He was an intense little boy, packed with that special sort of life energy that never truly dissipates. He ran everywhere in high-powered circles, was constantly in an advanced state of filthiness and was by far the biggest reader of the bunch. There was no incongruity in his activity levels and his passion for reading. He read as he did everything else, as if the vitally important was at stake, his fingers always jammed into his mouth, his teeth snapping away on his nails, which he chewed and swallowed like food.
His reading was fired by his imagination, which was immense, and which frequently lured him to the classic adventure stories, generally of the British variety. From around the time of his discovery of the little black notebook, his focus morphed to encompass the larger adventure of the world around him. The story of our little group gripped him in a profound way, and once he had wrapped his mind around the notion of a prior world, a prior existence with tools and people and buildings and machinery and businesses, he was unstoppable. He plugged himself into computers with gusto, powered with a manic intensity that could only have come from a righteous genetic combination.
Lebogang, Katlego and Lerato – who all shared Gerald as a father – were, in their early years at least, very different. They were all a similar age, a year or two back from Sthembiso, and they shared a marked disinclination for matters of the extreme imagination. While Sthem was racing up the mountains of his mind, the three of them preferred a more placid and tactile approach. In the sandpit they let the sand dribble through their fingers and actually felt it, grain by grain, moving through. They played softer games, and it would take them several years longer than Sthembiso to fully grasp the nature of the world they had been born into.
As collective parents acting individually, we all tried to influence the mix. For me, that meant archiving. I took whatever opportunities were available to let the kids experience the full extent of the knowledge challenge that lay ahead. In other words, I ratcheted up the Eeeyu rivalry.
Over the years of their births and early childhoods we covered many of Joburg’s major knowledge sites. All the universities, most of the Model C schools, all the notable art galleries. Then I pushed further. We cleared out the Sasol research department, all four floors of it, everything in the Innovation Hub complex north of Tshwane, and a lot of machines from the science and maths blocks of Wits, the Tshwane University of Technology and all the others. Of course, almost all of the plastic – the computers and pads and mobiles, etc. – was junk. Without the cloud, all that plastic was now simply boxes.
The futility of collecting the boxes was obvious to us all, and yet we carried on. Partially, I suppose, to create a sense of intellectual hope and purpose, and partially because it was fun for the kids. To hold them back on the great Eeeyu hunt seemed unfair.
Looking back, the most notable Eeeyu mission – and certainly the best documented[7] – was to the president’s office in the Union Buildings. The buildings were everything one would expect, but President Mbangi’s office was a shock – pristine and completely empty. Just an oak desk facing two large chairs. A Kentridge print on one wall, a batik wall hanging on the other, and in between the usual framed photographs – Mandela, Mbeki, Merkel, Jonathon, Zuma, Clinton, Obama.
‘Why is it empty like this?’ Roy Jnr asked.
‘They worked mostly from Cape Town,’ Beatrice answered smoothly. ‘I think this office was just for meetings and things. A place to be when there was business in Tshwane. I’m sure he kept all his stuff in his Cape Town office.’ The kids were dubious. Fats chuckled in disbelief. As much as we tried to prevent it, the emptiness of the office quickly became legend. The kids would talk forever more about things being as empty as Mbangi.
For years, though, through all of our excursions, I avoided the CSIR. It reminded me too much of Tebza and Lillian. Driving past and seeing the side fence ripped up from where we had cut through all those years ago sent rumblings through my chest.
But eventually the time came. The complex loomed in the distance, an emotional black hole for us all. I gathered a posse of children and headed out to the place where we had allowed ourselves to dream our foolish, ambitious dreams.
The CSIR was an unrecognisable jungle, the incipient growth of our initial experience a long-lost memory. Every movement required calculated physical effort, and the first visit was nothing more than a mission designed to frustrate and annoy a pack of small children. I drove us back home amid snot-laden moans and irritations, Sthembiso leading the choir in intensity and volume. There are few things more frustrating to children than an adult who refuses to enter a jungle.
Javas and I returned the next day, equipped with machetes and chainsaws. I had made a complicated deal with Sthembiso that we would not do any exploring as such. According to the terms of the arrangement, we would restrict our activities to those of an adult, jungle-clearing nature. No exploring would be permitted until such time as children could participate in the Eeeyu potentialities. Sthembiso waved us out of the Houghton driveway with an intense, man-to-man look on his face.
As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. It took us three return trips to create reasonable vehicle access. On day two we roped Gerald in, and only then did we make meaningful headway, each of us shirtless and sweating as we hacked away at the enveloping forces.
‘Makes you think,’ Gerald panted as he powered down his chainsaw. ‘All over the world this has happened. Trees and snow and sand—’
‘Makes you think what?’ Javas asked.
‘That soon we’ll never be able to go anywhere again without this.’ He lifted the chainsaw a few inches from the ground and dropped it again.
We cleared enough to allow our vehicles in. We went a few steps further in some places, clearing the bush around seating areas in what used to be the park, as well as around the nanotech building, Tebza’s place. I told them his full hack story while we were working. It created a fair buzz. Javas was shocked I had kept it to myself for so long. Gerald was stunned that such things existed at all.
‘You mean he was doing all that, the running into things, because he thought they could be fake?’ Gerald asked. ‘Computer corners?’
‘I guess it makes more sense if you’ve actually experienced it. Once you’ve been inside an interface for a while you can understand better. In my old Mlungu’s days, corners crumbled when you even looked. It was a big issue – holding it together.’
‘So you actually drank Tebza’s piss?’ Javas beamed at me, his biceps rippling, waiting to start up the chainsaw.
‘I did.’
‘Wonderful. You’re full of surprises, Roy.’ He ripped the cord and laughed as he attacked the trees.
Archiving often seemed futile. It was especially troubling when we were forced into heavy manual labour. I found myself begging for forgiveness at the CSIR. Javas and Gerald shut me down. ‘You’re like a teenage girl vrying and pleading no all at the same time,’ said Javas.
Gerald was more direct. ‘If we don’t do this, these children we have created will be running around in skins, grunting like baboons.’
Placated, I allowed myself to fall back into the dreamscape. The clearing away, the discovery and the archiving had become a kind of suspended fantasy, a ritualised physical experience that could be followed and repeated infinitely. A way to slow my brain down and keep my body moving.
I dumped my kit at the bakkie when we were finally done and headed for the nanotech building, seeking to retrace Tebza’s original steps.
7
While the Eeeyus themselves have been distributed across the archives, details of the Eeeyu philosophy, approach and general story are contained in a small section of the Slovo Library, KES campus. While the section as a whole is small, there is video footage of the more notable excursions.