Writers’ Block

Train drain

✍ Re Paul Ash’s “Highway Surfer” (July 20). I too deplore the disappearance of many of our trains, and most passenger ones too.

Regrettably, the bulk of our railway system has gone to ruin because the state railway insists on making a profit, while large numbers of heavy trucks demolish our highways, which we pay for in taxes and tolls. — Peter Smulik, Cape Town

Saved from the sign

In “Voyages of Madmen” (August 3), Timothy Gabb relates how the coloured community in Mossel Bay wanted a boycott of the 500th anniversary commemoration of Bartolomeu Dias’s arrival in SA because it was to be held on a whites-only beach, “until the event was opened to the public”.

The South African ambassador in Lisbon in 1988, Carel Wessels, was closely involved. He wrote in a book, which I co-compiled, that during a formal dinner in Mossel Bay on February 2 1988, a Portuguese TV announcer warned him he had seen a whites-only sign on the beach and that he would have to focus on this for his programme the next morning.

Wessels went to the beach with the then administrator of the Cape Province, Gene Louw, and others. Wessels later wrote: “I said: ‘Gentlemen, I have invested too much time and energy in this project to have it wrecked. I understand your regulatory constraints, please have the appropriate tools delivered to my hotel room and I will remove the sign before sunrise. You can prosecute me subsequently. It will be a pleasure to defend myself in court.’

“Louw then quietly instructed the mayor and his staff to have this and other similar signs in the vicinity removed by daybreak. After an uneasy sleep, I went down to the beach before dawn: the sign was gone. … We had prevented the commemoration from being sidetracked by a stupid apartheid sign.” —