the corner office

It's all interconnected, in a weird way. A week or two ago Ronwen was talking about how she'd love to visit the Groot (Great) Marico, a stark piece of land in the North West Transvaal. I was less than supportive of this idea. My recollections of the place are less than pleasant: I went to a veldschool in the Groot Marico.

Veldschool was a white-school institution in the old apartheid days (I have no idea if it still happens) where you'd spend a week or two at a "school" (think shitty hostel/school/dump) out in the wild, and apart from one or two of your teachers who came along, you'd be at the mercy of hardcore old geezers who'd decided that living in these places and dealing with snot-nosed school kids week in and week out was a great career choice, and they'd teach you about nature and bush lore and take you hiking and camping and expose you to all sorts of horrible stuff that was character building. And indoctrinate you into being good little Christian white supremacists (or at least, that's what it felt like).

I got to go to the Groot Marico veldschool twice: once on a leadership camp in Standard 6 and again for "proper" veldschool in Standard 8. I still have vivid memories of those experiences. One of the veldschool teachers was a bearded AWB-type bush ranger who lived in khaki shorts and had the personality of a storm trooper. Every morning and every evening we'd have to assemble on a dusty field and sing the last few verses of Die Stem (the old South African national anthem, which was referred to as "Die Stem" even when we sang the English version) while the South African flag was raised and lowered. Us wayward English-speaking kids were never big on anthems and stuff ("at thy will to live or perish" - yeah right), and I remember after one very half-hearted attempt at singing the anthem, this man freaking out at one of our teachers "your pupils might not love our country but by God I do and you can at least have the decency to respect that!" (you have to imagine that in a heavily guttural Afrikaans accent with full sturm und drang anger to get the full effect). There was another teacher with mean-ass sideburns who would teach us about the local fauna and flora (this old dude was a bird nutter, and promptly got the nickname "Alcatraz" - bird man - geddit?)

I also have recollections of forced-march hikes through dry, arid, eroded bushveld and clambering through dongas and being sent out to sleep on a rock covered koppie at some godforsaken base camp alongside a dry riverbed, after the veldschool teachers had done their best to convince us that the area was haunted. That, and obstacle courses in the middle of nowhere and grotty hostel food where the kitchen ladies would sit out behind the kitchens all day picking weavils from the rice spread out on a 100-year-old worn-away wooden table - and sand, sand and more frigging sand.

We did our Std 8 veld school with kids from Bryanston High School - Bryanston being a wealthy Joburg suburb. What a mix - us a crowd of awkward, small-town bumpkins whose worst vices were smoking and dreadfully uncouth slang, and them a bunch of rich kids telling us what drugs they'd done and how their parents were more messed up than they were. I'm exaggerating, but it was a real eye-opener. Speaking of smoking, on the first night the teachers declared a cigarette amnesty, allowing everyone to hand in their ciggies, with the understanding that if they didn't they'd be in real trouble if they got caught with smokes after that. Most kids handed in (most of) their contraband. By the end of the week, cigarettes were in short supply. The night before we were leaving, one bloke remembered that he'd stashed some cigarettes in the tubing of his backpack. He sold each cigarette for two bucks, which was probably what a whole pack cost in those days.

Veldschool sucked. And by association, I've always loathed the Groot Marico.

The Groot Marico is famous for two things, actually. The first is mampoer, South African moonshine, but the kind that dissolves paint on contact and hastens the onset of presenile dementia. The other thing the Groot Marico is famous for are the writings of Herman Charles Bosman, a South African author who told tales of a fictional Oom Schalk Lourens and the lives of the farmers in the area.

Reading recently about the outcry over racial profiling at the South African Blood Bank (a whole 'nother story), I dozed off a few nights ago thinking about one of Bosman's stories, about the white, sun-bleached bones of Boers and native Africans mixed together in the veld years after a skirmish - the gist being that our racial differences are all skin deep - and that got me thinking, again, about the Groot Marico.

Then earlier this evening, a link from Jo'blog (gotta stop linking to you guys!) to Mik en Druk, a new South African blog, which in turn had a post about the Groot Marico which linked to a brilliant story about the Internet and the Groot Marico circa 1999. The area still had a manual telephone exchange, which made connecting to the Internet rather difficult:

... accessing the Internet is not so easy when your telephone operates through a manual exchange. When Johan first considered putting his corner of the bushveld in cyber-space, he phoned the exchange for advice.

"I want to go on the Internet," he said.

"What's that?" said the operator.

Johan thought a while. "Like a fax machine, only through your computer." That satisfied the operator. The ladies in the Groot Marico telephone exchange pride themselves on their knowledge of fax machines.

The problem is that Johan can't get a line with a dialling tone unless the Marico gets an automatic exchange. The good news is Telkom has promised to provide one. The bad news is they promised it several years ago. They did once start constructing a building to house the exchange, but then they ran out of money.

To understand the difficulty of dialing up the Internet on a manual exchange, you must understand what it's like just to make an ordinary call. You pick up the phone, then you wait. Sometimes you wait for 20 minutes. Finally the operator answers and says: "Nommer asseblief?" (= "Number please?")

Johan used to get into his car and drive down to the exchange to ask someone to pick up his call. "Nowadays," he says, "I ring them with my cellphone and tell them to answer."

The story is a hoot, and that led me to read some of the other excellent pieces on the Groot Marico tourism site.

So now I'm hankering to revisit Herman Charles Bosman's works, and if Ronwen keeps pushing the issue, I might just give the Groot Marico another try.