Lo! A miracle is at hand.
Let us pray:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis
Pectus excavatum
Amen.
On 10 May 1994, with little sense of occasion, we were let out of class to watch the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela on TV. A majority of white pupils, a minority of black pupils and Indian pupils. Sons of ANC bigwigs, sons of sugar-cane farmers – all of us sitting stiffly in the day rooms of our respective boarding houses. One student stood up and shouted ‘Amandla!’; another said Mandela looked like a monkey. Liberal housemasters told us to quieten down and pay attention. The geography teacher who had (it was rumoured) fought for white Rhodesia sneered from the back.7
Although I am in some ways perversely grateful for the amount of narrative and comedy that my school generated, there are certain things that I will never forgive it for. Chief among them is that while some institutions in the region made the historical events of the South African transition central to their curriculum, at Milton these were (as I remember it) regarded as something distant and rather embarrassing by most of the staff. The Codesa talks, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the rest of the world was taking such an interest in – all part of the tedious and grubby world of politics that did, alas, still keep droning on beyond Main Quad and Far Meadows. The Afrikaner nationalists had mucked up the country; the African nationalists would doubtless do the same.
There was, in short, little sense that we were living through historic times. But, then again, South Africa rejoined the world community at a moment in history when history was said to be over, when the market had triumphed and economic globalisation was rolling across the world like an endlessly breaking wave. We became a new nation when the category meant less and less, when places were beginning to look and people starting to sound more and more like each other (in theory, anyway).
This version of transition we did experience; it saturated us. On every other (non-Mandela) day in the day room, matrics would sprawl like Caligula over six-seater couches and juniors would stand at the back as we all soaked up The Bold and the Beautiful. American soap operas and sitcoms and blockbusters were being beamed in from our rebranded national broadcaster, dissected with great relish as we ate our quarter loaves stuffed with NikNaks and drained huge quantities of Fresca, Fanta Grape or Sparletta Creme Soda.
If someone got hold of the VCR cabinet key, there would be late-night porn screenings. Apartheid censorship was gone; unstarred nipples and full penetration had arrived. Hustler magazines (SA version) were circulated samizdat, pored over, the letters in them read aloud by torch to the dormitory after lights out. One was set in a randy circus and climaxed with a dwarf having sex with a busty nympho trapeze artist and letting out ‘a loud cracking fart’ – what a scene, what a turn of phrase: it has stayed with me ever since.
Because my arms were skinny and could snake into people’s lockers, I stole the Hustler – a magnificent issue with two glossy blonde ‘lesbians’ on the cover – and spirited it away to the Butterfly Lab. The Butterfly Lab was a secret room that our progressive biology teacher had given me and a few other high-achieving academics keys: a life-saving place where we could escape from cricket-match scoring or cross-country in the long, drowsy afternoons. Tucked away upstairs, it was a teak-lined room filled with drawers of pinned insects behind glass, little piles of dust below them where the museum beetles had eaten the specimens hollow. There was a smell of chloroform from the killing jars, and hydrogen peroxide from the bleaching of small mammal bones for biology projects. All that plus this astonishing Hustler of airbrushed lesbians and farting dwarves and real penetration – some important afternoons unfolded there for me, hidden away.
Then one day Johnno had also won access to this secret lair, though (I felt) via corrupt means. The school had a recycling depot down near the dam, where you could use a machine rather like a huge garlic press to crush soft drink cans one at a time. For every hundred or so flattened you earned X amount of merit points, and so I would be there diligently crushing Cokes, Stoney Ginger Beers and Pine Nuts while Johnno lolled on the grass, bored. One afternoon he sauntered off and hailed the groundsman who was rolling the cricket pitch in the distance.
‘Shap, mfwetu!’
I heard Zulu carrying across the fields. Johnno was one of the few white people whom Zulu speakers seemed to want to speak with, since he knew the vernacular, while the rest of us pinko-greys never got past a series of elaborate courtly greetings. The cricket pitch tractor turned and began rumbling toward the depot. Johnno ran ahead of it, shouting to me: ‘Bring the cans! Bring the cans!’
He grabbed sacks of them and worked feverishly to lay out hundreds, thousands of cans in the path of the roller, which crunched over them like a tank, leaving a long trail of aluminium wafers in the dust.
This recycling coup had so entirely overloaded the school’s merit points system that the authorities had not known how to reward Johnno. So he had asked to join us boffs in our little tearoom, and soon he was there all the time, dominating the games of Risk and making us pay fresh attention to the bottled fetuses and tumours in the cupboards. He brought in hash brownies and CDs of B-sides by the Gallagher brothers, so weeks passed in a fug of us singing along to Liam’s nasal whine, while a big poster looked down from the wall: What Did You Do in the Britpop Wars?
One afternoon he convinced me to stay and bunk war-cry practice, a Friday-afternoon ritual when the whole school would assemble down on the rugby fields to drill for the big match the next day. Johnno regarded this with utter contempt, right down to the pidgin Zulu that we were all forced to chant. But someone had caught wind of our oasis. There was a violent banging at the door, and soon a group of bounty hunters were looking with disbelief at our little facility – the pickled embryos and chicken skeletons, the board games and powdery moths.
‘The Butterfly Lab, what the fuck? No, no – this ends right now.’
They were turning out the drawers and cabinets.
‘These fucking perverts have got porn in here. You disgusting man!’
‘You’re going to find the captain of the First Team and apologise to him. In front of the whole school. And I’ll ask him personally if you did.’
In silence, we made our way down to Far Meadows and peeped around the corner of the gym. The whole school was massed in ranks across the fields, letting out clipped barks as someone rapped a big stick up and down: ‘Red! … White! … Red! … White! … Dynamite!’
‘Look, I think if we just walk over very calmly, very casual,’ said Johnno, ‘Say we’ve been at a squash match or something, or representing the school at … provincial choir trials.’
But this time, I could read the situation better than him. I knew that traditions weren’t as malleable as he seemed to think. It was better to stay hidden, to reap the punishment later, in front of a smaller audience. He wouldn’t listen.
We began our walk of shame. For the first ten seconds, it went well. Then emerged a sound unlike any I ever heard before, or since. It was 500 people hissing under their breath: low, disbelieving, disgusted. Iyyyyyyyyyyyooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh …
At the end of these practices, it was traditional for juniors to run for their lives. The moment the last Shakan battle cry was ebbing through the evening mist, we would bolt like a herd of antelope, fanning out over the hallowed turf of the First Team rugby field. The rest of the school would pursue us like cavalry, running us to ground in a surge of adrenaline and time-honoured, meat-and-ale kind of violence enjoyed by all. But as Johnno and I stood there, arm in arm, already being kicked from behind and spat on as we did our best impression of devoted rugby supporters, we knew that this time the cavalry would be gunning for us and us alone.
I went down in a ruck of boots and kicks before I even made the 22-yard line, pleading that the maulers go gentle on my new glasses.
‘Your glasses are on your head, you cunt,’ shouted