Metro FM Music Awards and other small things.

Last night Hlubi and I attended the Metro FM music awards here in PE. It’s a glamorous event that awards such titles as, best Kwaito Album, best singer, best Hip-Hop Group etc. It is a celebrity showcase where everybody who wants to make it in the entertainment industry wants to be seen. The event is young and black and very trendy.

I attended the function this year and last year and was really impressed, confused and amazed by this craze and frenzy for celebrity and anything “famous”. There were of course various live music and dance acts and there was great excitement in the air. Fun really… but as I watched those around me being brought to tears and screams because, Ntando, or Kabelo or “Teargas” just stood up or sat down or sipped their Coca Cola, I could not help to realise how difficult it was for me to be caught up in the general mania. I was enjoying myself, but I did not scream, I did not leap out of my chair waving my arms and shouting “I love you Mzekezeke” … Why not…. I began to wonder? Why do I not get excited? Why do I not get emotional? Is it perhaps something that comes from my army days, when we were trained to continue forward while grenades and live ammunition crack about your head. Not to get exited, not to freak out. Made not to show your pain, but to carry on. Shown how to stare bankly forward carrying the dead on your shoulder. Or perhaps it was more than that, My father conscripted into service in South Africa and Namibia in the early sixties, My father’s father a combatant in World War one, where he survived the battle of Delville Wood, my mother’s father served in North Africa, fighting Rommel in World War two…. Perhaps all of these contributing to a sterness, a militarisation of family culture, a suppression of emotion, a recessiveness. A militarisation that is perhaps not noticed growing up in white middle classes because everyone is very similar. But last night at the Metro FM awards those around me were from homes different to the one that I grew up in and they have no difficulty getting excited in the trivia, the small things of life, ….I suppose the things that make life beautiful!

Cuito or bust!

PW Botha died in his bed in Wildernis last night. He lived to the age of ripe old age of 90 and never stopped wagging his finger at people when talking to them. In his day he was a tough man, I am sure, he was not afraid to take on the world or the armed forces of the ANC, Mozambique and Angola…..which brings me back to Rundu in 1987!

The Angolan border with Namibia was a war zone in the eighties, and (I suppose like any other war zone) information available to combatants is restricted to a “need to know” basis. You do “need to know” that you have to wake up at six in the morning and polish your boots, you don’t “need to know” that the South African Defence Force has just launched a major land and air offensive deep into Angola where they will be thoroughly beaten by Angolan and Cuban forces at the

Battle_of_Cuito_Cuanavale

You don’t “need to know” that for now Angolan and Cuban forces have no plan to chase South Africans all the way back to Rundu and bomb the shit out of your chopper tent!

Anyway, we (some of us) sensed that something was happening by virtue of the fact that huge military convoys (taking a full day to pass by) were crossing over into Angola, the runway was piled with body bags as the Puma helicopters came back over the river to base. Mirage F1’s, Impala’s and Pumas’were “scrambling” two or three times a day and coming back all shot up and buggered. We were on “readiness state high”, sitting on the anti aircraft guns, generators running and ammo bins full. Yet in the middle of all this we are all loaded onto troop careers and brought into base and piled into a hall/hanger where we are told to wait for a “surprise”. We had of course, with time, become suspicious of surprises, like the “surprise” of litres and litres of (normally scarce) fresh milk they dish out to drink before forcing you to “leopardcrawl” kilometres through the dust and till you puke all over you’re your overalls.

So, we are sitting in the hot, sweaty hanger and eventually after a long wait we are presented by the Officer Commanding with the President of the Republic, PW Botha. Then we really new there was big shit going on! He spoke to us of how grateful the nation was for the great sacrifice we were making, and how right would persevere over wrong. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember that, without him giving any details, that we were caught up in the middle of something serious and we were all going to die.

Only after returning back to South Africa and the passing of three months until January 1988, did the news eventually hit the newspapers that there had been a major “operation” in southern Angola (

Operation_Modular

). History will remember operation Modular as the great turning point in the Angolan war. South Africans badly beaten at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, retreating and eventually causing the government to concede to the provisions of United Nations resolution 435, opening the way for the “UNTAG” international peacekeeping force and Namibia’s first democratic elections that followed.

Anyhow, that was the last time I was in the same room as PW Botha.