One of the most endearing qualities of South Africans is their ability to meet our many challenges head-on, and softening the blow with humour. Does anyone remember how we reacted to the 2010 Fifa World Cup local organising committee’s confusing countdown that expired on a Wednesday?
I was co-hosting Kaya FM’s breakfast show at the time. Befuddled broadcasters across the country were reduced to saying stupid things such as, “It’s zero days before the World Cup kickoff” on the Thursday, more than 24 hours before the kickoff. A listener called to tell us that maybe the World Cup was already under way in China and no-one had told us.
A similar thing happened when the Presidency sent out ambiguous communications during the Covid-19 pandemic about the start of the level 5 lockdown, which went from 21 days to R800 for a bottle of Smirnoff. South Africans went to town about whether “Tuesday midnight” meant 00h01, or 00h00 the next day. And about two weeks into the lockdown, we were jiving to a brand new hit song that went, “When they zol, they put the saliva on the paper”, using then-minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s voice. The platform that used be called Twitter — before Elon peed all over it — went berserk.
South Africans are at it again, this time with a meme depicting the president, Helen Zille, Gwede Mantashe and Johann Rupert in a huddle, with the caption, 'This is the only national dialogue that matters'
Well, South Africans are at it again, this time with a meme depicting the president, Helen Zille, Gwede Mantashe and Johann Rupert in a huddle, with the caption, “This is the only national dialogue that matters”.
A severe cold front hit our shores this week. With disastrous consequences in several parts of the country, notably Mthatha and other Eastern Cape towns.
A friend’s uncle has adopted a wait-and-see posture on the existence of global climate change because, two decades ago, we were all fixated on El Niño. He has been arguing that the planet has always gone through these weather cycles.
This week he called my friend to talk about “liyabhubha manje mshana!” (“Tis the end of days, nephew!”). He then apparently gathered all his daughters, at 8am, and gave them an impromptu reading of his will, detailing which cattle/sheep/goats they must slaughter when they bury him, after he dies of hypothermia. He even shared details of his investments; life and funeral policies; that Ngubane owes him two bulls and a donkey; the places where he has cash stashed away; and where all the bodies are buried. The next day, when it was three degrees warmer, he retracted all of it. As it turns out, he had inadvertently disconnected his electric blanket overnight, leading to cold-induced temporary dementia. It didn’t help that he’d apparently guzzled a litre of Sedgwick’s Old Brown sherry before he started seeing cryogenically induced angels.
As a resident of the East Rand for the past two decades, by my unscientific reckoning it’s always at least 3⁰-5⁰C colder than central Johannesburg here. I trust only two measures of how cold it is. The first is when my own biological thermometer registers an underwhelming 4cm during my morning ablutions. The second is when I spot a random Karel at a Boksburg shopping centre at 7.30am and it’s apparent he woke up and yelled, “Jislaaik, Marietjie, it’s po*s koud this morning! Iron vir my sommer two khaki shorts today!”
You would not know it to look at me, but I know a helluva lot about “po*s koud” weather. I was born in one of the coldest areas of the greater eThekwini district, Hammarsdale. We just had the Comrades Marathon last Sunday, an event which I have participated in religiously for about 40 years. Mostly from the comfort of my couch, with a variety of hot and cold beverages. So, it’s probably still fresh on your mind that Hammarsdale, Inchanga, Drummond, Alverstone, Botha’s Hill and all the way to the Umlaas Road interchange are among the highest points on that route. It didn’t help that almost 30 years ago my folks went from the fridge that is Hammarsdale straight to the freezer that is the Mnamatha village of greater KwaNyuswa.
In keeping with the presumably brrr family tradition, I was shipped off to Vryheid for five years. At Inkamana High School, I was part of the botched Great Geyser Mutiny of 1985. The country was on fire while PW Botha waved his finger, warning us to not push him too far, and we needed a cause. So we figured it was tantamount to a gross violation of human rights that we were expected to take cold showers in -3⁰C Vryheid, a regular winter temperature in that part of the world. We had to bang on the water pipes just to get a dribble of ice-cold water. We decided that because Guy Fawkes had his Gunpowder Plot, we would have our own Geyser Plot. Because while we were getting ice-cold water, the priests, monks and nuns were enjoying hot showers. To be fair to them, hot water taps were a rarity in most black households in 1985. And our education was heavily subsidised from Germany.
Be that as it may, we formed two underground cells to infiltrate the monastery and convent and drop the geyser switches on the distribution boards. We wanted them to shiver in the morning too. I was dispatched with another comrade-in-arms, called BB, to have an audience with the principal, Sister Dorothea. The plan was that while she was distracted, one of us would go and implement the plan. Neither of the cells dispatched to the monastery and the convent were successful. All my fellow saboteurs and I got out of it was a cup of tea and Ouma rusks. Sitting there the next morning during a maths lesson — frozen to the bone, with blue-black chilblains — I had never resented anyone as much as I resented Sister Dorothea and her rosy cheeks.
Earlier this week, the playwright, fine artist and author extraordinaire, Zakes Mda, posted a picture on Facebook of a snow-covered signpost to his birthplace, Sterkspruit, captioned “South African winters”. Someone responded by reminding him that Athens, Ohio, in the US — where Bra Zakes spent a few decades as an academic and lecturer — was significantly colder than anything you’re likely to experience at the southernmost tip of Africa. To this, the literary giant responded: “Not really. Central heating. Everywhere indoors over there we were in short sleeves in the middle of the deepest winter.”
And he is absolutely correct. I once spent two weeks in Moscow during winter. Over there, I was sweating in my T-shirt and sweatpants. Over here, we seem to have buried our heads in the sand because, frankly, we have many pockets of this country with Siberian temperatures. I have, thankfully, never been to Sutherland, where I’m reliably told men walk about in 2cm ignominy for weeks on end, but I once had a car breakdown on the N3 near Warden, in -8⁰C weather. I had never spoken to my ancestors in such colourful language before.
Times and temperatures are a-changing. No-one has deemed me sufficiently “eminent” to invite to the mooted national dialogue. If I were to be included, I would highlight that government-sponsored central heating should be made compulsory in all homes in certain towns, as well as in public buildings, on pavements and under bridges. Besides legalising sex work and banning the playing of voice notes in public, I sincerely hope the national dialogue will address such bread-and-butter — sorry, I mean blanket-and-central-heating issues — for all the 2cm areas of the country. Stay warm, folks.
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