Seven-ping Sunday (12)

A ping a day keeps freedom in the bay

The bulk of the week spent in a quandary on how to update a 2004 newspaper feature I wrote on Krotoa, the first indigenous South African woman to marry a European (on 26 April 1664), my mind was on freedom and what constitutes it. Which means echoes of the past pinged loudly, but none so loudly as our university reunion scheduled at the Glen Country Club in Clifton on Freedom Day tomorrow. Ping ping. May you find one to pique your fancy.

Poetry ping. Reorganising book shelves, I found myself riffling through a well-thumbed copy of ‘Dialogue, A literary annual for young writers 1972’, and had a serious ping when I happened upon a pertinent piece by Paddi Clay from Cape Town High School. Besides eliciting a high school quote of my own (“Freedom is allowing yourself to be yourself – an enormous responsibility”), I remembered her name clearly from anti-apartheid Capital Radio station when it started out in 1979. (A day of humming “Babies to grannies keep all their trannies tuned to 604” followed.). Once the editor of the ‘Daily Friend’, the mouthpiece for the South African Institute of Race Relations, and having held many positions in the media (“the heady days when journalism jobs were plentiful, and newspapers still flourished”) over 45 years, Clay is now retired and dreams of an official end to race classification.

FREEDOM
Be careful

the thoughts

You give to their minds

like gifts:

like hand-down clothes

do not always

fit.

(An award-winning columnist, she has some great opinion pieces too. Click here.)

Memory ping. Last year’s Freedom Day turned out to be a surreal experience for me. Click here.

Soundbyte of the week. Free Nelson Mandela by Special AKA. Because I smuggled this contraband Soho purchase in my luggage coming back from London in 1987 after a year of working and travelling in Europe. Click here.

Play of the week: A few years ago I enrolled in a course called Positive Intelligence, the aim of which was to identify fear-based triggers. Dubbed saboteurs, the triggers appear when your inner judge takes over and you can’t hear your intuitive sage. Kings of the no-man’s-land of fear, your inner saboteurs lead to obsessive behaviour like doomscrolling and stop you making positive decisions. Sage behaviour, on the other hand, rather than operating from the survivor brain in the brain stem, uses the middle prefrontal cortex for perspective. Sage behaviour being an attitude of ‘maybe it will, maybe it won’t’, it sees obstacles as gifts. In short, a novel way to access, engage and connect with authentic feelings.

Strains of which I was reminded of on Tuesday night at a Baxter theatre performance of ‘Stupid Fucking Bird’, a modern, local reconstruction of Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’, in which the characters, all connected to each other in some way, bang out their existential crises on stage. Engaging from start to finish, the battle cry -- “Is it real if I can’t feel it?; is what you project what you feel?” -- seemed even more appropriate now, in social media times, than it may have in 1896. Or, as one character lamented on her perceived failed career, “I am not an actress, I am a seagull”.

Instagram of the week. Though she was only drawn to freediving after writing ‘The Diving’ about her brother’s tragic death and surviving a near drowning herself, freelance journalist Helen Walne’s name has become synonymous with mindblowing photography of Cape peninsula kelp forests. Using the ‘underwonder’ (her words) as a way to process her own grief, Walne has also inspired thousands to respect and protect this vibrant oceanic ecosystem. She hopes to spend Freedom Day doing just that. Click here. Her captions are as delightful and profound as the pictures she takes.

Swim of the week. Windmill beach, Simonstown. Low tide, the clouds were ominous, the sea was as warm as an impromptu sundowner at dusk. Or, As Kurt Vonnegut once said, everything was beautiful, nothing hurt. Paradise.

Word ping. Notwithstanding that there will always be politics involved in an undertaking of this nature, I have in my heppie hands the newly published Kaaps dictionary, or woriboek. (R300 from https://shofarbooks.co.za/book/kaaps-woriboek/). Defined as “an African language formed out of a slave lingua franca used among the indentured indigenous and enslaved populations in the Cape Colony. Its sound system, word formation, syntactic structure, and meaning-making character (were) historically formed through the use of Cape Dutch mixed with the phonological lexical variations of Arabic Low and High Portuguese (also known as Malay-Portuguese), Bahasa-Malay, and Khoi and San languages in the early 1600s to 1700s. It was later influenced by English and standard Afrikaans (and gradually marginalised) as a result of colonial and apartheid nationalisation policies”, the aim of the dictionary is to elevate the status of colourful Kaaps. Edited by Quentin Williams, Theodore Rodrigues and Chevan van Rooi. Comes with extensive explanations on how to use, but unfortunately it’s all Kaaps to English or Afrikaans and not the other way round.

Till next week,

Lekke bly,

Sharonski