I Em Smiling

By Brian Pottinger

I Em Smiling is the personal and family autobiography of journalist and author Brian Pottinger. A former Editor and Publisher of the Sunday Times, he was present at all the major moments of the “peaceful revolution” which brought democracy to South Africa.

The author traces his family roots back to Revolutionary France and Edwardian England to understand what brought his two grandfathers to these shores. He provides a highly personalised account of growing up in apartheid South Africa and of his sometimes hilarious, often brutal, introduction to his journalistic calling.
I Em Smiling is not merely a political memoir. It is the story of a many-faceted life: student, soldier, taxi driver, railways fireman and ticket inspector, journalist, Editor, businessman, café owner and Chair of a family sugar farming enterprise.

Comment on contemporary and historical events, often acerbic, is laced with accounts of his more esoteric quests: discovering the remains of every last Knight’s Templar commanderie in the United Kingdom and France or in search of the last Caravaggio paintings to be found on the Mediterranean islands.

About the Author

Brian Pottinger was born in Durban in 1953. He was educated at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Harvard where he was a Fellow of the Nieman Foundation. He worked on newspapers in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg and is a former Editor and Publisher of the Sunday Times.

He became a media management specialist and worked throughout Anglophone Africa on media and entertainment businesses. He and his wife Susan, owned a café-bistro in a small Cornish coastal village before retiring to South Africa where he now lives on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast beside his beloved Indian Ocean.

Brian Pottinger married Susan Leila Wicker in 1977. They have two children, Simone and Christopher, and three grandchildren, Kirra, Sarah, Declan and Nathan.

This is his seventh book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Pottinger
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005600204

Brian Pottinger

Brian Pottinger is a South African based journalist and author with extensive experience of developing world societies. He was educated at the University of KwaZulu Natal and Harvard where he was a fellow of the Nieman Foundation. He is a former Editor and Publisher of the South African Sunday Times. This is his eighth non-fiction work.

Book preview

Introduction

This is the story of my family and the Indian Ocean, for they are entwined. Its shores have served as a constant in our lives for generations, a background susurrus to the events and dramas through the decades. Trace a finger on a map along the 30th parallel and one comes to the Port City of Durban on South Africa’s eastern coast. Both my grandfathers arrived here in the first decade of the twentieth century, impoverished but seized – like so many of their fellow countrymen – by an irreducible belief that a better life awaited them. My maternal grandfather found that life. Not, sadly, my paternal one. Cancer, which has laid a venomous trail through my family for generations, claimed him at an early age. My father, mother, sister and I were born here.

It is where, after a long absence, I now again live; this time in an open-decked home some forty kilometres north of Durban, surrounded by wild banana trees, looking out on an indigenous coastal forest where bushbuck graze in the morning and mongooses scurry across forest paths in the evening. The vervet monkeys periodically mount company-sized raids on the banana trees, thundering across the roof to reach the foliage and teasing the dogs as they parade along the balustrades. At night, when the seas are high and the wind at the north east, I can hear the crash of the waves on the beach.

I walk through the coastal forest paths and I am on land my family once owned. I cycle on the laid-out roads of a developing township nearby built on land my family once farmed. Where the hotel-sized home of a billionaire stands, once was the farmstead my grandfather and uncle built in the 1930s, overlooking the ocean. I ride horses out from one of the old plantation farmsteads in the nearby Sinembe hills and skirt the farm that was my grandfather’s first purchase, back in the 1920s. My family’s past is thus real, tangible and all around me. In this I am very blessed.

Track the same finger east along the 30th parallel and one will hit as near as damnit the West Australian town of Perth. It is where my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters live, also within walking distance of this ocean although there the reefs have gentled the waters into a placid blue, much different from their rolling and tumultuous cousins on the African shores. North of my children stretches Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh and India, the eponymous apex of the Ocean triangle.

My late father-in-law, David Wicker, as English as they came, spent some of the happiest times of his youth in India and his early life was in the army and colonial service in Kenya. It was where my half-Finnish wife was born and lived her first years in a modest District Officer’s residence with elephants an ever-present danger to the vegetable garden.

My mother-in-law was born in Karelia, the contested eastern part of Finland, and carried with her the childhood memories of that dreadful winter of 1940 when she and hundreds of thousands of others were driven through the snow before an occupying Russian army. Neither of Susan Leila’s parents could escape the allure of this ocean, returning after many years abroad to South Africa to spend their last years overlooking it.

Cast an eye north-west from Perth towards the 20th parallel on the map and one will find the tiny island of Mauritius, a speck in the turquoise of the Indian Ocean. Here, in the hillside town of Quatre Bornes my grandparents were born, as were my forefathers before them, dating back to the first refugees from the aftermath of the French Revolution.

This is what I call my magic, if irregular, triangle. Durban, Perth, Quatre Bornes. Between those points, generations of my family have lived and died. Birth, marriage, and death have all played out within that blue space and before those three hot gates. Our family story, told simply, is an amalgam of migration, settlement, hard work, adversity, defeat and triumph. In every generation but one, family members have uprooted themselves to find a better life abroad and have laid down roots in new places. Mostly we have flourished. In singer-anthropologist Johnny Clegg’s inimitable lyrics, we are the Scatterlings of Africa.

This book is a personal and family history set against some of the great events that shaped the future of this part of the world.

TS Eliot said:

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things

In some of these twisted things here remembered we were mere spectators. In others, like the development of the KwaZulu-Natal sugar industry or fighting in African wars or reporting on South Africa’s epic transition to democracy, we were participants. Whatever the role, as a family, we have been truly blessed by our encounters with these exotic lands and the people bounded by this fascinating and enfolding ocean.

Part One

Family

I’le Maurice

On the 25th day of August 1879, at half past nine o’clock in the forenoon at La Louise Estate in the district of Plaines Wilhems on the Island of Mauritius, my maternal grandfather, Louis Joseph Marot, was born. The birth certificate was issued by a Mr C. Maingard, Officer of the Civil Status of the District Plaines Wilhems and L. Goorah, Officer of the Civil Status of the District of Port Louis. Arthur Pitot and Alfred Sanglois were witnesses. The price of registration was ten Rupees.

In that year, the Zulu armies of King Cetshwayo kaMpande inflicted the greatest single defeat of British arms by an indigenous people at Isandhlwana, not three hours’ drive from Durban. In Perth, Western Australia, the Roundhouse Prison had just been built at the nearby Port of Fremantle to keep order amongst unruly elements in the dusty town. And Quatre Bornes, my family’s Mauritian home town, was then little more than a ragtag collection of buildings surrounded by fields of sugar cane, the scattered remnants of the indigenous forest which had covered the interior in the eighteenth century, dusty roads, plantation homes and the shacks where the poor people lived. It would be ten years before Quatre Bornes could even aspire to the status of village.

My great-grandfather was Ernest Victor Marot, described as proprietor on the birth certificate, and my great-grandmother was Marie Lucie Marot, nee Brouard, both of La Louise Estate. He was third generation Mauritian, born on 2nd August 1852, the grandson of French-born Jean Jacques Marot of Angers, in the West of France, who arrived in this world on 8th June 1772. Jean Jacques was thus twelve years old when the tumult of the Revolution engulfed his country.

The Marots were apparently influential people in Angers, the medieval seat of the Plantagenet Dynasty. Certainly, the local directory still swarms with Marots in every conceivable occupation and profession. The sixteenth-century poet and artist, Clement Marot, is still revered in the town. I have a picture of myself and my cousin (from the English side but by then living in France and more French than Anglo-Saxon) standing outside Lycée Clement Marot. Corny, but this really was where it all began.

I am deeply indebted to the Société de L’Histoire De L’Ile Maurice for its help in tracing my forefathers so far back. The date of Jean Jacques’ arrival in Mauritius and the cause of his decision to voyage there are unknown. At the time we know there was a major migration of people out of France who may have been considered unfriendly to the revolutionary and post-revolutionary establishment. Distant parts like the Caribbean, North America and the Indian Ocean became a haven for such dissidents and adventurers. Was Jean Jacques one of them?

It is not impossible. Angers became a focal point of the War of the Vendee, the Royalist counterstrike against the revolutionaries. In December 1793, the rebels besieged Angers. They lost and the revenge by the revolutionaries was brutal. Two hundred and ninety people were shot in Angers. Over a thousand died in prison from illness.

Emblematic of the horror of civil war was the story of the de Marignys, distantly related to the Marots—descendants of both families now living in Mauritius and South Africa. Gaspard de Bernard de Marigny commanded the Vendeen artillery. Bouin de Marigny , on the other hand, was in the Republican armies and killed during the battle by a cannonball. Romance, if not fact, immediately demands that the cannon should have been fired by his kin.

Jean Jacques would have been twenty years old at this time. Was my Angevin forefather a counter-revolutionary? Was he forced to flee? I only have a blurred snatch of a comment made by my mother when I was young. She said our family were not aristocratic but we had been too close to the Ancien Regime. Not for the first time, we simply found ourselves on the wrong side of history.

What is known is that on November 4, 1809, this 37-year-old man married Louise Francoise Anne Routier in Port Louis in Mauritius. It is likely that he had already begun to make his mark on the island, investing in the sugar industry, acquiring land, prospering. My great-great-grandfather was born a year later.

He certainly arrived on the island at a pivotal moment. In 1810, the British seized the island during the Napoleonic wars to stop French corsairs operating from its sanctuary. They imposed their laws and systems but typically left the society alone. French remained the mother tongue. The fusion between French metropolitan and other island cultures, Arab, Dutch, Indian, Portuguese, African, continued apace in language, food and some social practices, for this was a crossing point for the Indian Ocean trade.

Unchanged, however, remained the dire social pressures against marrying outside one’s racial group and caste, an instinct common to all societies where immigrant settlers – whether European or otherwise – find themselves as minorities in the roiling confusion of a multi-ethnic existence far from home.

And thus, successive Marots married into the established Franco-Mauritian families: Boulle, Brouard, d’ Avice, Guerin, Fayd’Herbe de Maudave, Houquebie, de Chamoy, Rivalland, de Marigny, Lavoipierre and Robert. They produced enormous families. Six was considered frugal, ten common. One of my distantly-related family members managed thirteen children.

My childhood memories were thus to be infused with these family names, raised countless times in French conversation and gossip between my mother, aunts and grandmother, a vast network of relationships impenetrable to me but the very essence of my grandmother’s life. To mention a Franco-Mauritian name of a South African family would bring forth a stream of anecdote and memoir almost always ending with a declaratory statement that so-and-so came from a good or a bad family, although I never quite learnt the criteria underlying the classification. From an early age then, I became aware of an entire clan of distant relatives from a remote island in the Indian Ocean.

The estate on which my grandfather was born is now a suburb of the town of Quatre Bornes which is more colloquially known as La Ville des Fleurs because of its rich profusion of flowers, still much in evidence: multi pink-hued hibiscuses, the delicately fragrant frangipani, profuse bougainvillea, Victoria Regia, the regal water lilies, and the delightful Syzyguim Mauritianum, looking like nothing so much as the inverted and tessellated purple skirts of a Spanish dancer. I am sure there must have been anthuriums in the gardens of my great-grandparents; the long-stalked, exquisite flowers coloured in an astonishing range from ferocious red through to delicate pastels of pink, apricot, cream and mauve to iridescent white, each one shaped like the eyes of a Modigliani model. They were my grandmother’s favourite and through her life she grew them in profusion. I have long kept a welcoming display of them in the entrance hall of whatever house I have lived in, on whatever continent.

In his day there would still have been considerable forested areas in which there would be stag for the hunting. Louis Joseph, my grandfather, hunted in Mauritius as a young man and later in South Africa and then again on his return visits to the island, although he once told me he had stopped when it no longer became possible to stalk the prey because of a shortage of forest. He refused to shoot stags corralled into a field and opened to the guns of hunters on platforms. Nearly a century later, I was also offered the chance and declined. There was no sport there. Yet he did keep his trophies: yellow-grey skulls and horns adorned all his homes. As a child they always appeared to me to be reproachful and grisly.

La Louise was a sugar estate, one of the many which were the backbone of the Mauritian economy at that stage. My grandfather was thus born into a sugar family. It was to be his life and a large part of that of his family. It was to be part of mine as well. The history of what happened to the Marots and La Louise is not entirely clear. I can only rely on anecdote, for the records are skimpy.

What is certain is that in 1879 Ernst Victor Marot appeared on the birth certificate of his son as proprietor of La Louise, a position of influence and prestige in that society. And that by the time his son set foot in South Africa in 1906, twenty-seven years later, he was by all accounts not a wealthy man—perhaps even impoverished, with little formal education and living by his wits. Somehow, there had been a calamitous loss of family fortune. One can only conjecture why.

The Mauritian sugar industry suffered a huge decline in profitability with the opening up of new sugar industries in Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth century. Many of the young men of the island left at this time to find fortunes abroad, some to South Africa and others to Australia. My grandfather was certainly amongst them. But this alone could not have accounted for what the Victorians would have called his ‘reduced circumstances’.

I was told once by an elderly Mauritian relative from Quatre Bornes – another blurred recollection – that the Marots had once been important people. But they had managed their lands badly. They had allowed people to occupy the land as tenant croppers and lived off the rentals. It was a lazy way to make money, but it had its risks, enormous ones as generations of farmers in developing countries have learnt through time. Land tenure laws change. With the relentless drive towards egalitarianism, tenants acquire extended rights in law. Over decades they acquire title. That, I surmise, is what happened one hundred years ago in Mauritius to La Louise. The Marots forewent their lands by default. This signal event was the Marots’ loss. It was my gain. It brought my grandfather to these shores and with him the rich traditions of his homeland, which in turn became part of me and my identity.

The Butcher’s Boy

One year after the birth of my grandfather at Quatre Bornes, some ten thousand kilometres and a world away, another baby was born, this one in Clapham, a district of Wandsworth in London. His name was Frederick Charles Pottinger. His father, Charles, born in 1850, was a butcher and one can surmise he was a reasonably successful one.

The address on the birth certificate is 54 Bromells Road, Clapham. Bromells Road, now a row of gentrified three-storey terrace houses selling two- or three-bedroom apartments at between £750 000 and £900 000 a pop, runs off Clapham Common. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Pottinger and his wife Emily, nee Hall, together with Frederick and his daughter, another Emily, and two servants would have been living amongst the homes of the wealthier merchant classes.

Later, Clapham would fall out of favour with the wealthy and enter a period of slow decay during the middle to late twentieth century before reviving itself in the early twenty-first century as a desirable residence close to central London. No 54 became a studio for the sculptor Louis Frederick vai Roselieb who lived there from 1906 to 1908 and to this day it is known as The Studio. Who knows, perhaps the family sold it to the sculptor just as my grandfather embarked on his Indian Ocean adventures?

Frederick left England and arrived in South Africa at the turn of the century, within a few years of my Mauritian grandfather. And that is about as much as I know about the paternal family line although I have gleaned a little about the history of the family name thanks to something called The Historical Research Centre.

Buried amongst heaps of old documents in my mother’s possession when she died was a faded old certificate confirming the origins of our name and attaching a handsome representation of our family crest.

I quote: The English surname Pottinger, and its England variant Pettinger, is of occupational origin. Here the name is derived from the Old English term pottinger, ultimately from the old French potagier… one who made and sold pottage this being a thick type of soup or broth very popular in Medieval England.

So, we had an honourable family profession—at least my cousin, Ken Pottinger, thought so. He named his delightful gîte in Thegra in southern France’s Midi, Grange le Potager, home of the soup maker or, by extension, herbalist. I was to spend happy days there.

The document tells us that we can trace our ancestry back to Egbert, the first Saxon King. But then I guess so can fifty million other people. A Walter le Potagier is recorded as early as the 1300s. John Pettinger was recorded in the Court Rolls of the Borough of Colchester in 1321. Then a Benjamin Pottinger was married to Elizabeth Dance in St George’s Chapel, Hanover Square, in 1762. One of the more illustrious Pottingers was Lt Eldred Pottinger who in the 1840s made a name for himself as a daring soldier in the Afghan wars, once infiltrating enemy territory disguised as a horse-trader.

He was nephew to an even more famous Pottinger , Sir Henry Pottinger, Governor of the Cape and Hong Kong in 1842 at the time of the infamous Opium Wars (a main road in Hong Kong is named after him and I have, of course, a picture of me standing under the sign). There is a distant family connection, I am told. His only son, Frederick shot himself in New South Wales, Australia in the nineteenth century.

I discovered this intriguing sidebar to my story thanks to a book written by a namesake, George Pottinger, a former British Civil Servant, given to me by another namesake, Piers Pottinger of Bell Pottinger, the public relations company which was later to fall into great disrepute and eventual oblivion when it accepted as a client an Indian family notorious in South Africa for widespread corruption under the kleptocracy of former President Jacob Zuma. Fortunately, Piers was out of the firm by then. And I was never in.

It appears that young Frederick was a bit of a Victorian rake and the despair of his entitled father. After Eton, he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards but was forced to resign after losing £10 000 in a gambling debt which was only paid by selling his mother’s jewels. He promptly ran through his £100 000 inheritances and was forced to emigrate to Australia in 1859 at the age of twenty-eight. It was the proper thing for a bounder to do in those days.

There he accepted a commission in the New South Wales Police where he surprisingly gained some public esteem for his arrest of the notorious Starlight Gang. But the old devil was irrepressible and on a day on which Frederick was supposed to be apprehending three known bushwhackers he was presiding over, and riding in, a race meeting at Wowingagong race track.

He was summoned to a Board of Inquiry in Sydney to explain this gross dereliction of duty. Sir Frederick boarded a coach at Bathurst as the only inside passenger and somewhere near Lapstone, the driver heard a shot. Investigating, he found Sir Frederick with a chest wound and his silver inlaid pistol on the seat beside him. He refused medical treatment and subsequently succumbed in Sydney’s Victoria Club in Castlereagh Street of a mortified wound. He died within sight of Darling Harbour and not far from the Tasman Sea. It was not in my Magic Triangle, but near enough.

Still uncertain was whether he accidently shot himself playing with his weapon or deliberately killed himself out of fear of what he faced at the Inquiry. No matter, the story was so romantic that it was turned into a novel by Rolf Boldrewood with Sir Frederick Pottinger renamed Sir Ferdinand Morringer.

The Pottinger family motto was Virtus In Ardua which translated means Valour in Adversity, appropriate when one thinks about poor Sir Henry’s travails with his son.

The motto could equally have applied to our Frederick Pottinger of Clapham. What were the circumstances of Frederick’s youth? Why did he leave England? All is clouded by much conjecture and rumour and romance.

The orthodox version holds that my grandfather was from a wealthy English family and had been sent to South Africa as a remittance man to escape the consequence of a typically Edwardian undesirable love affair. The affair, the story goes, was with a barmaid from the East End. She, however, would brook no opposition to love’s destined course and took a steerage passage to Durban in defiance of the family where she met up again with my grandfather, then working on the Natal Government Railways. They married soon afterwards and produced three healthy sons. The outraged grandfather promptly disinherited his son.

It is a stirring story and one my mother told me she had confirmed with my grandmother. It is not without its supporting evidence. Frederick no doubt came from a decent family, an aspiring, upwardly mobile one but not necessarily a hugely wealthy one. His father, Charles, was in all likelihood of that class of people who had through grit and hard work emerged from a Victorian working class or even poor background. He might have had ambitions for his son which did not include marriage to a working girl of the class from which he had only just emerged. Did he encourage Frederick to go abroad to escape the entanglement? Did Frederick go himself to escape the claws of his family’s censure? Did Frederick flee his enamour? Or conspire to meet her far away from his family’s suffocating embrace? We just do not know.

Of my grandmother, sadly, there is little to tell. My father’s birth certificate in Durban dated June 9, 1913 records the mother’s name as Kate Virco. This is surely a misspelling of the common Cornish name Vercoe. UK Census data of the period record only one Kate Vercoe, born 1880 in Newton Abbot, Devon, the same year as my grandfather’s birth date. If so it means my grandfather and grandmother were thirty-three when my father was born.

Intriguingly, it also means my paternal grandmother was originally from the south-west of England, a part of the country in which I and my wife were to live for seven years. Was Kate in fact a West Country girl of Cornish origin who went to work in London and met and charmed my grandfather with her straight-talking ways? I never had the chance to ask her. She died when I was still very young. My memories of her are limited, as if the frames in the digital camera have darkened and frozen. She was short, diminutive almost, and by the time my recollections caught up with her she was living in a bleak council flat in Durban, eking out her pension, taciturn and, frankly, forbidding.

I have no recollection of her accent or indeed anything she ever said. Would I recognise it now for the slow and burred cadences of my village neighbours at Oak House in North Cornwall? I never had the chance to ask her if she had indeed taken passage on these seas, alone and terrified, for love. Was her affair born in a London pub while pulling pints of bitter? Did she indeed defy his family?

Irrespective of the background and the intrigue, my father was born the third son of Frederick and Kate, on June 9, 1913 in Durban and named Cyril Oswald.

If Frederick hoped for a better life here it is not entirely sure he found it. On my father’s birth certificate Frederick’s occupation was given as manager. What he managed and how, I do not know although as I said, he worked for the Natal Government Railways.

The home address is given as No 11 Lancers Road. This rather dashing name belies what it was and has become. Lying in Durban’s Lower Berea, the street is within a stone’s throw of the main railway line into central Durban, around the corner from the fresh produce market and within shouting distance of what then was the main road out of Durban towards the hinterland. It was also five minutes’ walk from Grey Street, the thriving, swarming retail area dominated by the Indian trading community, a network of streets and lanes with all the exotic charm of Asia. My father would certainly have been awoken by the Call to Prayers from the Grey Street Mosque and he grew up in one of the most multi-ethnic and poorest neighbourhoods in the city.

No 11 exists no more. Like so many along the road it has been flattened and replaced with bleak and run-down small shops, factories and a major depot for the fleets of minibus taxis which are such a part of contemporary urban living in Africa. It is a crowded, dangerous place. In my father’s day, the streets were probably lined with the tiny zinc-roofed cottages with their extended front verandas in which the working class and poor whites lived.

Compared with the relative wealth of Victorian Clapham’s Bromells Road, this was a major decline of fortune. Frederick died young, reportedly of cancer, leaving little Kate to bring up three boys in a country with no social welfare net. Her husband’s family, assuming they were in a position to help, apparently did not. This, if nothing else, suggests the marriage was not blessed by the family. Indeed, it smacks of dispossession and disinheritance.

That, at least, is the version I grew up with. A cousin has received another one. In this, Frederick’s father offers to bring the eldest boy, Eddie, back to the UK and to raise him as his own. Kate, typically, responded that she would manage quite fine. If true, Eddie would have been old enough to know of his mother’s decision. It was the first poisoning of their relationship.

But Kate did not really manage. She did her best, taking a job as a cashier at the municipal swimming pool on the Durban beachfront, the same North Beach salt water municipal baths in which my father and I swam in the warm summer evenings when I was a child. If he ever thought about his mother sitting behind that cramped cashier’s kiosk, he never mentioned it.

The boys grew up in an apartment in Point Road in the Port area. It was a rough neighbourhood. They were undoubtedly very poor. My father refused to talk about the poverty of his youth, preferring instead to reminisce about swimming in Durban Bay, body surfing the waves off Addington Beach and about the time he and his friends once dived off M Shed pier into the oil-stained harbour as a dare, bobbing in the choppy waters, slapping up against the hull of a berthed tramp steamer and being cheered on by the African dockers. They scrambled ashore by shinning up a ship’s hawser and fell right into the hands of a less than impressed port constabulary. Indeed, my father was a superb swimmer and on the few occasions he and I took to the waves on North Beach together, he far outpaced me in getting to the back-breaking line and surging into shore on the breakers, only the forepart of his brown body exposed in the line of frothing white surf to his left and right.

My mother once shared with me some