I've often been asked why I left Italy to return home. In this letter to friends around the world, four years ago, I explained.
Back in '86, in the week that Halley's Comet came visiting, Kate interviewed Tony Hambly, a geography teacher from a small town about 200km north of Durban. Mr Hambly was (and is still as far as I know) president of the South African branch of the Flat Earth Society.
Pretoria, December 15, 1993. Eugene Terre'blanche and his group have perhaps similar notions about how the universe works, except they have access to guns.
The first indication we had that perhaps we had not chosen a good day to come to Pretoria were the signs plastered on lampposts Eugene gaan praat (Eugene will speak).
The second indication was when I swerved to avoid rear-ending an ox wagon.
"Oh, look dear, it's the Master Race," I said to Kate in my best imitation of a bored-husband voice. (We try those out on each other every so often. Not very successfully.) Both of us were extremely tense, though.
I steered carefully around the procession making its way to the on-ramp of the Voortrekkerhoogte freeway. There they were, in the 1990s, in the most technologically advanced part of the continent; about five wooden ox-drawn wagons. It was as though someone had opened a dimensional door to the world of 200 years in the past.
The women sat on the front seats of the wagons or watched out the rear. The men marched alongside the oxen brandishing the Vierkleur (the four-coloured flag of the old Boer republic). All were dressed in costumes appropriate for the time of the Great Trek. A police escort brought up the rear.
I drove very carefully past them. ("Fly casual," was a phrase that came to mind.) They were probably loaded for bear, and the Toyota Cressida I was driving was definitely not faster than a speeding bullet. There was still a morbid sense of fascination overshadowing my feelings. They looked so very pathetic. More of them could be seen at a distance. They were singing and converging on the monument.
We got out of there quickly and I found my way to the new road leading to the Unisa campus. There were hundreds upon hundreds of us converging on that registration building.
I kept hearing snippets from the Pied Piper in my brain. . . Black rats, brown rats, white rats, brawny rats, fat rats etc etc. We began to count the number of people ahead of us. We stopped counting at somewhere around 400.
As we left Pretoria towards Durban, the ox wagons were still making their way towards the monument.
On TV news that evening, the rally outside the monument received some minor coverage. The English newspapers were more attentive to the occasion (and scathingly so, mostly). Final estimates were that there were fewer than 2000 people present at the monument to pledge their support for the Master Race.
There were more of the rest of us registering as students at Unisa in Pretoria alone. And most of us had enough sense to travel by car or bus.
Psychologically, this sequence of events was a tremendous booster for me. If the best that the racists could come up with was 2000 people in ox wagons at the monument, they have already lost completely.
Yes, many of those people have guns, and they will be able to murder many innocents, but they are as good as dead in the medium term. There will no longer be job reservation in the public service for their illiterate, bigoted minds. The government has always been their biggest employer, and large pay and perk increases on the eve of every election has been one of the factors in keeping the National Party in power. They are not trained to do much else. Their species is doomed.
Time to go home...