Like a blocked urinal at Loftus

ALMOST exactly 30 years ago, I voted for the first time in South Africa’s first democratic elections.

The voting station was outside the municipal swimming pool and I remember the queue was hundreds of metres long.

While waiting to make my own mark on our country’s history, I looked at the clear blue water through the fence and wished I could take a dip like I did almost every summer afternoon.

But the pool was closed on voting day, with even the lifeguard of 20odd years, Ducky Coetzee, standing in the queue a few sweaty bodies ahead of me.

Also in line were many black people who had walked across from the nearby Mandela Park informal settlement.

I overheard Ducky say to his wife that ‘if they win, they will also be allowed to use the swimming pool’.

Who all was included in his ‘they’ didn’t worry me, but I trusted The Duck would sort out any ‘urinaters’ right away.

“You don’t swim in the toilet, so you don’t wiz in the pool,” he used to tell a culprit while walking him out the gate - banned from using the pool for a week.

Yup, at 18 years old, urine in the municipal swimming pool was as much inconvenience as I could foresee for the democratic South Africa.

Others, on the other hand, were more pessimistic. A lot more! Like dad’s brother, Uncle Elmo, who queued with us and also heard Ducky.

Uncle Elmo said to everybody who cared to listen that, “in a week’s time this pool will look like a blocked urinal at Loftus when the Boks play the All Blacks”.

I didn’t pay much attention to his statement because it was coming from the man who had his gardener fill empty dog food bags with sand and had them placed in ‘strategic counter ambush positions’ throughout his garden.

Even Dad scoffed at his doomsday prophecies, calling his brother a nutcase. ‘They’ did win the election and, while the pool didn’t become a toilet right away, changes happened - the first being Ducky Coetzee replaced by three young lifeguards.

The first drowning in the pool’s history happened about a year after the elections, and before the inquest was completed, another two people were dead; one an adult male in knee-deep water.

The local newspaper later reported that only one of the three lifeguards could swim and that one of the nonswimmers was a new councillor’s cousin.

Simply too many people for the untrained and inexperienced to keep an eye on.

This past December while visiting my parents, I took a drive around my old hometown. The swimming pool where I spent countless hours making bombs in the cool blue water is now a rubbish dump for Mandela Park, the informal settlement having grown right up to the town itself.

The neat change rooms and pump house have been carried away to the very last brick. It’s a sad story and my swimming pool’s story is the story of just about every municipal pool in every small town.

As we get ready to queue up once more, to cast our votes in another election, I look at everything that’s going on, and for the first time since that first democratic election 30 years ago, everybody seems to be nervous all over again.

I therefore cannot help but think that my swimming pool’s story is becoming our country’s story too.

The most vulnerable people are being pushed into the deep end by politicians who care only about themselves.

I’m also starting to think Uncle Elmo wasn’t completely nuts after all.