Jesse and Juan
TOMORROW is the moment of truth. Can the pairing of Jesse Kriel and Juan de Jongh inject purpose into an otherwise listless Springbok side and present a realistic challenge to the All Blacks? Or will the negativity that has afflicted the Aussies prove infectious?
Something has to be done to rescue this southern hemisphere competition from becoming a cakewalk for the New Zealanders, who are currently playing at a different level of pace, handling and enterprise. Prematch analysis of ourselves versus the Aussies reads depressingly like also-rans versus also-rans. It's as if there are only two real sides in international rugby these days – the All Blacks and England.
Something has to ignite our rugby. We need to snap out of this psychological condition. Much rides on Jesse and Juan tomorrow.
Much rides also on the Currie Cup. If the Sharks can pull it off against Free State later in the day, good things lie in store. Can we hope that the Currie Cup can, in time, rediscover its role as a furnace for national rugby?
We need a Rugby Indaba – a re-invigoration of club rugby and the Currie Cup; get more people playing, increase the pool of talent. Strong national sides need a proper base, which is what they have in New Zealand. We have to snap out of our malaise. It won't happen overnight but it has to start somewhere. Why not tomorrow?
Let's get moving! The damsels of the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties are getting restless. They're strumming at their knicker elastic. If we don't have the customary celebratory feu de joie tomorrow, when the streetlights are shot out with catapults fashioned from knicker elastic, ugly demonstrations of displeasure could ensue.
Intriguing book
I'VE just put down an intriguing book that captures the essence of life in a sector of this province. Hazara: Elegy for an African Farm (Natal Society Foundation) is by John Conyngham, a former editor of the Witness, and it describes the cane farm where he grew up on the North Coast, from the time it began in the 1920s.
Hazara is named after the regiment in British India in which John's grandfather served. The district had several British India connections; also British, Malayan, Maltese. Also French-Mauritian. John's own family has Irish and Scottish connections, also North American. It all distilled into being part of an ordered but effective and prosperous cane-growing community, that came into being just about the time South Africans of British origin were fading into being a politically marginalised sub-group as Afrikaner nationalism gathered force, eventually to be followed by African nationalism.
It's a matter of fact account of the daily lives of Conyngham's antecedents, at times marred by personal tragedy and achingly sad. And because of their connections on the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere, the book digresses at times into lively accounts of the war against the Japanese, as well as other campaigns during World Wars I and II. Conyngham's own father was a fighter pilot in the RAF who took over the farm and brought it to a new peak of productivity.
But although it is intensely personal, the book is written in such a way that it accurately reflects what was happening in Natal and in wider South African society. Hazara happens to be close to the conflict zones of the Bambatha Rebellion, in 1906, and Conyngham does not shy away from those echoes, the unresolved contradictions of European settlement on what had been Zulu territory.
The book is called an elegy, and correctly so. The tone is elegiaic - restrained, respectful, a recording of a phase in the life of Natal that has all but passed. It is beautifully written and superbly put together and illustrated. The research that has gone into it is prodigious.
Hazara is more than the story of one family in a prosperous North Coast community. It speaks far wider and is a worthy piece of Africana.
Tailpiece
THE golfer slices his drive at a Scottish links. It richochets off two trees then lands in a bog.
He turns to his caddy: "Golf! It's a funny old game, isn't it?"
"Aye. But it's no meant tae be."
Last word
An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offence, no matter what happens.
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