‘Why waste cash on a funeral?’
Rural KZN champion with cancer decides to hold a ‘living wake’
DAVID Alcock is dying and three weeks ago he and his wife, Carole Baekey, invited their friends to a party because they wanted to celebrate family and friends who have enhanced their lives.
David joked that he wanted to hear what those closest to him thought of him while he was still alive.
He is receiving palliative care for terminal adenocarcinoma cancer.
Instead of mourning his death, he and Carole decided the remainder of his life should be lived fully.
Although some family and friends were taken aback by the idea of attending a “living wake”, held at the Alcock home in Cowies Hill, about 80 family and friends enjoyed the Living Writ Large party.
David, 67, was delighted, noting he wanted to hear what people had to say while he was alive. “I have never believed in funerals. Why spend that money.”
The party was recorded and there are plans to put it on YouTube.
Among those who spoke were David’s daughters, including their two older daughters from his first marriage, the four Mzolo daughters and three Mzolo sons. The Alcock and Mzolo families have been together since 1868.
The four Mzolo girls, now young adults, are the daughters of the family’s Zulu patriarch Bhokide Mzolo and his fifth wife. They lived with David and Carole and went to Kloof Junior Primary, Kloof Senior Primary and Kloof High School. All six young women have gone on to have successful lives.
The Mzolo brothers, from the patriarch, and his fourth wife have been working with David and living with the Alcocks for the last six years.
In praise of David, they spoke about having adopted the “Alcock can-do attitude”.
As a family the Alcocks have long made history in KwaZulu-Natal by walking their own paths. David’s father Neil, from farming stock, with Alan Paton and Peter Brown, was a founding member of the subsequently banned Liberal Party. After Neil and his first wife, Eileen, divorced, Neil married Creina Bond. Initially they lived in Wasbank and then spent decades in Msinga, living in a mud house with no water or electricity, focussing on rural development projects in impoverished communities.
While trying to mediate peace talks between the warring Thembu and Mchunu factions in 1983, he and his delegation of tribal leaders were ambushed on their way home. Neil and four tribal leaders were assassinated.
David has a sister and two half-brothers, GG and Khona, who grew up in rural poverty because Neil and Creina sacrificed the comforts of suburban life under apartheid. Like him their first language is Zulu.
Because his parents invited black people into their home, to stay over and dine with them, David recalls being ostracised at school in Underberg, in the 1950s and 1960s. Things were marginally better at school in Bulwer, but nine months at Michaelhouse in Balgowan in the Midlands were the unhappiest of his life. Admitting to being stroppy in those school days and having an attitude, David was badly beaten up by prefects and took to carrying a knife to defend himself. His parents were advised to take him out of the school before he killed someone or was killed.
In the early 1960s David attended high school at Waterford in Swaziland, where education was the priority while colour and religion were irrelevant. After completing high school David attended agricultural college in Potchefstroom, where he learned to speak Afrikaans. A succession of farming jobs followed in the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, Free State, Mpumalanga and KZN.
Eventually he went into doing farm maintenance, fixing farm machinery. His overriding passion has been practical and sustainable measures to improve rural and peri-urban lives. One of his areas of activity, was developing a hydraulic ram water pump, requiring no external power source. His ram pump design has only two moving parts, is made from local materials and requires little maintenance to pump water 24 hours a day.
David recalls his father saying water is central to life and “we must look after it”.
Building on 200-year-old technology, David created a ram pump relevant for South Africa, with the focus on efficiency, sustainability inexpensive to make and install. The Alcock ram pump was developed in part to address his anger at seeing women in rural areas carrying buckets of water on their heads.
David, with Mzolo brothers Sizwe and Mafo, has installed approximately 150 ram pumps throughout rural KwaZuluNatal and the Eastern Cape.
Ram pumps meet essential requirements for rural food security. David’s initial support came from Carole, who believed in his vision, and subsequently Khanyisa Projects and the Aqualima Trust.
David was approached more than a decade ago by the Johns Hopkins University Engineers without Borders to assist aspiring students with practical experience in the field. Over nine years Hopkins EWB students, with faculty and professional advisers, made the trek from the US to KwaZulu-Natal to learn from and work with David, installing ram pumps in rural areas.
David’s cancer diagnosis stunned him and the family. He and Carole consciously decided that having lived their lives with passion for their family, work and friends, neither giving up on life nor mourning works for either of them.
Their Living Writ Large party was the second of David’s bucket-list wishes. Another is seeing geographically distant family members and friends who could not make it to the party. With Carole working in the UK in early July, David accompanied her there with family and friends.
And what did his friends have to say at the party? “I can rest easy knowing that I was not as bad as all that.”