Luky
I WONDER if you watched the Afrikaans television soap opera Kromburg? Though I seldom watched after the news during the week, Wednesday nights found me riveted to the screen.
The nature scenes of that tiny southern Free State village gave me the queerest sense of déjà vu. The mystery was solved one night when I read the credits after the screening, where thanks were given to the communities of Jagersfontein and Fauresmith, where the programme had been televised.
My brother who had friends on a farm in the Fauresmith district and spent the last school holidays there with his wife and children told us that they called Fauresmith Kromberg thereafter.
My old haunt
It was with a certain amount of nostalgia that I watched all the happenings on the screen. That Jagersfontein period of my life, to which we came from Holland and where my father worked for about eighteen months, was the first experience I had of adapting to other kinds of people, other outlooks, different from mine, and in retrospect I realise that it had a profound effect on my life.
I' m sure some of you will have visited Amsterdam. Others may have been in Jagersfontein or Fauresmith.
Imagine coming from teeming Amsterdam to quiet Kromburg.
Lots of stops
We travelled on that same train Wenda Swart took from Cape Town, and stopped at every station. My mother, determined to make a good impression, washed and changed us four times on the journey.
When we arrived there on the third day, the station master phoned for a taxi, and away we drove through dusty veld whose grass looked brown to my eyes, accustomed as they were to the bright green of Holland.
I recall my amazement when a group of girls stopped talking to me, though I had explained to someone else that I found them "aardig". Though the Afrikaans dictionary gives the translation of this word partly as agreeable, nice, pleasant, which is what it means in Dutch, it also gives it as strange, disagreeable, unpleasant.
Fowl act
My father started working that very night. He was delighted to discover that the foreman had the same name as my brother, whom we then called Josje though he since became Jos. I suppose now that his name really was Joshua.
My father had a little trouble communicating, but his sense of humour often saved the day.
"Get me an egg, Josje," he asked the first week. Joshua called together a conclave of his ten fellow workers, but nobody could understand what my father wanted.
To get his message across, my father started running wildly through the bakery, arms flapping and shouting hysterically "Toc, toc, toc, toc!" They got the message and had a good laugh too.
I had difficulty adapting and it took me many years before I could truly call South Africa home. Yet looking back, I realise it was invaluable to have had my ideas and prejudices turned upside down at an early age.
It taught me one valuable truth; no matter what a person's culture, creed or what language he speaks, he has ideas which have been formed by his background and which are valid for him.
I know now that I am the way I am because of my Dutch background, my Irish school teachers, my South African school fellows, colleagues and children, my Irish husband and my Catholic faith. I know that I have to be true to myself and to what I have been taught all my life.
And by the same token, I have an abiding respect for the outlook, culture and ideas of others. They too have their story, even if different from mine.
Kromburg
http://www.vintagemedia.co.za/television/kromburg
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