Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 15
I am in the process of doing a final edit for the third novel of my Willjohn Trilogy. My publisher has been delayed for family reasons and the proposed date of November for the launch of Surviving Treachery is now postponed to March 2024.
My publisher Andrea always goes through a manuscript carefully, then gets me to make corrections or to explain what I mean by certain statements or words. The latest query made me realize how the use of the same language, in this case English, can cause confusion when used in one country (South Africa) and not have the same sense in England or elsewhere.
The word in this case is “location.” In South Africa since the late 1800s, the word has been used as a noun to denote a place where Africans may reside, mostly on the outskirts of a town inhabited by whites. My publisher asked why I did not use the word “township.” I replied because the word “location” was the more recognized word for an African township (although my generation tended to consider the word, if we thought about it at all, as a rather demeaning term for what would normally be called township.)
I have always related the word “location” with the segregated thinking of the Apartheid years. To my surprise, once I started to research the origins of this particular use, I discovered that it had been used as far back as the late 1800s by the Cape Government, which at the time was a combination of both English and Afrikaners. Its influence extended only as far as the Cape Colony, which by the mid-1800s had extended well to the north of Cape Town and bordered on the Transkei. The Transkei was an area to the north of the Kei River and was the domain of the Xhosa people.
The point being that it was generally felt in South Africa (and probably overseas) that racial segregation did not exist before the creation of Apartheid in 1948. This is not so. The Nationalist government that defeated Jan Smuts’ United Party in 1948 simply gave a name to what already existed, namely the attitude by most whites that Africans and in fact all people of color were inferior to the white Aryan races. The unfortunate word Apartheid, which was derived from the French term mettre à part, meaning separating or setting apart and later formed from the Afrikaans words Apart meaning apart and Heid meaning hood. Although some people preferred to pronounce the word “Aparthite,” the correct pronunciation is “Aparthate,” which could not be more racially abusive if it tried. The word “apartheid” in lower case is defined as any system that segregates people based on certain characteristics such as skin color, ethnicity or caste.
Today, twenty-nine years after the end of Apartheid when Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress came into power, there is a whole generation of both whites and blacks who have little or no idea of what it was like to live under the Apartheid regime. The Nationalist Government grew increasingly frantic and repressive over the years. When Dutch-born Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd became Prime Minister in1959, he used his early training in psychology in pre-war Nazi Germany to apply skillful social engineering to Apartheid, making it more suppressive than ever. Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966. His successor J.B. Vorster, who had been interned during World War II due to his pro-Nazi sympathies, continued with most of Verwoerd’s policies. Thankfully, due to increasing international pressure, the last ten years of Apartheid from 1984 to 1994 saw the relaxation of some of the most pernicious laws.
Anyway, my novel is not about Apartheid per se. The subject has been extensively covered by other works of fiction and non-fiction and has been exposed for the insane and harmful system that it was. All three of my novels show a multi-racial society trying to finally live in harmony. This has been successful in some areas of life and unsuccessful in others. The third novel which takes place in 2020, follows the adventures of the daughter of the original characters whom I wrote about in 2001 and 2002. She, as a post-Apartheid young woman, realizes how little she knows about the lives of the different races during Apartheid. Her father puts her in touch with an old English-speaking South African whom he knows and who has lived through all the Apartheid years.
The old man invites the girl to his home to meet not only his wife but two other old men, one black and the other an Afrikaner, who have all been affected by the same turning point in South African history in 1960. The old men have formed an unlikely friendship and are able to give the girl their thoughts from their particular perspectives.
The rest of the novel deals with a completely different issue unrelated to politics and is, I believe, the most exciting and cliff-hanging storyline I have ever written.
Perhaps the most heartwarming recent event involving South Africa has been our rugby team winning the World Cup for the fourth time. Traditionally the two strongest rugby teams in the world have been the Springboks (South Africa and the All Blacks (New Zealand). By the way, the New Zealanders are named after their all-black jerseys and not the color of their skin! They are a multi-racial team which includes whites, Maoris and South Sea Islanders. The four major Southern Hemisphere teams are South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina.
New Zealand has won the World Cup three times, Australia has won twice and England once. South Africa is the only team to have won four Cups. In the tournament played last month, the Northern Hemisphere teams of France and Ireland were fancied to win for the first time since England won in 2003. As it turned out, the old rivals, the Springboks and the All Blacks met in the final with the Springboks winning by one point.
Quite apart from the joy of winning the Cup again, the Springbok team reflects in many ways just what our nation should be like. It should be a tough, no-nonsense nation comprised of a variety of races working together towards returning to a First World status, with equal opportunities for all. The people of South Africa should unite with a common purpose and work as a team in the same way that the Springboks combined to win one of the most fiercely contested World Cups since its inauguration in 1987.
In interviews with the Springbok’s charismatic Captain, flank Siya Kolisi and the pocket blond bombshell, scrumhalf Faf de Klerk, both made similar statements to the effect that their country was troubled and turbulent. They both hoped that the example of the Springbok team that won the Cup due to a strong unity of purpose and an incredible team spirit would influence the spirit of the nation.
Going back thirty years or more to the time of Apartheid, it would have been unthinkable that black and white teammates would embrace each other with genuine mutual respect and affection. Of course, during the Apartheid regime only white players were selected for clubs, provincial and national teams.
In the post-Apartheid era, affirmative action policies made the fatal mistake of promoting players of color into provincial and national teams before they had achieved the required level of expertise. It was a horrible mistake. The players of color were palpably unprepared for the higher levels of professional rugby. As a result, the quality of South African rugby dropped alarmingly. Even the players selected because of their color were uncomfortable with this arrangement. My son Greg was at school with a number of black students. One of them, who had played no higher than the 3rd team at school, joined the same club as Greg after school. He was quickly promoted to the 1st team and a short while later to the Transvaal Provincial team. He failed to impress at either level and being an intelligent and decent fellow, he gave up playing rugby, saying that pushing him forward because he was black was ridiculous.
Fortunately, the rugby authorities continued to oppose this false equity and managed to reduce the quota of black players to those who had genuine talent. Over a period of years, more and more black players, most of whom attended private schools, began to emerge with real talent for the game, forsaking the more obvious allure for soccer (football) which had traditionally been the game of choice for African players.
The Springbok national team discovered black players with genuine talent for rugby and the team was finally able to select players on merit. Today the colored and black players have emerged as some of the best in the Springbok team and the world, hence South Africa’s success in winning more World Cups that any other nation as well as winning two World Cups in a row, a feat only emulated by the All Blacks.
This year, England who had a terrible season by their standards, somehow fought through to the semifinal, and played a magnificent game against the Springboks, losing by only one point. They are to be complimented on their return to form. However, it is sad that one of their players accused the Springbok Hooker Bongi Mbonambi of making a racial slur against him. The England player, Tom Curry, reported to the ref that Mbonambi had called him a white c***. In the investigation after the game, Bongi strongly denied the allegation. Apparently, he had commented in Afrikaans, not English, about the white (the color of their jerseys, not of the players) players being on the wrong side of the scrum and hence offside. The words Wit Kant in Afrikaans means “white side” with the correct pronunciation of the word Kant in Afrikaans with more of a “u” than an “a.” Had Bongi actually said the crude word in English, he would have correctly been severely punished. Despite the fiercely physical nature of the game, making obscene and/or racial slurs is not allowed and can result in the banning of a player, which is as it should be.
The Rugby Football Union’s investigation declared that there was insufficient evidence to support Tom Curry’s claim and the matter was dropped officially. The British media continued to press the issue and Bongi finally made the following statement: “I think it is a very sad thing when you live in a First-World country, England, you think the rest of the world speaks English. It was unprofessional on their part. They could have gone on a website and looked for an English dictionary and then looked for the word in Afrikaans.”
All of which goes to show that words can be dangerous tools if misused. Peter Warren in his initial research into the ExoTech computing system realized the fallibility of taking all words literally. As a result, ExoTech works with specific meanings and not words which often have multiple meanings. Whether a confusion arises over the meaning of a word in one language that means something quite different in another language or whether the use of a word like “location” is used in an odd and sometimes demeaning sense, misunderstandings and often conflict can arise. Through the use of specific meanings rather than words, ExoBrain will achieve a greater clarity of communication in computing, than ever before!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.