Nkosi Sikeleli Africa
Nkosi Sikeleli Africa
Watching the opening ceremony for the South Africa World Cup, I was startled to see faces I recognised. The camera kept selecting (as cameras will) sweet and smiling girls in the crowd. And I knew them! Yes I knew them, and yet I’d never met them.
How? Because I had taught so many sweet and smiling girls in Zimbabwe. The same openness. The same innocence. Zimbabwe in the late 1980’s was an earthly paradise, so far as my family was concerned. We arrived in 1986 – me, Chrissy and our two children – and so we soon we got to know four schools.
An example of their innocence. As an end of term treat, Chrissy took in a video of Indiana Jones for her girls (at Evelyn High School) which they watched through their cardigans, peeping through gaps in the material and shrieking in terror at Indy’s latest fix.
An example of their openness. Some boys from a neighbouring school were visiting ours (Montrose Girls High School) – so Portia Maseko and her pals came up to me. “Mr Fenge, we know you love us, so will you please introduce us to those boys?”
I wrote a song once: ‘Love Is Just Another Name For Africa’. I’d play it for you now but I lack MP3 equipment. No, hang on, I’d play something else. I’d play my choirs singing ‘Nkosi Sikeleli Africa’ (God Bless Africa).
I had 120 highs, standing one side of the hall, singing above the melody – and 120 lows, standing the other side, singing below it. The rest of the school, about 600, stood in the middle and sang the melody, so we ended up with three-part harmony – and it was real hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck stuff. That’s what I’d put on my profile, but, as I say, the equipment is lacking. (Only got it on cassette tape.)
Anyway, the point of the blog is this: the earthly paradise of Zimbabwe is no more. I thought that I – we – were training up the future of a beautiful country. But that was twenty or more years ago and, given the life expectancy in Zimbabwe (especially Matabeleland where we taught) many of our girls will probably be dead.
So, as I looked at the earthly paradise of South Africa, with all those sweet and smiling faces – whom I so nearly recognise – I just hope they don’t get another Mugabe. They’ve had a Mandela and that’s got them off to a fantastic start (fantastic, because such people are almost the stuff of fantasy). But there are a lot of Mugabes in the world, and only mature democracies can hope to shift them.
So Nkosi Sikeleli Africa. God bless them. They might need a bit of help from above.
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22 Comments
You described it so well.
Our vicar and friend used to speak like you and when he died Nkosi Sikeleli was played at his crowded funeral; there wasn't a dry eye in the church, or the church grounds, or out in the lane, so someone in his family knew what a stint in Africa meant to him.
I bet your copy of the song with so many children is wonderful, pity you can't share it.
Thank you
I'm touched by the magic of Africa even though I've never been outside my own country.
The changes that have been happening there over the past few decades are truly remarkable.
I'm no football fan but have been told by loads who watched the opening ceremony that they felt emotionally touched to the core.
You are truly lucky to have spent time there and it's wonderful that you look upon your time there with pride.
You too, seem to have made some differences by touching the hearts of those children who looked upon you with such admiration.
Thanks for sharing
kind regards
Nibs
Last year i read a book by Elspeth Huxley about her childhood in Africa and she wrote of the Afircan countryside and the people - what you describe -but the other book on aArica I read was 'the bllood River' I think, about the Congo. i suppose Africa is such a large placeQ
Em, I never got to Malawi but I flew over Lake Malawi (to be honest, it was a plane doing the job for me) and was amazed at the size of it. I was flying to Kenya to apply for a teaching job, which I got. So, Mike, we lived in the Thika of Elspeth Huxley's childhood (as in 'The Flame Trees Of Thika' starring Hayley Mills in the TV adaptation). Things were a bit less idyllic there - civil war at one stage (raise a two finger salute if a mob stops your car to show you're in favour of multi party democracy, and hope the mob agrees). Also I got spectacularly ill, but was able to verify that Mr Shashi Patel, chief surgeon of the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi, was a very clever bloke. Also Mr Jalley, the anaesthetist, who used to visit me post op, looking for signs of terminal brain damage and shaking my hand with vigorous relief. (He'd had to put me a long way out.)
Mike: prostitutes - impoverished people gotta do what they gotta do. (Probably a few children to support, and maybe the extended family too. Not nice but how do we wave the magic wand? One answer is education, which is a reason why I feel personally aggrieved at Mugabe wrecking the country that so many people were trying to build up.)
Em: no TV? Good thing or not? I imagine there are arguments either way. (Oh, I just spotted your children are at an international primary school. It was an international school we taught at in Kenya [when I was vertical]. We worked largely in the senior side [teaching our own children, lucky things][not][or maybe not not] but I did teach music [as a second subject] to the younger ones - lots of fun.)
12 years ago I was LUCKY enough to go to the Seychelles, when my niece was teaching there. The prison is on a beautiful island and everyone joked how being held there could no be called prison; except that the men had lost their freedom. Somone joked what crime could they commit so that they would be locked up there.
The man giving the tour explained that the crimes were not serious and men were not held long. Until the arrival of the latest movie, (the posters were everywhere) the images of violence did not fit with such a gentle place - and the latest robbery was particularly violent and lifted right from the movie. It was an espionage film starring that scientologist actor whose name escapes me, as does the name of the film.
The kids in my group who had been expelled all wanted to be rich, and if it meant selling drugs to do it that's what they would do.
Gerry, glad you survived your illness, hope it is without lasting problems. I dreamt about your blog last night and it gave me an idea for a novel!
So, thankyou for sharing.
Re TV violence: funny how advertisers believe TV influences us and are willing to put their money behind their beliefs, yet media people don't. (They're just reflecting society, they say, rather than forming it. Oh yeah! Sobering thought for us writers, by the way - are we helping form any bad habits in society?)
The reason you recognised those faces was because they were black, and they all look the same. No, no, I'm joking, I'm joking I promise! We used to have a black lady come to fix our phones at work, and she could never get our names right, and I told her the same thing. Don't worry, we're white, we all look the same, she liked the joke. Anyway, some of my best friends are black. (Oh god, here I go again)
The really depressing thing about South Africa, is that so little has changed for so many. Plenty of people still live without running water, not enough food, no electricity. How can they ever be truly productive? Even more depressing, I believe is that, especially in this globalised world, wonderful leaders can't make huge changes, not really, not the big issues, like who controls the resources. Just look at Obama, look at how he's having to duck and dive now that he's "in power".
Anyway, the World Cup made us all feel warm and fuzzy for a while, let's hope it lasts.
Caf
Good old Barack seems to be calculating he might get a few more changes through (on top of welfare) if he diverts everyone's anger to B.P. It's an old tactic. Trouble at home? Start a foreign war. (Lucky old Irish often caught the back end of this - e.g. from Olly Cromwell.)
The good thing about South Africa, and indeed every African nation bar one, is that they don't have Mugabe - although the suggestion now is that he's a puppet of the military. Having created a monster, he's now controlled by it. Can't tell, of course, how true that is, but it doesn't promise well for poor old Zim.
I've been here since 1975, through good times and bad. I love South Africa, South Africans, have a South African Passport, given to me by the Nats, when they needed all the "white" support they could get (I'd only been in the country about five years, and could not speak any of the "African language" I really hope I'm allowed to stay. This place, for all it's problems, rocks!
Caf
Caf.
I remember when Britain was about to invade Iraq, an Iraqi lad we taught (in Leeds) said the people would resist. What? Resist the well-meaning British? But the answer was easy to arrive at. Would the British resist an invasion by well-meaning Iraqis? No matter how badly our vicious British dictator needed overthrowing? (Let's say the National front or some such nutters had got into power). It's hard to imagine, isn't it, and yet it's dead easy at the same time - people just don't like being invaded. Or being insulted. Or thinking they've been insulted (whether they have or not). Or thinking people similar to them have been insulted.
If the Iranians hadn't been messed around so often by Britain (and then America) they wouldn't have bounced off in the other direction. But that's what insulted people do. They get defensive. Then aggressive. And they go for whichever extremist offers most extreme retaliation.
Poor old Afghans, invaded ever since 1979. You can tell how much they hated it because they ended up having the Taliban instead!
Caf
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