MATIE* LIFE 1973-1976
[*Matie is the colloquial name for a student at the University of Stellenbosch. The university is also known as Matieland. The name is said to come from the Afrikaans word "tamatie" (tomato) and is purported to have arisen from the official colour of the university's uniforms, which is a deep maroon]
Mid-February 1973 and I arrive in Stellenbosch to start my university career. First a two-week orientation programme, then the start of the first semester.
Between finishing school at De Villiers Graaff High in Villiersdorp and this momentous (for me, at least!) moment I had been quite busy.
I served in the South African Defence force as a member of the Permanent Force (i.e. regular or professional force) until I realised I had more brains (little as I had!) than all my fellow instructors and most of the officers I had to deal with on a daily basis. That engendered boredom, so I applied for a position as reporter with Die Burger, a Cape Town daily Afrikaans paper.
To my surprise they accepted me. After three months covering the Cape Town Magistrates Court, covering social events with a photographer (which meant lots of heavy drinking!) and doing my monthly stint in the Night Office, which meant doing all kinds of things, I was moved permanently to the night editorial staff as junior crime reporter.
But I soon realised that I wanted more, that I needed more, and my thoughts went to getting a university degree. So I resigned.
Of course I had three months and a bit before university started. At the time my parents were living in a small town called Moorreesburg. I went to join them, but soon decided I needed to stay busy. A visit to my bank and a chat with the manager led to me going for an interview with the manager of the Tiger Oats flour mill in town. He promptly gave me a job as apprentice miller. What followed I will cover at another time. Suffice to say that was what lay behind me as my trusty 1964 Vauxhall VX490 carried me into Stellenbosch one February morning.
in 1972.
To help finance my studies I had applied for and received a bursary from the Cape Department of Education. This would be enough to cover my tuition fees, books and lodging. The rest I would have to earn working during the long summer holidays, typically from early November to the latter half of February. The only stipulation attached to the bursary was that I major in at least one school subject and that, upon completing my studies, I teach in a government school for the number of years I had received the bursary (four, I thought, but I was mistaken! More about that at another time).
So I chose my subjects: Afrikaans-Dutch Literature, German Lit., English Lit, History, and Psychology with the idea of majoring in English and Psychology.
Ha! Within the first few days of my orientation I dropped Psychology for General Linguistics, and three days into the first semester I decided that French was far more to my liking than History.
Below is my Student Card . This is what I looked like after leaving the mill:
Now, keep in mind that at that time most first-year students were straight out of school, so 18 or so, or -- in the case of men -- had just finished nine months of National Service in the SA Defence Force, so they would be around 19 years old. I was already twenty-two then. Added to that was my already gained life experience, all of which meant that I was not your typical first-year. I was actually the same age as many, if not all Honours degree students, i.e. students who had already gained their BA degrees!
This meant that, on one hand I found it easy to communicate and socialise with seniors, junior lecturers and assistant lecturers, while on the other most of my fellow first-years could not quite engage my affection.
I already knew one lecturer from my Moorreesburg days as I was friends with his younger brother. Eon Smit was a lecturer in Statistics in the Dept. of Psychology and an inveterate partier, so I ended up being invited to many a party where I met even more of his peers.
Soon a friendship also developed between my Dutch Poetry assistant lecturer Riëtte Buhr and me. I also met and became firm friends (and drinking buddies) with another Psychology lecturer, who was also already an accomplished painter, called Karel Heydenrych.
Other friends with whom I ended up partying as if there would be no tomorrow were Koos "Kommunis" Coetzee, Piet Human and eventually also a few of my class mates.
PARTY TIME!
We all smoked in those days. My regular was still Gitanes, with occasionally a few packets of Lucky Strike or Gauloises added. Many was the morning I woke with a mouth dry as the Kalahari Desert and tasting as if a hundred camels had died in it! But the first coffee normally put the world right again.
Talking about waking up. I remember many an occasion when I'd wake up with absolutely no idea where I was, how I had got there or who had brought me there. On a few occasions it was the house on Dorp Street shared by a large number of students and that was known as the Commune, once it was in a flat in Cape Town (that's a long way away) and woken by a gorgeous red-head whose name I could not recall. I do remember carrying her from my car to the block of flats' entrance as it was raining, but that is all.
Once we had a party in the milking shed of an experimental farm just outside Stellenbosch. To get to the farm from the road meant crossing a very narrow sheet of thick steel which served as a bridge across a fairly deep ditch at the roadside. Eon and I went there in his Ford Taunus R20.
As the party was winding down in the wee hours and people were leaving, Eon kept on warning people to watch out and not end up missing the "bridge". Nobody did so -- until we left and Eon ended up putting the Ford's left front wheel in the ditch! Lucky there were still enough of us there to physically lift the car back onto the sheet of steel. I teased my friend no end about this!
Eventually we slept in the car. Dawn brought enough light to show that the ditch ended a mere two metres in front of the car! Piet received an almighty slap from the young lady. As it turned out she got off with a warning, given the circumstances, but our stocks among the ladies of the female residences were rock bottom for some time!
BUT SERIOUSLY...
Life as a Matie was, however, not all parties and shenanigans, even if it might seem so. I enjoyed all my subjects tremendously.
General Linguistics quickly became a favourite. Prof. Rudi Botha, the head of the department, was an excellent lecturer and managed to inculcate in me the same deep love for the subject he felt. Our other lecturer was Dr Walter Winckler, who did his part to make the course exciting and rewarding.
General Linguistics in my time
I also enjoyed French. Prof. Eben Meiring was a great teacher of the grammar, and our language laboratory sessions with the stunning and very Parisian Mlle Cazier were always very enjoyable.
German with Prof. Kussler and Dr Plüddemann was always taxing, as neither would ever speak anything other than German in lectures or tutorials. The effect was that my German, even after five years of studying it at school, went forwards in huge leaps, to the point where I was almost as fluent in it as in my home language Afrikaans, and English. Studying German Literature was a very enjoyable voyage of discovery.
Afrikaans-Nederlands was always going to be one of the two subjects I was going to take in my first year only. I enjoyed the Dutch literature especially. Dutch poetry was new to me, and a great discovery. The Afrikaans part of the course was 50% grammar and 50% literature. I don't recall much of what we studied, though.
the Humanities faculty. This was where I could
Afrikaans-Nederlands lectures and classes were
held here. I spent many an hour sitting on those
steps!
English had always been a great love of mine, from my earliest days on. In my pre-teens deep in the heart of South Africa where English was a foreign language, I used to devour English books from the local library, and as I grew older that particular horizon opened even wider for me. Studying English Poetry with prof. Harvey, head of the department, Shakespeare with the vivacious Mr Steve Curtiss, Middle-English with Mr Henderson and later the Romantic Period (prof. Thomson, he with the pipe) and tutorials with Dr Edmunds, one of the most intelligent people I have ever met, were all amazing experiences I am eternally grateful to have had.
In those days, BA students in the Humanities were required to write and pass two subjects in the first year, one in the second, and the two majors at the end of one's third year. So I wrote Afrikaans-Nederlands and French in my first year, passing with flying colours. Sadly I had to finish my German course at the end of my second year. At the end of 1975 I wrote and passed my majors and was awarded my degree.
The next year would bring a shock in the middle of the year, but that another time.
A PLACE TO STAY
As a child, even, I valued my freedom of movement very much (within the quite strict boundaries typically set by parents in those days (the 50s and early 60s). Equally, my parents gave me the opportunities to spread my wings. Helicopter parenting was totally unheard of then! So I spend most of my free time with friends, playing out in the veld in the Karoo, or in riverbeds and hillsides where those were available. Because of my father's occupation, we moved frequently, so much so that I spent my twelve school years in twelve schools in eleven different towns. Twice -- once when I was twelve and again when I was 16 -- I had to stay behind in a town when my parents moved. In both cases I was adamant that I did not want to be put in a school residence where I would be subject to all kinds of restrictions when it came to when I spent my time and on what. So I ended up lodging with people willing to take me in.
When it came to attending university, I had two reasons for not following the herd and going into a residence: I valued my freedom too much, and residences were expensive. Of course there was also my refusal to fall in with the herd.
Therefore I started my first year at Maties lodging with an aunt of mine and her husband in their home at no. 6 Dorp Street. Sadly the lovely thatched roof house has long since been demolished to make way for a soulless, dull modern monstrosity. My stay was not long, though, as my aunt's husband, an absolute mouse when sober, was in the habit of coming home drunk almost every evening and kicking up a fuss, shouting for his dinner, slamming cupboard doors and once even barging into my room somewhere after 9 pm and demanding to know why my light was still on. When I told him it was because I was studying, he became abusive and only left the room when I started brandishing a metre-long steel ruler!
After two months I decided I'd had my fill and started looking for alternative lodgings.
I found a room with its own outside door with an elderly couple on the north side of town. The husband had his own transport company, and his wife made sure we always had a plentiful supply of buttermilk rusks and freshly brewed coffee on hand. Unfortunately their circumstances changed, and I had to move about a year later.
I was lucky enough to secure a room in Marie van Heerden's house in De Beer Street. Her two sons were both in the acting world: the elder was a lecturer in Drama at the university, and the younger an up-and-coming actor. Marie shared her house with me and five students, and we all lived very happily there.
14 De Beer Street, Stellenbosch
My last place of abode in Stellenbosch was a house in Muller St that I shared with five women students. It was nothing like you would imagine! The girls left the kitchen in a mess, did not care whose food they took from the fridge, and left their underwear hanging all over the bathroom (which they occupied for what seemed like hours at a time, each).
SPECIAL FRIENDS
Apart from those mentioned previously, some special people became dear friends of mine. Berry and Peter from my first-year Gen. Linguistics classes, Marlene van Niekerk, who later became a celebrated author and poet, Marius Vermaak, with whom I had endless discussions on philosophy, Anita, the German girl from Angola who was in my life for a few months, but stayed on my mind for many years later, my "flock" of female art students with whom I spent days drinking coffee and chatting at what was then the Barracuda on Plein Street, Susan Schoeman who persuaded me to trust her to trim my shoulder-length hair, Anne-Marie Steyn, later to be a colleague of mine and for whom I always carried a torch, Rita Barnard, the only beauty queen I ever dated, albeit very briefly -- they are heavy duty! and Ruda Wahl, whose special friendship meant a great deal to me.Others came into the lamplit circle of my life, stayed for a little, then went their own ways again. But every single one brought something to enrich my stay at Stellenbosch University.
WHAT A TIME...
It was a time of long walks: early in the morning to class, late at night when hunger pangs drove me to walk almost all the way across town to the last café still open to buy a loaf of bread (even when I had no butter!), in the soft drizzle with a blonde friend I called the Peppermint Girl, walks taken while I was writing papers in my head, or wrestling with some question of literary theory.
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