From Metropolis to Wilderness: An Empowering Journey

By Doug Williamson

This is a book about a life, a life of travel and learning. Doug Williamson was born in South Africa. He has had several careers and lived in seven different countries. Now, he lives in Cambridge with his wife and much loved poodle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483463711

Book preview

FROM

METROPOLIS

TO

WILDERNESS

An Empowering Journey

DOUG WILLIAMSON

Copyright © 2017 Doug Williamson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-6370-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-6371-1 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 06/27/2017

Author’s Note

What motivated the writing of this book is that after my retirement two questions occurred and recurred to me.

Firstly, what have I done with my life?

Secondly, what have I learned from what I have done?

The first question was answered by an impressionistic overview of my life; the second by an attempt to articulate the beliefs and values that I have acquired from all that I have learned and experienced.

What strikes me most when I look back over my life is the magnitude of the change that occurred when I gave up my legal career. The decision to do this literally opened up the world for me, although I neither foresaw nor intended that this would happen.

In all, I ended up living for two years or more in seven different countries, namely: South Africa, the United States of America, Botswana, England, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Italy.

I have also visited more than forty other countries on six continents, mainly for work, but also out of personal interest.

So, although I know a number of people who have travelled much more than me, I do have a sense of having seen something of the world.

I have included some pictures, but these are only the remnant of a large slide collection that was destroyed in a flood, to my intense dismay – decades of slides wiped out!

I am grateful for the love and support of my family through the hard times that I have experienced.

Contents

Author’s Note

Chapter 1 Initial Conditions

Chapter 2 Lord of the Flies

Chapter 3 A Taste of Freedom

Chapter 4 The End of the Idyll

Chapter 5 California

Chapter 6 Wilderness

Chapter 7 Life Changes

Chapter 8 Kalahari

Chapter 9 Cambridge

Chapter 10 Riyadh

Chapter 11 Hard Times

Chapter 12 An Oryx called Douglas

Chapter 13 The Eternal City

Chapter 14 Beliefs and Values

Bibliography

Chapter One

Initial Conditions

Born in a city

A mile above sea level

Far from the ocean

I do not have a comfortable pedigree.

I was born in July 1944 in a metropolis, Johannesburg, to an English speaking South African father and a German mother, when the chimneys of Auschwitz were smoking and the world was blighted by the apotheosis of ideology and the industrialization of murder.

The scale of the butchery is truly appalling. The figure of six millions Jews murdered by the Nazis is grotesque but Stalin’s murderous career may have been even worse – the Liquidation of the Kulaks, the Gulag Archipelago and the extensive torture and murder of individuals by the KGB over a period of decades may well have taken the lives of more than ten million people.

These horrors would come to dismay and torment me, especially when I discovered that Germany’s rule of its colony of Southwest Africa, where my mother was born and raised, can quite reasonably be regarded as a dress rehearsal for Auschwitz.

The German ruler of South West Africa, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, made a determined effort to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples because of their resistance to German rule. Perhaps 100,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama people died as a result of German efforts to exterminate them. Many Hereros fled to what is now Botswana to escape this persecution.

When I was working in northern Botswana in the 1970s I got chatting to a Herero man and was puzzled by the scathing look he gave me when I told him that my mother was a German from Southwest Africa. At this time I was not aware of German atrocities against the Hereros, but now that I am, the look of the Herero man with whom I chatted makes perfect sense to me.

How could my mother’s nation have descended to the abyssal depths of evil that it reached in Southwest Africa and its Second World War industrialized murder of Jews in Europe?

This question has haunted me ever since I started to think about my ancestry.

I conclude that one important feature of all this evil is that it is the fruit of unaccountable authoritarian government, as was the carnage under Stalin.

At the time of my birth the defeat of Hitler was no longer in doubt, but a heavy price in blood remained to be paid before it was finally achieved. The western allies had successfully landed in Normandy and were fighting their way towards Paris against strong German resistance. In Italy, the allies, having landed in Sicily, were fighting their way north, also against fierce German resistance. On the eastern front, all of the Russian Republic had been liberated and Soviet forces were advancing into Poland and the Baltic states. In the Far East, the Americans were fighting their way from island to island across the Pacific towards Japan, against ferocious Japanese resistance, a fight which would be graphically depicted in Norman Mailer’s iconic novel The Naked and the Dead.

In the Union of South Africa, the country of my birth, the government, led by Jan Smuts, was enjoying what may well have been the highest level of international regard that any white South African government ever experienced. The country was a valued member of the western alliance and contributed significantly to the allied war effort. More than 200,000 soldiers, black, mixed race and white, all volunteers, were serving in East and North Africa and Italy; Cape Town and Durban were provisioning with munitions, food, clothing, and cigarettes the ships that were obliged to use the round-the-Cape sea route after the Mediterranean was made inhospitable by the Axis powers; South African mines provided a substantial part of what the allies needed in terms of strategic minerals, such as gold, platinum and uranium.

And because of the threat to supplies posed by German attacks on shipping in the Atlantic, the South African government had decided to focus on production for the war effort and spent heavily on developing local steel, chemical and textile industries. The South African Iron and Steel Corporation (Iscor) produced steel to manufacture armoured cars, shells, bombs, guns and tanks. Railway workshops turned out munitions and heavy armaments. Workshops in the mining sector produced shells, howitzers and mortars.

But of course the valuable contribution that South Africa made to the allied war effort during World War Two did nothing to diminish the magnitude of the social and political issues that the country faced at home because of the racial composition of its population and the history of white conquest, domination, discrimination and exploitation.

These issues would have a massive effect on my life.

Smuts also had an impressive track record in the wider world. For instance, during the Boer War he led a daring commando raid into the Cape with the aim of inspiring an Afrikaner uprising. He did not succeed in fomenting an uprising in the Cape, but he did strengthen British interest in bringing the war to an end.

During WWI Smuts led one of the two South African forces which invaded and conquered German Southwest Africa.

After WWI he played an important role in the establishment of the League of Nations.

During WWII he was given the rank of Field Marshall in the British Army and was a member of the Churchill’s War Cabinet.

After the war he was involved in the establishment of the United Nations and wrote the Preamble to the UN Charter.

But despite his stellar international reputation, Smuts was not universally liked by his own people. In the first post-WWII election in South Africa, he was defeated by the hard line National Party, which was advocating apartheid, a policy which Smuts had derided as the greatest nonsense he had ever heard.

This policy was actually not a home grown South African idea. It was proposed by Hendrik Verwoed, who was born in Holland, not South Africa – his parents emigrated to South Africa when he was a small boy. He was academically brilliant and as a young man was sent on a study tour of the United States. There he saw the Indian Reservations and they were what gave him the idea of the Bantustans in South Africa.

In the course of trying to understand the success of the Nationalists, it occurred to me that just as individuals are influenced by the circumstances in which they are born and raised, so Afrikaner culture itself would have been influenced by the initial conditions from which it evolved. I therefore find it significant that in the early days of the Cape, the ancestors of the Afrikaners were subjected to a number of profoundly negative influences, which could plausibly have contributed to the emergence of the harsh and domineering racial attitudes that were prevalent by the time of Smuts.

These influences included: the brutal discipline applied to company employees by officials of the Dutch East India Company; the neglect of education and cultural and intellectual life by company officials and the intellectual dormancy resulting from this neglect; the contempt of company officials for the efforts of employees released from their contracts to produce food for the settlement; the assumption by all whites that their religion made them superior to the people they encountered in the Cape; the decision to rely on slave labour rather than further European settlement to increase agricultural production; the appallingly brutal punishments that were routinely inflicted on slaves; the fear of being attacked by male slaves, who outnumbered white males soon after the introduction of slavery; and the white settlers’ awareness of the fragility and dangers of their existence on the tip of what was then a menacing and almost completely unknown continent.

Being aware of these influences helps me to understand the culture of the people who eventually drove me out of my birthplace.

But if I was born into a politically troubled country, I was also born into a country of great physical beauty, with great mineral wealth and richly endowed with ecological and biological diversity. Exploring and getting to know this diversity and the landscapes in which it is to be found would become for me one of the most engaging and rewarding aspects of living in South Africa.

As well as being born in a troubled time, in a troubled country, the family into which I was born was not without its problems. My mother and father came from utterly different backgrounds and, in comparison to my father’s upbringing, my mother’s was relatively disadvantaged.

My father was born in Johannesburg in 1899, the first child of an Australian accountant, of Scottish descent, and his South African wife, who was of Huguenot descent.

His father had emigrated from Melbourne in Australia to Johannesburg, following a major financial crash in Australia in 1891. He flourished in Johannesburg, founding a successful accounting firm and becoming a Member of Parliament. He was apparently an ardent imperialist and my brother Andrew and I were amused by a newspaper report about him that we found among my father’s papers. The report was about a political meeting in the Johannesburg suburb of Barnato Park, which my grandfather addressed. It concluded with the sentence: There was no applause after Mr Williamson’s speech.

My father was raised in a large white double storey house, near St John’s College, the private Anglican school that he attended, and of which he was headboy in 1916.

In 1917 my father travelled to London and joined the British Army. He became a Second Lieutenant and spent the rest of World War 1 in Europe, but he hardly ever spoke about his war experience, so I have little idea of what he did.

One thing he did speak about was the visits he paid to his father’s relatives in the town of Kirkcudbright, on the southern coast of Galloway in south-western Scotland. It was from here that my great-grandfather, Ernest Williamson, had set out for Australia at some time in the second half of the 19th century. What my father mainly remembered about these visits was the gloomy and tedious Sundays, during which whistling, hanging out the washing and other forms of frivolity, were forbidden.

For my father, Sunday was an ordeal.

Seventy years after my father’s visits, I spent a night in Kirkcudbright with my family and found it to be an attractive little town, its main street lined with fine stone buildings. After settling into our bed and breakfast accommodation we went for a stroll into the town. We were amused and intrigued when the first shop window we looked into turned out to be the premises of a firm of solicitors named Williamson & Henry.

So this was indeed a kind of homecoming.

The pleasant impression that Kirkcudbright created, made me wonder what had induced my great-grandfather to go all the way to Australia to get away from it. Maybe the miserable Sundays that my father experienced provide a clue to what motivated Ernest’s departure.

On his return to South Africa from the war in Europe my father needed to earn a living. He found that there was a fast track arrangement for becoming a lawyer, so that is what he decided to become. He duly qualified and began to practice as a barrister.

He subsequently married a young woman from an influential Cape family, the Moltenos. Three children were born in this marriage, two sons and a daughter. After some years his wife decided to live in England for a while with her daughter, presumably because of strains in the marriage. The two sons stayed in Cape Town with my father and continued with their education.

It was at this point that my mother appeared on the scene.

She had been born and raised in German Southwest Africa. Her parents were Prussians who had emigrated from a small town near Danzig in Prussia, now Gdansk in Poland, in the late 1890s. My grandfather was the Town Clerk of Okahandja, a small town north of the capital Windhoek. My grandmother was a harsh and domineering disciplinarian, who made liberal use of corporal punishment. She seems to have had much more influence on my mother than her father did.

My mother told us about an incident involving my grandfather being lost in the bush for weeks and given up for dead. Then, to the delight of all, he reappeared, having been looked after by Hottentots and finding his way home with their help.

The education of my mother and her siblings was curtailed by the First World War, which prevented them from being educated in Germany. As far as I can understand my mother’s education got no further than what would now be called middle school and was disrupted when German Southwest Africa was invaded and taken over by the South African Army after the beginning of WWI in 1914. At that time my mother would have been twelve years old and I do not know what happened to her education after the South African Army took over the country. What I do know is that she was literate and basically numerate and that she did train and work as a secretary.

While she was working as a secretary, my mother revealed a stubbornness and strength of character that would have an impact on my own life. When her mother unilaterally decided that she was to get married to a much older man, she refused to accept this arrangement and ran away to Cape Town, where she able to earn a living by working as a child minder.

It was she who my father employed to look after his two sons. Photographs of her from around this time show that she was a good-looking young woman. What followed therefore comes as no great surprise. She and my father had a child, a boy.

The Moltenos insisted on a divorce, which duly took place. They then used their influence to do as much damage to my father as they could. He was excommunicated from the Anglican Church and his legal practice declined. But he refused to follow the advice of his friends to move to Johannesburg, where he would have been treated on his merits. He was a stubborn man and was determined to remain in Cape Town until his legal practice recovered to its pre-divorce level. He duly did this and then moved to Johannesburg.

After the divorce my father did the honourable thing and married my mother, but it was never going to be an easy marriage. They were so different.

My father came from a comfortable and relatively sophisticated background. His family lived in Johannesburg, a relatively lively and cosmopolitan city in the context of southern Africa at the time. Hints about his upbringing were provided by a relative of his who we knew as Cousin Jocelyn. She was his contemporary and a relative by marriage. She had a lively and inquisitive mind, an MA in Greek, and many stories about the past. From her one gathered that, in the circles in which they moved, child rearing was a hands-off affair, left to servants of one kind or another. She remembered hearing a friend of her mother’s say: You know My Dear, I make a point of SEEING my children EVERY DAY.

My father’s sisters Cathy and Monica, both of whom I got to know quite well, were another source of information about his early years. They remembered that in their family my father was The Little Prince, the centre of attraction, whereas they, as girls, were consigned to the background.

My father did not talk much about his family life. He did mention that his mother was a friend of Olive Schreiner, the novelist, feminist and pacifist. He also mentioned that, in the course of his life as a politician, his father had got to know people like Jan Smuts and J.H. Hofmeyer, both of whom my father met.

My father was himself a highly intelligent man, had spent several years in Europe during WWI, was university educated and had a successful professional career. There was thus a cultural and intellectual gulf between my parents. The tensions arising from this gulf can only have been exacerbated by WWII, during which my brother Andrew and I were born.

On one occasion during my early years this tension got physical when a row broke out between my parents over the fuss that my mother was making about the Oregon pine floor that had been put down in the living room. I came into my father’s study to find my mother taking books from the shelves and flinging them onto the floor. My father was trying to physically restrain her from doing so. Obviously I was shocked by what was going on.

They turned to look at me and I said: If this is what marriage is like, I hope I never get married and left the room.

But whatever the state of my parents’ marriage, there was never any doubt that both of them loved and cared for their children and tried to make a decent home and family life for us. For me, this is more important than anything else and I have absolutely no inclination to judge my parents because of the difficulties in their relationship, although these obviously influenced the atmosphere in which I was raised.

In addition to the boy who was born out of wedlock, my brother Ewald, five children were born into their marriage, three girls, followed by two boys, of whom I was the last born. The first girl, Francis, died of septicaemia as an infant, so my birth brought the number of children in the household to five – Ewald, Elizabeth, Joan, Andrew and me.

I learned later from my father’s sisters Cathy and Monica that the time around my birth was the only time that my parents’ marriage was happy. This may be the reason why I have always been at ease with myself, something that can perhaps not be said about my siblings.

So this was the world, this was the country, this was the city, and this was the family into which I was born. In other words, in very simple and general terms, these were the initial conditions from which my life unfolded.

Although there were tensions in our family, I remember my early pre-school years as generally being happy.

We lived in a fairly cosmopolitan neighbourhood, which included French, Italian, Austrian, recent English immigrant, English-speaking South African, and Jewish households. Our house was one of the plainer ones on the street, a single storey building with a corrugated iron roof. It had four bedrooms. My sisters shared a bedroom, as did my brother Andrew and I.

When we were very young we had an African nanny, but from an early age we were left to our own devices, provided we did nothing to annoy my parents or give them reason to be concerned for our safety.

I have two particularly clear memories of incidents during the time I was around three years old. One of these relates to the visit of the British Royal Family to South Africa in 1947. I remember walking up the road with the family to Louis Botha Avenue, a busy main road leading into the centre of Johannesburg, to watch the royal procession drive by. The Royals were driving in an open car, waving to the crowds of onlookers.

Oddly enough, my other particular but very different memory from this time also relates to Louis Botha Avenue. In a perfectly literal sense, it was a matter of life and death.

On the afternoon in question Andrew and I had walked up to the shops with my mother. This involved crossing Louis Botha Avenue, which was always busy. On the way back we were waiting with my mother to cross Louis Botha. She was holding each of us by the hand. Suddenly, for no reason that I can remember, I wrenched my hand out of my mother’s hand and tried to run across the road. Just after crossing the white line in the middle I stumbled and fell in front of an oncoming African bus. There was no time for the African driver to brake so he swung the bus off the road and crashed it into the iron palisade fence of King Edward’s School. Had he not done so, I would surely have been killed.

It is hardly necessary to say that this was a shocking experience for all of us. I remain completely baffled about what made me behave in this suicidal reckless way.

My father tried to contact the driver to thank him and reward him, but was unable to do so. The only explanation I can think of for this is that the managers of the bus company did not want my father to make contact with the driver. They must have known who he was.

During this pre-school stage of my life we benefited from having a garden large enough to accommodate most the games we wished to play. As we grew older and got more involved in formal sport, my father put up a full sized cricket net on the front lawn and Andrew and I spent many hours practising.

In our teens we took to a game we could not play in the garden, namely golf, although for a short time we thought that we had found a way of practising hitting with our drivers. Because of their range, we could hit golf balls over three neighbouring houses onto the playing field of King Edward School. We never actually failed to reach our target, but when my father discovered what we were up to, he angrily put an end to it. He said it was purely by luck that we had not broken any of our neighbour’s windows or injured any of them.

Because my father was at work much of the time, my mother was the main disciplinarian in the family. Like her own mother, she used corporal punishment, but only when we did something that really got to her. She thrashed me severely on two occasions when I was still quite a small boy.

She used a bamboo cane for these beatings. One had to wait while she went to the bamboo clump in the garden to choose and cut a cane suited to the occasion. One of these beatings was for smoking. She noticed that I was nowhere to be seen and on looking for me found me in the bamboo clump smoking not one but two cigarettes, which I had nicked from her handbag.

The other thrashing was for breaking the bathroom mirror; entirely by mistake it has to be said. As I came into the bathroom I kicked off one of my shoes with unintentionally excessive force. The shoe shot off my foot and smashed into the mirror, breaking off a substantial piece of it, which shattered on the floor. This infuriated my mother.

Unlike my mother, my father never touched us, although he did not hesitate to let us know when we did things that he found irritating or offensive.

What I remember most clearly about him is the inordinate pleasure and amusement he derived from the process of argument. He could be a kind of mental anti-chameleon, whose views instinctively became the exact opposite to those of whoever he was teasing. His father referred to him as the Bolshie Nat. If you were a Nat he was a Bolshie. If you were a Bolshie he was a Nat.

He was never offensive, but often exasperating because he always had an answer and usually the last word as well. His virtuosity in the game of arguing led me to conclude that, on their own, face-to-face verbal arguments are not necessarily an effective mechanism for solving problems. They can help to clarify issues, but clever people can also make them terribly misleading.

One argument with my father was particularly memorable because it unequivocally demonstrated his playfully mischievous motivation. At the time he was one of the most senior judges in the country, a member of the Appellate Division, and I was temporarily working as his clerk between completing my first degree and entering law school. One morning I was in the clerk’s room, innocently typing something for him, when he came in and started making highly provocative right-wing political remarks. I reacted with great indignation and self-righteousness, responding to his points with idealistic liberal arguments. I became very agitated, but he remained completely calm and when he terminated the argument by leaving the room, I thought I noticed the hint of a smile on his lips.

A while later there was a phone call for him, which he was not there to answer. After taking a message I went looking for him. At the time the court was in recess and the Chief Justice was the only other judge in the building, so it was logical to try his chambers first. They were upstairs and as I made my