I am stealing these insights from George Orwell’s essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, in which he spends some 20 000 words analysing his schooldays in a tone of triumphant misery, with a real sense of relish, in fact. He was revising the memoir on his deathbed, as if at the end of a writing life tangled up with the greatest historical ructions of the twentieth century – imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism – it was these school years that offered some of the most formative insights into power, with ‘Crossgates’ becoming a kind of petri dish in which its operations and cultures could be examined most closely.
In my first year at Milton College, seniors would wake us up in the middle of the night and force us to go swimming. While we were all obediently (and nakedly) treading water in the dark, they would alert our housemaster. The next morning they sat on benches in the Main Quad, watching as we each filed in for a beating – a nice night’s entertainment. I ran out and hid behind the saloon doors of a toilet cubicle. It wasn’t the pain but the intense shame that made me cry – a raging, scombroid blush that consumed my whole being.
Right down to its architecture and its lingo, Milton had been modelled on the English ‘public’ (i.e. private) schools of the nineteenth century. But while schools in England had modernised and evolved, ours remained in a time warp, trapped in the colonial lag. I registered this when I attended my father’s (and grandfather’s) old school in Sussex, one of the original prototypes, for a year of A-levels after finishing matric.
It had the same vaguely prison-like H-block of quadrangles, sacrosanct lawns and red-brick chapel, but in most other ways had been slowly reformed. It was coeducational, filled with students from around the world: Korea, Dubai, Argentina. No uniform, sports regarded as a bit of a joke, detailed anti-bullying protocols tacked up on the walls – and all rather dull. A bland place in which I found myself missing the cruel comedy and narrative fertility of my South African schooldays, and regarding myself as a man among boys. Though not among girls: it would take years before I learned how to speak to women.
With the uprooting and transplanting of such cultures to the colonies in the nineteenth century, the contradictions embedded in the English public school system ramified still further. In apartheid South Africa, these bastions of conservatism became the progressive option in some ways – at least for white families – since private institutions became multi-racial earlier than government schools, which remained segregated. So I had left a whites-only (but coed) state primary on the Highveld to attend a racially mixed (but single-sex) private school. Most pupils arrived in Standard Seven, but I had come as a Standard Six – spending a first, academically undemanding year with a small cohort.
There were some ‘day boys’ in this initial year, but the full-time boarders with me were mainly from Zulu and Tswana families. Phila and Lesego, the tall football captains, already well into puberty, were heroic figures to us. There was Thabo, who got spotted as presenter for a new, multiracial kids programme on TV, and Sihle, who taught me how to change a duvet cover. And two Mphos: one who was friendly and one with whom I fought with on the field one day – or at least he just lifted up my khaki-shirt collar and then discarded me, not even bothering.
But that first year was more gentle, a late boyhood idyll before high school proper began. I was in thrall to long fantasy novels and spent afternoons staring at the lawns in front of the boarding house, imagining how various configurations of grass stalks, clover and kikuyu represented a world of different kingdoms and armies. In this epic trilogy, The Riftwar Saga, some kind of gap in space-time had opened up and violent, conquering races were streaming through from another world. Midway through the long afternoons, one of the kitchen ladies would wheel a juice trolley out onto the lawns. Bright orange juice with a sour, sherbety edge – good juice.
Nelson Mandela is free but I am living inside my head. I have escaped the mining town. I am so consumed by this trilogy that I wake up early and go to read alone in the dining hall. The housemaster sees me in his early rounds and smiles at ‘The Professor’. Another of those mornings, we are revising for exams and I remember Thabo explaining to me (on request) about masturbation, using a fineliner pen to demonstrate what one should do to get ‘the feeling’.
How green can one person be? My comrades laugh as they ask me what ‘erection’ means and I explain rather impatiently that it refers to the putting up or construction of something, like a building. Or the Cross, for that matter. I am paraded around, asked to trot out this definition: ‘He reads the dictionary for fun!’ Another time, Lesego beckons us into the moonlit toilets to see the spunk running out of his penis – the first pupil in our year to achieve this feat. We are jubilant.
The black pupils complain about the winter, and how it dries them out. They are forever rubbing in creams with great attention, lathering Vaseline Intensive Care into their skins. Or perhaps that is just how I remember it, since this ritual – this loving self-attention to keeping the epidermis moist – became a marker of strangeness and difference, something to joke and smirk about: ‘Leave that stupid cream of yours, man!’
This whole Vaseline Intensive discourse was a classic demonstration of how ideology works to create a reality that has little to do with the real. A superstructure of values and judgements had been erected whereby it was their skins that could have been seen as anomalous: the skins of the majority of the country’s population, the dark skins that had evolved under these skies, that age so much better than white skins.
‘The so-called white races are really pinko-grey,’ wrote EM Forster. Looking at my skin now, 37 years in, it also seems blue-grey, sometimes even grey-green. So endlessly pitted and pocked, creased a thousand ways, each pore triangulated to about six, seven, eight other of its fellows via a cracked mud pan of rivulets and wrinkles.
As with powerful telescopes, the more vision you train on a segment of this universe, the more you will see: galaxies of freckles and sunspots, the epidermal equivalent of new quasars or other deep sky objects. Scar gazing. Then those singularities, moles: points of dark foreboding poised between melanin and melanoma. Each one of them a potential double agent, a possible traitor; each one diligently photographed by my dermatologist. A ‘mole map’ is lodged on his hard drive: a deeply conservative landscape in which any shifting border might spell danger. But there are many skin marks that have no names, that go beyond the conceptual net of language. Raised, sandpapery patches that don’t quite seem to qualify as warts – what are they? Glassy speckles like microburns from a spatter of hot oil – mysterious. Then the quills of hair, thousands of them; sometimes the odd thicker, more wiry Morgellons-like fibre twisting out, as if a pubic strand were taking its chances elsewhere: shoulder, eyebrow, upper cheek. You rip it out and out it comes in its neat plastic sheath, its little bulb – a jolt of hot, satisfying skin pain.
‘Does it hurt?’
A year or two later and I am in the snake pit, skin going lumpy with painful cysts that very quickly revealed who was a saint and who was a devil.
‘I bet they hurt. Yoh.’
At the back of double maths, Thabang is taunting me under his breath, despite his own struggle with razor bumps (Pseudofolliculitis barbae). We sit at a twin desk and nothing can deter him from these sotto voce sessions, not even my having memorised the whole of Biggie’s verse from ‘Notorious Thugs’ to try and impress him: ‘Been in this shit since ’92 / Look-at-all-the-bullshit I been through.’
‘They hurt, don’t they? Yoh, yoh, yoh. They look sore.’
Acne, etymologically from the same Greek root as acme: highest or culminating point. Prime, zenith, flower of life; of a disease: crisis.
Turning to the entries on skin in my Dictionary quickly reveals the diabolical ingenuity of human communities as they beget insults, nicknames, neologisms. Given that our Standard Eight history teacher’s idea of teaching was simply to screen and rescreen episodes of Sir Laurence Olivier narrating The World at War, we all knew that Operation Barbarossa (Italian for ‘red beard’) was the code name for the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. And so the word attached itself to those suffering from the kind of acne that comes on like a red beard.
Bad enough, but it could be worse. This was a world in