On the Road – South Africa. By Rob Burton.
My first experience of South Africa was stepping into Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and wondering why all the policemen had machine guns. This was around 1976 and I had gone through the process of being accepted for emigration and no one thought to tell me, a politically naïve twenty-two-year-old, about apartheid.
I travelled with my wife of a few months to our new life in Vanderbijlpark in the Transvaal. I had found work in the steel mills of ISCOR the states massive Iron and Steel Corporation. This was to be my first experience of living abroad.
Everything was arranged by the recruiting department of ISCOR. Our first night in South Africa was in a hotel with other recruits who had been on the same flight. A new challenge was the meal. It was a steak in a monkey gland sauce. Monkey Gland Sauce? What? Real Monkey? It was Africa after all and I’d never seen this on the menu at my local Berni Inn. The waitress explained that no monkeys were harmed in the making of the sauce and to celebrate we all got slightly drunk on the over large bottles of Castle beer. At five thousand feet above sea level alcohol works very efficiently on the brain.
We moved in to our new flat furnished with brand new furniture we were encouraged to buy at the local shops on HP. The company stood as guarantor. Vanderbijlpark was a company town through and through––the person with us who took us around the shops provided each of the vendors with our work number and department. We also had a generous ‘settling in’ allowance burning a hole in our pockets. We’d all signed three-year contracts, which underlined the penalties of breaking said contracts. Mainly, it was to do with paying back all the monies the company had shelled out to get us there including our allowances. I never once, during my time in S.A., questioned why the company was being so generous. Similar enquiries to move to Australia uncovered the fact that once moving there one was pretty much left to one's own devices to find work and housing. So S.A. was an easy decision for me––a man of very little brain I am sure you are thinking.
The steel plant was straight out of Blake’s vision of Dark Satanic Mills. I was lucky, as a highly skilled centre lathe turner I worked in the maintenance department. Hard-bitten expat engineers and steelworkers from all around the world kept the mills running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no time off for good behaviour. Apart from fulfilling the regular maintenance work––making new bits for the plant to keep it running––there was also the drama of some frantic guy turning up at 2 in the morning with a mangled piece of steel in his hand demanding a ‘new’ one asap so production wouldn’t be held up.
They ran continental shifts, which was new to me. This meant I worked six in the morning until two in the afternoon. The other shifts were two until ten pm., and ten until six am. Weekends were twelve-hour shifts while one shift had a day off. Tuesday was the other day off. But that meant the ten till six crew had to be back at work at two until ten. They had glossed over this back in the U.K. so it came as a bit of a shock.
Long hours of hard, dirty work meant I crewed up with two characters I will call Jock and Paddy. One was from Glasgow and the other from Northern Ireland. Both older and grizzled, both had impenetrable accents. They would speak and I wouldn’t know what they were saying–– good job they were not my bosses.
Most of the shift foremen were local South Africans––Afrikaners. There was no love lost between the Afrikaners and the Brits for historical reasons. We soon learnt the bad things to say to the hulking brutes, swear words such as voetsec and son of a bitch, which seemed to rile them but to the normal Brit factory worker were quite mild. This antagonism came about during the shift switch. We would come in ready to work on machines that the outgoing guy should have cleaned down and made ready for the new guy. This rarely happened even though the white worker would have a ‘boy’ to do his work, hence the ill feeling.
I was an ill feeling that had far reaching consequences. One guy, a Boer, but friendlier than the rest as he was on my shift, apologised to me telling me he could not invite me to his house because his grandmother wouldn’t tolerate it and would not speak to me. Such is the power of cultural memory I was to learn later.
By ‘boy’ I mean black workers who did the menial tasks around the factory. Helping with the heavy lifting and the cleaning. The ‘machine boys’ were mainly Xhosa. This is because even in the factory there was a tribal hierarchical system going on. The Zulu’s had the best work because they were top of the heap. Then it was the Tswana people, the Swazi’s and at the bottom the Xhosa. The Zulu guys job was to sweep the factory floor. He did this with an air of authority and quiet majesty. He would stop and chat telling us of his three wives back at his homestead.
I'd come to understand what was happening politically in South Africa through the simple expedience of experiences such as getting on a local bus and being told I wasn’t allowed to ride on it because I was white, living in white only areas and becoming aware of the situation very quickly.
The black guys in the factory liked us Brits because most of us were used to doing the heavy work and cleaning ourselves and during the night shift (and the day time) we would let them get their heads down in some quiet corner. We were also useful in making knobkerries or fighting sticks on the lathe, which were very much in demand. We took payment in the form of matchboxes full of grass so everyone was happy.
Social life in Vanderbijlpark revolved around the club. The bar was a rough and ready place, a bit Wild West if you will. It was the preserve of MEN––rough, tough men––steelworkers. Women had to sit in the lounge and to go in there the male partner had to wear a shirt and a jacket. It was in the men’s bar that my friend and I had to crawl out on our hands and knees, like in a movie, because there was a full-blown punch up going on––just like in the Western movies on TV.
Other social events included braai (BBQ) on the Vaal River and hanging out at other peoples homes, especially if they had a pool. But this didn’t happen too often because of the shift systems we worked. For the young stay at home wives this was not much of a life as they barely saw their new husbands, as we were always at work or in bed asleep. Most of them strayed and marriages split up with the female partner often fleeing back to Britain. Mine lasted until we both arrived back in the U.K, but that’s another story.
At home I’d travelled abroad on holidays, France, Spain, Majorca, but now I was on another exciting continent. A continent, the best man at my wedding had piqued my interest about having been bought up in Zambia. I wanted to see more. So with my pal, another Rob, we purchased a Landrover and went exploring.
*****
How does this relate to writing you might ask? I believe in the adage write what you know. Since my adventures in Africa I have travelled to many countries and lived in a few––I am currently living and working in China. These experiences influence in some way or other what I write. I use my experiences and the people I have met along the way to give my writing depth and colour. So if a young writer were to ask my advice I would tell them to take Jack Kerouac’s advice and get On The Road.
My first experience of South Africa was stepping into Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and wondering why all the policemen had machine guns. This was around 1976 and I had gone through the process of being accepted for emigration and no one thought to tell me, a politically naïve twenty-two-year-old, about apartheid.
I travelled with my wife of a few months to our new life in Vanderbijlpark in the Transvaal. I had found work in the steel mills of ISCOR the states massive Iron and Steel Corporation. This was to be my first experience of living abroad.
Everything was arranged by the recruiting department of ISCOR. Our first night in South Africa was in a hotel with other recruits who had been on the same flight. A new challenge was the meal. It was a steak in a monkey gland sauce. Monkey Gland Sauce? What? Real Monkey? It was Africa after all and I’d never seen this on the menu at my local Berni Inn. The waitress explained that no monkeys were harmed in the making of the sauce and to celebrate we all got slightly drunk on the over large bottles of Castle beer. At five thousand feet above sea level alcohol works very efficiently on the brain.
We moved in to our new flat furnished with brand new furniture we were encouraged to buy at the local shops on HP. The company stood as guarantor. Vanderbijlpark was a company town through and through––the person with us who took us around the shops provided each of the vendors with our work number and department. We also had a generous ‘settling in’ allowance burning a hole in our pockets. We’d all signed three-year contracts, which underlined the penalties of breaking said contracts. Mainly, it was to do with paying back all the monies the company had shelled out to get us there including our allowances. I never once, during my time in S.A., questioned why the company was being so generous. Similar enquiries to move to Australia uncovered the fact that once moving there one was pretty much left to one's own devices to find work and housing. So S.A. was an easy decision for me––a man of very little brain I am sure you are thinking.
The steel plant was straight out of Blake’s vision of Dark Satanic Mills. I was lucky, as a highly skilled centre lathe turner I worked in the maintenance department. Hard-bitten expat engineers and steelworkers from all around the world kept the mills running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no time off for good behaviour. Apart from fulfilling the regular maintenance work––making new bits for the plant to keep it running––there was also the drama of some frantic guy turning up at 2 in the morning with a mangled piece of steel in his hand demanding a ‘new’ one asap so production wouldn’t be held up.
They ran continental shifts, which was new to me. This meant I worked six in the morning until two in the afternoon. The other shifts were two until ten pm., and ten until six am. Weekends were twelve-hour shifts while one shift had a day off. Tuesday was the other day off. But that meant the ten till six crew had to be back at work at two until ten. They had glossed over this back in the U.K. so it came as a bit of a shock.
Long hours of hard, dirty work meant I crewed up with two characters I will call Jock and Paddy. One was from Glasgow and the other from Northern Ireland. Both older and grizzled, both had impenetrable accents. They would speak and I wouldn’t know what they were saying–– good job they were not my bosses.
Most of the shift foremen were local South Africans––Afrikaners. There was no love lost between the Afrikaners and the Brits for historical reasons. We soon learnt the bad things to say to the hulking brutes, swear words such as voetsec and son of a bitch, which seemed to rile them but to the normal Brit factory worker were quite mild. This antagonism came about during the shift switch. We would come in ready to work on machines that the outgoing guy should have cleaned down and made ready for the new guy. This rarely happened even though the white worker would have a ‘boy’ to do his work, hence the ill feeling.
I was an ill feeling that had far reaching consequences. One guy, a Boer, but friendlier than the rest as he was on my shift, apologised to me telling me he could not invite me to his house because his grandmother wouldn’t tolerate it and would not speak to me. Such is the power of cultural memory I was to learn later.
By ‘boy’ I mean black workers who did the menial tasks around the factory. Helping with the heavy lifting and the cleaning. The ‘machine boys’ were mainly Xhosa. This is because even in the factory there was a tribal hierarchical system going on. The Zulu’s had the best work because they were top of the heap. Then it was the Tswana people, the Swazi’s and at the bottom the Xhosa. The Zulu guys job was to sweep the factory floor. He did this with an air of authority and quiet majesty. He would stop and chat telling us of his three wives back at his homestead.
I'd come to understand what was happening politically in South Africa through the simple expedience of experiences such as getting on a local bus and being told I wasn’t allowed to ride on it because I was white, living in white only areas and becoming aware of the situation very quickly.
The black guys in the factory liked us Brits because most of us were used to doing the heavy work and cleaning ourselves and during the night shift (and the day time) we would let them get their heads down in some quiet corner. We were also useful in making knobkerries or fighting sticks on the lathe, which were very much in demand. We took payment in the form of matchboxes full of grass so everyone was happy.
Social life in Vanderbijlpark revolved around the club. The bar was a rough and ready place, a bit Wild West if you will. It was the preserve of MEN––rough, tough men––steelworkers. Women had to sit in the lounge and to go in there the male partner had to wear a shirt and a jacket. It was in the men’s bar that my friend and I had to crawl out on our hands and knees, like in a movie, because there was a full-blown punch up going on––just like in the Western movies on TV.
Other social events included braai (BBQ) on the Vaal River and hanging out at other peoples homes, especially if they had a pool. But this didn’t happen too often because of the shift systems we worked. For the young stay at home wives this was not much of a life as they barely saw their new husbands, as we were always at work or in bed asleep. Most of them strayed and marriages split up with the female partner often fleeing back to Britain. Mine lasted until we both arrived back in the U.K, but that’s another story.
At home I’d travelled abroad on holidays, France, Spain, Majorca, but now I was on another exciting continent. A continent, the best man at my wedding had piqued my interest about having been bought up in Zambia. I wanted to see more. So with my pal, another Rob, we purchased a Landrover and went exploring.
*****
How does this relate to writing you might ask? I believe in the adage write what you know. Since my adventures in Africa I have travelled to many countries and lived in a few––I am currently living and working in China. These experiences influence in some way or other what I write. I use my experiences and the people I have met along the way to give my writing depth and colour. So if a young writer were to ask my advice I would tell them to take Jack Kerouac’s advice and get On The Road.
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