I had spent a year in a small room at the back of the press shop at the steel factory, trying to identify about 2000 dies used for making toolboxes and candlestick holders and trommels and jerrycans.
They made millions of candlestick holders out of scrap metal. In fact they seemed to turn metal into scrap in order to make more. It was beyond me who would need so many candlestick holders but then I had never been to Soweto, to Diepkloof and to almost any black home in the country. Had I done so I would have understood why candlestick holders were a basic household appliance for most Black families.
I worked with an old black man named Kestel ? he was the only one there who knew what each die did. But he had a drinking problem or maybe it was a drinking solution. And so each week for him would begin on Tuesday, the overwhelming stench of skokiaan (a powerful mixture of rooted fruit, yeast, animal entrails and anything else that might create a lively high) still hanging redolent off him.
Kestel might have been 80, he shuffled along slowly. He might have been 60 and simply reflecting what life had wrought upon him. He had a wry smile and somewhere deep inside I sensed that he knew that he held all the cards in this steel factory run by blunt white men.
In remarkable irony, in Hebrew they call it the laughter of fate (Tzchok hagoral), Kestel was the only one who knew what each and every die did.
My task, before he died or his brain rotted away from the powerful liquor he used to forget, was to unlock the secrets he held. And so we sat, for months on end in a dark and dingy storeroom behind the press shop with the furious din of crashing machines bending steel all about us.
Every few days, in the steel factory, the press shop would grind to a halt. An eerie silence would descend.
Through the ominous stillness, a fury would settle over the shop. Someone had caught their fingers in a machine. Someone would never be able to use their hands again. The cruel bosses who made prayer over their lunches each day would carry on in contemptuous disregard. Simple precautions never taken.
So I dropped out again?
This time to go to work in the Okavango. I had met a man named PJ Besterling and his wife, a Wilmot from the famous Wilmot crocodile hunting family of Maun. I had been up at his camp XabaXaba for a short weekend in October and asked, given that he was having to move and rebuild his camp if I could come and work for him without wage. His camp was having to move as the Moremi had been declared a reserve at the time. Where it was being moved to I did not know. But two days there had resolved me that life in a steel factory was Dante?s Inferno brought to awful reality.
And so, in March of the following year, without telling anyone, including PJ Besterling himself, I left Rhona (in the hope that one day she might allow me to return), left the dark factory and hitched a ride to Gaberone, another ride to Maun and finally hitched a ride in a small plane with a pilot from Safari South who was heading north. He would drop me at the airstrip close to the camp.
From the air, the pilot could not spot the camp but I recognized the landing strip and he landed. I unloaded my pack and took off. A hot summer?s day. I walked the 2kms from the sandy airstrip to the camp.
I arrived at the camp. Everything had gone. There were simply clearings where huts had once stood.
The only sign of life apart from the fish eagles sitting in the great trees along the waterway was a large crocodile sunning itself in one of these deserted clearings. As I was later to discover, I was 2 boat days away from Maun. I had no idea of how to find my way out, what to eat, and how to avoid being eaten or trampled.
I sat there for hours. A cousin of mine had drowned on a raft in the Limpopo River a few years earlier and his body had never been found. I was about to join him.
But a swamp bushman called Killi Billi had heard a plane land. He wondered why and had gone to a camp called Delta and got the owner Neville Austen out to go and inspect.
And so after a long lonely day sitting in the deserted camp, you might imagine that the sound of an engine coming from the airfield, was perhaps the most welcome sound I had ever heard.
In his own uniquely acerbic way Neville lent out of the landrover and enquired as to whether I might be lost.
Killi Billi was assigned to take me in a makoro to the new camp.
It took a few hours to get there. On the way we stopped off at his own hutted camp and ate honey. Raw and deliciously sweet. I learned, in the months that followed how to follow a honey guide (the bird). To identify when the bird knew where honey was to be found or whether it was just flirting.
In the Okavango young men identify appropriate trees that they will one day cut down for their makoro. And they mark it with their personal insignia. A tree once marked remains that man?s for life. And the very tallest trees normally stand as epitaphs for men who succumbed at some point years before to the tse tse fly, to malaria, to a hippo or to the brutal gold mines on the hiveld.
I worked in the swamps for many months. Mostly cutting reeds in the rivers for use in building walls and roofs. Each day would end with the team of men I worked with, emerging from the water bleeding profusely from wading constantly amid the reeds. We would all be covered in leeches which would take ages to remove with the burning ember of a cigarette. We lived in constant fear of hippos.
Once tourists started to come to the camp, life became different for me. I was assigned to the walking group. I had been relegated to this role for in ignominy, I had sunk a landrover into a 12 foot deep pool thinking it was solid ground.
Days were spent on the river fishing, and nights, glorious nights were spent cruising along the reeds getting so close to the sleeping kingfishers (Angolan, Malikite and Pied) that you could literally lift them off. And then for the piece de resistance we would catch a croc.
When you shine a powerful torch along a river the eyes of the croc reflect that light back. The driver then directs the boat towards the glinting eyes and cuts the engine with about 10 feet left to go and the boat glides in silently and fast. The person on the front of the boat has to lean forward, judge the size of the croc (anything over three feet is too heavy, too strong and not conducive to happy tourists), lean over and grab both ends firmly.
Once you have done so, the croc is hauled into the boat. It becomes plain quite quickly whether you have misjudged ether the size of the croc or your own strength. I once made the mistake of underestimating three feet and landed up with a croc lying loose on the floor of my boatload of drunken Germans.
Here is a tip if you ever find yourself in a similar predicament. A piece of rope or cloth is most handy. Not the tip of a boot. For if you feed a croc a piece of rope he jaws will clamp down on it and then you might be able to once again regain control of your boat. IF you feed the tip of a boot he is likely to clamp down as tightly on that and you might be forced to throw a drunken German overboard too.
I suffer from asthma. Rhona would send me up a parcel of medicines every now and again. One day working with an older guide, I offered him one of my tablets. He wheezed badly and told me about getting lung disease on the mines (I was going to write down the name of this ? something like Ptysus, but then realized that I had no idea how to spell it).
The next day there was a line of men outside my hut. All wanting the magic medicine. And so for some time, I became, in my own way a minor legend in the Okavango.
When I returned to Johannesburg, I was a changed person. I had silence. My feet were laden with thorns and splinters and had grown hard.
I never did go back to the steel factory. I fervently hope and believe that the ghost of Kestel laughs on knowing that the foolish white men were never going to figure out what every die did and that anyway, making candlesticks out of expensive steel would always be a sure pathway to bankruptcy. Sure enough, before the end of the decade they had gone out of business. It was a merciful end.