Eid, Passover, Easter... Just another multicultural week in the new RSA
It's a peaceful Wednesday night in the newsroom here in the fairest Cape. The weekend lies ahead with the promise of a little rest and relaxation.
Our reporter on duty, Judy Damon, is putting the finishing touches to her report of our deputy mayor and four other councillors spending the night out on the city streets among the ranks of the homeless.
"Call Pagad and the gangs," I tell her. "Tell them I've issued an injunction. No one is allowed to shoot anyone tonight. No one is allowed to bomb, maim or disfigure anyone tonight. The holiday weekend lies ahead. It's a time for peace and joy."
It's the festival of Eid-ul-Adha, an Islamic celebration that forms part of the history of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, and God intervened, substituting a ram instead.
(Or so the legend goes. No matter, it's a time of peace and joy. My kind of time.)
And the phone rings.
"It's the Crescent Moon Society," says our acting Night News Editor, the indefatigable Tony Weaver.
Who?
"The Crescent Moon Society. They say if you look out at the full moon right now, you can see the words 'Allah-u' written in Arabic. Should we do anything?"
I thought about it. "Naw. We'd have to get in a photographer with a long lens. Then we'd have to find someone who reads and writes Arabic to transcribe it. And unless we had someone like a Moulana we could trust, we'd have no way of knowing whether or not what we reproduced was really 'Allah-u' or whether it said 'A jihad has been declared. Kill all Americans'."
I paused. A thought had come to mind. "What about the 'Akbar' part?"
"I dunno," said Weaver. "Presumably that's on the dark side."
I sighed. "It's like the eggs we had last year. For every five people who swear that they can see "God is great' written on the side, you'll find a dozen more that deny it."
It's the flux, I thought. Arabic had been on my mind a lot that day. I sidled up silently behind the Night Chief Sub-editor, "Oom" Godfrey Heynes, who was wrapped in tense concentration as the dreaded deadline approached.
"Did you know," I said to him, startling him as I had expected, "that the first book ever written in Afrikaans was in Arabic?"
Eyebrows raised around the table. They're a relatively unflappable lot, our sub-editors. Nothing fazes them.
"Maybe we should send that message out to Robert van Tonder. What do you think?"
A decade ago, as a student in the US of A, I wrote a history of South Africa called "South Africa for Beginners". It was written to contradict the blarney I had been taught in school that Jan van Riebeeck and his descendants took control of an uninhabited part of the continent, crossed the land, and met the Nguni travelling southward.
Earlier that day, we had had a power failure. So I strolled across to the museum outside of Parliament. There they sat, two copies of Arabic texts — phonetic transcripts of Afrikaans as spoken by the Malay slaves and their kin and written by them. Predating the first Afrikaans book in the modern Western alphabet by several years.
And I remembered what my research back then had revealed — that the trekboers were largely illiterate. But I had not learned that it was left to the Islamic Malays, who were literate, to first commit the taal to paper.
Truly amazing. The more I learn, the more I realise how much I do not know.
Perhaps it's time for me to dust off "South Africa for Beginners" and start writing again.1 Then next time Constand Viljoen begins to speak of an Afrikaaner Volkstaat, I can ask: "And who exactly are these Afrikaners? Christians or Muslims?"