I spent the first 10 years of my boyhood running wild in the streets of Kew Town. There we played Cowboys and Crooks and Kennetjie.
We had a basic moral grounding in the supposed truism that the good cowboys wore white hats and the bad cowboys, black ones. Sadly, we did not spot then the insidious subliminal lies on which the racial issues would eventually be predicated.
In those streets I also learnt that neighbours preferred sending me to the shop because I was fast and reliable. My friends tended to dally playing with spin-tops or balls or spokeless cycle wheels, delaying the execution of the chore. I learnt that efficiency and reliability and a willingness to perform well had tangible rewards. A penny per trip could turn into a lucrative day.
At the same time, I learnt other little tricks, like the fact that potato size influenced price. There were times when I bought the cheaper potatoes to score a few extra pennies without being caught out. We were already developing the streetwise skills which made us so effective when the confrontations finally came.
Other lessons learnt in this first decade had life-long consequences. In fact, all the lessons moulded me, but not as immediately as the following two. My eldest sister, Daphne, who has since passed on, started going to school. I realised that she, at 6 years old, was ready for school.
I lacked by one-and-a-half years. But the gap she left by leaving me alone each school-going day became too much. On the third day (is there a mystical reference embedded here somewhere?) I decided that enough was enough.
She was my playmate and my friend and she was not going to be around for a long while on most days.
My solution? Like Mary’s little lamb, I followed her to school one day. Mrs Ontong, the teacher, was horrified. She couldn’t send me home alone, nor could she send Daphne to take me home and then come back. As a result, I was given a slate and a stylus (slate “griffie”) and started my schooling right there at four-and-a-half years.
Believe it or not, at the end of the year I wrote the exams and passed with Daphne! But wonder of wonders, she passed to Sub-Standard B and I went to Standard 1. Modesty and a sense of decorum prevent me from expanding on this anecdote.
The other lesson occurred a few years later, when we had gravitated to feint-ruled classwork books and pencils. And pencils could be sharpened at school in hand-operated pencil-sharpeners. But at home it was different. I surreptitiously used my dad’s Minora blade to sharpen a pencil and then put that stout product back into its metal cradle for dad’s next use.
But horror of horrors, he confronted me a day or so later by simply asking: “When did you use my blade to sharpen your pencil?”
It was a question and an accusation in one. And he sealed his case against me by turning the blade over and revealing the tell-tale lead-marks which I hadn’t thought to clean off.
The memory of the lesson – and the hiding that went with it – remains with me right up to this day in my eighth decade of life.
Can we replicate those life-lessons where we learnt about being obedient and being rewarded? Or being naughty and accepting punishment? We need those lessons, but I fear it is too late.
My dad never abdicated from his duty as patriarch. When I misbehaved, he exercised his God-given right to beat the living daylights out of me for any misdemeanour. Can we say the same about today’s fathers?
Is this perhaps a place from which we can start the healing that is screaming so desperately to be born? Are our children tired of their debilitating rights put into place by miscreant politicians?
Can we correctly place Holy Writ before a man-made constitution? Do we have the courage?
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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