“I identify as a solar panel!” I exclaimed, extending my black biker jacket arms into the sun.
I needed every thin ray to warm my core.
Minutes earlier, Jock Jnr, 70, had turned at 500m while swimming the historic Nqweba Dam above an even more famous town.
The water is 16°C, but it feels more like 13.
I let out a frigid yawp to the wild Karoo sky, this full expanse of tasty mountain water flowing for scores of kilometres through the Sneeuberg range to the west, decanting into the ocean from the Sundays River at Colchester.
We’d found a flat spot at the water’s edge in a grey, lowering dawn on a day which would soon glow with warm, startling embers of SA truths.
Right now we have wobbled dangerously out of a twin-spoer on 1200 GS bikes, so cold all I could focus on was a hot shower and getting under bed covers to wait for normal life to return.
So it came to pass that we thawed in our humble but spotless and magnificently maintained sick bay rooms at Läer Volkskool’s Huis Eybers hostel!
Yes, I had taken the Peril’s bait: “Molo, feel like going to Graaff-Reinet?”
The full meaning of this multilayered code was, “my brothers and I attended Union High there in the 60s and 80s and every year they re-enact the Boer War when Volkskool and Union have a week of interschools; clashing at every point from debating to the final battle of top hockey and rugby teams”.
This magnificent Karoo town is territorially divided with each school pos decorated with mauve, white and black stripes, or the Windsor green and white of Union.
Ooh jinne, I will be spinning back into our violent racist past ...
Err, no.
We make it in time for Union’s general assembly where the class of ’65 row had a few empty seats, but the rest of the hall was packed with others watching on screens outside.
In came the first hockey and rugby teams and choir to sing — but what happened to whites-only Soufeffrika?
The teachers on stage are a blend of colours, but the kids are coloured or African.
There are a good few white kids, but one thing stood out like a large banner flapping above town, based firmly in both schools, was the arrival in the purest form possible of a cultured nonracialism we could only dream of in ’94.
I am almost reluctant to write about this pocket of exceptionalism pulsating here under the Spandauskop for fear of hexing it, but it is a public day — a most important day for the town — and so here we go.
The classes of old were a coiffured fun array of white and grey transitioning through the years to black.
History, seated literally in rows. But out in front, encouraged by loving teachers, the kids, the pupils, stood in sharp greens, their sparkling white scarves draped smartly, gleaming badges, and sang.
One song, Jimmy Mulovhedsi’s arrangement of the Sotho-Zulu Emlanjeni , felt like a freedom hymn.
Emlanjeni (“at the river”) is a plea for reunion with a loved one, at a place where people meet and connect, symbolising a desire for togetherness and the hope of rekindling a relationship.
It conveys a sense of nostalgia, longing and the pain of separation, while also expressing a strong desire for reconciliation and a return to a cherished connection, according to three music sites.
The song and the singing felt hyperreal ... This was all about change we can love and cherish, and the rest of my day here simply affirmed this.
Headmaster William Pringle, speaking in a quiet, firm but deeply meaningful tone, tolled out the best of educational values, but I was touched most when he thanked the scholars for being wonderful youths.
The speech which really rocked me was from head girl Aaminah Steele, who spoke not about glory and hubris, but about home being more than four walls and a door, but about place and its people. This school felt like home.
I felt this intuitively as the Peril and I drifted through the grounds, upstairs and downstairs at his old hostel, all the gruesome beatings and injustices yet the wonderful times, good teachers and thrill of the Karoo.
This was what made his quest for personal reconciliation and forgiveness so poignant.
It was the interactions with the teens playing pool or passing by that kept pulling us back to the present.
So interested, curious, polite in a personally invested kind of way.
I saw much infrastructure design, care and maintenance.
Much wear but no tear. Always painted, clean and working. Never ostentatious. Always grounded and clear.
This, in its SA context, is such a radical place.
You kind of want to fight for it, to defend these gains from the postmodern barbarians at the gate, to borrow from JM Coetzee.
There is so much grace that even the crunching games appeared to take place within the protected walls of medics, refs, private security, a few cops, the teaching staff and an entire community.
Why? Why is this place here? During apartheid, this town was a mean garrison of National Party control
I have been through a house used as an operations centre for the fascist security branch in the 80s and 90s — every room had a row of electrical plugs at desk level! That was a lot of Big Boetie going on.
But not today! These are transformed school communities — where best for SA to start but at the heartbeat of fecundity, where young families set out on their life journey of hope and aspiration?
I am a Queens College matriculant from then-Queenstown. These Karoo schools fascinate me. They are far from big cities and close to hills and mountains.
At the Saturday night dinner for the Union class of 1968 and 1969, inside the extraordinary oord binne n dorp, Profcon Country Village with every kind of facility available for kids and adults, I hold the braai light for a dik Engels farmer from the Tarkastad district.
He farms with his son-in-law whose name he pointedly tells me is Xhosa.
His second daughter has married a “Zimbabwean”, and he does not mean “Rhodesian”!
This is all about walking in other people’s shoes.
Later in the evening we are joined by a representative of the union alumni, who very sweetly informs us about all the ins and outs of the liquor ban in schoolgrounds causing a divisive problem for annual gatherings in the licensed lounge above the main field.
Did any of this class find the songs at assembly troubling?
Tosh and nonsense, explodes the table. They loved it! Bring it!
Later in the stands at the first-team clash, Union High’s voices ring out across this town of Sobukwe and Goniwe, “Amandla! Power!”
And? Did the sky fall in? No. Nothing. Just a great vibe.
I was stunned by the easy incorporation of the mountains, Camdeboo plains and wide Karoo skies in the school song, and then the Peril told me about the gate.
He would sign out, go through the gate and straight onto the mountain where they would play, scramble and explore for the entire day.
Lost and found in nature, the hills, with the school’s tacit blessing.
Headmaster Pringle, who is from East London’s Wallpaper Inn family, says access is more regulated due to safety, but it is still there.
I want answers! Why are you still coming here in your 70s to the reunion?
Why was this school so special? I asked a beautifully groomed woman next to me.
Distractions! In two orders: fewer distractions of big city wicked problems, but also the wholesome distraction of being at a mixed school, with boys!
And when the two school heads went out onto the field, Volkskool’s head was a woman, in pants!
Womandla Henriëtte Malan!
I could have wept when I saw those youths, boys and girls, fighting like deadly foes on the field, hugging each other like beloved friends when the end whistle was blown.
There is so much corruption and violation of Mandela’s SA, and such a dreadful spread of malfeasance and egregious cruelty — a knock-down effect of our dream being colonised and robbed by mendacious, ruthless elites.
So, to find these pockets of nonracial resistance — for that is what they are, centres of academic, sporting and human excellence — places a responsibility on all of us to gather and form a social dome of defence.
We need to go out and support and encourage them, put money into maintenance and outdoor education (sorry, slipped that one in), just any support.
But also, go to these school reunions and support, and shout, like the kids we once were.
For, in doing so, you are cheering on the South Africa that we so profoundly desire, which is being forged against all odds and must never, ever again be stopped.