Has the party line returned?
IS TWITTER a modern-day equivalent of the old party line, by which information flashed instantly across entire communities? A blogger named Spyker Koekemoer seems to think so.
For the benefit of younger readers, the party line was a telephone system which lasted until relatively recently in some of our rural areas. The Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, Albert Hertzog, refused to upgrade it because he said it was part of Afrikaner tradition.
Subscribers were all on the same telephone line. Each had his own call sign consisting of a combination of shorts and longs – a bit like the dots and dashes of morse code – which were produced by cranking a handle attached to your telephone set. Calls from outside came via an exchange, whose operator also cranked out shorts and longs.
When your call sign sounded, you lifted the receiver. As the other party began speaking to you, a series of clicks on the line would signify that every tannie in the district was listening in. There were no secrets on the party line. The listeners would sometimes burst in on the conversation, especially if it concerned them.
As Spyker Koekemoer ruefully remarks in his blogged letter to an Oom Schalk, of the Marico, he was once discussing the breasts of a certain Sannie Pretorius when she burst in on him with a stream of invective. Even though he eventually married her, she has never forgiven him.
Yes, you had to watch your tongue on the party line.
Spyker's discussion is prompted by the row between Julius Malema and Twitter over uncomplimentary postings that are appearing on the social network. One tweet noted: "The only struggle Julius ever was involved in was struggling to log on to Twitter."
Spyker concludes that this is one thing he and Julius have in common. Neither knows how to log on to Twitter.
Make that three, Spyker. I don't know either.
Who is this Spyker Koekemoer? Step forward Pat Smythe, Durban raconteur, after-dinner speaker and rugby personality, who specialises these days in recreating the world of Herman Charles Bosman. He's the bogger, I mean the blogger.
Mampoer
THINKING about it, there was an immediacy and practicality about the party line that Twitter seems to lack. A friend who farmed in the Karkloof was once discussing on the telephone the qualities of the latest distillation of mampoer produced by a recluse who lived in the forest and had an illicit still (He also produced excellent rum and pernod).
Suddenly the local police sergeant was on the line, ordering a case.
Old and new
I WAS privileged to have been involved in what was possibly the first-ever linking-up of microchip technology and the party line.
I was in Fauresmith, a small town in the southern Free State, for a bitterly contested election. I had with me what was then state of the art IT – a portable computer with a keyboard. It was not called a laptop because it was too bulky to use on your lap and it was festooned with wires connecting to this and that. Also, it weighed half a ton compared with today's laptops.
But it was portable. And it was a computer. To transmit, you clamped a telephone mouthpiece into a rubber connecting piece and the phone listened to the computer chirpings and sent them on.
But Fauresmith was on a party line. I had to arrange with the tannie on the exchange not to interrupt transmission. And the only telephone in the hotel was in the public bar.
The kroeg manne were fascinated as I set up the apparatus. I explained to them that I was the local communist agent and had to report to Moscow. They crowded round as I sent my message.
With this portable, the message sent would come up on the screen, the words pouring across. Sometimes they were legible, sometimes they would be reversed into mirror-image. It looked a bit like the Russian cyrillic alphabet.
"Yislaaik!" exclaimed one of the manne. "Die man is mos 'n Rus!" (Wow! This man's really a Russian).
Tailpiece
He: "All right, you sexy thing – bedroom now!"
She: "Ooh, you horny hunk!"
He: "No seriously, the rugby's about to start. Get lost!"
Last word
Getting caught is the mother of invention.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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