The tiny man of God who touched us with his giant heart
Jonathan Jansen remembers his uncle Goliath, who used humour and the Bible to resist the destructive forces of apartheid
GOLIATH was a small man. In a crowd you would not notice him. Yet nobody I have ever known had a presence as imposing as Goliath Rademeyer. Now, as his small and ailing body lay on a hospital bed in Port Elizabeth, fed with fluids through his veins, 80-year-old Goliath drifted slowly into that other world he had preached about all his life.
You have uncles and you have uncles. Most live in your memory as distant adults, the relatives of your parents who pass through your home on regular visits or materialise only on special occasions such as funerals; uncles were mostly invisible to nieces and nephews for that generation which believed children were to be seen and not heard.
A Cape Flats uncle was, moreover, either consumed by alcohol or exhausted by work as he tried to make ends meet for a domestic unit that escaped the logic of “family planning” preached by the local clinic in those days. And then there was Uncle Golly.
For as long as I can remember, Golly was in and out of our house. You heard him before you saw him as that flat, highpitched laugh echoed through the little council house. He was such a funny man when he was not in church, an eccentric who would light up our house with his tales about fixing cars or saving souls, two disciplines which, thanks to Golly, I would come to understand as being very close relatives. “Hey, Abe!” he would start one of his stories as he called my father to attention, yet conscious of the crowd of family in attendance.
Cars broke down regularly with Golly, who must have driven up and down between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth more than the average long-distance taxi driver. Like my father, Golly could never afford a decent car — which was why, on those long trips along the Garden Route, the car would invariably break down. Heaven help you if you were travelling with Golly.
Somewhere outside Port Elizabeth in the early hours of the morning, the rickety blue panel van stuttered to a halt.
Then that flat, shrill laugh. “Brethren, I think we need petrol.” That laugh again, echoing across the Gamtoos Valley.
In your late teens, you feared the next announcement. “Walk to the nearest garage and get some petrol,” was the instruction, with the attendant laugh.
Then it hit me. In the back of the van, permanently, there was an empty petrol can for moments like these. Like my dad’s vehicle, Golly’s car travelled on petrol and God’s grace.
One of these two vehicles would regularly give out on a road somewhere, and then they walked, or, if teenagers were in the car, we were posted to the nearest petrol station. It was a standing joke during family gatherings that between Golly and Abe they often had cars for one-way journeys between the Mother City and Friendly City.
On his kitchen table in Salsoneville stood the engine of a car alongside an open Bible. That is how I will remember Golly. Since his cars were permanently in need of a fix, and a trained mechanic was too expensive for this working-class uncle, he did it himself.
He was either under a car fixing it, or around the kitchen table with the engine loaded on the standard green and white table top of a coloured family home. He would pride himself on his do-it-yourself skills as the engine disappeared under the car’s bonnet, only to emerge later for further treatment on the kitchen table.
It was the companion piece on the table that amused us as visitors to Golly’s home — the St James version of the Holy Bible.
Golly went nowhere without that Bible.
Like the car engine, the good book defined him down to his bones. With one eye on repairing the engine, the other was reading a passage from Scriptures as he prepared to fix souls for eternity at a church gathering that same evening. For those who knew him, Golly’s life seemed to alternate between the Engine and the Word, not necessarily in that order, for the Bible had another puzzling role in the Rademeyer family.
The story is now apocryphal among the cousins that when one of his children did something wrong, they were called to the bedroom and offered one of two forms of discipline — the belt that would whip them or the Bible that would instruct them.
The legend goes that my naughty cousins mostly chose the belt because Golly could permanently scorch your conscience with searing words from the scariest passages in the Old Testament.
With a good whipping, it was over and done within minutes and the physical wounds would eventually heal. But that strain of preaching on the eardrums would stay on your mind long after you had forgotten which of the minor prophets had been called to duty on that fateful day.
To remember Golly is to remember this diminutive man with the Bible tucked under his arm. That in itself was a mark of pride and manhood.
It would be fitfully out of place for a woman to place the blackcover Bible under her arms; she had a smaller version for the handbag. But the man carried the larger edition either in his right hand or, more commonly for Golly, under the arm. There was no more menacing sight, I can assure you, than Golly striding towards you with that Bible tucked away like a sling. You suddenly felt the need to confess some sin, even though one did not come to mind immediately. And then he was upon you: “For the wages of sin is death!”
They might have denied it, but there was a happy kind of com- petition between Golly and Abe when they preached from the Gospel Hall platform on Sunday nights. Man, could those two men hold an audience and, when these lay preachers did their thing in tandem, it was a sight to behold.
Abe, my dad, could memorise Bible verses (and the registration plates of relatives’ cars) with astounding accuracy as he proclaimed the Gospel to a packed house with eyes closed. Then, like tag-team wrestlers, Golly would enter the ring, minus only the obligatory hand slap of their WWF counterparts, and hail fire and brimstone on hapless sinners in the pews. Whether you were “saved” or not, chills ran along your spine as you felt the flames of hell licking at your toes.
To understand this fervour of Goliath, you had to go far back in history to the violent streets of the Cape Flats. There emerged a group of black men who were determined to raise their families in honour despite the crime, alcoholism and the relentless battering of the apartheid system. Evicted from homes in areas declared white, denied quality education in privileged schools, and reduced to unskilled labour on factory floors, it was easy to give up, to drown your sorrows, and to aim simply to survive the mean streets. But not Goliath and his merry band of fellow believers.
When these men encountered the Gospel on the Cape Flats, they embraced it with passion and reorganised their homes and their lives around the certainties of the evangel. They made public confessions followed by water baptisms, then spread out across the Flats and into the “upcountry” areas driving broken cars to mend broken hearts.
Such was their fervour that these newly minted men tied their families tightly to the Kingdom, starting by giving their children biblical names. Abe and his wife Sarah started the naming process with me, the eldest, Jonathan David, followed by Peter, Naomi and Isaac. My youngest brother, Denzil, was the exception, named after the son of the madam in whose home my father charred at one stage in his working life.
Golly and his wife, Edith (my father’s sister), followed suit with Lydia, Epaphras, Phoebe, Ruth and Silas; Patsy, the eldest, was his stepchild. Together, this set of cousins pretty much covered the important books of the Bible and this naming process marked all of us as the children of fiery evangelists — notwithstanding the embarrassment of a name like Epaphras, which the poor child promptly shortened to Paf.
Golly’s speciality was openair preaching.
On a Sunday afternoon, when the rest of humanity took a post- lunch nap ahead of the working week, Golly would raise them from their sleep with that highoctane voice floating through an open window: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”
Standing behind the taller believers, in case my school friends saw me, I shuddered to think what ungodly utterances must have flowed from the mouths of the slumbering sinners as their peaceful rest was shattered. But that was Golly and his tag-team mate, Abe.
Neither Golly nor Abe finished high school, and they had to work hard to support their families. By some strange coincidence both men were drivers for dry-cleaning firms; Golly for Atlas in Port Elizabeth, and Abe for Nannucci in Cape Town. They would collect clothes by going from home to home, returning suits, shirts and pants on hangers a few days later as customers paid cash for the dry-cleaning jobs.
It was tough work building your customer base in the townships among lower-middle-class coloured people, but when the day ended you came home to prepare for one or other church meeting that evening — prayer meetings on Mondays, house meetings on Tuesdays, business meetings of the church on Wednesdays, Bible study meetings on Thursdays . . . until the cycle restarted with a minimum of four gatherings on a Sunday.
It was an all-consuming Christian commitment.
There was a dark side to evangelical fervour, which expressed itself in a harsh, ascetic discipline that would leave deep wounds in cousins’ lives. Physical beatings, when they happened, were merciless. Public humiliation was not uncommon, like the time my cousin Ruth was struck by lightning on a Port Elizabeth racetrack.
At her funeral, Golly held up her jewellery, partly burnt by the electricity that had shocked her lean frame.
“This is what happens,” he said publicly, when wearing worldly attire; God strikes you dead, in other words.
We were taught from a young age that jewellery was what Jezebel wore, the harlot from the Old Testament. I stood in shock at the open graveside as my dear uncle clutched Ruth’s most basic adornments and, for the first time in my life, I was angry, very angry, with Golly.
As his life drained away last week, I found myself remembering the many good things about Golly, but also his imperfections. I could not help wonder how he arrived at his extreme asceticism and rigid discipline. Was it his harsh upbringing, a model common to earlier generations of South African families? For a long time he greeted his own children with a handshake.
Or was it also a mortal fear of what would happen to the children if they were exposed to the harsh consequences of living under apartheid on the Cape Flats? Was the overreaction a vigorous defence against those forces that threatened the very dignity and decency of his family life that he tried so hard to uphold — such as the eviction from their large home in the beautiful suburb of Fairview when it was pronounced “white”, with the immediate consequence of relocation to a small dwelling on the outskirts of the Friendly City?
Was this hard-working family man with little formal education or economic opportunity, and who in his 80 years never once wavered in his faith or fidelity even through the difficult years of apartheid, not in fact one to be admired?
In my estimation, Goliath was a giant.
There was no more menacing sight than Goliath striding towards you with that Bible tucked away like a sling We were taught from a young age that jewellery was what Jezebel wore, the harlot from the Old Testament