SA has undergone a sea change
CHANGE seeps, mainly. Not headlines about change; those can be the size of crocodiles, like the now long-ago headlines that told us our nation’s Number 1 prisoner was now its Number 1 president.
It’s flesh-and-blood change that seeps behind.
After months you might notice a post office clerk you wouldn’t have seen before, that’s a change-jolt. More months go by, and there’s a second new clerk. That’s barely a jolt.
Next step is 20 years later. A flashback-jolt awakens the days that you took it as purely natural that every face behind the counter was pale and every voice was Afrikaans.
Now you’re taking it as just as natural that no single voice is Afrikaans and no single visage is pale. The original natural has become its opposite natural. Magic. Little bit baffling.
For punch-in-the-chin change you need a place you haven’t been for a while. Best, one whose features you’ve had in your head since bucket-and-spade days, but that you last visited around the time the Beatles broke up.
Which fits the Natal North Coast in your correspondent’s cranium.
One change is proudly banal: speed humps. You may have noticed the Stoep getting a little heated on this theme (“it’s like you want to be the world’s first Speed Hump Correspondent”, says a critic) but, well, here’s the good news: we in Gauteng are outrageously privileged, at least next to the municipality of KwaDukuza, nee Stanger.
They contain, apart from approximately 998 of the Thousand Hills, more speed humps per square metre than, I’ll bet, anywhere on the planet.
Moreover these are anything but the standard hump, the desirable one that you can know it’s safe to take at 40km/h.
Each is an individual work of art with its own angle of tyre-strike, its own plateaus and valleys.
The taxis know the tricks of the trade, like which way to launch at each while retaining your sump, and how long to hoot at the wussy GP hire-cars that pause to crawl across.
For the Gauties, we rethink the blessings we have to count.
At the same time we also thank KZN drivers, taxis included, for their wondrous touching way – must be Valium traces in the coastal air – of treating pedestrian crossings as holy.
Amazing, Mr Taxi has just deafened you in penalty for delaying him at the hump; next thing he pauses, meek and mild, while a group of holidaymakers debate logistics on the roadside.
They don’t notice they’re on the edge of a zebra crossing, an artefact that Gauteng minds take to be something for surveyors with theodolites. We can but marvel that here in the Kingdom, it’s the apotheosis of driver civilisation.
Much else that’s beautiful. Subtropicalism as a whole. We can rejoice in our own summer verdancy, but it’s inspiring to be re-reminded of theirs: trees like ours with elephantiasis, leaves the size of miners’ shovels. Take a bit of delight, too, and righteousness, in the handlability of our heat; seldom too cold, never too hot. Here, crossing the beach at noon is a work of endurance requiring two beers for recovery.
Then there is that special privilege that belongs to people who lived through South Africa at the end of the 20th century: seeing things that in advance seemed fearsome turn to the most natural of naturals. Simple stuff like how everybody is now on first names, none of the old imbalance with one side “Sir” and the other side “Jack”. Simple acceptance that the beach is everyone’s beach.
Seeping change is growth in peace; no headlines, no squawking; maturing.