Farewell To Innocence

By Vincent Gray

The life of Hannah Zeeman becomes entangled in multiple plots which unfold sinuously in a world where the boundaries between faith, reason, race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and sexuality start collapsing inexorably as the dawn of a new age sweeps away all ancient verities and customs. It is also an exotic story of revolution and love between women. Hannah Zeeman's journey begins in the 1950s at City Deep, a mining village located in the southern suburbs of Johannesburg South Africa. City Deep was one of the first gold mines developed in the late 1880s in Johannesburg. By the late 1950s City Deep goldmine has reached the end of its useful life as a goldmine and for this reason, and also for other reasons which will become disclosed in the novel, the Zeeman family relocate from City Deep to the small mining town of Stilfontein situated on newly discovered gold fields located about 100 km west of Johannesburg. These gold fields first became operational in the late 1950s. From Stilfontein the family moved to the mining town of Hotazel located next to a massive and deep opencast manganese mine. Hotazel is situated in the Kalahari Desert. As an adolescent girl in Hotazel, she becomes aware of her nascent erotic attraction for women. From her high school years and onwards her adventure into the universe of lesbianism begins. It is an adventure that becomes theologically, philosophically and politically entangled with her revolutionary engagement in the struggle against apartheid. As a Marxist and Communist, she finds herself having to negotiate all kinds of conflicts and contradictions regarding her double life as an underground revolutionary and a nightclubbing lipstick lesbian. It is also an exotic story of love between women. Erotic entanglements are negotiated with genuine care and sensitivity in a world fraught with all kinds of risks and uncertainties about the future. And inevitably the dark shadow of betrayal transforms the new world order into a bleak wilderness, exposing the futility of politics and revolution. This is also a novel that belongs to the literary genre of confessional-autobiographical-writing. Augustine of Hippo is one of the earliest founders of this literary genre and Henry Miller's work represents the quintessential modern version of fictionalized-confessional-autobiographical writing with no political commitment whatsoever. The saga of Hannah Zeeman lies somewhere between Augustine and Henry Miller and Che Guevara.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Gray
• Release date: Feb 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201962999

Book preview

Chapter 1:  Who am I?

1

My name is Hannah Petronella Hendrina Wilhelmina Zeeman. I am no longer ashamed of my name. I am no longer uncomfortable with the fact that my family became Anglicized Afrikaners. My great grandfather died fighting in the anti-colonial Anglo Boer War against the British. He died in Ladysmith. I am also a direct descendent of a Mr Ambroos Zeeman who settled in the Cape of Good Hope in 1661. He was a slave trader connected with the Dutch East India Company or Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie that was founded by the Dutch in 1602.

2

By the vagaries of descent, I have been assigned to that demographic group of South Africans who are recognized as being white. I also belong to that subgroup of whites who are not fully Afrikaans nor fully English. I grew up living in the interstitial spaces of two languages, two cultures and two white ethnicities, while never being fully at home in either language or culture or ethnic group. So in a way, I am one of those white South Africans, a umlungu as they call us, the kind of person who does not have a mother tongue or an unambiguous sense of ethnic identity. By sheer contingency and not by choice I have become predominantly English speaking. So in a real sense, English has become my adopted language. In South Africa, like many Indians, Coloureds, Whites and now also many Blacks, I have also become ‘English’ without having any intimate or special kind of ancestral connection to England. My relationship with England, an island that I have been fortunate enough to have visited many times, is one without any sense of rootedness. Yet when staying or travelling in the UK everything felt both alien and familiar at the same time. Is this something experienced by all non-British English speakers? Viewed from the vantage point of the global south, England for me exists as a remote and distant country. This remoteness and distance are cultural and social, and it’s this kind of distance and remoteness that reinforces its foreignness. Two kinds of Britain have always lived in my mind the one shaped and coloured by novels authored by English writers, and then the actual country that I have experienced at first hand as a visitor, a country which always failed to live up to my expectations, especially as a speaker of the English language. England never felt like home in any sense of the word. I felt foreign in England than in Spain or France or Holland or even America. Outside of Africa, I felt most at home in France, a country that I have had the opportunity to also visit regularly. However, I do not feel European in any way, and I do not feel any connection with Europe. Except for Africa, I am a foreigner everywhere in the world.

So in fact, I am not English nor do I wish to be English. Maybe English speakers outnumber the English. English as a world language belongs to anyone who cares enough about the language to claim it as their own. English knows no nationality, race, colour, creed, country, culture and ethnicity. English as a language is at home in the world no matter where that home happens to be. English has colonized my mind. English is a language that assimilates foreign words and concepts. It is a language that has colonized the minds of natives and aboriginals, filling their minds with words that embody foreign concepts and meanings that cannot be decolonized. So I reconciled myself to speaking English as my preferred language. I don’t really know why I am expressing these thoughts about English, but English is the language in which I now live, and it is also the language which I have taken ownership of without being English, it is now my language.

3

I was born in Johannesburg and for the first years of my life, I grew up in City Deep, a mining suburb in the south of Johannesburg. It was while we were still living in the mine house at City Deep that my father bought the two-door 1934 Riley Nine Lynx Tourer. As a young child, I watched them push the car into the garage. After my father had counted out the British or English pounds, also the currency of the Union of South Africa at that time, the men who had towed the car to our home left after counting their money. Give me one hundred English pounds and you can have it. One hundred English pounds, cash! Give me a hundred. This is the memory I cherish in my mind when I think of that day when he paid for the Riley that he had wanted so badly. Corelle also loved the Riley. Eventually, I inherited the Riley, but that is another story. Alone with my dad, I watched him take ownership of his purchase, taking possession of his baby which he wanted so badly, yes he wanted it so very badly. Standing next to him in the garage, I watched as he lifted the bonnet and began examining the engine under the bright leadlight that he had clamped to the underside of the open bonnet. I must have asked him a thousand questions about the Riley. Without becoming impatient, he took the time and made the effort to satisfy the curiosity of his little daughter. Overhauling the engine, he said, was the first job that he was going to tackle, but first, we must inspect the engine. He placed a large wooden block in the front of the car and lifted me onto it so that standing on the block I could also peer down on the engine lit up under the spotlight beneath the hood. After he had finished his examination of the engine, he ran his palm lovingly over the front fender. He explained that he had to fix the engine so that it would work again. This meant that he would have to lift the engine out. To me, this seemed to be a task too daunting to even be considered as a possibility. He wanted to start right away. While he was draining the oil from the engine, mom came into the garage with Elsabe in her arms. She did not look very happy. She said that we could ill-afford such an extravagant hobby, a hobby that involved the restoration of vintage sports cars. That was all she said after glancing at the Riley. Before leaving, she looked at me and asked if I was coming. I replied that I wanted to stay with daddy and watch what he was going to do. She left without me, carrying Elsabe she walked back along the concrete footpath that separated the house from the backyard lawn over which the washing lines were strung, slamming the kitchen door behind her. I did not follow her. I stayed behind with my father. After draining the oil he leaned over the engine, clutching a spanner in his hand, he began to deftly unscrew bolts that were hidden from sight in every nook and cranny of the engine, all the time speaking to himself. Standing on the wooden box, leaning over the fender I too peered down at the engine, observing what he was doing. I listened while I watched him work under the glare of the bright light. I asked him if the car was a girl or boy because he kept on referring to the car in the gendered terms of ‘she’ and ‘her’. He replied without hesitation that the car was a she. He said all cars were she’s. It was a bewildering revelation to learn that all cars were girls. No car was a ‘he’. Out of curiosity, I began interrogating him on whether all machines were also girls. Yes, he confirmed, all machines, all cars, all trucks, all boats, all ships, all aeroplanes and all steam engines were girls, they were all ‘she’s’, not one was a boy. The feminization of all machinery was something that astonished me as a child. And it took a conscious effort on my part to accept that this was the reality of the world of machinery and engines and all things with mechanical moving parts, covered in grease and oil, they were all girls. So the Riley that my dad was going to restore was a girl. Should we give her a name I asked? Yes, you can give her a name he answered with a distracted look on his face. I thought and thought. Eventually, I came up with Doris. The car will be called Doris after Doris Day, the singer of ‘Que, Sera, Sera’, which was my favourite song at the time, together with Patti Page’s ‘Doggie in the Window’. On second thought, it was going to be a toss-up between Doris and Patti. When I finally informed my father that I had decided to name the car Doris he asked if the car was going to have a surname, I immediately answered that Patti would be her surname. So the Riley was baptized ‘Doris Patti’.

He disconnected all her wires, pipes and hoses. He unbolted and removed her radiator, carburettor, and alternator. He jacked up Doris Patti so that he could unbolt her transmission and unbolt all her remaining bolts that fixed her engine to her chassis. Once her mounting bolts were removed, he hoisted her engine out. While her engine hung suspended in the air I helped my father push the car out of the garage. He lowered her engine so that it rested on blocks of wood that he had arranged on the floor in the middle of the garage. Bathed under a cone of light in the dim garage he stared at her engine. Now the engine by itself had become a she. He had to do this and he had to do that to her to get her working again.

By nightfall, he had disassembled the entire engine into its component parts. I learnt that the engine block had to go to the machine shop. Some of the engine parts had to be replaced with new parts and other parts had to be reconditioned, and other parts had to be remade from scratch from blocks of steel using machine tools such as grinders, drills and laths. After overhauling the engine, he then single-handedly put the engine back using the chain, block and tackle. Hoisting it up high and then lowering it down so that it rested comfortably in its place on the chassis. I have never forgotten that distinctive metallic sound of the ratchet as my dad pulled on the chains. Once everything was reconnected including the battery, he turned the ignition key and to my amazement, the engine started. Now he could drive the car in and out of the garage.

4

As usual, after he had fetched us from Sunday school he continued working on the Riley. And also as usual Malcolm and I joined him outside by the garage while he was busy with the Riley. Malcolm generally made a nuisance of himself. Once fiddling with the bonnet he managed to collapse it on dad’s head while he was busy working on the engine. On another occasion also after Sunday school while dressed in his Sunday best Malcolm began to kick the front tire of the Riley with his shiny new black shoes. ‘Stop kicking the tire with your new shoes’, I heard dad’s voice coming from under the car. I was sitting in the front seat playing with the steering wheel and dad was busy working on connecting some cable under the car. Corelle was also present. On most Sundays Corelle, who was my mom’s best friend, would visit us for the entire day. She and mom had been friends since their childhood days. They often joked that they were sisters. While mom was busy, preparing the Sunday roast Corelle would often join us outside. Sometimes she would bring dad some tea on a little silver tray that she had given to my mom as a birthday present. I always called her auntie Corelle. While she stood holding the tray, I was my usual loquacious self:

‘Look auntie Corelle I am driving daddy’s Riley. Auntie Corelle do you know that I have given the car a name, her name is Doris Patti.’

The Riley resting on four jack trestles had been lifted high off the ground. I climbed down from the passenger seat and crawled under the car.

‘Hannah you going to get your nice Sunday school dress all grubby and dirty,’ I heard Corelle say. My dad spoke Afrikaans to Corelle. Corelle spoke English like a Boer, the same as my Mom. My dad’s English was unaccented. It was the English of Johannesburg.

Lying on my back next to my father, I looked up Corelle’s dress. The whole world was upside down from my vantage point. I could see her stocking encased legs, her suspenders and her panties as her skirt billowed in the light fresh breeze. Then I could see Malcolm’s knees, socks and shoes. He was standing next to Corelle. Ignoring dad, Malcolm continued to kick the front tire and the toe cups of his shiny black shoes were becoming increasingly damaged with each kick. Dad was becoming increasingly irritated with Malcolm’s constant kicking of the tire and reprimanded him again, this time angrily, telling him to stop destroying his shoes immediately. Malcolm ran bawling to mom who was busy in the kitchen preparing the Sunday roast. Knowing that mom would soon storm out of the kitchen I quickly crawled out from under the car and climbed back onto the front seat. Corelle also quickly climbed into the passenger seat next to me just as mom came screaming out of the kitchen wanting to know why dad had yelled at Malcolm and why he had upset the child by threatening to take away his new Sunday school shoes. It was a lie. Dad did not threaten to take away his shoes. Corelle smiled sweetly at me. Her eyes sparkled with conspiracy. I smiled back at her as mom dressed in her apron over her Sunday best outfit walked back to the kitchen with Malcolm, still snivelling, holding her hand. As soon as mom disappeared into the kitchen, Corelle hugged me, kissing me on the cheek.

‘You are definitely daddy’s little girl hey? You are such a pretty little girl I wish you were mine.’

Then mom called from the kitchen. Lunch was ready. Dad crawled out from under the car, took his greasy and oily overalls off. After washing his hands and face, he would join us at the table still smelling of grease and oil. We ate our Sunday lunch at the kitchen table. They had cut Malcolm’s hair on the same table. He had a shock of dark curly locks that covered his ears and almost reached his shoulders. I don’t think that he ever had a proper haircut since his birth. Ouma Zeeman had brought her scissors and clippers. Dad and Oupa Zeeman had to hold him down on the table as he screamed blue murder, kicking and twisting. Lying on his back on the kitchen table with his head hanging over the edge of the table having his locks shorn off, with his body writhing about violently like a captured wild animal, it was a sight to witness, and I could not help imagining the likeness of the scene to the sacrifice of Isaac. On the same table, Oupa Vollenhoven deftly butchered the carcass of a sheep with a sharp knife and hacksaw. When he first laid the skinned carcass on the table, I thought the carcass was from their dog. The head was missing so I could not tell what kind of animal the carcass belonged to. I was convinced that Oupa and Ouma had killed their Alsatian and that the carcass belonged to their dog. It took a lot of convincing before I believed that they had not slaughtered and skinned the Alsatian and that we were not going to eat their dog for supper. During Sunday lunches Dad sat at the head of the table, Elsabe sat in the highchair next to mom, and mom feed her in between eating her own meal. Malcolm sat next to me and Corelle sat on the opposite side of the table. We ate the roast lamb with mint sauce that mom had prepared from the mint which grew in the garden next to the tap. It was also during lunch that Corelle announced:

‘Did you know that Hannah has given the vintage car a name?’ ‘Nooo, I did not know that,’ my mom replied with a frown on her forehead. ‘Yes she has, such a clever girl, the car’s name is Doris Patti. Don’t you think that is so sweet?’

After lunch dad would go back to work on the car and then at three-o-clock Oupa and Ouma Zeeman or Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven would arrive. After the visitors had arrived mom would stick her head out of the kitchen door, yell at him to stop working and come in. She would have to do this several times, each time reminding him that it was time to stop working on the car as his tea was getting cold, also reminding him that he was being very inconsiderate working on the Riley while Oupa and Ouma Vollenhoven were visiting. Eventually, Corelle would also get up to tell him to stop working, adding that mom was now getting really agitated. At five-o-clock, Oupa and Ouma would be ready to leave. It was also time for Elsabe to be bathed, fed and put to sleep.

5

The sun had already set. At seven mom complained that she could barely keep her eyes open. Elsabe and Malcolm were fast asleep in bed, but I was still up, wide-awake. It was getting late. As usual, dad had to take Corelle home. Mom looking weary would apologise for being such a bad host, barely able to keep her eyes open she excused herself. Apologizing once more for not coming along on the drive, but then someone had to stay behind with the kids. Instead, I would go with. The drone and motion of the car made me sleepy and I would fall asleep on the back seat. I would wake up again when we arrived at Corelle’s flat at the edge of Hillbrow. Dad would park the Hudson next to Berea Park across the road from Corelle’s flat. Leaving me behind in the car he would reassure me that he would be back very soon. I would fall asleep again on the back seat of the locked car. When we got back home mom would already be in bed dead to the world. With me submerged in a deep asleep, he would carry my sleep-limp body cradled in his arms into the house, unbuckle my shoes, and tuck me into bed. In the morning, I would wake up still wearing my Sunday school dress and white socks.

Soon it was Christmas again. The Christmas before we had driven in the Hudson to Germiston Lake where dad, unseen under the shrouding cover of a rapidly descending twilight, surreptitiously sawed off the top portion of a young sapling conifer which became our Christmas tree. Now we had bought a real Christmas tree from the nursery, a cone-shaped grey-green conifer, and perfect for decorating with its horizontal branches bristling with brushes of spikey prickly needles. It had been planted into a large green painted tin drum and dad decorated it with tinsel and coloured lights. After that Christmas, he planted it in the middle of the front lawn. Years later when we drove past the City Deep mine houses we would spot our old home among the other houses. Our Christmas tree had grown into a towering cone-shaped grey-green pine tree with thick horizontal branches sprouting long brushes of spikey prickly needles.

6

Out of the blue, I learnt that we were moving. Just before we moved from City Deep to Stilfontein Uncle Roger moved with his family to Empangeni to establish a sugarcane farm. I thought that I would never see my cousins again. However, at the end of grade one during the December holidays, we went to visit Uncle Roger on his sugarcane farm. One morning we woke to a huge commotion. We heard Auntie Anna shouting.

‘There is a rhinoceros in the backyard!’

We jumped out of our beds and ran barefoot into the kitchen dressed in our ankle-length nighties, and sure enough, there was indeed a black rhino in the backyard facing the kitchen door. We climbed onto the kitchen counters next to the sink, kneeling on the counter with our faces pressed against the windowpanes we stared in total disbelief at the rhino. Auntie Anna brandishing the kitchen broom standing her ground under the threshold of the doorway began to shout: ‘shoo, shoo, shoo,’ while waving the broom in a menacing manner. After a few minutes, the rhino turned around and trotted off, disappearing into the surrounding bush.

7

It felt like we had barely settled down in Stilfontein when we learnt that we would be moving once more, this time to a place called Hotazel, which my mother pronounced as follows: Hot-as-hell. So we going to move to a very hot place. I felt quite perturbed at the prospect. Before we moved from Stilfontein to Hotazel, I remembered that my mom had said something about the mine houses in Hotazel that struck me as being quite odd especially as a child. She said that the houses in Hotazel had floors covered with Marley tiles. As a young child, I could not understand why she seemed to be so thrilled that our new home soon to be in Hotazel had floors that were covered with Marley tiles. I tried to imagine what a Marley tiled floor looked like. For some weird reason, the word ‘Marley’ made me think of marbles. I developed this mental image that the surfaces of the floors of the Hotazel houses had marbles stuck into concrete.

Our house in Stilfontein had polished wooden parquet flooring which I liked. I was not very happy about leaving Stilfontein, especially leaving my room that had just been painted pink. I was also leaving behind the newly built Strathvaal Primary School.

However, my older brother Malcolm was ecstatic. If anyone wanted to escape from Stilfontein, it was my brother. For some unexplainable and mysterious reason, he had decided to fling fist-sized clods of red earth at the whitewashed walls of the home of Dr Simon Cohen our neighbour. Dr Cohen a medical doctor was the local general practitioner in Stilfontein. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in the neat little house next to our home. His wife was a sophisticated Jewish woman as I remember her. Being a housewife was her main job which involved supervising the domestic servant and looking after their two daughters.

As a friend of her daughters, I was a frequent visitor in their home. We would listen for hours to LPs of ‘The Snow Goose’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ on their brand new Pilot Radiogram. Compared to my mother Mrs Cohen was a wonderful mother to her two daughters and an excellent host to me as a regular visitor, a Gentile intruder into her kosher home. Malcolm was mom’s favourite. Elsabe and I often felt like second class children. My mother was always on our case. The bonds between my mother, Elsabe and me were never strong as far as I can remember.  There were the odd moments when my mother become our wonderful friend and indulged our every wish.

An act of vandalism had been committed and the suspect was Malcolm. I had to go and find Malcolm who had disappeared off the face of the earth after committing the deed. Malcolm’s friend Kevin and I set out on a search for Malcolm while my hysterical mother Mrs Amanda Zeeman was having one of her dramatic cadenzas. Kevin reckoned that Malcolm was playing pinball at a Café up the road on the bult (hill) which was next door to the old Strathvaal Primary School where I had been first enrolled as a grade one pupil. The memories and smells of that first year of school are still vivid in my mind, the apricot jam sandwiches wrapped in wax wrap, the little plastic bottle filled with Oros orange juice, the little black slate board, pencils, exercise books and the English reader. Every day I would walk home down the bult along the tar road with my big brother Malcolm and his gang of friends. Every day we had to contend with the harassment of a pet crow that would be waiting to ambush us.

We saw Malcolm coming down the hill walking with his hands in his pockets quite nonchalantly as if he did not have a care in the world. My instruction from my mother was to tell Malcolm to come home immediately. I was to say nothing else. Kevin wanted to embellish on my mom’s message with other threatening information like for instance that he must come home immediately because the doctor was going to give him an injection.

Before I could inform Malcolm that mom wanted him to come home right away without any dilly-dallying along the way, Kevin immediately blurted out that Dr Cohen was going to give him an injection. Malcolm instantly put two and two together and his face turned ashen white with apprehension. I became livid with anger at his stupidity and insolence. I began to shout at him in the street so that the whole neighbourhood could hear what he had done. How could he spend the afternoon playing pinball with not a care in the world after he had defaced the walls of the Cohen’s home? How could he entertain the possibility that his actions would have no consequences for him?

It was pathetic to watch him. He howled for the remainder of the afternoon until nightfall while he washed down the Cohen’s wall down with a hose and tried unsuccessfully to mop and wipe away the red stains from the walls. Dad had to pay for the repainting of the outside walls of the Cohen’s home. Malcolm did not get a hiding. His punishment was the humiliation that he had to endure as the Cohens, mom, Kevin, Elsabe, the domestic servants and I stood watching him trying to clean the red stains from the wall.

8

After a while, I made peace with my fate that my new bedroom in Hotazel would have thousands of different coloured glass marbles stuck into the concrete floor. Mom always exaggerated. She said the manganese mine was in the Kalahari Desert that was covered in dunes for as far as the eye could see. They were flown in a small aircraft to the desert to visit the mine. My dad who was a mechanical engineer seemed to be some kind of bigshot on the mines. They wanted him very badly in Hotazel. So they flew my mom and dad to Hotazel to see the huge open cast crater of a mine from which broken rock was hauled out by huge yellow coloured Euclid trucks which were as big as houses. They were away for a few days. We had to stay with family friends across the road from our house while they were in Hotazel. I stayed with my friend Edith Malherbe. For three nights, we slept in the same bed. Her parents took us to see Sleeping Beauty in Johannesburg at His Majesty’s in Commissioner Street.

My mom loved the Marley tiles. And even though my dad got very sick on the roll-coaster flight to Hotazel and vomited into a paper bag he still took the job even after having to go through that ordeal. Anyway, I managed to form a mental picture of the house with Marley tiles in Hotazel after we saw a short documentary of a desert in Arizona that was screened before the main movie. I couldn’t believe that we were going to leave our nice face brick home in Stilfontein to live in a desert-like the one in Arizona that I had seen on the movie screen, which included scenes of primitive dwellings, possibly with marbles stuck into the concrete floor, surrounded by tall cactuses, and a desert filled with rattle snakes, rats, eagles and coyotes. Our home in Stilfontein had become very special to me.

9

Just before we moved to Hotazel, I had an experience that in a way changed my life for good. While I stood on the lawn trying to come to grips with the fact we were going to move to a desert-like the desert in Arizona I saw a chameleon walking, or was it crawling, along the top of the diamond mesh fence. A low diamond mesh fence separated the row of mine houses from the main road that connected Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom to Stilfontein. I had never seen a live chameleon before. Fascinated and filled with wonder I watched it crawling along the top strand. It looked so exposed, so awkward and vulnerable. Its eyes mounted on mobile conical turrets eyed me out warily. Where was it going? Where did it come from? What was it thinking? I was curious beyond belief at the sight of this mobile sentient being which filled my visual world with such unspeakable mystery. What did it eat? Where does it sleep? What does it do with itself all day? What was it thinking? It kept its wary little eye focused on me as it began to crawl faster along the fence towards our neighbour’s property that happened to be the home of Dr Cohen. Yes, what could it possibly be thinking or feeling? It must be able to think I thought to myself as I gazed at its anxious-looking little reptilian eyes. I didn’t realize it then, but I had asked the questions that were going to preoccupy me for the rest of my life. I knew it was thinking. It had to be thinking something at the very least. I could see that it was aware of my presence. It was very obviously a fully conscious being. It was a sentient being that was very much aware of its surroundings that included me, a very curious little girl, who had become enthralled by the sight and presence of the chameleon on the fence. It looked so vulnerable exposed on the top of the fence. I followed the chameleon until it vanished into the shrubbery in the Cohen’s garden. I was born with an innate fascination for animals. There was something electrifyingly magical about living creatures, especially wild ones, which captivated me. I immediately began to search for more chameleons in the foliage of our garden. The search for chameleons became an obsession. From that day on, I was always on the lookout for chameleons wherever I went, but I never found another chameleon in our Stilfontein garden. Little did I know that the first animal, which I would encounter on our arrival in Hotazel, would also be a chameleon?

Where was it going? Where did it come from? Where did it sleep? Did it have a home? What did it eat? What did it think about? These questions began to fill my head as a small girl whenever some animal happened to catch my attention such as a lizard, a toad, a snail, or a caterpillar. I did not realize at the time as a young girl in Stilfontein while I stood gazing at the chameleon in an emotional state, which could only be described as a mystical rapture of enthralment that I was going to build my future career on trying to find answers to these questions as a zoologist. Nor did I realize that the answers to my questions regarding animal minds and animal behaviour would have profound personal philosophical, theological and political implications. The answers would shape my understanding of Marxist theory and my commitment to the class struggle and the Communist Revolution. Animal studies transformed me into a radical, it turned me into a materialist, a materialist with a physicalist perception of the Universe, that is, a Universe that was causally closed. For most of my life, I have grappled with implications of a Universe such as ours as being one that was causally closed.

Chapter 2:  Hotazel and Puberty

1

On Monday the second of January 1963, we arrived at Hotazel in the brand new Austin Cambridge just after a rare massive thunder storm had saturated the dry Kalahari sands with life-giving moisture. The Kalahari did not look like the desert in Arizona nor did our new home look like the rude dwellings that I had seen in the movie. The mine manager’s house that we were moving into was a newly built six-bedroomed double storey face brick house on an acre stand. Vast lush emerald green Kikuyu lawns surrounded the house. To my delight, the garden had a fishpond. In the backyard there was a nearly built fowl run and a large aviary; it was something that my dad had organized specially for me. He also had a pigeon loft built. In Stilfontein, he had become a homing pigeon enthusiast.

2

While they were unpacking the furniture truck Malcolm, Elsabe and I went exploring. We walked over to the mine recreation club, which was referred to as the ‘rec’. We discovered that next to the rec surrounded by a wooden split-pole fence was a swimming pool. I left Malcolm and Elsabe and went wandering off on my own because they wanted to go back to the house. I walked across the rugby field into a patch of veld. My heart skipped a beat when I saw a large chameleon walking with its odd gait over the fresh damp white Kalahari sand. It was the second chameleon that I had seen. I bent down to take a closer look. In a threatening display, it inflated its body and began to hiss furiously at me, opening its gape wide. Again like with the previous chameleon encounter questions flooded my mind once more regarding this beautiful slow-moving reptilian animal: Where did it come from? Where was it going? Where did it live and where did it sleep? What was it thinking?

I noticed that it had left its spoor trail behind in the soft wet sand. I began to follow the spoor to see where the chameleon had come from. I must have followed its spoor trail for more than 100 meters before I decided to give up and go back to our new home. I was in a state of elation. I had fallen in love with Hotazel and the surrounding Kalahari Desert landscape. Does the chameleon have a mind? It was clearly very aware of me. Does a chameleon have consciousness? Does it have self-consciousness? Does it feel? What does it feel? What does it mean to feel? To feel is to experience. Surely, it must be able to feel something for it to be a sentient creature. By observing its behaviour we assume that it possesses the capacity or the power to feel hungry, danger, pain, fear, cold, hot, or excited, and so on. Feeling something is the same as experiencing something. To experience something is to feel a sensation. To feel a sensation is to be aware of the sensation. In a materialist Universe, it is matter that is feeling, it is matter that is aware of a sensation, to be aware of a sensation is to be on the road to full-blown consciousness including self-consciousness. On the other hand, we honestly don't know how 'matter' can feel and experience consciousness especially if we hold to the materialist metaphysical thesis that the physical Universe is causally closed and all physical effects have physical causes. If this is our metaphysics then I promise you that mental activity and consciousness are going to be a mystery for quite a while. If we can solve the problem of the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of mind or what we call consciousness then we will be able to build a human-like robot with a mind and with free will.

3

Sartre, the modern philosopher of consciousness, did not ask the fundamental question regarding the origination or biogenesis of consciousness, nor did Descartes who was the original philosopher of consciousness. He did not inquire into the material conditions for its possibility. The material conditions which make it a possibility for something to possess the ‘power’ or capacity for consciousness, include all the molecular-based causal mechanisms which give rise to the experience of consciousness or in the state of being conscious. Can we deny that the chameleon was in a state of consciousness? Can it see anything without being conscious of what it was seeing? Every experience of any sentient being had to be a conscious experience of something. This is what being aware is all about?

4

The chameleon sees me! How could I possibly doubt that? The chameleon is showing all the signs that it sees me. My encounter with the chameleon resulted in the chameleon experiencing something. A human cannot be conscious without being conscious of something. With regard to its attempts to escape from my presence the chameleon’s locomotory powers were absurdly modest in the extreme. As a young prepubescent girl, I realized this, yet I was too fearful to touch it and I do not attempt to capture it. For some reason the chameleon does not move, it remains fixed in one spot,  trapped in my gaze, standing a full yard away from the exposed toes of my sandalled feet, bright green on the rain-washed white Kalahari sand, it is exposed and vulnerable. It remains frozen. To escape it must not move. I repeat, to escape it must not move! Its immobility makes it appear inanimate, like a large leaf lying on the ground. I am fascinated. But also extremely cautious.

I step forward half a yard closer and bend over to have a closer look. Now the chameleon suddenly moves, it puffs up its throat, it opens its mouth in a wide fearsome gape, and it hisses aggressively. My heart skips a beat. I pull back immediately, a rapid reflex response. Eyeing me out with its tiny eyes, watching my every move, it is no longer the passively frozen vulnerable green creature, instead, it has become black with anger, and it now seems ready to lunge at me with all the ferocity that it can muster.

5

In Hotazel, while in primary school with my eyes glued to the ground I searched for the Kalahari Tent Tortoises (Psammobates oculifer). My father stopped me from collecting them, explaining to me that I was interfering with their lives and they should be left in peace. He suggested that I should rather study their natural habits by marking them where I had found them with Cutex nail vanish. So I became obsessed with finding tortoises and marking them before I released them again. My father took an interest in my tortoise marking activities and soon he was asking me questions like: how many tortoises had I marked, how many times have I recaptured tortoises that I had previously marked. The marking and recapture of tortoises kept me busy throughout my primary and high school years.

The men on the mine sometimes went on nocturnal springhare hunting or chasing excursions. Several times dad took Malcolm and me on a night drive. He drove the mine bakkie and we sat in the cab next to him. The young men from the single quarters would stand on the back of the bakkie. One of the men used a powerful spotlight to locate animals in the pitch dark.

Years later, I discovered the Formozov-Malyshev-Pereleshin (FMP) formula that Russian scientists had used for converting animal track counts or track frequency into animal density. As a child in Hotazel, I had entered into the fullness of the Universe of non-human sentient beings. I was obsessively curious about animals. The evidence of the presence of sentient beings was written in the many spoors, in the tracks in the sand that I came across, which I saw everywhere as I walked in the Kalahari’s sandy scrub landscape dotted with its ubiquitous thorns trees. As a child, I wandered into the Kalahari that surrounded the mining village of Hotazel in a continuous state of rapture and wonder. I never ceased to experience that state of wonder and rapture whenever I discovered an animal in its wild state. I could not help marvelling at the fact that the animal was a living sentient being, which somehow managed to exist all by itself, whether it was a tortoise, or frog, or lizard or even a snake, and I came across many snakes, mole snakes, cobras and puff adders. My heart always skipped a beat if I flushed a hare or duiker or a steenbok. With every animal encounter, I relived that same experience which I first had when I discovered the chameleon crawling along the top of the diamond mesh fence. I was amazed and filled with joy when we flushed our first hare in the veld across the road from our house in Stilfontein. I would never forget my fascination when I first saw that large blackish coloured fish in the bathtub in the Klerksdorp flat. Without fail throughout my life, in my teenage years and when I was a student at Wits, the sudden accidental discovery of a tortoise or the unexpected springing up of a steenbok or grey duiker in my path never failed to be a thrilling event for me. Why this obsession with non-human sentient beings? From early childhood I had found myself in a state of proneness when it came to animals, I was prone or predisposed to be fascinated by any encounter I had with a sentient non-human being existing wild, undomesticated in a state of nature. It was a wonder and fascination with wild animals that was unsentimental. As I have already mentioned, I never had a pet in my life, not even a dog or a cat. Except for the pigeon, bantams, geese and ducks we kept, I was not drawn to domestic animals. But both my father and I got great pleasure from keeping the homing pigeons and love birds in Hotazel. And we got a lot of enjoyment out of having the bantam fowls, ducks and geese.

6

I cannot remember the details but when I was in standard three we spent a weekend as a family on what was one of the largest cattle farms in the Kalahari. It was owned by an Afrikaans widow who was in her sixties. She lived alone on the farm running the cattle ranch with the help of a few Coloured labourers. The farm also teemed with game. One of her sons who were a medical doctor in Kuruman took us on game viewing drive. Malcolm, Elsabe and I stood on the back of the bakkie as we drove along a two-track road that wound like a snake through the Kalahari scrubland. We saw kudu and gemsbok, but what we had really come to see was the huge herd of springbok. Eventually, we found the herd of springbok. After stopping about 50 metres from the herd, the doctor climbed onto the back of the bakkie with his hunting rifle. I have an idea that it was .303. Anyway, he took a bead