Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

Schoolchildren were often in the front lines of the riots; when police occasionally shot them there would be a global outcry. If you got in their way when they were on the rampage, these ‘students’ would stone you to death with half-bricks and dance and sing over your body. It made little sense to me, because—besides the rioting in the townships—almost everybody, black and white, seemed to get along and there was a lot of goodwill on both sides, contrary to the simmering hatred portrayed by the world media.

Our black maid on the farm shook her head at the rioters and said that they were mal, crazy, and that if the black people ran the country it would be a mess and she would leave.

But this wasn’t the only trouble our country was going through. Since the sixties, South Africa had been dealing with an ugly conflict on her northern border. It had started off in a small way with a few isolated landmine incidents and the odd abduction here and there, but over the last six or seven years had erupted into a full-scale little war, sometimes with as many as ten or 15 South African troops being killed in a week.

The objective of the South West African People’s Organization, SWAPO, was to try and wrest South West Africa from the control of South Africa and see it become independent. South West Africa, as it was then, had been a German colony until it was taken from her after World War I and given to South Africa to look after on a 99-year mandate as part of the war booty. SWAPO wanted independence for what it called Namibia, which in itself wasn’t such a bad idea, considering it wasn’t our country to begin with. The only problem was that SWAPO were communists, trained, backed and supplied by Russia, China and half a dozen other communist-bloc countries who, as we saw it, wanted to get their sticky paws on mineral-rich South West Africa, and in particular the uranium that was mined there.

SWAPO spread its communist doctrine by force and propaganda. They would lay landmines on civilian roads, abduct new recruits from villages by force and take them back to be trained in Angolan bush camps. They would often kill the headman of the village and his family, or anyone who crossed their path. They came armed with AK-47s, RPGs and landmines and, by the mid 1970s, were pretty well trained and would not hesitate to stand and fight against South African security forces. The threat to South Africa’s security took on a different complexion in 1975 when Portugal, which had controlled Angola (just northwest of South Africa) for over 400 years, threw in the towel and pulled out after 16 years of bitter civil war. The communist-backed MPLA promptly seized control of Angola. The new MPLA government threw its weight behind SWAPO, which had its training camps in Angola, and SWAPO in turn stepped up its intimidatory forays across the border into South West Africa. At the same time, Cuban troops started pouring into Angola as ‘advisers’, and pretty soon there were 50,000 well-armed Cuban troops in southern Angola, dug in about 160 kilometres north of the South West African border. This was a major threat to the security of South Africa.

My older brother, Murray, had returned from his 12-month stint of national service as an MP, a military policeman, and told us what was happening on the South West African border. He had been in the beautiful Caprivi Strip, a thin finger of South West Africa that drove an 800-kilometre wedge between Zambia and Botswana to the tip of Zimbabwe–Rhodesia. Although Caprivi was not considered a red-hot area, his base had come under 122-millimetre rocket fire from across the Zambian border—the great, muddy Zambezi River. He told us how he had heard the first explosion when the big rockets hit the base and how they had all dived for the bunkers, but he had gone back out when the call went out for a volunteer who knew the area. He volunteered to drive with and direct a Jeep full of ammunition to their mortar pits down by the river. Afterwards, the officer in charge had said that he would be mentioned in dispatches for his action. They had careened the Jeep down a dirt road which was in open ground and taking heavy fire from across the river, so he directed the driver to smash through a fence and a wooden wall and bounce across a field to get to the mortar pits where he spent the rest of the attack.

“It’s the sound that scares you,” he said. “Shit and dust flying all over the show, bullets sounding like a whip being cracked over your head when they pass over you.

“By the time you do your national service, boet, there will probably be a lot more shit going on up there. They’re coming in every day.”

That was 1978. My folks had moved me from the public high school in Kempton Park to a private college-type school in downtown Benoni. It was great doing the interesting subjects like criminal law, criminology and ethnology.

It was a gas until the eve of my 19th birthday when I was bust once again for weed possession. Some hot-shot undercover narcotics cop was going through the downtown crowd like a jackal in a hen-coop and getting everybody to squeal on one another. Someone must have fingered me because two narcs turned up at the plot at about midnight one night, just as I was going to bed. They were dressed like bikers, with long hair and black leather jackets. They pulled a stash of marijuana out of my desk drawer, having placed it there themselves only moments before and despite my howls of protest and loud protestations of innocence, I spent my 19th birthday in jail. This time the old man flipped and threatened to send me to the big weed party in the sky, but my mom jumped on him in time, stopping him and talking some sense into him.

For a couple of months, life at home was hell again. No one spoke; I sulked around the farm and slept a lot. Mom tried to be her usual cheerful self and walked around the house whistling ‘Moon River’, but the notes sounded strained and she couldn’t reach the high ones. Murray, who was now at university, was the only one who seemed to find my misfortune amusing.

But time healed, as time will do, and soon the family was talking and joking with one another again. One night my dad poured us each a whisky and we talked. He said that he loved me and that I should stop all the drug crap, that I should get on the right track and get on with my life and leave all that sort of stuff behind me. I agreed with him, as I was getting kind of tired of that scene anyway, and had been at it since I was fourteen. I cleaned up my act a bit, stopped hanging around with the downtown crowd and even started dressing a bit better.

It was around this time that I started diddling the English teacher. I was still going out with Taina and had been for a couple of years now, but I was caught up in the forbidden, exciting affair and couldn’t give up having Bev on the side. It was simply too easy to meet her after school and screw her brains out in her study, or parked somewhere in her car. It went on for five erotic, funfilled months, till the end came crashing down surprisingly swiftly when I found myself busted by the headmaster and given the ultimatum: “Tell your parents all of it and bring them in to see me, or don’t come back at all.”

I made the decision there and then in the principal’s office not to return to school.

Paul Jackson would meet me on his breaks sometimes, bringing me the latest extra notes that he had scrounged from class and bringing me up to date on everything that was happening at school. It was during one of these breaks on a windy day that Paul and I were walking down Princess Street, Benoni’s main drag. Coming towards us, head on, was a soldier in his stepping-out uniform. It was not unusual to see a soldier in uniform, but this guy looked somehow different.