Chapter One
Early Years - a Dissident in the Making?
Mid-1930s to early 1940's

 

Of entangled knots and families

Who among the ‘Western’ middle-classes, escapes the questioning gaze of Sigmund Freud, his contemporaries or successors, his allies or bitter opponents? To date I have, and propose, like most of my fellow human beings, to continue in that ignorant state - although this book may prove to be a fruitful source for contending psycho-analytic interpretations. That unlikely event noted, I begin, a mite hesitantly, at the beginning, at what I sense to have been my decisive early days. Be assured, this is not a work of amateur self-analysis, I’ll not delve deeply.

My accessible memories tell me what I know: my mother was constantly ill, a severe asthma sufferer whose latter years were spent in desperate attempts, quite simply, to breath. I remember too, too clearly the recurring scene of her standing at an open window, oxygen flask to hand, gasping. Her face - otherwise reassuring, serene, loving - distorted by despair, scored by pain. At such times, she was able to control neither bowels nor bladder. My sister, almost seven years my junior, and I would stare from the doorway, embarrassed by and for our mother; bewildered, frightened, oppressed by our shared agony. We came to know helplessness in misery. Her tears were ours. We walked the house a-tiptoe in fear of upsetting her, of incurring her now quick irritability - her pain-induced, soon to be regretted bursts of temper. In comforting each other, we longed for the hugs, cuddles and smiles of her less distraught moments.

My father, probably as bewildered, as scared as his children, could not cope. His timid, Babbitt-like fears, his consistent weakness seemed to inhibit, prohibit empathetic understanding - for his wife or children. He certainly scared me in my pre-barmitzvah years. He threatened, at times almost daily, to exercise on me the harsh discipline his autocratic father had practised on him years earlier. He too, I sensed, was dismayed by everyday life, not least by his wife’s prolonged, obdurate ill-health. My sister was treated sentimentally, as though she were a gorgeous porcelain doll; which is precisely the way she was dressed and presented to others, particularly our aunts, uncles, cousins. I, a young boy, was repeatedly ordered to be a “proper man,” to care diligently for my mother and sister, “our two ladies.” I was to be strong and quiet in the home, invariably to “leave poor Mama in peace.” Instructions that he seemed himself unable to fulfil; peremptory commands that remain lodged in my memory.

But, I must stress, life was not hell, ceaseless distress. We did not wallow in emotional trauma. To the contrary. I recall happy, extended, enduring periods: family games in the garden, picnic trips by motor car in the days when their ownership was rare, regular night-time stories, an adored dog sleeping nightly on my bed; loving relatives, cheerful friends, months of emotional sunshine. By and large, we revelled in the easy-going, cosy domesticity of white, middle-class suburban existence. It was seductive. There was loving kindness, a great deal of it. There was security, comfort, happiness. There were flashes of joy. But there was also a terrible illness, a sad loneliness, the dread of an impending relapse. The black times occurred, recurred, occurred again. That was a stubborn focus.

Then our mother died, my sister was almost ten, I just sixteen. The wider family gathered, there were ready assurances, “it’s a blessing, a blessing in disguise.” Neither my sister nor I were convinced. Given what we knew of our father’s habitual weaknesses - often discussed between us - that was no surprise. In mourning, we were troubled, deeply anxious. I recall weeks of attempting to placate my sister’s tears and forebodings.

She was right, the blow came soon, too soon and too much of a blow. We were told that she - aged ten, mother just ripped from her, the funeral-baked cakes scarcely digested - was to go to boarding school in a distant city, Potchefstroom. Boarding school, sent from home at this vulnerable, poignant time! She wept, incessantly. I argued against the proposal, none too coherently, sensibly or, indeed, calmly. Our father, supported by ‘the family,’ was adamant. She went - overwrought, packed off to return at each term-end, never to come adequately to terms with her arbitrary banishment. Within months, I was also off, in the South African Air Force (SAAF) at flying school.

A year or so on, our father sold the house in which we had lived for a decade - cumbersome, large, lonely, filled with painful memories? He moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the fringe of the inner city. The main bedroom was patently his: his furniture, his ambience, the smell of his after-shave lotion. The other, smaller room was fitted-out with what passed for ‘feminine’ colours, patterns, textures; not, unambiguously not suitable for a youth in his late teens. I had been relegated, when ‘home’ on leave, to a narrow balcony on which a bed and wardrobe were tucked behind an awning, portion of which could be raised in fine weather. A clearly make-shift measure. The message seemed plain: here, as at the bungalow I shared with my fellow pupil-pilots, I was camping out, passing through, expected shortly to move on. In addition to being emotionally and ideologically at odds, my father and I were to become physically separated. I felt hurt, rejected; not though as profoundly as my sister had done.

The father, the Freudian authority figure, and the son, the challenging rebel, had collided too often, too profoundly, too hurtfully. This was made explicit when he and I clashed horribly after an unusually, a perhaps ominously uncontroversial Sunday lunch. The meal concluded, the dishes cleared, we sat in his sitting room over coffee; he preparing to doze and I to go off with a group of SAAF friends. I do not recall precisely how it happened, but I know that the conversation turned to that ever explosive issue for white, male South Africans - cross-colour sexual relations, ever-so-politely referred to via the supposed euphemism ‘miscegnation.’ A deed, misdeed, that was at that time illegal. We both became angry, our differing values were colliding yet again. There was nothing on which we could have disagreed more forcibly. This was and remains the final, the crucial test for white South Africans. The matter was, then as now, emblematic. He asked whether, horror of horrors, I would ‘allow’ my sister to marry a k*****, a black man.

Astonished that this hoary racist cliche should come from him, I responded inappropriately, brutally, thoughtlessly. I recall telling him that, as far as I was concerned, she was to wed with whoever she wished, I could not, would not attempt to allow or disallow. I would counsel her - as though that was needed - on the damaging socio-politica difficulties such a couple might expect to encounter. But, if they were determined to marry, or live together, I would support them. I was, above all, honest, self-righteously, scrupulously, possibly irritatingly so - “to thine own self be true.” But Polonius has ever been a disaster.

The sitting-room seemed to burst apart. My father went purple with apparently uncontrollable rage. He sprang from his chair, rushed over to me, began beating, slapping, punching and kicking at me; curses pouring from him all the while. In turn, my anger intensified, to the point at which I screamed a warning that, with but one further blow from him, I would fight back, punch and kick back, knock him down. A sudden, harrowing, shattering silence. We stood heaving, staring at each other, drained of feeling. I left the apartment, limp, hurt, guilty; as, I imagine he was. It was a watershed, we had taken each other - father and only son - to a crumbling brink, to stare into a maelstrom of discordant values; a gross mismatch of which we had been aware but chosen to skirt.

After that, and for many years after, our relationship was mutually cool, tense, kept under carefully screwed-down control. I had achieved, I believed, a long wanted independence. There were, however, threatening break points. The most memorable being when I told him that Beate, my wife-to-be and I were jointly to occupy the apartment of friends who had gone on a lengthy trip abroad. His immediate reaction was to advise me that if she slept with me before marriage, she would, thereafter, sleep with any man. I asked whether that was true of all women, including my late mother. He replied positively, emphatically. That, he affirmed, is the nature of womenfolk, they all are, have been, will ever be potentially unfaithful, sluts. I did not pursue this perverse interpretation of radical feminist orthodoxy, of what men reputedly think of women.

A far-reaching change occurred in our relationship only when, toward the end of his life, he grew suddenly ill during a visit which he and my step-mother were making to my family and I in Cardiff. They occupied an upstairs bedroom; before I could volunteer, she and he asked me to help him to bed. He was a big man, we struggled - manfully is, I suppose, the prescribed description - he becoming more and more helpless. Eventually, with great difficulty, I lifted him into my arms, carried him to the bed, undressed, bathed and helped him into pyjamas.

This, of course, is what he had done on many, many occasions vis-a-vis his infant and toddler son. For each of us, I suspect, the frozen animosities of our shared past thawed, momentarily. We were again, however fleetingly, father and son, now in an affecting reversal of formal roles. In this sentiently charged manner, I recognised once more that the rule of my central authority figure had early on become, had probably ever been that of a painfully weak, a pitiably frightened person. He had not only been the crassly insensitive man so enduringly embedded in my thoughts; there was much more to him.

Perhaps we humans need again and yet again to learn and re-learn that the bases of overbearing power - weakness and authority - form an especially oppressive combination. It is an amalgam that marshals and is marshalled by the social, economic, political, military factors which, in 1994, Eric Hobsbawm portrayed so grimly in his Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, a period that includes the years covered here. In this context, my use of the word ‘perhaps’ seems aptly ambiguous, it is an escape from exact formulation. The use of ‘perhaps’ or indeed of ‘perhaps not,’ signifies little but that further consideration is, surely, called for.

There were, unsurprisingly, other encounters with familial authority. There was always avuncular advice: about, for instance, my proposed career; about me volunteering for service in the Air Force, here in South Africa or, later, in Israel; about my increasingly attenuated attendances in synagogue, my growing participation in liberation activities ... There was perturbation when my partner and I declined a formal, religious marriage. Kindly, concerned advice seemed to slip, not quite imperceptibly, into firm, authoritative quasi-instruction. One had continually - trying always to be polite, calm - to assert one’s independence. We found none of this unduly troublesome. It probably occurs widely. It is perhaps expressly characteristic of tight-knit, diaspora Jewry. It did though underscore the pervasiveness of single-minded persuasive power - i.e., authority - whether benignly intended or not.

There were, in my case, two factors that, in their effects, defy the description benign. These centred on an academically brilliant cousin and on my reaction to his father, the closest my relatives came to having a paterfamilias. Another father and son tale, now with a different twist.

 

Father and son; cousin and uncle

Cousin Paul, some eight years my senior, tall, slim, handsome in a specifically ‘Jewish’ manner, became the bete noir of my youth. He was an outstanding pupil at school, an accomplished student at university and, reputedly, the youngest professorial appointment in the Wits Medical School. He was urbane, witty, a sparkling raconteur; a polite, smiling charmer. Even now, sixty or more years on and long after his death, I tend on occasion to become uneasy at the thought of him. Even in distant recollection, he seems to have possessed all the feted qualities I lacked. Cousin Paul was a radiant, phosphorescent presence in conventional Johannesburg Jewish society. I was, am not. Our families, my father in particular, did not conceal their preference. He was repeatedly, emphatically - and I do mean emphatically, repeatedly - presented to me as an exemplar, as the model on which I ought to, must, need fashion myself.

I came, understandably, to resent him - “ a puffed up swot, an intellectual snob, a clever, clever prick,” as he seemed to me. In adolescent reaction, I thought to underscore that angry response by seeking to counter what I identified as the central element of his vaunted reputation - his well-directed scholarly application. Years later, on reading Heinrich Boll’s singularly insightful novel, Group Portrait with Lady, I realised that I had adopted the posture, and associated behaviour, of a vividly portrayed character in the book, Boll’s “deliberate under-achiever.” Though I continued consistently to read widely, I treated my school and, later, undergraduate studies with a foolish, ill-considered, self-destructive disdain, with conscious neglect. Unknown to him, cousin Paul, my recommended authority on most matters, was being challenged, defied. I unequivocally refused incorporation into his image. I would be my own person, not his mirrored reflection.

That extensive reading was an escape from my virtually bookless home and, at the same time, a recurring invitation to the new-found worlds which reading offers. I found refuge in the Johannesburg Public Library; found release from my father’s collected copies of the Readers Digest and his single shelf of beautifully bound, unread volumes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray. There, in the public library, the shelves brimmed with universes previously beyond my ken. But, as always in South Africa, a caution: under the bravely inscribed declaration on its main facade - “Libris Thesaurus Animi” - this ‘public’ library, with its treasures of the mind, was closed to all but whites.

Nonetheless, the library was my intellectual warehouse, the storage depot in which my interest in architecture must have originated. It was there that I found and gobbled up a symposium report, New Architecture and City Planning, that I was gripped by Frank Lloyd Wright’s An Autobiography, his quirky Genius and the Mobocracy. It was there that I stumbled on Banister Fletcher’s splendidly illustrated A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. Even now, these and similar volumes stand invitingly on my bookshelves. It was in that gloomy reading room that, week upon week, I read The New Statesman and Nation for, especially, John Berger’s inspiring, his overtly political reports on art.

I devoured and devoured, but did not necessarily digest. Much in those volumes was then beyond me. That applied with particular force to the philosophical content of, for example, Karl Marx’s Das Capital - it could, insofar as it was accessible to me, have been left in the original German. My metier, the shorter, more popular, more poetic Communist Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels, was, in contrast, pellucid in its clarity.

Back to ‘the family,’ to my rich, rich, rich Uncle Henry, cousin Paul’s father - a markedly conventional, indeed orthodox success in the eyes of Johannesburg Jewish society. He served on numerous committees, many of which were influential in South African Jewish affairs. He was, he himself told me, an internationally recognised expert on company law, the world over. He was widely consulted and commissioned, an authority. He owned huge share holdings in industrial and other cross-national companies. A self-made man - self-assured, confident, haughty, firmly established in the mode of post-Victorian, Edwardian heroes like those Anthony Trollope’s novels depicted so evocatively. Uncle Henry: powerful, authoritative, a pundit who, confirmed in his established status,‘brooked no nonsense.’

After my aborted attempt to enlist in the South African Naval Forces (SANF), my father had consulted with Uncle Henry, who I had long, privately named “die grootbaas,” the big boss. Without reference to me, my uncle decided that, since he, quite arbitrarily, believed that a career in engineering suited me, I should get experience in one of the many factories he controlled. Also without reference, my father agreed. I, presumably, was expected merely to accept. Intrigued by the prospect of working with members of the real, the egte proletariat, albeit mostly whites, I too agreed.

I remember little about the working details of that six-month interlude - winding dynamo armatures in a Charlie Chaplin-like, Modern Times production line - but a great deal about the demeaned lives, the shabby working conditions and shoddy incomes of the workers. At best, they were being thoroughly exploited; at worst, a condition that applied most immediately to the non-unionised black workers, they were treated nothing less than disgustingly, inhumanely. All this was firmly in the domain of Uncle Henry, my family’s leading member?

Then, shortly before I left for the SAAF, the entire family gathered for the annual Passover meal at Uncle Henry’s home. These occasions are usually splendid, celebratory affairs, filled with custom-laden rituals, chanting choruses and readings from the history of toil under Egyptian bondage.. This one was rapidly reduced to a monologue from our host who lectured us on the then supposedly severe economic crisis in southern Africa; all, as he presented his quasi-legal case, occasioned by the “lazy, greedy, stupid” working classes, the blacks in particular. Those three adjectives were burned into my mind.

Having worked in one of his factories, I had a somewhat different perspective; one which I volunteered when, on concluding his lecture, he turned for confirmation to me - one of ‘his workers.’ As I contradicted him, at considerable length, I watched the scandalised family, mouths agape at my effrontery. Depictions such as “bloated plutocrat” and “brutal capitalist” or “exploiting industrialist” had, one imagines, not previously been used to describe ‘die grootbaas,’ my solicitous benefactor. And this in his spacious home, at his generous dining table. Stock Dickensian stuff - Uncle Henry the unrepentant Scrooge.

He, obviously taken aback, angry, furious, tried to silence me. When he had succeeded, it was to tell me that I, in addition to being stupid, greedy lazy - i.e., an indolent worker - had been unacceptably rude. If, I recall him yelling, I had an iota of respect for an elder host, his home and table, and for a sanctified family assembly, I would at once apologise. The offended voice of established authority - pompous, self-righteous, oblivious to contrary views. I left the table as well as the house, now an outcast, a rebel with a somewhat shaky cause. Uncle Henry, no fool he, had torn mercilessly at my youthful enthusiasms.

Was I now free of that abstraction, ‘the family’? No. Insulting its head, its leader, in his home, the entire complement present, was no easily dismissed event. Phillip Larkin - a past Poet Laureate no less - tersely, famously, defined the institution’s parental scope: “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They do not mean to but they do.” As I recall, Larkin did not stipulate a time limit and I have yet to encounter one.

 

Masters and servants?

There are, of course, other oppressive or potentially oppressive institutions. In the main, they exist, and practice, with wide social endorsement. Here I am thinking, as a prime example, of schools, primary and secondary. My early schooling was, as I remember, placid; without pronounced instances of rebellion from me - possibly because it occurred before I had opted for the path of deliberate under-achievement. This programme of sharply reduced activity, of minimum academic work, began in and persisted through much of my five year spell in secondary education, at high school. There, with a singular exception, I was by-passed by the teachers, the “masters.” What else were they to do with the numerous non-achievers dumped annually in their crowded classrooms?

The exception was our history teacher, Mr Terry, a man who would, I’m sure, have scorned to be anyone’s master. He presented history studies as a series of intricate, inter-related interrogations of the past, as holistic enquiries into the relationships between human beings, their complex attitudes and behaviours, their interactions with their environs, including the animal and vegetable world. There were no lists of memorable dates, no tales of ‘heroic’ individuals; least of all, monarchs, statesmen and similar ‘leading figures.’ There were no stories taken principally from the victors of past battles. In his hands, history came alive, a contested and re-contested tale - as engaging as the pressing world about us.

Mr Terry impressed me enormously. For a considerable period, my programme of extra-curricula reading turned on historical volumes. I kept in touch with the school’s official curriculum via books covering, among other topics, the history of art, of linguistic history, the history and philosophy of science, specifically of physics and chemistry. That excluded mathematics and Latin; two subjects which have bewildered me, turned me off from my very earliest introductions to them. Later, when I turned from academic, but not other forms of deliberate under-achievement, I learned that my undirected but zealously followed programme had provided a sound platform for further, detailed studies. My unplanned mix of disparate and attentive readings proved to be surprisingly useful. Thank you, Mr Terry, you helped to save me from myself.

Whatever else it was - tedious, dull, repetitive, boring - my schooling was not oppressive. Apart, that is, from the whooping senior pupils who repeatedly turned the juniors upside down in order to pocket the small change that fell from them. I found the stresses which did occur manageable. In any event, I was able to flee them; to retreat into the extensive reading that I indulged at home and, preferably, during the frequent cycling/camping trips which my close friends and I enjoyed. There was, I still fondly recall, something inexpressibly relaxing about reading outdoors, on the banks of the then clear Jukskei River, or on unwatched farm land, at times under canvas.

 

Soldiers of the Queen, my lads

There was, however, an inerasable matter - our obligatory cadet parades. These took place each Friday, when we were required to dress in neatly pressed, toy-soldier uniforms, to drill for hours with massive, outdated rifles, to pretend, with an enforced show of willing, that we were fighting men. Our teachers and a clutch of favoured prefects played earnestly at being officers and/or senior non-commissioned officers; tasks which, I was persuaded, they embraced heartily. They stood, on the most marginal pretext, smartly to attention; they saluted each other ostentatiously, as we were to do to them. They regularly marched us back and forth across the cricket field, they shouted commands and counter orders, their uniforms were assiduously cared for, soldier smart. They were occasional, play-play soldiers - at, their demeanour suggested, the pinnacle of manly accomplishment.

They acted like the credulous, naive boy-scout youngsters which we were. They appeared to believe, as matters of self-evident faith, in an array of strange, literally outlandish ideas and ideals - in fighting gallantly to the death for King and/or Queen, in defending ‘the country’ against unnamed, stereotyped hordes, in safeguarding the always victorious British Empire, and, though not overtly, in securing the apparently fragile virtue of white women. The latter seemed permanently to call for alert protection, they were delicate magnets for the always marauding natives “at the gates.” We first year pupils described their would-be guardians as “weirdos’, a wholly appropriate depiction; one I have carried with me through a half century.

Initially, in my first term, I found all this mildly troublesome, an irksome consequence of being in an all-male school. I escaped by joining the Signals Corps - an astonishingly, unwittingly brilliant move. It saved me from the weekly uniform charade because the master/officer in charge was, unaccountably, lax about this otherwise inflexible matter. More important, it enabled me to practice and learn a great deal about such absorbing topics as the morse code, field telephone communications, radio transmissions and receptions.

But my underlying objection to the pathetic war-games played weekly by members of our cadet unit lay in their concordance with the unthinking machismo that pervaded the school. Men and boys, we were there to teach and learn, above all else, about confident assertive manhood; about a, if not the, purported central tenet of ‘Western’ civilised society, about the iron laws of male superiority. Our lessons, our sporting feats, our military training, our social activities; all re-enforced us as morally, emotionally, intellectually peerless male beings. Those who concurred, were insiders; those who did not, were pitiable outsiders - lapsed, make-believe men who had briefly been permitted to look in.

That inglorious ethos was, in its turn, linked to a snobbish love affair with things English, especially matters associated with top echelon, English public schools. For example, our school houses - relics of Harrow, Marlborough and the like - were named in honour of the largely mythical ancient Romans, Trojans, Spartans, Tuscans, Thebans, not, heaven forbid, in homage to local groups. We were enjoined to live, in our minds, on the far-off British Isles; to think of ourselves as the inheritors of triumphant imperial, gentlemanly, late-Victorian values. Latin was an essential ingredient: our long-serving, tirelessly honoured Headmaster, laboured under the title Dux - he was, after all, our revered leader.

The teachers often underscored their comments on our essay submissions with, to us, curious Latin phrases - “quo vadis Lipman A?” Latin, the imposed study of which marked the putatively suave British public schools. Latin, the idealised language of lofty imperial dominion, the ancient accents of the blimps among our teachers who, oblivious to, say, the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon’s damning views, urged us to war. They sought daily to direct youngsters in the crude art of dying nobly for their country; an ‘art’ by which members of the majority populations had regularly been slaughtered by superior, mechanised weaponry. Mr Terry must have despaired. But not the teacher who had ignored me when Officer in Command of the cadet corp to then fawn discomfited when, months later, I greeted him from my barathea uniform. I was now worthy of attention, a potential hero, readied for a gloriously gallant death.

His attempts to re-enforce what he took, as a matter of course, to be my Christian patriotism were crude, offensive. On departing his creepy company, I comforted myself with a memorable passage from Leo Tolstoy’s On Civil Disobedience and Non-violence (1890),

What then of the commander of the school cadet corps?

His insensitivity about my religious affiliations brought Mark Twain to mind, a contemporary of and as biting a commentator as Tolstoy. In 1900, Twain wrote:

My recent corps commander, a soul full of meanness, a pious hypocrite? Surely not. But his warrior Christianity was a far, far cry from a humane, principled determination to halt fascist/nazi terror.

To conclude that those schooldays were wretched would be to fly in the face of white middle-class norms. Privilege then, as now, rarely included analyses of its bases, of those who made it possible. We were a happy bunch, cheerful youths whose minds and days were filled with sport, a sunny white South African pre-occupation. Yes, the ancient Romans were with us, we attended their distracting circuses morning, noon and evening. I was no exception: a rugby player who delighted in the competitive brawls of this sprawling, brawling game. I remember even now the adrenalin excitement when, in possession of the ball, I heard the cry from the sidelines, “plat die Jood” - flatten the Jew. That was the call immediately to pass the ball to a team-mate. I remember also the triumph and disappointment when, wildly, blindly, I hit a six off a visiting cricket team’s renowned fast bowler. Having struck, I opened my eyes to watch my achievement smash into the pavilion clock. School rumour was that such a striker would be rewarded, money would pass hands. Not so, my father was presented with an account for the repairs.

Despite these assertions about my generally pleasant, happy schooldays, I must confess to being under-privileged in a specific respect - music. The cadet band apart, there was no musical tuition, we were without a school orchestra. Moreover, my home environs were fixed at the level of Gilbert and Sullivan. We had a radio, primarily for listening to the news, and a record player which was devoted to excerpts from Iolanthe, The Mikardo, a smattering of Richard Tauber’s syrupy, middle-European kitsch. That was it. That was my world of music.

 

Music, not, certainly not an interregnum

I was introduced to jazz - King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Ma Rainey, the genius of Louis Armstrong - by a neighbour. It was, to coin a cliche, love at first sight. This famed trio and many, many others like them filled my waking hours, and dreams. I read widely on jazz history and theory and listened the more attentively, affectionately than before. The affair flourished, despite or because of family protestations that this was barbaric, k***** music; destined, unlike the Madame Butterfly choruses, to be forgotten. No way, my amours extended, to include Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and at home in SA, Hugh Masekela, Chris McGregor, Abdullah Ibrahim. Life has been enriched, beyond measure.

And that vast reservoir of inspiration, the classics? In my early teens, I forced myself on them - in the Johannesburg City Hall and at open air concerts in Joubert Park, among audiences who were white, white, white. That fortunately, was a temporary disaster; one being redressed even now by, among many others, Professor Khumalo, his niece Sibongile and the members of the Soweto String Quartet. When Warwick Braithwaite, a visitor from Britain, conducted the local orchestra, he seemed directly to be addressing me. He took me through Beethoven, Papa Brahms and Bach - I have clung to them ever since. Bach’s Tocatto and Fugue will, if my wishes are fulfilled, mark my cremation ceremony - with Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige and Armstrong’s gravely voice punching out When the Saints go Marching In.

Not long after these awakenings, came the not entirely unexpected outcome of my high school efforts at deliberate under-achievement - a bare, scraped pass in the school-leaving, matriculation results. Shocked, ashamed, I signed-up with a so-called cram college to re-sit the entire examination four months later. It was, however, an examination in a different province, the Cape rather than the Transvaal Matriculation Board. Different curriculum, set books, different emphases, unexpected nuances. Four long months on, the Christmas holiday period included, I sat to write again. Shortly after, came the results: I had passed - passably well.

The notion of what, following Heinrich Boll, I was years later to depict as deliberate under-achievement had to be re-examined. To which spheres of life was it applicable and to which marginal - possibly self-negating? What, henceforth, was I to oppose, to resist adamantly and what might be regarded as peripheral? What was it that essentially offended, challenged my most cherished values? Questions which have taken a life-time to address. Questions to which definitive answers remain elusive.