enveloped in bright yellow tarpaulins.
The show went on but at the end of the night show participants and audience alike (which would number in what seemed like their thousands despite the murderous weather) were drenched.
Thankfully it was warm and it didn't much seem like hardship. Inevitably the show would take place on Christmas Eve and we would wend our way out of the park, past trains, tanks, roundabouts and trees gaudily painted with flashing and flickering lights, unbelievably excited with the thrill of an impending Christmas morn.
Magic!
12 November 2007
1979 Part II
The Rhodesian academic year consisted of three terms that were separated by school holiday blocks of four weeks which allowed for lengthy periods of annual leave. This was just as well because the nearest “safe” beaches for us were a good two days’ drive away in South Africa.
With the war raging around us South Africa was also one of the few places that would take us. Our neighbours on every other side were hostile.
In the autumn of 1979 we crossed the border into South Africa and made our way to that closest beach, Durban. We had done a jaunt around South Africa a few years previously with our good family friends the Jenkinsons where we’d spent some time on the Garden Route, holidaying a few weeks in George, taking in the Kango Caves and spending Christmas Eve in Port Elizabeth.
This time we went to Annerley, just south of Durban and north of Port Shepstone, a base that was central to my Mum’s extended family in both of those centres.
Being born fifteen years behind the previous sibling meant that I was practically raised as an only child - my two older siblings leaving for national service and nursing college respectively when I was still in nappies.
Going to Shepstone meant that I was in close proximity to my cousins, my first, and really only experience of having family close in age around. Mum’s younger brother Eric had six children, one boy just a few months older than me.
Uncle Eric was a commercial fisherman and my memory of that holiday was of us being inundated with fresh fish and crayfish and of rollicking on Annerley beach with the extended Bowden clan.
One day when we were there a surfer flirted too closely with a rocky buff and was dumped on the barnacles and was bought up onto the beach a bloody mess.
I did make another friend on that holiday. His name escapes me but I do distinctly remember that I spent several days on the beach with a boy my age. This may not seem remarkable except that his skin was black and this was South Africa at the height of apartheid.
South Africa definitely had a different atmosphere between the races than Rhodesia. Though we were in the midst of a pitched civil war in our country, there was a large battalion of black troops known as the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR) that were feared and revered by the insurgents.
In Kindergarten the RAR band had come to play at school and had entertained us with renditions of “one banana, two banana” etc and had also called a girl out from our class to “conduct” them which resulted in inevitable chaos and much mirth.
While Rhodesia had echoes of apartheid in its segregated schools and some facilities, there did seem to be an easier relationship between the races than in South Africa where it was very clear that hatred smouldered and the segregation was institutionalised.
To get to Annerley beach we passed the large “Net Nie Blankes” signs that proclaimed it to be a whites’ only beach. So my friend was playing roulette by being there and quite possibly it could have meant trouble for us too.
Not that it would have been the first time we’d usurped the authorities in aid of a black child. When our house-maid had given birth to a son sometime in 1973 she’d had to send him out to family in the townships where he clearly became neglected. So we used to hide him away at our property for extended periods in defiance of the edict that children of the house-help were not to live in the “white” suburbs and nurse him back to full health.
Eventually he was allowed to stay with us and we grew up together as "brothers" and playmates. His name was Weatherley (named after the surname of a policeman colleague of his father). A year ago he passed away. He was walking home one day and simply collapsed in a gutter. In preceeding months he had lost a lot of weight and was in ill-health.
Sadly he had managed to reach the new median age for males in the "new Zimbabwe". He'd lived his alloted lifespan under the Mugabe regime and probably fell victim to the AIDS pandemic.
1979 was a year that saw the ignition of several life-long passions. Obviously writing featured prominently under the controlling hand of Mrs Mcaninch but this joy in written expression was being fed by a voracious reading regime. Sometime in 1979 I crossed the line from Enid Blyton (who my librarian aunt despised) to the wonderful world of the Willard Price Adventure series and Paul White’s iconic Jungle Doctor books.
Bulawayo City Council ran several libraries including a mobile library on a bus. Once a week it would roll up to our closest shopping centre (Retreat on the Matopos Road) and open the doors to a large collection of children’s and adult books.
Our entry into the general school population also meant that we started to participate in the various sporting activities on offer. Our school day would end at 1pm and we’d have lunch at home before we’d go back to school for several afternoons each week for sport.
The Standard One boys were all expected to play soccer and I remember our first training session involved a rigorous regime of sit-ups, press-ups and even as many chin-ups as we could do off the goalposts.
We had our first taste of inter-school competition that probably didn’t amount to much more than a ball, twenty bodies and a cloud of dust. I’d soon found out that I was happiest on the wing. Not right or left wing though. I’d start on the wing closest to the adjoining rugby field and swap over at half time to remain so which enabled me to keep half an eye on the rugby action.
It would be politic of me to not go into the gory details of why one so young was already indoctrinated in the knowledge that soccer is an inferior game to rugby. Suffice to say that Dad and his best mate, Uncle George (who coached the Northlea 1st XV for a few years during their only period of success) were avowed rugby men.
It was fitting then that 1979 saw me take my first pilgrimage to one of my favourite places on earth, the rather grandly titled Hartsfield Rugby Stadium in northern Bulawayo. In actuality it was little more than a few ramshackle grandstands (one covered) on the western edge, some concrete piered steps on the eastern sideline and hills on the northern and southern edge.
However, for me it was a field of dreams and the stadium is still firmly etched in memory. In those first few visits we would sit in the cheaper section of the concrete steps on the eastern terraces, staring directly into the sun and surrounded by a loud crowd that was well oiled by Lion Lager.
Immediately to our left was a fenced section that was reserved seating for the Bulawayo Lions Club. I never saw it used. The southern edge had the scoreboard, a massive structure that had people inside it, watching through holes and manually changing the score.
Opposite us was the “posh” seats in the covered grandstand and across the player’s tunnel was another grandstand that was not covered but generally always full. The northern end was next to a bike racing track underneath huge spreading trees and this was the domain of the vocal schoolboys that were there to support their teams in the curtain-raisers.
Hartsfield’s moment of glory had been in 1949 when it hosted the only victory the Rhodesian side recorded over the All-Blacks. Apparently the 10-8 victory had prompted scenes of pandemonium and when Rhodesia went on to draw the second leg in Salisbury 3-3 they’d managed the impossible, a series win over New Zealand.
The game I distinctly remember from 1979 was a clash between Rhodesia and Griqualand West, visiting from South Africa. It was a game of some portent, my understanding was that the loser would be eliminated from the top-tier of South Africa’s provincial competition - the Currie Cup.
Uncle George’s son, Neville, has just broken into the national team and was playing out of position that day at flanker. The national stalwart, Ian “Buccy” Buchannan would most likely have been captaining the side from scrum-half.
The side that year had also contained other prominent players including Ray Mordt and Dave Smith who would go on to represent the Springboks the following year when they locked horns with the British Lions.
The match was tense for the best part of an hour before the Rhodesians managed to get in front and powered home, probably on account of playing at home in front of a large, boisterous crowd (maybe 4000)!
There was a post-game traffic jam that we managed to avoid on account of the fact that I was riding on the fuel tank of Dad’s rather small motor-bike, though we were later pulled up by police who advised Dad to not let me ride that way in future.
The start of my own rugby career was two years away, and I eventually had the thrill of playing on the hallowed Hartsfield turf, but the competitive instincts were certainly stoked.
In a sport-obsessed school, the athletics program was taken very seriously. We were all assigned to school houses named after the great English sea captains. I was assigned to the emerald green ranks of Raleigh which was fitting as I’d already developed a fetish about the green and white hooped jerseys of the national team. The other teams were Drake (red), Gilbert (blue) and Hawkins (yellow). We were identified by a green square sewn on the front of our red school singlets.
The athletics program was a progression of new wonders. The school ovals were watered by recycled water from the city sewage system and they were always in immaculate condition, the tracks painstakingly marked out in crisp, white starch.
We didn’t have mattresses to land on in the high jump competition. Our landing place was a high bed of sawdust flakes that would get inside our singlets and itch all day long. We were taught the “scissors” jump though some of the seniors were illegally trying out the new-fangled Frisbee-flop.
We had several sandpits all marked out for both the long and triple jump.
I found the before-race anticipation invigorating and loved the thrill of competition. From aged eight we were involved in pitched battle. This was not about competing against one’s own times, or doing one’s best, this was all about winning.
That year we received a lot of rain just before the inter-school athletics competition and the event was moved from the spacious bottom ovals that were waterlogged and onto the top ovals. The rain had compacted the sawdust in the high jump pits and there were several broken arms on the day.
Urged on by the chanting of the various House teams I’d had a good day, jumping a good distance in the long-jump and finishing top-two in the sprint events to make the school team.
From there we went to an intra-school, triangular carnival held at arch-rival Hillside Primary. This was a warm-up for the big day, the Bulawayo and district inter-schools carnival. Henry Low were very strong in the triangular event and we headed to the inter-school carnival confident of a good display.
This was a big step up in class and experience and the oval at the Hugh Beadle School was studded with officials and track-markings that we hadn’t encountered previously. I was involved in the sprints and the long-jump but the big event of the day was the relay.
Mum and I took a lift to the carnival with the daughter of Mum’s boss at Stansfield & Ratcliffe and her son. He was first runner off in the relay and I was to receive the baton from him to run the second leg. And much to Mum’s horror I spent the entire trip exhorting him to run his fastest.
The gun fired and we were off and racing. Perhaps we should have spent the trip talking about tactics rather than motivation. At our change I was quick out of the blocks and it took an eternity. After passing the baton the runner that had finished was required to immediately sit down to mark where the baton change had taken place.
Our baton change had cost us time and we were running third when I passed the baton at the halfway mark. However, our final two runners scorched around the field and Craig Fitzgerald hit the tape marginally in front of Hillside. It had been a battle royale down the home straight.
We went berserk. We’d just won a relay at the inter-schools and this guaranteed that we’d receive our athletics colours, a patch sown onto the sports tracksuit that was a badge of honour that could be paraded around school.
However, unbeknownst to us each baton change needed to take place within a specified distance and the change between first and second runner had overstepped the boundary by a metre. We were cruelly disqualified. So close and yet so far. It still rankles (the curse of a retentive memory).
Not that the day was a complete loss. Henry Low dominated the carnival and we made off with all three cups - boys, girls and obviously overall!
In some respects we were living in a fool’s paradise with our running as we were only competing against the other “white” schools. Within a few years when the races began to mingle the white kids were blown off the park much as we see in the Olympic sprint events today.
But that was yet to come. We enjoyed our glories while we had them.
Uncle Eric was a commercial fisherman and my memory of that holiday was of us being inundated with fresh fish and crayfish and of rollicking on Annerley beach with the extended Bowden clan.
One day when we were there a surfer flirted too closely with a rocky buff and was dumped on the barnacles and was bought up onto the beach a bloody mess.
I did make another friend on that holiday. His name escapes me but I do distinctly remember that I spent several days on the beach with a boy my age. This may not seem remarkable except that his skin was black and this was South Africa at the height of apartheid.
South Africa definitely had a different atmosphere between the races than Rhodesia. Though we were in the midst of a pitched civil war in our country, there was a large battalion of black troops known as the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR) that were feared and revered by the insurgents.
In Kindergarten the RAR band had come to play at school and had entertained us with renditions of “one banana, two banana” etc and had also called a girl out from our class to “conduct” them which resulted in inevitable chaos and much mirth.
While Rhodesia had echoes of apartheid in its segregated schools and some facilities, there did seem to be an easier relationship between the races than in South Africa where it was very clear that hatred smouldered and the segregation was institutionalised.
To get to Annerley beach we passed the large “Net Nie Blankes” signs that proclaimed it to be a whites’ only beach. So my friend was playing roulette by being there and quite possibly it could have meant trouble for us too.
Not that it would have been the first time we’d usurped the authorities in aid of a black child. When our house-maid had given birth to a son sometime in 1973 she’d had to send him out to family in the townships where he clearly became neglected. So we used to hide him away at our property for extended periods in defiance of the edict that children of the house-help were not to live in the “white” suburbs and nurse him back to full health.
Eventually he was allowed to stay with us and we grew up together as "brothers" and playmates. His name was Weatherley (named after the surname of a policeman colleague of his father). A year ago he passed away. He was walking home one day and simply collapsed in a gutter. In preceeding months he had lost a lot of weight and was in ill-health.
Sadly he had managed to reach the new median age for males in the "new Zimbabwe". He'd lived his alloted lifespan under the Mugabe regime and probably fell victim to the AIDS pandemic.
1979 was a year that saw the ignition of several life-long passions. Obviously writing featured prominently under the controlling hand of Mrs Mcaninch but this joy in written expression was being fed by a voracious reading regime. Sometime in 1979 I crossed the line from Enid Blyton (who my librarian aunt despised) to the wonderful world of the Willard Price Adventure series and Paul White’s iconic Jungle Doctor books.
Bulawayo City Council ran several libraries including a mobile library on a bus. Once a week it would roll up to our closest shopping centre (Retreat on the Matopos Road) and open the doors to a large collection of children’s and adult books.
Our entry into the general school population also meant that we started to participate in the various sporting activities on offer. Our school day would end at 1pm and we’d have lunch at home before we’d go back to school for several afternoons each week for sport.
The Standard One boys were all expected to play soccer and I remember our first training session involved a rigorous regime of sit-ups, press-ups and even as many chin-ups as we could do off the goalposts.
We had our first taste of inter-school competition that probably didn’t amount to much more than a ball, twenty bodies and a cloud of dust. I’d soon found out that I was happiest on the wing. Not right or left wing though. I’d start on the wing closest to the adjoining rugby field and swap over at half time to remain so which enabled me to keep half an eye on the rugby action.
It would be politic of me to not go into the gory details of why one so young was already indoctrinated in the knowledge that soccer is an inferior game to rugby. Suffice to say that Dad and his best mate, Uncle George (who coached the Northlea 1st XV for a few years during their only period of success) were avowed rugby men.
It was fitting then that 1979 saw me take my first pilgrimage to one of my favourite places on earth, the rather grandly titled Hartsfield Rugby Stadium in northern Bulawayo. In actuality it was little more than a few ramshackle grandstands (one covered) on the western edge, some concrete piered steps on the eastern sideline and hills on the northern and southern edge.
However, for me it was a field of dreams and the stadium is still firmly etched in memory. In those first few visits we would sit in the cheaper section of the concrete steps on the eastern terraces, staring directly into the sun and surrounded by a loud crowd that was well oiled by Lion Lager.
Immediately to our left was a fenced section that was reserved seating for the Bulawayo Lions Club. I never saw it used. The southern edge had the scoreboard, a massive structure that had people inside it, watching through holes and manually changing the score.
Opposite us was the “posh” seats in the covered grandstand and across the player’s tunnel was another grandstand that was not covered but generally always full. The northern end was next to a bike racing track underneath huge spreading trees and this was the domain of the vocal schoolboys that were there to support their teams in the curtain-raisers.
Hartsfield’s moment of glory had been in 1949 when it hosted the only victory the Rhodesian side recorded over the All-Blacks. Apparently the 10-8 victory had prompted scenes of pandemonium and when Rhodesia went on to draw the second leg in Salisbury 3-3 they’d managed the impossible, a series win over New Zealand.
The game I distinctly remember from 1979 was a clash between Rhodesia and Griqualand West, visiting from South Africa. It was a game of some portent, my understanding was that the loser would be eliminated from the top-tier of South Africa’s provincial competition - the Currie Cup.
Uncle George’s son, Neville, has just broken into the national team and was playing out of position that day at flanker. The national stalwart, Ian “Buccy” Buchannan would most likely have been captaining the side from scrum-half.
The side that year had also contained other prominent players including Ray Mordt and Dave Smith who would go on to represent the Springboks the following year when they locked horns with the British Lions.
The match was tense for the best part of an hour before the Rhodesians managed to get in front and powered home, probably on account of playing at home in front of a large, boisterous crowd (maybe 4000)!
There was a post-game traffic jam that we managed to avoid on account of the fact that I was riding on the fuel tank of Dad’s rather small motor-bike, though we were later pulled up by police who advised Dad to not let me ride that way in future.
The start of my own rugby career was two years away, and I eventually had the thrill of playing on the hallowed Hartsfield turf, but the competitive instincts were certainly stoked.
In a sport-obsessed school, the athletics program was taken very seriously. We were all assigned to school houses named after the great English sea captains. I was assigned to the emerald green ranks of Raleigh which was fitting as I’d already developed a fetish about the green and white hooped jerseys of the national team. The other teams were Drake (red), Gilbert (blue) and Hawkins (yellow). We were identified by a green square sewn on the front of our red school singlets.
The athletics program was a progression of new wonders. The school ovals were watered by recycled water from the city sewage system and they were always in immaculate condition, the tracks painstakingly marked out in crisp, white starch.
We didn’t have mattresses to land on in the high jump competition. Our landing place was a high bed of sawdust flakes that would get inside our singlets and itch all day long. We were taught the “scissors” jump though some of the seniors were illegally trying out the new-fangled Frisbee-flop.
We had several sandpits all marked out for both the long and triple jump.
I found the before-race anticipation invigorating and loved the thrill of competition. From aged eight we were involved in pitched battle. This was not about competing against one’s own times, or doing one’s best, this was all about winning.
That year we received a lot of rain just before the inter-school athletics competition and the event was moved from the spacious bottom ovals that were waterlogged and onto the top ovals. The rain had compacted the sawdust in the high jump pits and there were several broken arms on the day.
Urged on by the chanting of the various House teams I’d had a good day, jumping a good distance in the long-jump and finishing top-two in the sprint events to make the school team.
From there we went to an intra-school, triangular carnival held at arch-rival Hillside Primary. This was a warm-up for the big day, the Bulawayo and district inter-schools carnival. Henry Low were very strong in the triangular event and we headed to the inter-school carnival confident of a good display.
This was a big step up in class and experience and the oval at the Hugh Beadle School was studded with officials and track-markings that we hadn’t encountered previously. I was involved in the sprints and the long-jump but the big event of the day was the relay.
Mum and I took a lift to the carnival with the daughter of Mum’s boss at Stansfield & Ratcliffe and her son. He was first runner off in the relay and I was to receive the baton from him to run the second leg. And much to Mum’s horror I spent the entire trip exhorting him to run his fastest.
The gun fired and we were off and racing. Perhaps we should have spent the trip talking about tactics rather than motivation. At our change I was quick out of the blocks and it took an eternity. After passing the baton the runner that had finished was required to immediately sit down to mark where the baton change had taken place.
Our baton change had cost us time and we were running third when I passed the baton at the halfway mark. However, our final two runners scorched around the field and Craig Fitzgerald hit the tape marginally in front of Hillside. It had been a battle royale down the home straight.
We went berserk. We’d just won a relay at the inter-schools and this guaranteed that we’d receive our athletics colours, a patch sown onto the sports tracksuit that was a badge of honour that could be paraded around school.
However, unbeknownst to us each baton change needed to take place within a specified distance and the change between first and second runner had overstepped the boundary by a metre. We were cruelly disqualified. So close and yet so far. It still rankles (the curse of a retentive memory).
Not that the day was a complete loss. Henry Low dominated the carnival and we made off with all three cups - boys, girls and obviously overall!
In some respects we were living in a fool’s paradise with our running as we were only competing against the other “white” schools. Within a few years when the races began to mingle the white kids were blown off the park much as we see in the Olympic sprint events today.
But that was yet to come. We enjoyed our glories while we had them.
06 November 2007
1979 Part I
Entry into what was then known as “Standard One” meant that our class made its way down the hill at Henry Low and entered the general school population which also opened up the window to a number of new experiences and adventures.
The first academic change we encountered was that we were “streamed” according to academic ability. While the practice of grouping students according to their academic ability is somewhat derided these days (particularly in the supposedly egalitarian Australia) I have always been grateful that we were placed in class with our academic peers and taught accordingly.
The streaming was held fairly loosely in Standard One, and changes made to the class groupings in subsequent years, but it did mean that those of us in the more academic stream were certainly pushed in those early schooling years.
And if there was pushing to be done then we certainly had the woman for the job in our Standard One teacher, Mrs Mcaninch. In our first week she drummed into us the spelling of her name and proudly proclaimed that hers was the only Mcaninch household in the entire Rhodesian telephone directory. She was very particular about us getting the spelling of her name right too!
It wasn’t just her name that made her one of a kind. Mrs Mcaninch had a frightful reputation as a firebrand who would put up with no nonsense whatsoever. By today’s standards her methods were far from politically correct (I somehow doubt they’d allow her to teach in most school around here) but she did get results.
This is the teacher that didn’t threaten to wash the mouths of swearing children out with soap. Upon hearing an expletive she would grab them by the ear and march them into the nearest toilet and do the deed herself. I distinctly remember her doing that with several trembling children, and not just those from our class.
Inside the classroom she was the master of using illustration to hammer home a point or foundational rule. These were times when we were learning how to change words such as breathe to breathing and a few of us had a tendency to scribe it as “breatheing”.
Very soon we entered a regime where we were encouraged to “drop the e in the dustbin”. And after that if we were found to do the wrong thing we ourselves had to stand in the dustbin to remember that’s where the “e” goes. It didn’t take long for us to get that part of the English language right.
With Standard One being such a foundational year in spelling and punctuation it seemed that Mrs Mcaninch was absolutely determined to brand the basics into our developing brains.
To the important essentials she also added some of her own peculiarities and preferences. For some reason she despised the word “got” and sometimes we’d spend hours playing the “got box” game where we were asked questions by someone standing up the front and had to find an answer that steered around the use of the word “got”. If we didn’t we would be sent up the front (to the “got box”) to do the asking until someone else fell into the “got” trap.
We were banned from using imperial measurements such as “mile” and “inch” (which did lead to some back-of-the-hand snickering whenever her name was mentioned).
One of our class reported in class news that he’d stayed at the “Golden Mile Motel” in Que Que and we all gasped expecting a tirade of fire and brimstone for the use of such a heinous word. One of us even piped up (I suspect it was Robert Goldie) to correct him that it must surely have been the “Golden Kilometre”.
Her other pet hate was the starting of a sentence with the word “and” or “but”. In her opinion this was bad English and lazy.
I have to admit that thirty years later, and in a position where writing is a daily staple, the rules of grammar, punctuation and expression hammered into me from Mrs Mcaninch still ring vividly in my brain. I cannot take short cuts and find it nearly impossible to use the word “got”.
I see many advantages to starting the odd sentence with “and” for the sense of fluidity it gives to a piece of prose, but whenever I do it I still feel a twinge of guilt and expect to see the ghost of Mrs Mcaninch wagging her finger at me in disapproval.
Despite the ferociousness of her desire for discipline and perfection I have to admit that I didn’t have much of an issue with Mrs Mcaninch. If anything she was precisely what I needed – someone who wouldn’t give me an inch (haha) and who extended me beyond mediocrity.
If Mrs Eyre had won me with fun, laughter and encouragement, Mrs Mcaninch did so with respect. And if any further proof was needed one simply has to leaf through the school Year Book from 1979 to see the kind of impact Mrs Mcaninch’s demand for excellence had upon our class.
That year in the Bulawayo Eisteddfod Henry Low School received thirteen awards for prose at the Honours or First Class level. Seven of those awards were given out to students from Standard 1.30 – Mrs Mcaninch’s class.
Included in that list were national awards in writing for two of us, myself and Bridget Campbell. It’s still unclear why we were so feted but I do recall that to receive our award we had to go to a cocktail party at the Bulawayo Municipal Library and our framed certificates were handed over to us the new Minister for Education in the just-formed government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
I do recall during that year that the class next door would start off each morning with a loudly shouted rendition of all of their times tables while we’d be beavering away at the latest grammatical imperative. I’ve often wondered if our peers from next door ended up our superiors at mathematics whilst we had the edge in English.
Not that we didn’t cover mathematics. I distinctly remember wrestling with fractions and it was also the year we were taught how to tell time using the old analogue clocks. This seemed to coincide with the year that digital watches took the world by storm.
My sister purchased a watch for my birthday but it had taken her hours of shopping to find an analogue clock so it would assist me with my time-telling. I remember thinking that we were wasting our time learning the analogue time when it was obvious digital would take over and seemed to make much more sense. How wrong can one be?
Speaking of the next door class, it does seem strange that we had relatively little to do with them (or that’s my recollection anyway). We might have shared the same playground but we didn’t seem to mingle much.
All the photos from my birthday parties were pretty much made up of the group from our class and my recollection is that the vast majority of parties I attended were also kids from our class. One that particularly stands out is Bridget Campbell’s party where there must have been one of the very first video machines in the country because we were kept amused for hours by vision of the film running backwards and in varying speeds. It was a wildlife film and a giraffe looks ungainly running normally, let alone backwards at warp speed.
That was also that party where I suffered the ignominy of being so good at hide and seek that I wasn’t discovered until after the prize had been given out to the last person found – my absence in the tool shed unnoticed.
We did combine with the other Standard One class for scripture and I recall one infamous lesson in our classroom where the kids from next door were perched on our desks and, right up the front and in full view of everyone, one of the boys (who shall remain nameless) lost control of his bladder and flooded the inside of the desk he was sitting on – with pools of water forming on the floor underneath too.
Mrs Mcaninch wasn’t impressed with that display.
Perhaps the cause of his misfortune was the daily milk-runs that were then in operation. In an effort to make sure that all the country’s children were receiving a good intake of calcium the government was providing a subsidized milk service and the milk would arrive in little triangular plastic packages that we sometimes placed in wire cages specifically designed to hold them.
We’d stab a straw in the corner and suck down the contents gratefully. Our milk back in those days was not processed to within an inch of its life. Before using the bottled milk it was necessary to hook a good inch or two of thick, fat cream from the top of the bottle with one’s finger.
We’d receive our daily milk by pedal power. We’d leave empty glass bottles near our gate with a coupon for the number of replacement bottles we required and they’d be replaced by the milk man on his bicycle who would peddle cheerfully around the neighbourhood, delivering bottles and topping up from white lock-up cages that dotted the landscape as a drop-off and collection point for the daily supply.
Occasionally our milk-run at school would include a few packets of “Bengal Juice” which was a chocolate flavoured milk with a Tiger on the plastic cover. If one of us spotted the precious Bengal juice there’d be a rush for it like pigs rushing a trough, the victors emerging with the spoils to the moans and groans of the rest.
We were just eight after all.
But not as most eight year olds. This was also the year where the cruel little civil war we were born into reached its crescendo. During 1979 our country changed name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and the first indigenous-led government installed under the leadership of Bishop Abel Muzorewa. We all stood to attention late that year as a new national flag was raised on the flagpole near our marble patch, just outside the main hall.
The new government was dismissed by the international community as a puppet regime and the bloodshed contiunued. The kill count on both sides mounted and even at that age we were made vividly aware of the dangers around us. Our school had two sirens - the normal siren for what most people would know as the normal fire drill.
But we had another, more urgent one, that wailed out and required an entirely different response. This was known as the "terrorist attack" alarm and our response was to immediately fall to the floor under our desks where we would supposedly be safe from incoming mortar fire. I never quite figured out how this routine was going to keep us safe from shrapnel grenades and the inevitable invaders that would follow their arrival. I suppose it gave us a greater chance than we'd have if we all went screaming for the exits.
This was around the time where two commercial flights of Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscount airplanes had been shot down by SAM7 Heat seeking missiles flying out of Victoria Falls and Kariba. The survivors had been cruelly finished off by the waiting guerrillas. So the spectre of a mortar attack did hang heavily over us - particularly as the odd rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been known to lob into the metropolitan surrounds of Umtali. There was a distinct feeling that it was only a matter of time.
Horror came to our city when a bomb went off in downtown department store, Haddon and Sly. It led to a new policy where we were required to paint a large, white St Andrew's cross on all of our school suit cases to identify that they were not parcel bombs.
It's sad to say but even at eight years old the cynic in me could not understand why people who would stoop to bombing innocent citizens in a department store would give us fair warning by leaving a bomb without a white cross on it.
It's interesting to leaf through the year book from that year. An entire page is devoted to musings on war and peace from the older kids at the school - but I think it captures well the undercurrent that floated throughout the school population.
We were too young to really understand the reasons for the fight, or the rights and wrongs of either side in the conflict, but we did know it took our fathers away for extended absences and sometimes they didn't return.
Part II to include:
And if there was pushing to be done then we certainly had the woman for the job in our Standard One teacher, Mrs Mcaninch. In our first week she drummed into us the spelling of her name and proudly proclaimed that hers was the only Mcaninch household in the entire Rhodesian telephone directory. She was very particular about us getting the spelling of her name right too!
It wasn’t just her name that made her one of a kind. Mrs Mcaninch had a frightful reputation as a firebrand who would put up with no nonsense whatsoever. By today’s standards her methods were far from politically correct (I somehow doubt they’d allow her to teach in most school around here) but she did get results.
This is the teacher that didn’t threaten to wash the mouths of swearing children out with soap. Upon hearing an expletive she would grab them by the ear and march them into the nearest toilet and do the deed herself. I distinctly remember her doing that with several trembling children, and not just those from our class.
Inside the classroom she was the master of using illustration to hammer home a point or foundational rule. These were times when we were learning how to change words such as breathe to breathing and a few of us had a tendency to scribe it as “breatheing”.
Very soon we entered a regime where we were encouraged to “drop the e in the dustbin”. And after that if we were found to do the wrong thing we ourselves had to stand in the dustbin to remember that’s where the “e” goes. It didn’t take long for us to get that part of the English language right.
With Standard One being such a foundational year in spelling and punctuation it seemed that Mrs Mcaninch was absolutely determined to brand the basics into our developing brains.
To the important essentials she also added some of her own peculiarities and preferences. For some reason she despised the word “got” and sometimes we’d spend hours playing the “got box” game where we were asked questions by someone standing up the front and had to find an answer that steered around the use of the word “got”. If we didn’t we would be sent up the front (to the “got box”) to do the asking until someone else fell into the “got” trap.
We were banned from using imperial measurements such as “mile” and “inch” (which did lead to some back-of-the-hand snickering whenever her name was mentioned).
One of our class reported in class news that he’d stayed at the “Golden Mile Motel” in Que Que and we all gasped expecting a tirade of fire and brimstone for the use of such a heinous word. One of us even piped up (I suspect it was Robert Goldie) to correct him that it must surely have been the “Golden Kilometre”.
Her other pet hate was the starting of a sentence with the word “and” or “but”. In her opinion this was bad English and lazy.
I have to admit that thirty years later, and in a position where writing is a daily staple, the rules of grammar, punctuation and expression hammered into me from Mrs Mcaninch still ring vividly in my brain. I cannot take short cuts and find it nearly impossible to use the word “got”.
I see many advantages to starting the odd sentence with “and” for the sense of fluidity it gives to a piece of prose, but whenever I do it I still feel a twinge of guilt and expect to see the ghost of Mrs Mcaninch wagging her finger at me in disapproval.
Despite the ferociousness of her desire for discipline and perfection I have to admit that I didn’t have much of an issue with Mrs Mcaninch. If anything she was precisely what I needed – someone who wouldn’t give me an inch (haha) and who extended me beyond mediocrity.
If Mrs Eyre had won me with fun, laughter and encouragement, Mrs Mcaninch did so with respect. And if any further proof was needed one simply has to leaf through the school Year Book from 1979 to see the kind of impact Mrs Mcaninch’s demand for excellence had upon our class.
That year in the Bulawayo Eisteddfod Henry Low School received thirteen awards for prose at the Honours or First Class level. Seven of those awards were given out to students from Standard 1.30 – Mrs Mcaninch’s class.
Included in that list were national awards in writing for two of us, myself and Bridget Campbell. It’s still unclear why we were so feted but I do recall that to receive our award we had to go to a cocktail party at the Bulawayo Municipal Library and our framed certificates were handed over to us the new Minister for Education in the just-formed government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
I do recall during that year that the class next door would start off each morning with a loudly shouted rendition of all of their times tables while we’d be beavering away at the latest grammatical imperative. I’ve often wondered if our peers from next door ended up our superiors at mathematics whilst we had the edge in English.
Not that we didn’t cover mathematics. I distinctly remember wrestling with fractions and it was also the year we were taught how to tell time using the old analogue clocks. This seemed to coincide with the year that digital watches took the world by storm.
My sister purchased a watch for my birthday but it had taken her hours of shopping to find an analogue clock so it would assist me with my time-telling. I remember thinking that we were wasting our time learning the analogue time when it was obvious digital would take over and seemed to make much more sense. How wrong can one be?
Speaking of the next door class, it does seem strange that we had relatively little to do with them (or that’s my recollection anyway). We might have shared the same playground but we didn’t seem to mingle much.
All the photos from my birthday parties were pretty much made up of the group from our class and my recollection is that the vast majority of parties I attended were also kids from our class. One that particularly stands out is Bridget Campbell’s party where there must have been one of the very first video machines in the country because we were kept amused for hours by vision of the film running backwards and in varying speeds. It was a wildlife film and a giraffe looks ungainly running normally, let alone backwards at warp speed.
That was also that party where I suffered the ignominy of being so good at hide and seek that I wasn’t discovered until after the prize had been given out to the last person found – my absence in the tool shed unnoticed.
We did combine with the other Standard One class for scripture and I recall one infamous lesson in our classroom where the kids from next door were perched on our desks and, right up the front and in full view of everyone, one of the boys (who shall remain nameless) lost control of his bladder and flooded the inside of the desk he was sitting on – with pools of water forming on the floor underneath too.
Mrs Mcaninch wasn’t impressed with that display.
Perhaps the cause of his misfortune was the daily milk-runs that were then in operation. In an effort to make sure that all the country’s children were receiving a good intake of calcium the government was providing a subsidized milk service and the milk would arrive in little triangular plastic packages that we sometimes placed in wire cages specifically designed to hold them.
We’d stab a straw in the corner and suck down the contents gratefully. Our milk back in those days was not processed to within an inch of its life. Before using the bottled milk it was necessary to hook a good inch or two of thick, fat cream from the top of the bottle with one’s finger.
We’d receive our daily milk by pedal power. We’d leave empty glass bottles near our gate with a coupon for the number of replacement bottles we required and they’d be replaced by the milk man on his bicycle who would peddle cheerfully around the neighbourhood, delivering bottles and topping up from white lock-up cages that dotted the landscape as a drop-off and collection point for the daily supply.
Occasionally our milk-run at school would include a few packets of “Bengal Juice” which was a chocolate flavoured milk with a Tiger on the plastic cover. If one of us spotted the precious Bengal juice there’d be a rush for it like pigs rushing a trough, the victors emerging with the spoils to the moans and groans of the rest.
We were just eight after all.
But not as most eight year olds. This was also the year where the cruel little civil war we were born into reached its crescendo. During 1979 our country changed name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and the first indigenous-led government installed under the leadership of Bishop Abel Muzorewa. We all stood to attention late that year as a new national flag was raised on the flagpole near our marble patch, just outside the main hall.
The new government was dismissed by the international community as a puppet regime and the bloodshed contiunued. The kill count on both sides mounted and even at that age we were made vividly aware of the dangers around us. Our school had two sirens - the normal siren for what most people would know as the normal fire drill.
But we had another, more urgent one, that wailed out and required an entirely different response. This was known as the "terrorist attack" alarm and our response was to immediately fall to the floor under our desks where we would supposedly be safe from incoming mortar fire. I never quite figured out how this routine was going to keep us safe from shrapnel grenades and the inevitable invaders that would follow their arrival. I suppose it gave us a greater chance than we'd have if we all went screaming for the exits.
This was around the time where two commercial flights of Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscount airplanes had been shot down by SAM7 Heat seeking missiles flying out of Victoria Falls and Kariba. The survivors had been cruelly finished off by the waiting guerrillas. So the spectre of a mortar attack did hang heavily over us - particularly as the odd rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been known to lob into the metropolitan surrounds of Umtali. There was a distinct feeling that it was only a matter of time.
Horror came to our city when a bomb went off in downtown department store, Haddon and Sly. It led to a new policy where we were required to paint a large, white St Andrew's cross on all of our school suit cases to identify that they were not parcel bombs.
It's sad to say but even at eight years old the cynic in me could not understand why people who would stoop to bombing innocent citizens in a department store would give us fair warning by leaving a bomb without a white cross on it.
It's interesting to leaf through the year book from that year. An entire page is devoted to musings on war and peace from the older kids at the school - but I think it captures well the undercurrent that floated throughout the school population.
We were too young to really understand the reasons for the fight, or the rights and wrongs of either side in the conflict, but we did know it took our fathers away for extended absences and sometimes they didn't return.
Part II to include:
- Athletics carnivals and the swimming pool.
- Holidays to South Africa.
- Rugby at Hartsfield Stadium.
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