The truly scary part about growing older is realising how much you haven't learnt yet...
THE OLD MAN in the Unisa parking garage in Pretoria had a wizened look not unlike that of Yoda in Star Wars. He had been carefully listening in on a conversation I had been having with his subordinate, a young security guard about 22-years-old who had recently signed up for correspondence classes to complete his matric.
The younger man had a burning ambition to attend medical school. Lack of money in the family had forced him to drop out before completing his matric. That day, December 15 1993, he was standing on the threshold of a new South Africa. The possibility of being part of a new and exciting future thrilled him beyond measure.
The old man listened carefully to the advice I gave to his companion, and waited for him to leave. He then looked at me and fixed me with a piercing gaze.
"You have travelled far and seen many things," he said. "You are not like those who live here."
To travel. The Star Trek credo has haunted me since my childhood. "To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life forms and new civilisations. To boldly go where no man has gone before."
I was late into my teens before I realised with despair that I would never travel to the stars. Politics and greed would prevent my breaking the bounds of this planet and heading out there into the vast magnificence of all creation.
I realised then why Verwoerd had said that a black child should never be allowed to aspire to the greener pastures of white education.
I cried out in agony to those who had given me the ability to dream; Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, my grandfather, HG Wells and those thousands of others: is this all that I have to live for?
Bob Marley came later. Yes, that dagga-smoking layabout who the Western world could only remember as having had a dozen or so species of lice in his hair when he died of cancer. "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds." Bless you, Robert Nestor.
And I've travelled. No, not holiday making. I've lived in other lands. I've wallowed in the belly of the beast, riding through plains where Native Americans once walked free, now squeezed into Bantustans demarcated with signs such as "Onandaga Nation Territory".
And five minutes after one crosses the boundaries of the "free people," one passes the Butler Shock Incarceration facility where the offal of society have their synapses fried by electrodes in the name of civilisation. Most of them are black.
America. Land of the free and home of the brave. And the biggest contradiction of my life is that for all the evil that that country has inflicted upon this planet, I well and truly love the place.
It's one of the contradictions that make human existence worthwhile. The Swedes, the Danes, the Finns with their high taxes and perfect lifestyles live sterile, antiseptic existences with cradle to grave social security catering to their every need. To be born, work, and die in ones sleep. A notch on the census pile of history...
I have a sister, 18 years younger than I am from my father's second marriage. She goes to school in Lenasia - that sprawling dormitory built on eca-shale on the outskirts of Soweto. Many of her classmates have never been out of Lenasia. Not even to Johannesburg.
And something inside me screams. Is this what we have built up to? Is this the pinnacle of human achievement? Where are the promises of Arya Bhatta, of Galileo, of Einstein?
But there is a contradiction again. Because it's only in a society as fucked up as this one that people are driven to extremes. We are pushed to the brink of despair, and we laugh or die.
I visited Durban beach again today. I will be travelling again, soon. By the time you read this, I will have begun spending more than a month of my life in the belly of the beast, surrounded by some of the finest intellects in the modern world.
And I will again wallow in the experience. I will soak up of knowledge that has built up in that part of the world in only 200 short years.
And I will come back home to Blue Lagoon, and shed a tear for that child who will never leave Lenasia.
It's great to be alive.