Ndumiso Ngcobo asks if adults will ever grow up
This past weekend coincided with the 95th anniversary celebrations of Inkamana High School in Vryheid. This is where this columnist received his secondary education. Spending a weekend with former high-school mates will catapult even the least meditative individual into reflective mode. I experienced several of these moments myself and I will share them randomly. The first one was triggered when I drove through the hostel where I spent most of my time at the school.
In 1985 we had a dining-hall monitor with a notoriously short fuse. A dining hall monitor determines who gets to eat what, who cleans up and even who deserves to be present in the dining hall at chow time. A few days earlier he had woken up on the wrong side of bed and randomly declared, Mussolini style, that the washing of hands or utensils in the washbasins inside the dining hall was forbidden. From then on hands and plates were to be washed only at the outside tap.
On this particular Friday late afternoon my spirits were buoyed by the anticipation of yet another scintillating episode of the TV series
MacGyver. In my absent-minded daze I forgot about the “no washing of hands in the washbasin” rule. After I had washed my hands I turned around, whistling jovially. The monitor asked me calmly why I was defying his rules. So I started rapping a mini dissertation on the stupidity of not using the washbasin for its intended purpose. After all, it’s not called a washbasin for nothing. The next thing I saw was a palm the size of a Martial eagle’s wing approaching my left cheek at the speed of Lewis Hamilton’s F1 Mercedes. I saw Diwali fireworks. I saw neon-green sea horses in purple drum-majorette uniform performing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker while a band of fireflies played vuvuzelas in the background. I got up and bolted from the dining hall, screaming like an Irish banshee.
What lesson did I learn from this poetic episode, then? Well, I learned that in the real world there is often a limit to the effectiveness of possessing more compelling facts or even superior logic when attempting to settle a difference of opinion.
Nobody appreciates this philosophy better than our Department of International Relations and Cooperation officials. They might believe the Dalai Lama is a harmless Tibetan monk with a bubbly personality who walks around in a colourful robe and sandals. But our great friends, the Chinese, don’t share that view. So when His Holiness applies for a visa to come and visit our own robed fellow with a sunny disposition, The Arch, the application is handled like a hot potato. It is tossed from official to official until our notoriously easy-to-distract media and public, with the attention span of Dory from
Finding Nemo, inevitably shift focus to the latest shenanigans in Parliament.
The other realisation that hit me is hardly ground-breaking at all. A few years ago I actually ran into my tormentor from the dining hall. After a few pleasantries, it occurred to me that he had absolutely no recollection of the incident from that fateful Friday. More importantly, I realised that I harboured absolutely no hard feelings about it.
But this past weekend I witnessed a tension-filled interaction between two individuals who are former classmates. The following day I asked another classmate of theirs what the source of the tension was. She shrugged and said: “Ag, they’ve had beef since we were all in standard six. They were academically competitive with each other and have never been able to get along.” I felt smug, thinking: “I guess
I’m more mature than those two.”
But the truth is that most adults are nothing more than just giant children with facial hair, fruitful reproductive systems and pubic hair. It’s just that most of us are blind to our own juvenile nature. That’s my disclaimer just in case someone hallucinates that I think I’m more mature than my former schoolmates who are hanging onto a 30-year-old grudge about who was able to retain Pythagoras’s Theorem better than the other. Far from it.
The same goes with some of the tiffs I have with Mrs N that end up with us not talking to each other for a few hours. During that time both of us will wait for the other to break the ice and get to the passionate make-up part of the fight. My reasons for the reluctance to go first? “Well, she started it!”
There is often a limit to the effectiveness of possessing more compelling facts or superior logic