Epiphany at Bronkhorstspruit - Basil Porter

Growing up in Lower Houghton in Johannesburg offered a pretty good life. A big house, swimming pool and tennis court, and extensive areas of grass to play cricket or any other adventures I would choose. I was an easy-going kid, who had a large circle of friends who lived in similar homes, and I showed leadership qualities at a young age, forming a gang based on the “William” books of the time. Life was a routine of school followed by swimming and tennis at one of the friends’ homes. The large houses of the Jewish denizens of Lower Houghton were also natural settings for imaginary games involving climbing on the roofs, or descending into dusty basements, or even treading into the area where the servants spent their few private hours.

Vacations for my family centered around travelling to Durban in the winter, where one could still enjoy the sea and sun, and Cape Town during the summer holidays. In Durban, we would stay at one of the beachfront hotels, in the Cape in Muizenberg, in a rented flat where the noise of the waves at high tide crashing across the road into the embankment would lull me into a most delicious sleep. Even the preparation for these holidays provided a break in the routine of life, studying the book of maps sent from the AA, which would point out that the road between Middleberg and Colesberg was being renovated and an alternative route suggested. The trip to the Cape involved being woken at 4 a.m. and setting out in the dark, with an overnight stay in the middle of the Karoo at the Colesberg hotel, where, despite its location in a tiny dorp and the hot summer weather, the men had to wear a jacket to dinner. An addition to these holiday sites was a trip to the Kruger Park, followed by a week in the luxury Polana hotel in what was then Lorenzo Marques, for many of us the first taste of “overseas”. These vacations were the only time when I would see my serious father loosen up, taking me for early morning swims in the sea, or buying hamburgers for lunch at the end of a morning lazing on the beach.

This life of routine, luxury and endless playing with friends was disturbed by only one thing. Somewhere around age eight or nine, the idea of sleepovers at a friend’s home began to appear on the social calendar. The idea did not appeal to me, but bowing to social pressures, I would agree to leaving my secure territory, and stay over at a friend. However, nobody had diagnosed a crack in my seemingly extremely happy temperament and social aptitude. Those nights when I first agreed to sleep away from home, instead of providing another opportunity for fun and friendship, with midnight gorging on cream cakes and new games, were for me a nightmare of anxiety and pathological homesickness. I would stay awake most of the night, listening to the strange new sounds surrounding me, a grandfather clock which chimed on the hour, or a dog barking, disturbing only the visitor to the home, while the rest of the house slept peacefully. When dawn would finally arrive to relieve my misery, I would have to present a happy face to my hosts, while waiting for the moment I could return to my safe place.

My parents shrugged off my stories of fear and horror from my overnight experiences, clearly believing I would “get used to it”. But each experience was worse than the previous one, and in keeping with the upbringing tone of the time, I was labelled as a “cry-baby”, to be treated with disdain instead of sympathy. The cute little boy with the blond curls who would return from school with his shirt hanging out, usually torn, the smart social kid with the freckles who was head of his own gang, had revealed his other face, the fearful mommy’s boy.

A new way to socialize appeared when we were invited to attend the activities of Bnei Zion, a small youth movement, with similar Zionist-Socialist goals to the much bigger dominant movement, Habonim. This involved attending a weekly meeting on Sunday mornings, with some educational content focusing on Israel as the future for nice Jewish kids, together with some games or soccer. I would have been happy staying with my William gang, but social pressure made me start attending these meetings. Uniforms were required, with blue shirts and scarves with woggles (a leather ring to hold the scarf in place), and epaulets on the shoulders with the words Bnei Zion in English and Hebrew. When we were a little older, the meeting times changed to Friday nights and I was speedily elected to the neighborhood committee responsible for planning the agenda for these meetings, together with the madrich, a more senior member. My memory fails regarding the content of these gatherings, but I do remember the pressure each week when the committee had not met by Thursday, and the worry about poor attendance. Together with my problem separating from my family, I was blessed with a really strong superego, always ready to take the blame for a poorly planned meeting or a poor attendance.

A new challenge soon appeared, when the madrich mentioned that we were expected to attend the movement seminar in July during the winter holiday. This seminar took place in some rural setting, usually a farm or school situated a few hours’ drive from Johannesburg. The seminar was a week-long affair, with a schedule of lectures on Judaism and Zionism, sports and a few movies to help pass the long days. A week even then did not seem like a long time to most kids, but for me the mere mention of a week away from home resulted in an immediate anxiety state. I basically enjoyed the social part of our meetings, but a week presented a vista of eternity with misery for me. My friends responded positively and registered, while I had to mumble an excuse which would satisfy them and the madrich. They would return with positive descriptions of the experience, including first experiences with the other sex, cigarettes, and even a little alcohol, all part of the early teenage rebellion. But the hard part was still to come. They were planning to attend camp at the end of the school year, three weeks in the Cape, with a train ride of two days and one night included. Those returning from Camp described their escapades of sneaking out of camp at night and getting into the local hotel and drinking alcohol till unconsciousness or vomiting ending the binge. I greeted these descriptions of new experiences with a smile and a mumble, meant to intimate that it sounded fascinating, but that I was unable to attend for special, highly secretive reasons.

But as I reached age fifteen, I realized that my number was up. My absence from seminar or camp over four years was unacceptable, and with tears beginning to fill my eyes, I gave my assent to attend the next seminar in Bronkhorstspruit. I counted the days until departure, with increasing anxiety as D-day neared. And then I was boarding the bus, saying goodbye to my mother, and on the road to hell. I don’t remember exactly how I behaved, but I know I felt alone and abandoned during the day activities, and anxious and miserable to the point of total despair as evening closed in on the wintery nights in the Transvaal Highveld. There was a public phone which we could use when the day’s activities had ended, and I was the first in line, bawling at my mother that I wanted home, and expected her to come and fetch me immediately. However, there was no solution offered, and I was forced to hand the phone to the next in line, and flee to my bed and cry through most of the night (I cannot vouch for the details of the sleepless nights, but the misery is a vivid memory). I was trapped, abandoned by my family, and I think mocked by my friends.

On the third day, when the end of my misery was still nowhere in sight, with four more never-ending days to go before returning home, we were informed there would be a campfire that night after supper, and a request for volunteers to perform at the campfire. One of the madrichim who knew that I had some musical talent, suggested I perform at the campfire on my penny-whistle. This instrument was a mainstay of African music, consisting of a simple hollow metal tube with holes for the scale, and a mouthpiece. A couple of black musicians, with the catchy names of Spokes Mashiany and Lemmy Special, who showed amazing abilities on the instrument, had recorded popular tunes, and the primitive instrument had been given the name “Penny Whistle”. I had bought their recordings and then the instrument itself, which had become commercially available, and proceeded to teach myself to play the instrument, which I found much easier than the seven years of violin lessons I had endured until then. This opportunity to appear before my peers appealed to me, and I informed my accompanying penny whistle player, a stalwart friend who had learned the accompanying part I had composed for a couple of tunes, that we would be appearing.

After supper, we duly sat around the campfire, and the evening began with the traditional “Campfires burning” and “Harry was a camper”, before we were introduced as the “Penny Whistle duo”, and we dutifully launched into the tunes borrowed from the African protégés. As we ended our performance, there was a burst of applause, and shouts of encouragement from our madrichim, with a few smiles of interest from the girls in our group. I was suddenly reset, the hidden tears disappeared, I laughed, and shrugged off the compliments. That night I climbed into my bed and instantly dropped off, and jumped out of bed in the morning, ready to participate in all activities with a smile. My phone call to my mother in the evening consisted of a simple “Hello Mom, things are great. See you soon.” Unfortunately, I was not able to see my mother’s face at the end of the line. I returned home eager to renew our neighborhood Bnei Zion meetings, and was one of the first to register for summer camp after informing my parents I would not be joining them to the Cape. At the age of fifteen, I had found a new sense of wellbeing, a desire to be part of this special group. Arriving at camp after the thirty-six-hour train journey, and another few hours on the bus to the campsite in Hermanus, I helped set up our tent. Sleeping was on the ground in sleeping bags, on a slope with rocks snuggling our backs. Sleep was immediate and deep, the days were long and hot and wonderful.

For many years, I thought about the life-changing event of a simple communal activity at a Jewish camp. The penny-whistle debut did not only save my stay at the seminar, but put my life on a different trajectory. The house with a swimming pool and tennis court, the luxury holidays in posh hotels, the home diet of t-bone steaks and crème caramel all became secondary to life in the movement. The blue shirt and scarf with woggle were more important than the fashionable stove-pipe jeans and starched collars of the time. Life now revolved around the movement, the Zionist dream, the path we were supposed to follow ending in life on kibbutz as the ultimate dream to implement.

Sixty years later, we the graduates of the Zionist movements in South Africa, dispersed around the world, still feel that special belonging to a special group. Most of us had some kind of penny-whistle experience, a wake-up call to a different life, away from the British culture and Apartheid reality that had governed our lives. We laugh at the passionate oratory of Leib Golan and the academic leadership of Wolf Mankowitz and Giddy Shimoni. I still remember my heroworship of Leib Gafanowitz (Geffen after Aliyah), one of my first madrichim in Bnei Zion, a Mayfair Jewish boy, who lit every cigarette with the previous one, causing his blonde moustache to have a permanent tint of bright yellow from the huge nicotine load. Leib was probably five years older, but talked and joked with me as a colleague, and who to my huge regret I never visited on Kibbutz Hasollelim before his premature death.

There is no way to accurately describe the effect of being in “The Movement”. Everyone has a different explanation, some very rational, most purely emotional. There remains a special nostalgia, reminding ex-Habonimites and other movement escapees of a common bond from a different, special and unique life that we managed to live in our adolescent years in South Africa, that shaped us as individuals and a special group, through to these traumatic years in Israel and other far-away places. But to this day, when a Habonimite meets another, the greeting will probably be, with a huge smile of recognition and solidarity, “Hazak Veematz”.