Self-preservation dictated that he left home a few seconds after arriving, and he did so without clothing, equipment or supplies, his ears ringing from Mom’s tirade. He then picked up his friend Buck and went to christen the Rover in the wilderness.
Suffice to say that our destiny as a family was largely determined, some would say, by the unfortunate positioning of two shops on a dusty Copperbelt street!
As our impending departure for South Africa drew closer, Dad got grumpier and grumpier. He ranted and raged about the Rhodesian Wildlife Authority’s ‘downright rudeness and arrogance’, with their failure to confirm his Lake Kariba appointment central to his chagrin. Preparations for the move progressed at an alarming rate with Mom’s knowing, but mostly concealed, smile a constant source of friction between them.
Suddenly, the morning of departure dawned and it was time to go. Our Peugeot 404 station wagon, bought new for the occasion by trading in the Opel and the Land Rover, was jam-packed with all manner of household goods and three little wide-eyed kids aged eight (Debbie), five (me) and four (Mark), respectively. The roof rack was piled high with an assortment of chests and trunks covered with a green canvas tarpaulin.
Peter, dressed in his uniform of short white trousers and white shirt, stood barefooted next to the car. In his hand was the tiniest little suitcase you have ever seen.
‘Where do I sit?’ he asked Dad.
‘You can’t go with us, Peter,’ my father responded.
‘Why not?’ asked Peter.
‘Because the family is moving to South Africa, Peter,’ replied my dad firmly.
‘But I am family!’ he pleaded.
‘But this is your home, Peter. South Africa is not,’ my mom tried to reason with him.
‘My home is with my children and my family,’ shouted Peter, ‘and you are they!’
For a full ten minutes the exchange raged on, by the second becoming more charged with emotion. Peter couldn’t accept that he was not coming with us. The sound of his voice, beseeching first my mom, then my dad, to allow him to sit on the roof for the duration of the 3 000-kilometre journey to South Africa, remains with me to this day.
Finally, with tears flowing freely, and too choked up to say another word, my parents bundled our loudly wailing family into the Peugeot, with Peter standing resolute alongside, tears coursing down his cheeks. We drove off slowly down the road.
I was one of those three little faces staring out of the rear window watching the ever-diminishing image of Peter, tiny suitcase in hand, trotting down the dusty road after us.
He finally disappeared in the cloud of dust kicked up by our car.
We entered South Africa on Dingane’s Day, 16 December 1963. My paternal grandparents lived on a farm just north of Pretoria, and we joined them there and lived on the farm for a few months.
During this time, I started attending Loreto Convent in Gezina, Pretoria. When Mom picked me up after my first day and asked whether I had enjoyed myself, I let her know quite firmly that ‘I didn’t mind it but I don’t think I need to go back there any more.’
Each day when I got back from school I’d ask Lettie, the housekeeper, whether Peter Chibemba had arrived that morning. When she replied, as she always did, that he hadn’t, I would go to the start of the long driveway, which ran down the boundary fence of the farm all the way to the Great North Road a few kilometres away, and stare down it for hours.
I told anyone who asked that I was waiting.
Waiting for Peter to appear.
Before too long, my folks bought a house in the suburb of Valhalla, in the southwestern part of Pretoria. Valhalla was where many of the serving military personnel of the South African Defence Force (SADF) lived, due to its close proximity to the vast military complex of Voortrekkerhoogte and the airfields of Air Force Base (AFB) Swartkop and AFB Waterkloof.
Dad went on to forge a successful business career, adjusting surprisingly well to corporate life, but ultimately his desire to be in his own business prevailed and he formed and ran a short-haul construction company right until he died in 2003. My mom was a specialist in state-of-the-art printing techniques and soon joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), where she was still employed at the time she passed away so tragically.
From the time we moved to Valhalla in April 1964, Debbie and I would catch the school bus to and from General Andries Brink Primary School in Voortrekkerhoogte, the only primary school in the area that taught in English. I do not remember the exact details of what happened one Friday afternoon in October 1964 while we were on the homeward-bound school bus, but I think it started with our driver failing to heed a stop sign at a T-junction in Valhalla. He turned a corner directly into the path of a large truck carrying a load of enormous cement sewage pipes.
In the carnage that followed the collision between the bus and the truck, thirteen children lost their lives, including the two who were sitting on either side of me. I was pulled from the mangled wreckage by rescuers. I had suffered quite severe head injuries. An ambulance rushed me to Pretoria General Hospital, where I teetered between life and death for a few weeks before ultimately making a full recovery.
The crash left me with a permanent aversion to crowded places. But it also introduced me to my guardian angel, who has hovered around me my whole life.
My schooldays went by in a flash of sport, friends and fun. I had a great sense of privilege while growing up, and I don’t mean privilege in the material and financial sense of the word. My folks and my friends’ parents were neither wealthy nor poor, though they tended towards the latter. ‘Dumplings’ to fill our bellies and ‘bread and scratchit’ were regular items on the supper menu, often before the middle of the month.
Our education in the government schooling system was relatively backward by today’s standards, and television was not yet a reality. Yet we were wealthy beyond price. For example, just across the road was Laureston Farm, where a dairy herd of approximately 100 cows produced the freshest milk and the richest cream you could imagine. There was also a natural slip-and-slide chute shaped into the black clay on the banks of the Six Mile Spruit (today known as the Hennops River), which could be made even more slippery by spreading cow dung on it, and delivered hours and hours of glorious fun and laughter.
The Six Mile Spruit, or ‘the Spruit’, as we fondly called it, was central to the freedom of our outdoor existence. In those days, it flowed only about twice a year. I say ‘flowed’ but I really mean ‘flooded’, as it would burst its banks after a typical Highveld cloudburst, and the resultant spate would always create a playground of gooey mud in which we played rugby and football, emerging unrecognisable at the end of the games. Not surprisingly, clothes had a short lifespan in that neck of the woods.
On the banks of the Spruit we built a football field where, practically every single day, summer or winter, matches of ‘international importance’ were played, and it was on the Laureston Farm field that a crop of genuinely good players honed their natural skills. A significant number later went on to play professional football in South Africa and abroad.
Afrikaans was the dominant language in Pretoria during this period (1965–1975). I estimate that Afrikaans-speaking families outnumbered their English-speaking counterparts in Valhalla by about eight to one. Even though it was 70-odd years since the end of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), many of the Afrikaans-speaking kids had grandparents and great-grandparents who still had vivid personal memories of their awful treatment at the hands of British forces, or ‘khakis’. From time to time, English-speakers growing up in the area unfairly bore the brunt of that lasting animosity.