The effect of Keats, Donne and Eliot on lady students

The Grahamstown Festival of the Arts is almost upon us again. Which always makes me think of Rhodes University back in the seventies, and of poetry and young ladies.

The thing is, I was a late starter. When my high school classmates at St Benedict's were boasting of their conquests with the opposite sex, I was so terrified of women I REALLY didn't even know how to talk to them. I probably put them up on a pedestal. Bit of a romantic twat.

It took a year of national service in the Navy to beat that out of me. In the seventies, national service - especially in the Army - did a lot of things to a lot of young men, so I am eternally grateful that all it really did to me was make me "cowboy up, cupcake", as they say in Arizona.

It happened on Navy shore-leave, with a very forward girl who started the evening as a friend's date and ended up as mine. Parked outside her parent's Kempton Park home, it happened in my mom's hand-me-down old Opel Kadett with the gear lever that came out of its socket every time you engaged third - a pretty apt description of the evening, come to think of it.

Things did improve after I left the Navy and became a student. Rhodes in the late seventies was a universe populated with the likes of Andrew and Janet Buckland, Ian Roberts, Jeremy Mansefield, Shaun Johnson, and many others who went on to achieve great heights.

I, like many of them, found myself studying English, Speech and Drama, Psychology and Journalism. Unlike them, instead of paying attention when demigods of literature like Andre P Brink and Guy Butler had the lectern, I was falling for a series of remarkable young women I really didn't deserve.

It never occurred to me until many years later that this was more due to simple availability than ability. I spent the vast majority of my time in the Drama faculty, where women heavily outnumbered men, and where straight men were few and far between. So the reality was simply a matter of statistics.

I remember I never went home in the July holidays. It was the Festival of the Arts, and I tended to be cast in the festival productions. Drama students from UCT, Wits, Natal, Stellenbosch, Tuks and other faculties descended on Grahamstown to perform their Festival productions.

There was a bakery opposite the main pub where one could buy raw dough (cheaper than bread, which meant more money to make gluhwein - it's really cold in Grahamstown in July).

In between productions, the drama students would meet at various digs, and the dough would be baked in strips on a fireplace (many student digs were in old Settler houses with massive hearths and yellowwood floors), and we would discuss Pirandello, Lorca, Ibsen, Brecht, Chekov, Sartre and God knows what else over copious amounts of gluhwein and hot bread.

Among other poems, I could recite 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' by Keats, particularly when drunk, and it had a remarkable effect on young ladies.

I really did love Keats. And John Donne. And a good few Shakespearean sonnets. And if I was really far gone, then out would come a few quatrains of The Waste Land. The drunker I got, the more readily their poems tumbled from my lips. I couldn't help myself. An unanticipated side effect was it got me a fair bit of action.

Except T S Eliot.

Eliot's poems really turned girls off. Especially The Waste Land. With me, it was always a toss up between Eliot and Donne as my favourite poet of all time. It took a couple of disappointments that should have taught me to avoid Eliot, especially when la belle dame sans merci was a really interesting, bright, witty, gorgeous actress, touched by the muse with truly ridiculous amounts of onstage presence, and I ruined the moment by slurring out 'April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land...'. Idiot.

Start the evening with Donne, build up through a few of the Bard's sonnets and end with Keats. Avoid Eliot. Not difficult to remember. Except when you've had an entire bucket of gluhwein chased with couple of glasses of Tassies. Then out came Eliot, and good-bye la belle dame.

Is this what the Jews felt like before WWII?

In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, I've been resolutely optimistic about this beautiful country of my birth. I claim as much right to be an African as anyone else born on this continent and reject the label of settler with contempt. I have put down roots, worked hard, got married, had kids, bought property. This is my home. I cannot conceive of life without vermilion-sky sunsets, umbrella trees, cicadas, boerewors, the penny-whistle, the Hector Petersen Memorial, Table Mountain, Highveld electric storms, fresh mango, the Springboks and Kaizer Chiefs.

But as I was editing a debate by high school kids today, their incisive minds gave me pause. You would not expect to learn pessimism from the youth, but they made me think seriously about their and my future in this country.

The topic of the debate was, "This house would recommend the lifting of sanctions in Zimbabwe if that country gave unconditional access to the international press to monitor the next elections."

As the sides argued their points they reminded me that Zanu PF had actually lost the 2008 elections. They reminded me that in 2008 SADC and South Africa in particular had been tasked with the job of monitoring and enforcing the Global Political Agreement (GPA) between ZANU-PF and the two factions of the MDC.

And that got me thinking. Not only has our government been woefully remiss in its job of umpiring the GPA, allowing Mugabe and his military cabal to get away with one crime after another, but they also turned a blind eye to Juju's rock-star visit to Zim in April 2010 when Malema endorsed Mugabe's economic policies and talked of importing them to South Africa to nationalise white-owned farms and mines. Since then, he has been on trial for refusing to back down on a song that a judge admitted has racist consequences, he's called white opposition politicians cockroaches and madams, and their black colleagues tea girls. He's called white land-owners criminals.

The former mayor of Port Elizabeth, Nceba Faku, in the wake of the recent Municipal Elections urges ANC supporters to chase those who voted for the opposition into the sea - and goes un-reproached by the President.

Roux Shabangu is exposed by Thuli Madonsela, the Public Prosecutor, who also fingers shenanigans in the CCMA and others, for renting a building to the SAPS at inordinately inflated rates (a R500 million deal), and her findings are ignored, swept under the carpet or become the subject of protracted civil cases.

In the wake of mounting media criticism about its fielding of candidates for the Municipal Elections, reports on corruption, accusations of racism and criticism of its economic policies, the ANC threatens to steam-roll the Protection of Information Bill through parliament, which will substantially limit press freedom.

The ANC, in these and many other actions over the past few months, is becoming increasingly similar in style, policy and thinking to Mugabe's ZANU PF.

What, one wanders, would the ANC do if it ever got to the point where it may be in danger of losing an election? Based on what has transpired in the last year or so, I have no doubt they would resort to the same dictatorial tactics Mugabe has employed over the last decade in Zimbabwe.

My wife's family has roots back to Germany before and during the war. Her grandfather was killed by the Nazis. Her grandmother was Jewish. Her mother and aunts have talked of the decision to finally leave Europe. I am relating more and more to those conversations. I have two sons. What future will they have here?

I am starting to think about that parable of the frog who never knew he was being cooked because the water he was swimming in was heated up so slowly. By the time he realised things were too hot, it was too late.

A part of me would be eternally rootless for leaving this place. Am I being selfish, leaving others to a destiny they do not have the resources to escape from? I know there are thousands of township families with the same misgivings, who have fewer options than I.

But perhaps its time to cut those ties. I and the skilled South Africans of all races who can sell their labour overseas are looking at our options a little more closely. Putting out feelers. Looking into possibilities we would never have considered two years ago.

All this because our leaders show no signs of change. On the contrary, their rabid nationalist Africanism appears to be hardening and entrenching itself further. Which reminds me of another parable where the electorate can be compared to a tortoise and the ruling party to a scorpion.

There was once a land where greed, corruption and lies turned to water, and caused a flood, the like of which had never been seen before. Everything sweet and fertile was washed away by the relentless waters. The lone survivors were a scorpion, on the highest stone, and a tortoise, who could swim in the water. As the waters continued to rise, the scorpion knew that even his high stone would soon be covered. 'Carry me over the water so I don't drown', says the scorpion to the tortoise. The tortoise refuses, knowing that the scorpion has stung many of its fellows to death. But the scorpion insists, 'If I sting you when we are in the water, we will both die', so the tortoise relents and gives the scorpion a ride. Half way across the water, the scorpion scuttles up to the tortoises' neck and stings it to death. As it is dying, the tortoise says to the scorpion, 'Why did you do that? Now we will both die.' The scorpion replies, 'I couldn't help myself. It's in my nature.'