Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 3 - final)

(Continued from Part 2)

On Sunday morning we had breakfast with Theo Ngubane and his brother Owen, and Owen told us something of his history. He had kept a shop for a while and then gone overseas to England, where he drove buses in London, based at Ealing, but he had been there after me, when it was Transport for London, not London Transport.

Owen & Theo Ngubane, Steve Hayes

So we had something in common, but with a time lapse, so we compared notes. Owen said the buses he drove were fully automatic and could almost drive themselves. I drove RT buses with preselector gearboxes -- you selected the next gear you thought you were going to need, but it wouldn't actually change until you pressed the gear pedal with your left foot. A little later we got Routemaster buses, which had automatic gearboxes, but not very good ones, because they only changed at certain speeds. so late at night one would have to travel long distances slowly in a fuel-wasting low gear. because to change to a higher gear one would have to travel faster and so get ahead of schedule.

The London we lived in was also very different. If anyone is interested in my reminiscences of the Swinging London of the 1960s, you can find them here.

Deacon John Aitchison reading the Gospel, St John's

After breakfast we went to Durban to St John's Church in Clark Road. John Aitchison was serving as deacon, and they had 3 New Testament readings, one of which was St Peter's vision of clean and unclean foods, and John preached on that. They sung hymns to a piano accompaniment, and John read the Gospel from the middle of the church, surrounded by servers swinging incense.

Afterwards John told me something about the arrangement of the stained-glass windows, how they surrounded people with saints, the disciples of Jesus, his friends, and others. We asked the Rector, Themba Vundla, if we would use the chapel to sing the Hours and Obednitsa, and we read our own Gospel of the Samaritan Woman. There are not many Sundays after Pascha left when we can sing the Paschal hymns. so we did not want to miss this one.

Gammage Family, Pinetown 19 May 2025

On Monday 19 May we went up to Farningham Ridge to see Val's cousin Arthur Gammage, who was celebrating his 74th birthday. Arthur's younger brother Douglas and his wife Margie and their son Ken was also there, so it was a fair-sized family gathering, with Arthur's wife Jenny and their son Keith.

They talked about their children and foster children and adopted children. Both families had adopted or fostered children with various disabilities, and Hilda, who had been adopted by Arthur and Jenny was now in a home, where she could be cared for. 

Arthur Gammage, 74th Birthday

Doug and Margie had adopted Hilda's brother Richard, who had even more problems than Hilda, and they said his behaviour would worsen at the time of the full moon. Nowadays many people seem to think that is a silly superstition, I had noticed that much the same thing had happened with someone I had worked and shared a house with 50 years ago. He could be very pleasant and affable sometimes, but then he would start getting fits of the sulks, and would do all kinds of petty spiteful things. I sometimes wondered if I was just imagining things, or perhaps was going mad -- more recently I discovered that this kind of behaviour is called "gaslighting" After a few months I noticed that his sulky phases seemed to coincide with the full moon. I don't know if Richard's behaviour was similar, but it did seem to be affected by the moon.

After the birthday party we went to Durban North and again went to the Spur Steak Ranch for their pensioners' special. That particular branch of the Spur franchise was in the grounds of a sports club, and we parked next to an abandoned bowling green.

Blacksmith plover at Durban North

There we saw a blacksmith plover, like the ones we have in our garden at home. This one had a sore foot, and, perhaps because it was more difficult for it to run away, stood still and let me take a photo of it. It seems that several species of birds that used to be quite wild and rarely seen, and then only out in the country, are becoming urbanised and even domesticated. Hadedas became urbanised about 1990, and plovers and dik kops a few years later. At first it was crowned plovers we saw in our garden, but now the blacksmith plovers seem more common. The are called that because their cry sounds like a hammer hitting an anvil. There were also a couple of babies, and the one with the sore foot appeared to have a mate on the other side of the bowling green.

We sat by the window overlooking a hockey field with astroturf, and some schoolkids were practising on it. Four schoolboys came in, aged about 11-13; two Indian, one coloured, one white, They sat at a table nearby, and we wondered how they had enough money to buy lunch at such a place. Maybe they were here after school to practise some sport, and their parents might have arranged for them to have lunch first.

Nora Saneka, Noreen Ramsden, Val Hayes

We went on to see Nora Saneka, now living in Roseglen with her widowed mother Noreen Ramsden. We had known the Ramsden family in Durban North in the 1970s, and it was good to see two of them again

They were having their fibre telephone cable repaired, as the municipality had cut the grass and cut the cable as well. Nora showed us photos of their family -- her husband Mike Saneka, who had died a couple of years ago after an operation for a cancer resulting from smoking too much. Her daughters Rebecca and Pascal, Pascal was a doctor, and specialised in trauma, and had gained a great deal of experience through the disasters that had struck Durban in recent years -- the Zuma riots, bringing in gunshot wounds; the floods, with drownings and so on. She said her brother Richard was in Sydney, Australia, where he was a kind of consultant, and he was the one member of the family that never seemed to be mentioned in our communications with them on Facebook.

Mexican Sunflower?

Her mother Noreen came in in a wheelchair, now in her 90s and suffering from Parkinson's disease, which made it difficult for her to talk. Her father, Bill Ramsden had died a few months ago, and had been disappointed that he would not last long enough to get a letter from King Charles on his 100th birthday, as he never made it that far, but tried to pretend he was older than he actually was. There was, however, a commendation from Queen Elizabeth hanging on the wall.

Nora said she belonged to St Mary's Anglican parish in Greyville where she seemed to be quite active. She said the rectory had been sold to become a pizza parlour, and the adjacent shops were used by a group of businessmen who wanted to take over the church hall as well, but the parish had started a nursery school, which the businessmen seemed anxious to close. Nora was worried that the Archdeacon of Durban seemed to support the businessmen, as he thought the sale of the hall would bring in some money for the church. Nora argued that the church should use its buildings for the benefit of the community rather than just selling them off to raise funds.

Val Hayes & Peter Gunning, Ballito Beach

On Tuesday 20th May we had breakfast with Theo and Owen Ngubane, and left Nagina at 9:15 am, to head up the North Coast and stopped nearby to take some photos of the ubiquitous yellow roadside flowers. They only seem to grow along roads with heavy traffic, so it's difficult to take photos of them. Carl Brook told us they were Mexican sunflowers and were an invasive alien species, but we thought they looked rather pretty and looked them up on the Web, and found that they are useful for fertilising the soil.

We drove down to Umngeni and along Riverside Drive and up the old North Coast Road. We turned off at Casuarina Beach, where there had once been an old house we liked as we passed it when we lived in Melmoth and travelled to Durban back in the 1970s, but it had long been demolished, and modern ugly blocks of flats were being built in its place, and most of the Casuarina trees had vanished and we saw only a few palms.

Melvain Donyes at iHlozi Lodge

I went to a toilet there, but only the shell remained. It was full of rubbish, and all the fittings had been nicked. As we were leaving a bloke in a car stopped, and said it wasn't safe there; old people had been attacked, and we should rather go on to Westbrook Beach, which was further on.

We went on to Ballito, where we called on Peter Gunning, who took us to coffee at a beachside kiosk. We sat on a bench overlooking Ballito Beach and Pete spoke of Bible study groups he had participated in, some of which had old St Martin's people in them, including Alison Bastable, whom he said had wanted to see me, but we did not have her contact info. He talked about the millennialists in Bible study groups who waited for the end of the world, and were fans of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. I wasn't aware that there were people who were still interested in that, and Pete said that they had changed the ending to put forward things that Hal Lindsey had predicted would happen, but hadn't happened as predicted, so they moved them further into the future.

IHlozi Lodge. Kuleni Estate, near Hluhluwe, KZN

We went on our way up the coast, using the R102, and avoiding the N2 toll road, partly because of a conscientious objection to toll roads. In the past all roads had been paid for out of the Road Fund, which was replenished by the tax on petrol, which seemed a pretty fair "user pays" way of doing things, but the then National Party government wanted to rob the Road Fund for its attempted conquest of Angola, and so toll roads were introduced. Another reason for avoiding the toll roads was that they are full of big 26-wheeler trucks, which make driving unpleasant.

Along the R102 at every settlement or village there were speed bumps in the road, often not well marked. But though the road makings had faded, you could often tell where they were because of the sugar cane that had bounced out of trucks as they went over them. The road was otherwise in good condition.

Melvain Donyes

We crossed the Tugela (uThukela) River on the old N2 bridge, which had been washed away in floods some years ago, so we had had to take a detour via Mandini when we travelled this way before, but the bridge had now been replaced. looking much as it had before, and from there to Empangeni the road was much as it had been 40 years ago when we lived in Melmoth and travelled down to Durban. Here it was the new toll road that was nearer to the coast.

We filled up with petrol for the third time on our trip at Mtubatuba. We drove on to Hluhluwe and reached Kuleni Estate at sundown. We went on to iHlozi Lodge, where our friends Melvain and Lynette Donyes welcomed us and we had supper with them and chatted. Melvain and Lynette had bought iHlozi Lodge out of their retirement savings and run it as a guest house to support them and their ministry as evangelist/teachers in the Pentecostal tradition. Melvain was one of the pioneers of online communications in South Africa, having set up one of the first BBSs and importing some Christian networks. One of the forums we started back then is still functioning, now as an email mailing list. It's called Offtopic, because it's a relaxed sort of place where you can discuss things that might be considered "off topic" in more specialised online forums. If you know us and would like to stay in touch, feel free to join us there -- you can find out more about it here. And if you're looking for a place to stay in northern Zululand near the coast, click here to find out more about iHlozi Lodge.And for more places to stay run by our family or friends, see here.

Melvain Donyes, Val Hayes, Lynette Donyes

On Wednesday 21 May we spent the day with Mel and Lynette, driving into the small town of Hluhluwe to have lunch at a small cafe there, and chatting about old times and old friends sitting around the fire in the evening.

On Thursday 22 May we said goodbye to Mel and Lynette and headed for home, and again had problems with poor road signage. Perhaps the roads authorities think that road signs are not needed because nowadays everyone listens to the plastic auntie giving directions on GPS, but we found that doesn't work too well, at least not on our cell phones. It shows you approaching a turnoff, but by the time is shows you have reached it, you've already passed it, so the signs would be useful. So we drove up the N2 for about 5 kilometres looking for the R69 to Vryheid, and had to turn back. It turned out to be a rough gravel road, but soon climbed into the hills with some spectacular views over the Pongola Dam.

View from Magudu, KZN

Then the map showed we had to join the R66 and travel 3 km south towards Nongoma before continuing along the R69. This time there was a sign, but it was actually a "short cut" and we should have carried on along the unmarked road. Eventually we saw a sign to a place that was on the map, the small village of Magudu, perched high on a hill, with splendid views in every direction -- well worth a visit.

And from there it was a zig-zag run (to avoid potholes) to Vryheid via Louwsburg (off the road and unseen) and Hlobane, a rather unromantic coal-mining town. Stopped for lunch at a Wimpy in Vryheid, and then on to Utrecht, where we had lived in 1976/77. 

St Michael's Anglican Church, Utrecht, KZN

The small church of St Michael & All Angels, built by British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, looked much the same as ever, but there was nothing to indicate what denomination it belonged to or the times of services. When we had been there there was an amazing carbon-filament light bulb in the entrance, which had probably lasted the 77 years since the church was built. Perhaps, after another 48 years, it is still working.

 We had a quick look around the town, which seemed little changed from nearly 50 years ago, before heading on home via Volksrust, Standerton and Leandra -- 710km in 13 hours, tired from avoiding potholes, for which Steve blames Maggie Thatcher, who started the mania for deregulation of road transport which has led to the deterioration of both the road and rail infrastructure. But hey, it was an enjoyable trip, and we saw a lot of old friends and met a few new ones.

The Times - Let’s stay off Resentment Road

Jonathan Jansen writes about visiting Durban recently and finding that many of the streets had been renamed, and questions the wisdom of renaming places to commemorate political party hacks.

The Times - Let’s stay off Resentment Road:

Imagine, for example, naming a street after Julius Malema, the youthful idiot who found a way of remaining in the news by threatening to “eliminate” or “crush” the enemies of his campaign to seat Jacob Zuma in the presidency.

As the Sarah Palin of South African politics, he is a dangerous demagogue rescued from obscurity and not sure what to do with his new-found power other than display his limited vocabulary with words like “kill”. Apartheid taught him well.

I have to admit a certain amount of sympathy. I too visited Durban recently, and had the problem of finding myself in Problem Mkhize Road, and wondering what Problem Mkhize had done for Durban. Though I have to admit that I didn't really know what Mr Cowey (after whom the road was previously named) had done for Durban either.

One of the nice things about the 1990s was that after our first democratic elections a lot of places and buildings named after politicians got renamed with neutral names. The Marais Viljoen Building down the road from us was sensibly named Compensation House (it houses the offices of the Workmens Compensation Commissioner). The Hendrik Verwoerd Dam was renamed to something neutral. Jan Smuts Airport became the Johannesburg International Airport -- that was a bit silly, because it isn't in Johannesburg, it's in Ekurhuleni. Now it's the O.R. Tambo International Airport, so it doesn't really matter where it is.

I liked the idea of removing the names of politicians (especially living ones) from the names of places, because naming things after politicians smacks of totalitarianism to me. In Moscow, Kalinin Propekt is now Arbat again, and Kaliningrad is back to being Tver.

One of the last acts of the last Nationalist city council of Pretoria was to rename Kilnerton Road to C.R. Swart Drive. Part of it has been re-re-named back to Kilnerton Road, but the rest remains with the name of C.R. Swart. That, it seemed to me, was a calculated insult to black people. The Kilnerton Institute was a well-known educational institution in eastern Pretoria, run by the Methodist Church. Many black South African leaders received their education there. In the 1960s it was closed down as part of the ethnic cleansing that took place to implement apartheid, and renaming the road seemed to be a deliberate attempt to remove even its memory. C.R. Swart, however, was Minister of Justice in the 1950s, and presided over the introduction of some of the most oppressive and racist legislation ever to disgrace our statute book. I would not be at all sorry to see his Drive go.

I've got nothing against O.R. Tambo or Pixley ka Seme, or Rick Turner or Alan Paton. They were certainly not repulsive like C.R. Swart and worked for freedom and justice rather than to oppress people. But I wonder how happy they would have been to have things named after them?

But the Nationalist City Council of Pretoria has gone too. Pretoria joined with twelve other local authorities to become part of the megacity of Tshwane, and Pretoria no longer has its own city council; it is only part of a bigger city. There is now only the council of the City of Tshwane. I'm quite happy about that. Nobody seems to quite know who Tshwane was, except that he is said to have once lived in the area. That's a bit like Cowie's Hill. Unlike Mr Cowey of Cowey Road, Mr Cowie lived on his hill.

The amalgamation of municipalities and local authorities seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. As Jasper fforde, the author of the books about Thurday Next, the literary detective, points out, the Cheshire Cat of Lewis Carroll's Alice books is now the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat. And "City of Tshwane" is much easier to say than "Unity Authority of Warrington" or "Nelson Mandela Metropole".

Now suddenly we seem to be back to the 1950s, when the Nationalists were renaming everything after their party hacks. As Bob Dylan once sang, "Oh no, no no, I've been through this movie before."

Wireless hotspots

We've been on holiday for a couple of weeks, and have been without Internet access for much of the time. Then we went to stay in the Formula I hotel in Durban, which had signs in every room saying that it was a wireless hotspot on the Vodacom WirelessG network. I thought we might be able to catch up with e-mail and do a bit of blogging, but that proved to be a snare and a delusion.
Most of the time the signal ranged from "very weak" to nonexistent, and so all that one could see was a lot of messages saying that servers could not be found or had timed out. Eventually after two days of trying I've managed to connect, but how long it will last is anyone's guess.

Perhaps Vodacom need to beef up their transmitting power before they advertise their wireless hotspots.

Growing up in Durban

I've just finished reading Barbara Trapido's Frankie and Stankie -- a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Durban. A few days ago I wrote about it in Notes from underground: Evocation of a Durban childhood. That was after I'd just read the first few chapters.

I found it quite fascinating, and it made me put my project of reading Ulysses on hold, because it gripped me so much. There was so much that I could identify with, especially my own childhood up to the age of seven, and then the university parts in the early 1960s, because though I wasn't on the Durban campus, but in Pietermaritzburg, it was the same university, and I knew some people from there.

Plus, as Trapido would say, some of the people were real people with real names, like Ken and Jean Hill, whom I did not know well, but I had met them a few times. And Francis Cull, whom she referred to as a 35-year-old Anglican priest, and who in my time, three years later, was doing English Honours in Pietermaritzburg, and seemed nearer to 70 than 60, as old as I am now, perhaps, except that I don't feel as old as he seemed to me then.

There were some anachronisms, or at least so they seemed to me -- she referred to the university as "uni", an Australianism that came in long after the time. Perhaps people speak of it as the "uni" today, but in my -- our-- time it was always "varsity". Another term I don't remember using at that period is "airhead", though the description is accurate enough. John Vorster did not become Minister of Justice until 1961, though the book suggests that he held that position in 1960, at the time of the Sharpeville massacre.

Her description of the freshers reception committee also rang true, though since I was somewhat older by the time I got to the University of Natal, I was in a position not to take it very seriously, unlike the 17-year-olds straight out of school. But I think she had them well sussed out, and the thing about freshers having to wear hair ribbons and bow ties was spot on, though in my day they were yellow and purple, which for various reasons entirely unrelated to fresher integration, I happened to like. On the Durban campus the Philistines were the engineers, while in Pietermaritzburg they were the agrics. I remember an agric friend once railing against "liberals" and how he hated them, and when I asked him why he replied, "Because they're against integration". It was just the opposite of the usual complaint -- that liberals were against segregation -- so I was quite gobsmacked (yes, that's an anachronism too), but it turned out that he was talking about fresher integration, not racial integration.

I couldn't identify quite so much with the high-school period of the late 1950s, perhaps because by then my family had moved to the Witwatersrand and we lived on a smallholding in Sunningdale, just outside Johannesburg, whose expansion into the surrounding countryside I viewed as an assault on my freedom. Plus (is that term catching or what?) I was at a boys' boarding school, so fashion in clothing played a much smaller role in my life as a teenager than it did at a Durban girls' day school. Nevertheless, there were enough parallels to make it interesting.

I suppose the book is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, a novel about growing up, or a "coming of age" novel. And in that it succeeds. It may be fiction (or at least semi-fiction), but it is also a piece of social history, a memoir. Such was the segregated nature of South African society in those days that it is the memoir only of a Woozer [1] upbringing in the post-war era, the period 1945-1965. Trapido (whose husband was the well-known South African historian Stan Trapido) sets her story of growing up against a background of real historical events. She tells it as it really was; much of it is just as I remember it.

In my earlier post I noted that I had met Babara Trapido, and now I'm rather puzzled, having come to the end of the book, since that was nine years after she had left South Africa for good. So now I wonder just who it was that I met.

----

[1] Woozer - a White Urban English-speaking South African (WUESA). The experience of other South African cultural groups might be quite different. For White Rural English-speaking South Africans of roughly that period, for example, the classic Bildungsroman is The power of one by Bruce Courtenay.

Evocation of a Durban childhood

Yesterday I went to the Unisa library and found a novel by Barbara Trapido, called Frankie and Stankie. I saw it on the end of a shelf and was intrigued by a review quote on the cover that said, "There aren't many novelists whose stories one doesn't want to read, but Barbara Trapido is one of them." It seemed a strange enough recommendation, so I took it out.

In the evening I read the Barbara Trapido book, and read bits aloud to Val, because it was a very good evocation of a Durban childhood, and actually some of the people were real too -- it mentioned people I knew or knew of, like Ken and Jean Hill, who were members of the Liberal Party, and Eileen Krige, the anthropologist, whom I had heard of. I checked the cover blurb again, and found that it was not what I thought it was -- it said "There are very few novelists whose books one doesn't want to end", not "doesn't want to read", so I'd taken it out under false pretences. But I was glad I had; it brought back a lot of childhood memories, like this

Dinah continues to be a non-eater throughout her childhood. When one of her dad's colleagues visits with a packet of biscuits, he says they're 'for Lisa to eat and Dinah to play with. The biscuits are called Iced Zoological but the girls call them Animal Biscuits. Each biscuit is a scalloped rectangle with pastel icing on the top and an animal piped on to it in a contrasting colour. There are yellow giraffes on rose-pink icing and white tigers on sky-blue icing.

And this:

By eight Lisa is judged too big for the sleigh-ride through Santa's grotto in Greenacre's department store, and has to walk around to the exit to collect her present from Santa, just as Dinah comes helter-skeltering to conclusion in a cloud of fake snow and piped jingle bells.

Both Val and I remember the sleigh ride in Greenacres, though it belonged to Father Christmas rather than Santa; but that could be explained in the book by Lisa and Dinah's father being Dutch. And then

The school wash basins are all furnished with shiny pink chunks of slimy carbolic soap that look like sections of human lung.

I haven't seen Lifebuoy soap for years, but its appearance after being left in a wet soap dish can never be forgotten.

I think I spotted a few anachronisms, but they were minor ones: Cadbury's Crunchies appeared later on the scene than the time described in the book, as was the girl Julia Painting being bitten by a shark.

The name of the author, Barbara Trapido, sounded vaguely familiar, so I Googled, and found she was born in the same year as me, 1941, so it's no wonder her evocation of post-war Durban as seen through the eyes of a child was so familiar. I also checked my diary, and found I had actually met her once, on 19 August 1973:

In the afternoon there was an incredible party where there were 12 kids and 19 people altogether in the house, having separate little tea parties. Andy Argyle arrived with her children and Barbara Trapido, and Roger Aylard came round with two of his boys, and Gill Browne was there with her children. In spite of the numbers, it was amazingly peaceful, and it could hardly be noticed that so many people were
there.

And at the time I was banned, and not supposed to attend any social gatherings. Of course it was my landlady's gathering, not mine, but still. And at that time my landlady's children also attended the Berea Road Girls School, described in detail in the book.