Sentiment is a really difficult thing. How do you express your feelings over something that has affected you deeply for all of your life without seeming dramatic. I had an idea to do a mix of tracks by k. d. lang about a week ago and the mix became something else entirely. I was listening to Dropout by Urge Overkill (again) thinking about how I’ve loved that song for so long without really understanding it’s true significance to my life. For years I thought of it as being about a young girl, all stylized as the perfect waif character, lost in the world. Truth is it very closely describes the life I led for many years. It also struck me how much it applies to so many of my crew, the boys I grew up with, the lost generation of whiteboys who “fucked-out” as we used to say back then. It’s difficult to describe what living under the apartheid government was like. When I think back the best way to describe it would be to say that there was never any air. You could breathe but nothing nourished you. When I was sixteen I refused to register for military service. My entire family was not aware of this and I kept it a secret. If I think about it now my motivation for everything was to get away from things and not towards them. By the age of seventeen I was blacklisted. This was not as significant as it sounds really, it never affected my life. I stayed in school and managed to get into university so I was safe. If I had continued to refuse national service without an official way of getting out of it I would have gone to jail for six years. This fact may be insignificant in retrospect but I honestly wonder now: how did a society that brought up it’s children in that way expect them to turn out if they treated them like that. It got me thinking about Karl. Karl was the older brother of one of my best friends in Primary School. During the BMX years he was our hero. He used to do off road racing and he was really good at it. He was even on a TV drama program for awhile. He was always my benchmark for how to survive within the circumstances we found ourselves. He went to university and studied journalism, I wanted to follow in his footsteps.

On Wednesday night I was speaking to my new friend Eran. He’s busy traveling at the moment, visiting the country of his birth, which is here due to the fact that his parents were working in Jo’burg when he was born. He’s from Israel and in a hardcore punk group. I was interested in what he had done as far as his military service was concerned. He told me that he had served two months in jail when he was younger. I thought that it was quite a strange time period to serve and he explained to me how it works. They put you in jail for two weeks. They don’t tell how long it’s going to be for, they don’t put you on trial. After two weeks they ask you again and so on. Depending on the political situation and other factors your time served is up to the whims of your captors. He was lucky I suppose but to hear him talk about it is pretty heavy. That is basically legalized torture.

The military issue was always an axe hanging over our heads. Two years before I would become eligible to serve in the military, South Africa experienced some of its worst township violence. One of Karl’s friends ended up going to the army around that time. He was an intelligent individual who would skillfully argue against apartheid, in the bravest fashion. Within about eight months of going into the military he came out on leave. He was dating one of my friends sisters at the time. He had become a raving racist. My friends sister was trying so hard to get him back on the ground, like where the fuck are you, what happened. He would tell us what happened, it did not sound good. In the townships they were basically at war. In the process he had learned to hate black people. The constant threat of dying had made him insane with hatred. His girlfriend ended up biting off one of his fingernails during a really violent fight that occurred later that evening. She was pregnant at the time and ended up having a boy called Christopher (named after me, yay!). They never married, she ended up with someone else, a family friend. They had been deeply in love.

The first time I ever smoked Mandrax I was walking with my two drug buddies back to Northcliff corner. They were both a year older than me and about to finish school. They were poor kids whose parents would not have been able to put them into university even if their school marks had been good enough. Alister started talking about going into the army, asking in our lingo if my other friend thought it was inevitable that he would have to go. He was scared. He OD’ed on Wellconal a year later. A few years ago so did Karl. This mix is for my friends, the one’s who did not make it through the wilderness, the ones who barely did and for the rest of us lucky ones. May we never go “there” again.
Both The Oppressed And The Accused

Image: The death of Ken Oosterbroek, 1994.