Episode 25: The Cult and I – Part 1
In which the narrator begins his tale of sometimes reluctant involvement in a "youth movement", which will eventually lead to a gratifying reacquaintance with Mrs. Azoulay.
My Life as an African: A BiograFictional Memoir "The Truth But Not The Facts"
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When I am fifteen I am sent to take extra Afrikaans lessons after school. My friend Don and I are to be coached by Mrs van der Merwe, a fortyish Afrikaner woman teacher who lives in nearby Tamboers Kloof. My mother drives us there and comes back to pick us up.
Mrs v. d. Merwe lives alone, seems a little lonely. We never see or hear of a Mr v. d. Merwe. One day on the shelf of the living room where she teaches us I notice a strange electrical device attached by wires to what seem like two small tin cans.
I’m curious and ask about it. She explains that it can measure your feelings. She lets me hold the two tin cans and tells me to think of something scary, and the needle moves up. Then she tells me to think of something peaceful. The needle moves down. She explains about how with this device you can eventually become clear, untainted by harmful emotions and free of their consequences. Halevai!
Between the ages of 17 and 21, I too am a member of a (well-intentioned but unintrospectively powerful) sort of cult: Habonim (The Builders in Hebrew), a Jewish sorta Zionist Socialist-inspired youth movement. We called it “the movement”. Those words “the movement,” even now, trip off my tongue like the verses of a poem learned by heart. On Sunday mornings, as a Madrich, a group leader, I wear a sort of derivative boy scout uniform consisting of short khaki pants, a khaki shirt, long khaki socks, and a triangular folded scarf rolled up and decoratively tied around the neck, held firm with a braided leather woggle. This Boer War uniform, mind you, in the early 1960s.
My involvement starts as a child, innocent of purpose.
From age eight to twelve I belong to Hashtilim (The Saplings). Our local group meets every Sunday morning at The Orphanage, learns Jewish history, plays games, has competitions with other Shtilim groups throughout Cape Town, and attends a national summer camp with other members from all over the country. The structure is a lot like Lord Baden-Powell’s colonial Boy Scouts, with the Mowgli mythology replaced by an evangelical pioneering Aliyah symbolism. Who made up the structure and the symbols we used? I don’t know.
My sister Ruth is a Madricha, and when I am eight she takes me with her to a big several-week-long national summer camp at Ceres by the side of the Breede River. I am allowed to go because she is there to keep an eye on me. It’s fun, I’m looked after, and I become nearly famous for repeatedly entertaining people by singing Thumbelina, from the Danny Kaye movie about Hans Christian Andersen, every night at the campfire. In my opinion I give a great performance, shamelessly singing the words and miming the corresponding actions. Years later through high school some people who were there still say “Thumbelina” when they see me.
At age twelve I graduate to the next age group, Bonim (Builders), where there is a solid accent on acquiring expertise in classic Boy-Scout British-Empire skills: tying knots, pitching tents, making fires, building camp furniture out of felled saplings lashed together with string and rope, signaling with semaphore flags and with Morse code. You can use your scarf to make a tourniquet and as a sling for a broken arm. We learn Jewish songs and Jewish history and 1958 Israeli geography, and pass tests and get badges. I remember being coached by Selwyn Selikowitz1, fifteen years old to my thirteen, later to become a Cape High Court Judge in Cape Town. We attend sleep-away outdoor camps for three weeks in the summer, drink hot cocoa cooked in a cauldron, and sing around the campfire. We spend ten days at indoor “seminars” in old up-country hotels in the winter, a kind of indoor camping. All of this is overlaid with a back-to-nature romanticism reminiscent of the German Wandervogel movement of the early 20th Century.
After that, at age sixteen or seventeen, if you haven’t completely succumbed to the overlapping obligations of university, the challenge of racialized South African politics, and the attractions of serial dating, you become a member of the highest age group, Shomrim (the Guards). That’s the route I take.
There must be a thousand or more movement members countrywide in those three age groups, all run, most impressively, entirely by Shomrim boys and girls in their late adolescent teens. They organize the business side of it, coordinate weekly group meetings for all age groups, plan winter and summer camps, arrange educational trips to Israel to work on Kibbutzim, hold annual youth congresses, and so on, with virtually no adult help.
A few more idealistic members spend a year or two working full-time for the movement, on a small salary, in our downtown office. “I’m going to Office,” someone might remark to you when they go in to do some movement work, as though there were only one office in the entire universe. Office is also a good place to socialize. We type bulletins and manifestos and educational material on wax stencils; we make copies of movement songbooks, create our own literary magazines on rotary Gestetner machines. The songbooks are heavy on spirituals but also contain other songs for campfire or bus-ride entertainment. Some were pretty amusing:
(Sung to the tune of Song of the Volga Boatmen)
My brother Joe and I
We went to school in Omsk
There we spent our time manufacturing atom bomsk
All the best atom bomsk comesk fromsk Omsk
Tomsk makes atom bomsk
But the be-e-e-st atom bomsk comesk fromsk Omsk.My brother Joe and I
We went to school in Minsk
There we spent our time manufacturing safety pinsk
All the best safety pinsk comesk fromsk Minsk
Pinsk makes safety pinsk
But the be-e-e-st safety pinsk comesk fromsk Minsk.My brother Joe and I
We went to school in Dnipropetrovsk …
Many of us who still belong to the movement once we go to university are (mild) social misfits, uncertain or fearful about how to embark on an unsheltered life. We find succour in the weekly meetings and activities of the movement. Then, around 1964, when I am eighteen-and-a-half, my contemporaries who lead Habonim begin to pressure me and everyone else to make a written commitment to emigrate to Israel, or leave “the movement”.
I’m not really a group person but I’m in a group. And I am someone, to my detriment, who cannot easily ignore other peoples’ expectations for me.
To be continued
Welsh first name, East European last name. As my mother once perceptively pointed out, if you ever meet someone with a Polish last name and a Welsh, Irish, or Scottish first name, they will be Jewish and come from Southern Africa. Unlike the US, in South Africa immigrants from Eastern Europe or Russia often kept their last name but gave their kids Anglicized first names that the parents and especially the grandparents might have a hard time pronouncing correctly.