Canonical friendship of fleeting hugs and a home-made dagger

ABOUT ten of them stood huddled against the wall outside the Westridge Civic Centre in Mitchells Plain. The sea air drifting off the ocean brought a clinging wetness to the late autumn night.

I was with Vernie Petersen and two others. It was 1980 and we were part of various youth and studentbased structures that had emerged in the wake of the boycotts around education and worker strikes.

The reception committee ahead of us could have been some of the youngsters who had dropped out of high school during that time. Their homes, small and overcrowded, pro- vided little if any social space to entertain and host friends.

So they gathered on the street corners of their neighbourhood. Idleness became the meeting place of mischief and, eventually, crimi- nal activity. As we drew closer, half the group swaggered over to the other side of the road, creating a corridor through which we had to pass – a sign of their hostile intent.

We resolved to hit and run our way out of this situation and kept walking into the silence ahead of us “’ cause he who fights and runs away…” The silence was broken as one fellow stated in a matter-of-fact way, “Au, ouens, di’sie politicos.” (Okay gents, it’s the politicos).

A few nights later, Simon Fredericks visited me. We sat in the yellow Volksie outside my home in Nile Way. Simon was our man with a plan, a working- class hero from Hanover Park.

Later he found his way into the camps of Umkhonto weSizwe. I spoke at his funeral in Langa a few years ago.

I had told him about our almostskirmish and my concern about the crime in the area.

I was instructed to open the cubbyhole. I had to choose between the chubby revolver and the home-made dagger. I chose the less ominous recrafted file with a cork handle, the shank sharpened to a point. Its encrusted rustiness evidence of previous use.

The nature of that moment I never fully understood but always treasured. The sharpened file joined the diary and the collection of John Milton’s poetry in my khaki fisherman’s haversack.

It was in my possession wherever I went all over the Cape Flats and eventually to St Paul’s Seminary in Grahamstown. There a thieving seminarian dispossessed me of it, an item I had cherished despite its iniquitous origin and use.

That fleeting engagement on Nile Way could be what Jacques Derrida refers to as a “canonical model of friendship”. Simon was in a hurry that night and throughout his life.

I never saw him again until we met in a fleeting flurry of hugs outside the movies on a Friday night at the Waterfront.

He was with Zou Kota, his wife. Our friendship, grounded in our common class origins – “an organising role in the definition of the political experience” – hinged on an intuitive offering, and the acceptance of a solitary possibility for survival.

Take it easy, my brother, heaven is beautiful because of the likes of you and the way you make God smile. After all, you knew that “talk is cheap, but the hotter the battle, the