SAFM does run some pretty bizarre 'after-eight' debates from time to time and this week's keynote event on Monday was no exception. Monday's debate concerned the sudden awakening and 'discovery' that more than 20 % of the 1992, so called 'White' population, have left South Africa over the post-revolution period. They called their debate 'Whitey's who leave: Victims or villains' and the debate convenor, Nikiwe Bikitsha demonstrated her own sub-texts to the topic by her enraged response to a caller's objection to the title-
The topic was once again revealing of the schizophrenia that afflicts out new society. The regular battery of callers who usually phone in denouncing 'Whitey' for past 'evil deeds' with declamatory demands that all whiteys be deported, dispossessed or inflicted with whatever other particular hellish punishment they want to vent on those who abused them for so long, were now phoning in to denounce said villains for having left.
I thought the whole fruitless debate a glorious demonstration of the principle that one is dammed if one does- and dammed if one doesn't. It certainly brought our all the fundamental reasons why 'the frogs' have hopped out of a warming pan before they lost the use of their muscles. [It was also an intriguing comment on the tense nature of the 'news' topic that it has take some years for this particular 'olds' to actually make the SABC headlines, given that the Economist first published this story about the huge exodus of so-called "white" skills, more than two years ago.] Evolving from the programme though was the realisation of how much I had been personally affected by this evacuation process-
Later this month I will reach the sixtieth anniversary of my birth and had pondered the idea of having a celebratory bash-I am not too keen on the idea-my father only made 61 and my granddad 66 so I thought it would be prudent to lie low and shut up until I hit 67, if ever, and have actually got something to brag about.
On the other hand the kids thought I should rip the arse out of things and have a party. So I sat down a few days ago and started to list who would be there. It was a sobering exercise. Going through the lists from old birthday anniversaries I eventually realised that after sixty years of living I barely know enough people around here, that I would call kith or kin, to fill a small table at the old Zoo Lake Bowling club where I like to hang out now and again.
Of the 57 members of my family who could have attended my fiftieth birthday non-party [I was too busy with the launch of my first novel to care about such rudimentary things as birthdays] one has since died [aged 98] and only eight still live anywhere in South Africa-the rest have evaporated into a planet wide diaspora.
So to friends-I've never been a person that encouraged friendships having had many bad friendship experiences growing up. So I was always pretty low on friends at the best of times -.I have many acquaintances, some associates but few friends. Nonetheless I did manage to rustle up about fifty people [friends, colleagues and associates] who came to my fortieth birthday bash which involved the roasting of sheep and oceans of liquid refreshments, and which turned into a three day hooligan affair, with some people even staying until tuesday.
Only five of those people would still be around to make my sixtieth. Some have died, in itself a disturbing piece of knowledge, the rest-gone offshore-three this year alone.
Even in my own immediate family we mirror the trend with one of my children gone already. She went to a place where she expected only to make some real money, an experience increasingly fantasy driven in our own neck of the woods. But now she makes so much its falling out of her ears, and she enjoys opportunities she knows from harsh experience that she is being denied in South Africa. She recently told us that she wont come back except to visit her aging parents, which she did one weekend last month for her birthday. Plus maturing romance with an offshore citizen from some exotic island will in all likelihood cement that probably.
So there we are-as one grows older one is more likely to make enemies than friends and one has also passed that time when anyone who more or less knew your name could be called a friend and so one's circle of associates grows smaller-I've also carefully avoided cultivating 'invite people to my home' type friendships amongst my work associates at the place where I have worked part-time as a 'casualised wakker' for nearly a decade. So I'm not suddenly going to break the mould by getting a bunch of them together for drinkies-I've always held to the view that one should keep one's work and one's play separate: not to mention the politics of who to ask and who not to.
Then to add a cherry to the top of what may be called the 'Migration birthday invitation blues saga' my nearest local pub, where i have stopped off for year to nourish my aching soul before breaching the last few hundred metres to the homestead, closed down last month and migrated to a 'larnier' part of town where they have less demand for 'takeaways' and they can charge more for healthier rounds-So I can't even down a few celebratory down downs with that collection of congenial neighbourhood businessmen that used to mooch around there on a Friday afternoon to chew over the week's events and who were always such a minefield source of useful information.
Ja boet, this migration business is hell on anniversary stuff hey-Were those who left victims of villains, as Ms Bikitsha stridently demanded we decide [with venomous emphasis on the latter choice] and I would say neither-I know of few returnees -most who have left have turned out to be winners in the places where they have gone and those who didn't 'win' did no worse than many of us who have remained to endure the various poison tipped slings and arrows of this new outrageous fortune. [with apologies to old 'Bill Spokeshave'].
So I guess I'll have a quiet birthday 'bash' with me n the missus, who is a serious workaholic, so I hope I can induce her to abandon work for an hour or two. Nope- I've just mentioned this to her and she tells me she is organising a Sports Dinner that night with 'Whatisname': some important celebrity person as the speaker- So tough on the birthday shit; and my son says he's going to be in Cape Town, and my matriculating baby reckons she has other plans.
So I shall dig out my dusty copies of the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath both of whom share my 'Day' and together we'll guzzle liquids at some congenial café: maybe the Blue Naartjie up in the 'Grove' if they haven't also moved to larnier pastures in the meantime; and I'll stand a round or two [it's not usually too crowded] and drink a wee snifter to all those absent persons.
Then I'll blast the airwaves around us with the poetry of my best buddies: Sylvia, Dylan and me-and if no one listens, I'm officially old enough and ugly enough that I don't really care.
Cheers
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My birthday turned out to be a great day...some difficult customers paid me the money i was owed, i was invited to play Arthur Bell on the Bells stand at the Whiskey Live Show at the Sandton Convention Centre and that was a buzz, we [the family] feasted on their glorious food at the Radium; and later i guzzled beer at the Blue Naartjie where, having lost my copies of Plath and Thomas, i made do with the maudlin ramblings of a band of drunken muslims...how's that for a first time in your life for something, just when you thought you had peaked.
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