Episode 22: Epiphanies
When my friends and I read Atlas Shrugged, we think it’s a subversively leftwing book.
Size Matters
When I enter UCT I am 5’4”. By the end of 1962 I am 5' 11” and have actual stretch marks. I’m not used to the idea of this new size. Towards the end of this first year, as we are standing in a crowd in the Maths Dept, Professor Skewes, who discovered one of the largest naturally occurring numbers in mathematics, asks one of the students during a crowded tutorial to point me out. I hear the the student reply: He’s that tall fellow over there, giving me a sudden burst of cognitive dissonance.
I am a human palimpsest with the stretch marks of 1962 still faintly visible.
The Beauty of Cigarettes
At lunchtime at UCT we go to the Student Union to eat steak-and-kidney pies or Cornish pasties with chips — England Expects, even though we are no longer part of the British Commonwealth. We sit six to a table for a couple of hours and talk and talk and talk — and smoke.
It’s great to be able to smoke freely. I’ve been yearning for cigarettes for years, and now I can smoke without much embarrassment. I’m uncomfortable pulling out a pack in the Union and lighting up, because I look so young and incongruous. But I do.
There is a marvelously tempting plethora of foreign cigarettes available at tobacconists in town. Sometimes I buy packs of Players, or Mills in tins, or other exotic English cigarette brands that I convince myself taste better than the regular South African brands — Rothmans, Ransom, Peter Stuyvesant. The English cigarette packaging is so beautiful and classy. I temporarily convince myself that though I will spend more money on a foreign pack, I will smoke less of them because they are so much better.
My friend Philip claims smoking helps your hay fever.
Unnatural South African Life
Before varsity my interactions with Black people have always involved two different levels of power.
An embarrassing example: When I learn to drive and have a car of my own, I stop at the garage to get petrol and to have my oil and water and tires checked. A Black man, one of several Black attendants, comes forward without speaking to do all this while I wait. I go to pay for the petrol at the kiosk inside. When I come out I give the shilling tip to the wrong man.
Being at UCT is an eye-opener. The university is mostly white, but anti-apartheid politics is everywhere. NUSAS, to which UCT belongs, is a liberal association of students at the English-speaking universities. Heads of the student council at UCT often subsequently become heads of NUSAS, and often subsequently get banned by the government or have their passports withdrawn and are forced to leave the country on an exit permit.
There are numbers of Coloured students and smaller numbers of Chinese, who are not considered white. Japanese, though, are honorary whites because they have purchased tons of pig iron from us, even though some people have trouble distinguishing Japanese from Chinese.
There are few Blacks. One of them is Philip Kgosana who, after the massacre at Sharpeville, leads a peaceful march of 30,000 Blacks from Langa for miles along de Waal Drive past UCT into central Cape Town to protest the South African pass laws. I was in my last year in high school and everyone was terrified of what would happen when the crowd met the police. They sent us home early. My sister worked nearby in town and my parents kept phoning her to find out if she was safe.
Avant Garde
Varsity the student newspaper is fabulous. The highlight is Anthony Eaton’s humorous column each week.
It’s the early Sixties and there are avant-garde plays put on by student groups: Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, The Sport of My Mad Mother. It’s a different world.
Anti-Epiphany
When my friends and I read Atlas Shrugged, we think it’s a subversively leftwing book.
The South African political spectrum is shifted many degrees to the right. There is no TV (for if there were it would all be in English with standards that violate the Nationalist Party norms), books and people get banned. The degree of rightward shift and attitudinal distortion is what makes fail to grasp the capitalist message of Atlas Shrugged. The libertarian individualism of its characters reminds us of the South African Liberal Party which seeks political rights for everyone independent of color, and their slogan is “One man, one vote”, which sounds vaguely Randian.
Liberal
When I am at UCT, liberal is a very good word.
One day one of the liberal politicians tells off the avowedly ‘conservative’ Nationalist pro-apartheid government that has instituted arbitrary detention laws:
You call yourselves conservative but we are the actual conservatives, preserving the democratic customs of the past. It’s you that are the radicals.
How to Learn By Myself
I have always waited to be taught advanced stuff, and then, at UCT, I have a couple of episodes of self-stimulated intellectual endeavor.
The first is in the summer at the end of my first year, when the Pure Maths department instructs us to read a short book on Functions of a Complex Variable over the summer. I have never learned an entirely new topic by myself before, and now for several weeks I begin to master analytic functions and contour integrals.
The second is in my fourth year, when I am doing an Honours in Applied Maths. I do a mini-thesis/survey on Unified Field Theories that try to combine Einstein’s theory of general relativity with Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic fields using tensor calculus and differential geometry. I search the literature in the library and manage to get a grip on Einstein’s attempts, Schrödinger’s attempts, the Kaluza-Klein five-dimensional theory, etc., and write it all up, critically.
I am amazed then (and now) that I can learn something untutored. It doesn’t come naturally.