North to Outjo

After a repid scanning of church registers from Walvis Bay and Otjimbingwe kindly provided by Gunter von Schumannn, to add to our family history research from yesterday. we said goodbye to Enid and Justin Ellis, whose hospitality we had enjoyed for a week, and set out north for Outjo, stopp;ing at Okahandja for lunch at the Bakerei Dekker, where Val had a sausage breakfast and I had Bockwurst and salad. It wasn’t gourmet stuff, but good and plentiful.

Bakerei Dekker in Okahandja, where we had lunch

Unlike Gobabis and Windhoek, Okahandja has changed little over the last 40 years. It seems cleaner, leass dusty and better-maintained than back then, and no doubt some of the shop names have changed, and there are more eating places, but that’s about it. O yes, and the highway had bypassed the town. But unlike similar towns in South Africa, such as Villiers and Wepener, which we visited two years ago, there was no marked deterioration. Wepener was neglected and dirty, and Villiers looked like a ghost town. Perhaps the differce was that in Okahandja the new eating places, even the franchised ones ;oke Steers, were in town rather than on the bypass.

Another difference was the road signs. Forty years ago one had to beware of kudu. Now it’s warthogs that pose the danger to cars.

Speaking of roads and traffic, one thing we noticed was that Windhoek drivers are much more disciplined and courteous than Pretoria ones. They wait at pedestrian crossings. They queue in the correct lane, and they observe speed limits (for the most part).  There are few minibus taxis, but apparently lots of metered taxis, using ordinary saloon cars.

On the road to Otjiwarongo there are two distinctive conical hills, which can be seen for about js;f the distanve of 170 km

Conical hills on the way to Otjiwarongo

There are also some distinctive rock formations

There is also a place called Sukses, which used to have a sign saying Hotel Petrol, but this time we failed to see it. Perhaps the Hotel Petrol failed.

At about sunset we reached the Dasa Safari Lodge near Outjo, which has a splendid view over a broad valley, and a heraldic dog reflected in the swimming pool.

;

So here I am sitting at the dimly-lit bar, Windhoek lager at my elbow, typing this and enjoying the free WiFi which ;asts untul the electricity is switched off at 11:00 pm, while Val sits outside contemplating the stars in idyllic peace. And the guy who runs the place is preparing a braai for supper. And if there are typos in this, blame the dim light, I can hardly see the keyboard.

 

 

Books and worms and things

After yesterday’s busyness with family history research, we enjoyed a much quieter day today,  browsing through The Book Den, where we were told we could find a copy of

Axel Wilhelm Eriksson of Hereroland by Ione Rudner

and indeed we did find a copy, and bought it.

It was not however, listed on the Good Reads website, so I had to add it manually, and apparently its ISBN is shared with another book, the first time I’ve come across that kind of error. The ISBN is 99916-0-746-3 and this site seems to have it listed correctly.

A.W. Eriksson was a Swedish trader in Namibia, who married (and divorced) Fanny Stewardson, and we hope it might some of the information about those families that we could not find in the archives yesterday.

Though The Book Den is only about a third of the size of  the bigger Pretoria bookshops, it seemed to have a much wider selection of books. That is no doubt because it is an independent book shop, and not part of a big chain like Exclus1ve Books or the CNA, which dominate the book market in Pretoria. Actually Exclus1ve Books started out as a small independent bookshop in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, where I bought my copy of Waiting for Godot on 11 November 1960, so it started more than 50 years ago, only thern it was called “Exclusive Books” and not the rather twee “Exclus1ve Books” that it became after becoming a big chain, now introducing central ordering, which will be the death of it.

So one of the pleasures of visiting Windhoek is being able to browse in a real bookshop for a change.

I bought a couple of other books too

Beginning Programming for Dummies [With CDROM] by Wallace Wang

I don’t recall seeing that book in any bookshop in Pretoria. It must be about 20 years since I last bought a computer programming book. When GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) became all the rage, I gave up. As I get older I still find the old text interfaces much easier to  read. But I thought that if nobody is going to write the kind of program I really, really want — an event-based database program for family history, biography, and historical research — then I’ll have to write it myself. So I hope this book will hel[p me to do a quick catch-up on some of the developments in programming in the last 20 years.

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We got back to the Ellis household and Enid and Justin showed us how they feed their pet worms. The worms subist on a diet of used tea bags, banana skins, egg shells and the like, which they turn into compost, which is useful for gardens in the sandy soil of Windhoek.

In the evening we all went to dinner at the Sardinia restaurant in Windhoek; recommended.

Justin Ellis, Steve Hayes, Val Hayes, Enid Ellis — at the Sardinia Restaurant, Windhoek. 11 May 2013

This is my blog of our holiday triup to Namibia and Botswana, continued at Sunday in Windhoek: Quaker meeting and walking the dogs | Khanya

Trans-Kalahari Highway, Kang to Windhoek

We woke up about 4:00 am at the Kang Ultrastop, where we had stayed overnight, and after breakfast at 7:00, filled up with petrol and left at 8:25 on our way to Windhoek.

Accommodation at the Kang Ultrastop on the Trans-Kalahari Highway in central Botswana

This time the only vehicles we saw on the road were big trucks, mostly 26-wheelers, and they were fairly few and far between. It is obvious that this is a mainly commercial highway. It probably cuts off quite a bit of the journey time betweeen Windhoek (and points north, like northern Namibia and Angola) and Gauteng, but tourists might prefer to travel a longer but more scenic troute, through Upington. This route is miles and miles of miles and miles.

The Trans-Kalahari Highway somewhere north-west of Kang, where most of the traffic is 26-wheelers

We did discern three varieties of Kalahari scenery (I’m sure the local Bushmen would tell you there are hundreds of kinds of Kalahari). The ones we saw were (1) Bush and grassveld, (2) Bush and sandveld and (3) Smaller bushes with scattered big trees.

Kalahari bush and grassveld, about 65 km north-west of Kang

About 100 km further on we came to the bush and sandveld variety:

Kalahari bush and sandveld, about 160 km north-west of Kang

And a bit further on we passed through the third type — low scrub with scattered trees.

One often reads descriptions of the Kalahari, or of people travelling through it, but they are rarely illustrated, and I know my picture was somewhat different from the reality. Previously I had only seen the southern fringes, and the central Kalahari was not what I imagined it to be.

A third type of Kalahari scenery — low scrub with scattered trees

For the first 100 km or so from Kang we passed black plastic rubbish bags at regular intervals, until we reached the teams picking up the rubbish and hoeing thorn bushes out of the verges, I imagine it must help to provide employment for local people, not that the Kalahai here has a large population. We saw fewer animals on the verges than yesterday.

Beyond the cleaning teams, we saw at some of the roadside sitplekkies what they were doing — there were polycarbonate cold-drink bottles, and polystyrene hamburger boxes everywhere, and we had to walk quite a long way into the bush to take photos that didn’t have the foreground full of them.

The sign that everyone seems to ignore

There are some creatures that seem to like the rubbish though…

These birds seem to congregate at the sitplekkies. We didn’t have our bird book with us, but they seem to be a species of crow.

The map showed a village 138 km from Kang, but we saw no sign of it, and one of the first settlements we saw after the highway turned left towards the Namibian border was Tsootsha, about 300 km from Kang, and from there there was still another 100 km to go to the border at Mamumo.

We were struck by the politeness and professionalism of the customs and immigration officials on the Botswana side of the border, and the rather lax and couldn’t-care-less attitude of those on the Namibian side. When we went to pay the road fund contribution they were sitting on their desks eating lunch, and seemed to mildly resent the interruption.

The scenery was slightly different on the Namibian side, for a while at least. The bush seemed greener, and more familiar. I wondered whether it was because of different farming methods, because the border is not based on any natural geographical features — it is an arbitrary line, drawn on a map by people who had probably never been within 5000 kilometres of it, colonial officials playing at maps in London and Berlin — we’ll cut off this bit from Namibia and and give it to Botswana in exchange for the Caprivi Strip.

We reached Gobabis at 3:20 pm, nearly 7 hours and 500 km after leaving Kang. Actually it was 2:20, because Namibian time is now an hour behind South African time, tho0ugh I think they have daylight savings time in summer. Gobabis should have been familiar territory for me, but wasn’t. I used to come here about once a month when I lived in Windhoek. But after 40 years, the town had changed beyond recognition. Now there were islands with trees down the middle of the main street where in the past there had been a central strip of tar, with wide gravel stretches on either side. Now there were branches of all the major chain stores in southern Africa, and we saw at least two specialist stationery shops. Back then there were a couple of banks, a couple of general dealser stores, a hotel and farming cooperatives and suppliers. Perhaps it is the Trans-Kalahari Highweay that has brought prosperity to Gobabis,.

As we headed west for Windhoek the main road too was unrecognisable. On my monthly trips 40 years ago, it had been gravel from the airport at Ondekaremba, 40 km east of Windhoek to Gobabis, though construction teams were building the tarred road, leading to frequent detours. I think it was only on my last trip there that the tarred road had been completed all the way. In many places it followed a different route, giving different views, like this one of the approach to Witvlei.

Witvlei, Namibia

The hills in the distance were a familiar sight, but I was used to seeing them from a different angle.

As we approached Windhoek, the road from the airport into town was more familiar, and we stopped to take photos of the Auas mountains. They were a familiar sight when I lived in Windhoek, so I would not dream of taking a photo of them, but absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I wanted a memento of a once-familiar sight that I will probably never see again in my lifetime.

Auas mountains, east of Windhoek

We reached Windhoek at 17:37, South African time, just over 9 hours and 718 km after leaving Kang. We went to stay with Val’s cousin Enid Ellis and her husband Justin. I first met Justin when he came to Windhoek in 1970, with a group of Anglican students from Stellenbosch University, who had come to spend part of the Christmas vac working for the church there. When I was deported from Namibia a couple of years later,  along with the bishop and two other church workers, I met Justin again at a student conference, and tried to persuade himn to go to Namibia to take our place. Whether as a result of my blandishments or something else, he eventually did so. I met Val and her cousin Enid at the Anglican parish of Queensburgh, which I was looking after for a year while the rector was overseas, and they went on a holiday to Namibia in 1973, and then Enid went back in 1974 to work there, and married Justin. Then they too were deported, and spent several years in England, returning when Namibia became independent in 1990.

The story continues here.

 

Kang: ver in die ou Kalahari

At 6:45 am on Bright Monday, 6 May 2013, we set out on our holiday trip to Namibia and Botswana. We drove west through Pretoria, stopping at Broederstroom to fill up with petrol, and passing the Hartebeeshoek Satellite tracking station, to Magaliesberg. I went to school at Magaliesberg for a few years, so the place is familiar to me, and has changed little in 60 years. I went to the Mountain Lodge Prep School, which closed at the end of 1952.

Magaliesberg

On the road down to Magaliesberg we waited at the level crossing for a train to pass, four or five diesel locomotives
pulling soda ash cars. When I was at school there, that used to be the main line to Rhodesia, through Botswana, and the trains were pulled by Garrett steam engines. We used to put pennies on the rails so that the trains would squash them.

Leading diesel locomotive pulling a train of soda ash cars though level crossing at Magaliesberg

The stop sign at the level crossing has flashing lights to warn when a train is coming, and nearby is an advertising hoarding with spectacular photos of a minibus taxi disintegrating after being hit by a train, with the legend “Trains can kill”.

Train passing level crossing at Magaliesberg, with “No hawkers” sign and warning that trains can kill

Then on through Derby and Koster, which we reached at 9:25 am, 166.5 km from Kilner Park. Two of my fellow pupils from Mountain Lodge School, Ross and Judy Gilfillan,  had lived in Koster, where their father was a farmer. I wonder what happened to them. Like many of the towns in that part of the world, it has a prominent grain silo.

Koster, a farming town

We went through Koster to avoid the N4 toll road. The non-toll route is some 80 km longer, but the extra petrol would cost less than half the toll at the Swartruggens toll gate alone, which is one of the most expensive in the country.

We then went to Lichtenburg, a road I had taken in 1969, when I first went to live in Namibia. Then I had had a puncture there, and had had to buy a new tire in Lichtenberg, which meant I would not haver had enough money for petrol to get to Windhoek. I took a detour down to Postmasburg, where a student friend, Clare Isted, was teaching at the local high school, and borrowed R10.00 from her, which in those days was enough for a couple of tanks of petrol. As we learned in geography klessons in school, Lichetenburg was one of the corners of the maize triangle, hence all the grain silos in the towns we had just passed through.

Lichtenburg

We reached Lichtenburg about 11:00, 260 km from home, and wandered up and down the main street, Nelson Mandela Drive, looking for a place to have breakfast or lunch. I didn’t recognise anything from when I was here 44 years ago. I recalled that an old friend Mike Wimmer was once rector of the Anglican parish here, and wonder what happened to him. Eventually we had lunch at Maxis, one of several restaurants in the vicinity in converted houses. The surroundings were pleasant, but the food less so. Val had tramezzini, and I had their “English breakfast” — two fried eggs with bacon, chips, tomato and boerewors, since it was Bright Week. But the bacon was tough and leathery, and the boerewors tasted funny — I wondered if it was one of those with kangaroo meat in it.

We left at 11:50, this was new territory for us, along roads which neither of us had travelled before. We stopped at a garage in Mafikeng at 12:30 to fill up with petrol, though we didn’t really need to, as there was still half a tank left, but we wanted to be able to pay with a credit card, rather than have buy it for cash with our limited supply of Pula in Botswana. Mafikeng, or Mafiheng, is famous for having been besieged during the Anglo-Boer War, and for a while the word “Mafficking” was used to describe exuberant celebrations such as those the Brits held when they heard that the siege had been broken. One of the lasting results of the siege has been the Boy Scout movement.

Mahikeng, Mafikeng, or Mafeking — choose your own spelling!

The main drag there was also called Nelson Mandela Road or Drive, and we drove straight through and out the other side, and in a short time came to Ramatlabama, the Botswana border post. There were no queues there (another advantage compared with the toll road),
and we went straight through without much fuss, through we had to pay P190 for the Botswana road and insurance fund, but it was valid for three months, so we would not have to do it again on our return, As we left the border post a policeman checked our
passports and road fund papers before opening the gate, and asked what I did, and I said I was a moruti, and he said, “Ah, umfundisi”
and said that in Botswana I would be called a pastor. That struck me as a little odd. How did he know we were originally from Natal,
that he used the Zulu term, and why “moruti” does not seem to be used in Botswana.

We stopped to take some photos on the road between Ramatlabama and Kanye. Part of the purpose of our journey is to follow in the footsteps of Val’s great great grandfather Fred Green, who was an explorer and elephant hunter in what is now Namibia and Botswana, and when he travelled from Bloemfontein in the late 1840s and early 1850s with his brother Charles to hunt in the region of Lake Ngami, he would have traversed country very like this in his oxwagons.

The road from Ramatlabama to Kanye, in Botswana

The Green brothers  would have had to wind their way through the thornbushes with their ox wagons, but there we were on this long straight tarred road, with no other traffic visible the whole time we were stopped. The thorn bushes were cleared from the verges of the road, leaving only a few bigger trees and grass, which attracted grazing animals — cattle, donkeys, goats, and, more rarely, flocks of sheep. Many of them were lying under the trees in the shade to escape the midday sun. The Botswana roads seemed better-maintained than the South African ones. The animals seemed to be there even though the fences were intact, and there seemed to be no sign of human habitation, and no herders looking after the animals either.

The kind of country the Green brothers would have traversed in their ox wagons to reach Lake Ngami from Bloemfontein

We reached Kanye at 2:30, 440 km from home, and saw the first road sign that indicated the road to Windhoek. It was the
first hilly bit we had seen since arriving in Botswana — the rest of the country had been very flat.

Kanye, Botswana

We continued on the road to Jwaneng, and arrived there at about 3:25, 526 km from home, and stopped at a garage to buy cold drinks
and go to the loo, for which one had to pay 1 pula.  There were a few smaller villages, where we had to slow down to 80 km/h, but
many of them were not marked on the maps, and as the afternoon got later we saw more animals on the road. We eventually reached Kang at about 6:00 pm. We stayed at the Kang Ultrastop, which was quite pleasant, had supper at their restaurant, and went to bed early. We left a couple of our BookCrossing books there.

The story of our journey bto Botswana and Namibia continues here Trans-Kalahari Highway, Kang to Windhoek | Notes from underground

Not dead yet (book review)

Not Dead Yet by Peter James

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Sussex Police has a lot on his plate: a murder case with a limbless headless corpse. How can they search for the killer if they don’t know who the victim is?
And then a film crew want to use the Brighton Pavilion for a new film on King George IV and his mistress, and Roy Grace is put in charge of security for the film set and the star Gaia Lafayette,
whose temperamental fans can turn adoration to detestation in an instant, and has already received several threats to her life. There are others too, with grudges against the producers of the film, who are planning to disrupt it. Some of the threats are known, but some are unknown to anyone other than the plotters.

Peter James has written several whodunits featuring Roy Grace, and I think this is one of the best. As with many such books it is not easy to say much about it without giving away too much of the plot. But this one is definitely a good read for lovers of murder mysteries.

Are there flaws?

Yes, it is difficult to write a book that has none. But in this book the most obvious flaw does not affect the plot and is peripheral to the story, though it could quite easily not have been. And that is that I can’t imagine any circumstances in which one would take a newborn baby home from the hospital in a car seat.

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Know your DA

During the past week the Democratic Alliance (DA) appears to have been trying to rewrite history and rehabilitate its past, including a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #KnowYourDA. This has prompted others to use the same hashtag to denounce the DA.

One of the more controversial elements of the campaign was this pamphlet, quoting Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC, praising Helen Suzman, one of the leaders of the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party was the great great grandmother of the DA.

If you know anything about family trees you will know that each of your great great grandparents contributes about one sixteenth of your DNA. The pamphlet appears to be trying to tell a different story, with Helen Suzman as Mummy and Nelson Mandela as Daddy of the DA.

It wasn’t like that, and it still isn’t like that.

Check where the other fifteen-sixteenths of the DA’s DNA really came from.

One Tweeter put it in a nutshell when he said:

Akani Mathebula ‏@Akanirelo 1h

#KnowYourDA is failing because instead of crafting a new future @helenzille wants to rewrite history. Epic fail

The Democratic Alliance was formed out of a campaign, led by one of its components, the Democratic Party led by Tony Leon, to unite the white right during and after the 1999 General Election, under the slogan “Fight back”. Their campaign posters were clearly aimed at appealing to those who were “Gatvol” with five years of democracy, and wanted to fight back against it to restore the status quo ante.

After the election the united with the rump of the National Party (the party of apartheid, the former political home of most of the white right), and in order to do so introduced the thoroughly undemocratic practice of “floor-crossing” into parliament. That turned round to bite them when some of the former leaders of the National Party found the Democratic Alliance too right-wing for them, and themselves crossed the floor to join the ANC.

While this effort to whitewash the DA is reprehensible, some of the comments to counter the DA campaign are equally reprehensible. Some people are trying to counter it by attacking Helen Suzman, and trying to show that she was evil.

But Helen Suzman was not responsible for this pamphlet, nor for the misuse of her photograph and the words of Nelson Mandela.

I think Nelson Mandela’s words were sincere and genuinely meant, and for the most part true.

What is bad is the DA’s dishonesty in trying to claim the credit.

I was one of those who voted for Helen Suzman in 1961.

The Progressive Party had broken away from the United Party two years previ0usly, and she was the only one of their MPs to be re-elected. It was not perfect, and it did not have a perfect policy. But after 13 years of apartheid, and the relentless efforts by the National Party to create a race-obsessed society, the Progressive Party opted for a different policy. They switched the focus from race to class. The National Party wanted to ensure that only whites could elect representatives to parliament. They removed black representatives. They were in the process of disenfranchising coloureds, and their aim was to have an electorate defined by skin-colour. Only whites were to be able to vote. The official opposition, the United Party, were lukewarm in opposing this, and so the “progressives” left.

But they did not join any of the several parties and movements that advocated “one man, one vote”. They still wanted a limited franchise, only it was to be limited by class, not race. In their policy, anyone of any race could vote, as long as they were rich and educated. Property, income and education were to be the criteria, rather than race.[1]

But Helen Suzman’s significance was far wider than her party’s restrictive class-based franchise policy. She spoke out against the Natoinal Party’s increasingly totalitarian jackboot rule at a time when few others did (and most of those who did were detained, or banned, or harrassed by the police). And she was the only one who did so in parliament, where she could not be silenced.

But when, after several political marriages of convenience, in which the Progressive Party became the Progressive Reform Party, the Progressive Federal Party and then the Democratic Party, it finally, after the 1994 General Elections, held aloof from joining the Government of National Unity led by Nelson Mandela.

If the DA had joined the GNU, there might just have been a grain of truth in the picture of Nelson Mandela and Helen Suzman together on the DA pamphlet. But as it is, it is lying propaganda, which deserves all the contempt that has been poured upon it.

Instead of trying to reinvent the past, the DA would be better occupied in trying to rebuild the future.

As for me, I’m still waiting for Mamphela Ramphele to bring the train to the station.

_____

Notes and references

[1] The DA is not the only one to twist history here. In 1960 there were three political parties that stood for “one man one vote” and were also themselves nonracial: the Communist Party (which had been banned since 1950) the Liberal Party, which had been formed in 1953, and the Pan African Congress (which was banned in 1960).

The Congress movement — the African National Congress, the SA Congress of Democrats, the Indian Congress and so on — was made up of racially exclusive bodies. Rica Hodgson, a member of the Congress of Democrats, recently tried to blacken the name of the Liberal Party by saying that it did not allow blacks to join, whereas it was her own organisation, the COD, that was all-white. But whether one tries to blacken the name of other organisations, as Rica Hodgson did, or whitewash one’s own, as Hellen Zille is doing, it is still distorting history.

 

 

 

Lily of the field (book review)

Lily of the Field by John Lawton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

According to the blurb, it seemed that this was a whodunit, with Scotland Yard Detective Frederick Troy as protagonist. But in the first hundred or so pages he had only made one very brief appearance. It also seemed to be a rather highbrow intellectual whodunit, aiming to be more a work of literature than a light read.

It is set in the pre-war Vienna of the 1930s, in the world of music and the arts, a young girl learning to play the cello in the shadow of the growing threat from Nazi Germany. There are a couple of shifts of scene to a British internment camp for enemy aliens at the beginning of the Second World War.

When the detective finally appears on the scene, he is a bit of a puzzle. There is clearly a backstory to this, and it turns out that Lily of the field is only the first of a series of novels with Inspector Troy as the main character. And, like many British fictional detectives, he has an unusual characteristic that distinguishes him from most of his colleagues. Like Inspector Morse, he is a Musical Policeman, and this enables him to solve a mystery that baffles his colleagues.

But it seems that it would probably be better to begin with one of the earlier novels in the series, as one learns who Inspector Troy is through allusions to them, which are not completely clear if you haven’t read the other books.

The book is set in the 1930s and the 1940s, and the author, John Lawton, seems to have been quite careful to avoid or explain anachronisms in the settings. There are a few, which I would never have noticed, yet he includes some rather interesting notes on them.

Unfortunately he does not seem to have been quite so careful about anachronisms in language, and he uses some expressions and turns of phrase that would not have been used in the 1940s. I spotted two on one page that I am fairly certain were anachonisms, and a couple more that may have been. On page 215 of my edition, it is said of someone that he “went ballistic”. “Ballistic” was a technical term used by military gunnery specialists, police forensic scientists and rocket scientists, but probably only entered the consciousness of the general public in 1957, with the launch of Sputnik I. The most significant thing about Sputnik I, the media told us, was that it showed that the USSR could launch an ICBM — an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. And I’m sure it took a few more years before the term “went ballistic” was applied metaphorically to human beings.

The second such anachronism is where someone is described as “a scrounger living low on the food chain”. Again, while the food chain may have been a concept familiar to biologists, I don’t think that the general public became aware of it before environmental concerns came to the forefront in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and people began writing books with titles like Diet for a small planet.

Another possible anachronism, on the same page, is where someone speaks of “blows coppers away”. That one I’m not sure of, but I don’t think people would have used such an expression in the 1940s.

Lawton goes to some trouble to set the scene of the dreariness of postwar Britain, to remind readers who weren’t around then about things like rationing, almost making too much of it, but then spoils it somewhat by using language that seems out of place.

In spite of that, it’s still a good read, though the beginning promises more than the author actually delivers, and there are some poor patches, especially in the second part. But it whetted my appetite for more, and I’ll look for the first of the series to see if I can find out who Inspector Troy is, really.

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Franchise?

There are some words that are quite meaningless, because they can mean just about anything. Words like “unit”, “module”, “aspect” and “facet”, for example. The latest word to join this rapidly expanding group is “franchise”, and that is why I wondered about this tweet that I saw on Twitter this morning:

Has any of the print media written a story about an ‘inexperienced’ CEO being appointed to lead a franchise this morning? Yes No Maybe?

Perhaps there is something that preceded it that would explain what it means, but I’m left puzzled. In the last five years or so, “franchise” has been increasingly used of sports teams. Why, I don’t know.

I tend to think of “franchise” as referring to a retail chain of shops under a common name that sell something. So one has Nandos and KFC that sell take-away cooked chicken, Wimpy and McDonalds that sell hamburgers, and so on. The “restaurants”, if they can be called that, are individually owned, but they have the same decor, use the same recipes, and sell stuff for the same price, at least in any one country where they operate. The have a licence to operate, a “franchise”, from the owner of the brand name.

But I find difficulty in seeing how this applies to a sports team, like the Dolphins, the Sharks, the Titans, Orlando Pirates, Kaizer Chiefs or Mamelodi Sundowns. I know that these teems sometimes have sponsorships from commercial firms — at one time Mamelodi Sundowns were being called “Ellerines Sundowns”. But the term “franchise” implies that there is a Mamelodi Sundowns team in every city, all wearing the same outfit in their games, and that somewhere there is a big Sundowns CEO who manages all these franchisees, and admits new ones once they have learnt the culture of the franchise.

If you refer to the Titans as a cricket team, you know they play cricket. But if you refer to them as a “franchise”, they could be selling fried chicken or hamburgers or pizza for all anyone knows.

So just as “unit” can refer to anything from an electric locomotive to a kitchen cupboard to a group of soldiers, “franchise” can now mean anything, or, more likely, nothing at all.

The nightwatch winter (book review)

The Nightwatch Winter by Jenny Overton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thirty years ago, when our children were small, we subscribed to the Puffin Book Club, and every month a new book arrived, and was put on the shelves. I don’t know how many of them the children read, but the other day, looking for some light reading, and not having seen anything I hadn’t read on our general fiction shelves, I looked on the old children’s books’ shelf, and found this.

It’s a very ordinary story about some school children in a village in the south of England. In the Christmas holidays they get bored, and go exploring the neighbourhood, in the course of which they encounter a reclusive woman who lives alone with her cat. When the Lent term starts at school they get involved in preparing for a play.

The children are of indeterminate ages, though as the youngest is 11, I assume that most of the others are somewhere in the age range of 11-14.

I think it is the kind of book I would have hated as a child.

The problem is that it is so ordinary. It describes things that children do, like climbing up drains and acting in school plays, and being jealous over who gets the best parts and so on.

It was published 40 years ago, and so describes a vanished generation. There is only one mention of a computer in the whole story, and no one would have had one at home. And the play they produce is an Easter play, and the children seem to be familiar with the plot. Even back then, that might have been quite unusual (though the girls were at a church school, run by nuns). I recall a Church of England bishop of about that period describing how he took his nephew and niece to see Jesus Christ, Superstar, and being somewhat disconcerted to find that they didn’t know the plot.

But in spite of its ordinariness, I found the story quite moving in a way. I wouldn’t buy it for a child to read, though. I’d be afraid that they would have been as horribly bored as I would have been.

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Rational and scientific values

Twenty years ago I wrote in my diary:

Tuesday 30 March 1993

I worked in the Editorial Department because there were a couple of meetings … including some guy talking about the post structure of the university, and how it needed to be rational and scientific.

Glynn Meter asked him if that was what their values were based on, and he didn’t understand the question. Obviously he thought “rational” and “scientific” must be approval-eliciting words, and it did not occur to him that they could elicit disapproval. I left at that point and went to do some work.

That was when I worked at the University of South Africa, and the bureaucrats were always thinking up ways of wasti ng time on unproductive activities. One of them was filling in questionnaires about how one spent one’s time, and an inordinate amount of time was spent in filling in questionnaires like that, because it was thought to be “rational” and “scientific”.