Learning Afrikaans

Along with Ebay sale No. 8384642082

Learning Afrikaans

Extracts from my acceptance speech for the
Pull-it-to-bits Prize for Bullshit




This prize is for my upcoming novel about Rhodesian values and superior way of life against all odds, which includes you bastard Brits who stabbed ‘Good Ol’ Smithy’ in the back. When I have finished giving my speech, I will start to write the book.

I have just pointed out to the rapturous, enthusiastic crowds that the disgraceful attitude of semi-illiterate children in Britain is due to the lowering classification of top grade marijuana, the abundance of alcho-pops and PlayStations, school teachers being stabbed to death and a complete breakdown in discipline by smoking, binge drinking teenage parents on the dole, who will happily post their offspring’s ASBOs on the worldwide web to achieve superior rankings of hooliganism.

Picture the scenario. Standing on the stage of the Albert Hall, I have the trophy in one hand and the Coutts guaranteed cheque in the other. The Rt. Hon. Tony Blier stands two paces behind me, and is shouting, along with the Minister of African Poverty and Corruption, Sir Bog Jellyhead, ‘Bravo! Bravo and it’s Xmas time, give money!’

I look out over my ecstatic audience, and say, with a knowing smile, and perhaps a glint of moisture in my eye,

‘Let me share with you tonight a little example of the kind of proper schooling I received. It still brings tears to my eyes.’

Allan Wilson Technical High School, Salisbury, Rhodesia 1971-72.



My Afrikaans teacher was called Mrs Smuts. Oh my, what a fucking terror! Almost as wide as tall, but built like a Russian kick boxer; grey haired and uglier than a bicycle beaten into the back of a bus, she had a voice like gravel and a hand of steel. Sunny boy me, a sweet faced innocent and extremely unwilling lad of twelve and a half, was getting on her indeterminate mound of tits within seconds. Her acceptance speech for the task ahead would be the start of an eighteen month bitter, and sometimes bloody, campaign. There would be no medals for heroics, but both combatants would emerge psychologically scarred forever.

Her first words to the nervous class were,

‘I hate boys!’

She turned her ferocious gaze on to every one of us.

‘I hate little boys the most!’

She had our full attention.

‘If it weren’t for the fact that my useless husband doesn’t earn enough money, I would not be here at all. I would not be forced to teach little boys Afrikaans. But, that is my job, and if I have to beat it into you, I will.’

This was heavy stuff. I began to entertain fears of a second Holocaust; maybe she knew I was a half-fake Jew! (The only half I ever found was my docked dick, but unfortunately that wasn’t faked.) Time to lighten the scenario, I thought. I put my hand up.

‘Ma’am, why don’t you teach at a girls’ school then?’

Half the class, the dafter ones, snickered. The smart ones knew I had signed my own death warrant. Fifteen seconds later I was hauled out of my chair by the hair growing in that excruciatingly tender area next to my left ear.

‘And clever little boys like you, I hate most of all!’

The Game was on!

It was a long and tedious war. Every day we were given woordeskat (vocabulary) to learn at home, and every day I didn’t bother. Lessons always began with the same routine: a five minute oral test of the previous day’s assignment. At first, Ouma Smuts asked random boys for the answers, and beat them with the heavy cane she always carried if they were wrong. It didn’t take her long to clock that I flatly refused to learn the shit.


We were given a choice of two foreign languages to learn: Afrikaans or French. French was for ‘Morfs’ (Gays), the rugby playing macho boys said. Plus ‘Afriks’ had the advantage it was supposed to be relatively easy to learn. Why didn’t they teach us something useful, like Shona, the Black Rhodesian’s most spoken language? Then I could tell the Garden-boy to stop taking the piss by pretending he didn’t understand English just because I asked him to wash my bicycle. Not as if I would ever try it; my Father would flay me alive if he caught me fobbing my chores onto our domestics. It would sure come in handy though. I had no intention of going to live in a land that hacks people’s heads off with giant weighted triangle razor blades or of living ‘Down South’ where the Afrikaners still swore revenge against the ‘Rooinekke’ after losing the Boer war.

I started this war of attrition slowly, achieving sixth from bottom of the class and a result of 29% in my first end of term exam. Beatings were restricted to two cuts of the cane three times a week. I definitely needed to put in some extra effort to enter the bottom five.

I improved my tactics by looking out the window while the mad cow screeched Afrikaans at the front of the class. Six months later I managed fifth from bottom, with 21%.

Meanwhile I took to wearing extra underpants and also allowed my delighted Father to have my hair sheared till not even a koeksister (a sickly sweet delicacy designed to give Afrikaner women large behinds, judging from Mrs. Smuts), would have stuck to it. That would eliminate one of her favourite tortures.

Not to be outdone, the Marquis de Sade’s Boer counterpart switched tactics too. Beatings were increased to every lesson. I was no longer asked if I had learnt my woordeskat, I simply presented myself and complied with the only word that she had managed to beat into me: the word buig (which means bend)!

‘Buig! Buig! Buig!’ the mull (mad) thing would scream, then she let rip with the cane. And now, as an added treat, she twisted my ear every time she passed my table and saw me gazing at a blank piece of paper.

I fought back hard. I filled my exercise book with alien emblems, and scattered here and there a few real Afrikaner words I had somehow retained, like pen, which meant pen, or bobbejaan, which meant Mrs Smuts in her hairy wool skirt and jumper. Even she was fucking shell-shocked when I finally cracked it. Bottom of the class, with 8%! A triumph of gentle mind over violent body.

That was the sign of her uselessness, I was only 10% lower than the class average and her crazed mind snapped. When the results came out, she decided on revenge. She couldn’t beat me to death in front of the class on my own, so she thought up a very ingenious way to murder me.

‘I have decided to call each one of you out to the front of the class in order of your exam results. Each boy’s mistakes will be read out, and for every mistake you made you will receive one cut with my cane.’

At that point an image leapt into my brain: one of her sporting a small black toothbrush moustache instead of the thin grey one she had cultivated above her sneering mouth. For a few seconds the Afrikaans class became the maths room. I wasn’t that good at maths, but I soon added up my total, and I wasn’t sure if I could survive 92 cuts.

This was it! The end was nigh. Would they take my dismembered corpse and parade it around on the end of a teacher’s cane like pieces of drying biltong down Oom Paul Kruger Street in Bloemfontein to the chorus of ‘We are marching to Pretoria’?

She started with her favourites, giving them a light smack on the arse. Full of bullshit this bit, but by the time she had reached those with less than 60% she was in full flow. Norman, my mate, and a big bloke, was wilting after 13 cuts. Then she went on to Johnson, a tough, wiry, farmer’s kid. He was a school border and had won the under 14s arm-wrestling competition. At 20 lashes he was crying; she stopped at 26 lashes, when the bell went.

‘I’ll deal with jou liefde tomorrow,’ the red-faced, sweating cow hissed at me as I filed out with the rest of my physically and mentally tortured classmates. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I had the feeling there was scant love towards me.

Being of logical nature, I knew it wouldn’t actually be me the next day. There was still half the class to abuse, and even if she speeded up the beatings to 30 a minute she wasn’t going to fit me in. Just as a precaution, I wore three pairs of underpants the next day. Afriks was first on the class agenda; if my time had really come, at least I would be shot at dawn under a glorious fresh morning Rhodesian sky, my last breath filling my nostrils with her perspiring odour.

I decided I would refuse to be blindfolded, and I would have my last cigarette. Forget the fact I didn’t smoke. Stiff upper lip and squeezed buttocks. Don’t fart. Remember the school was named after the leader of the brave pioneer members of the slaughtered Shangani Patrol. They were ‘Men of Men’; we were ‘Men of Men’, and we had the remaining bits of them after the massacre in glass cabinets to prove it!

Actually, I was full of shit, and was about to have it beaten out of me. Sure beats laxative.

What followed was a total anti-climax!

Mrs Smuts stood meekly at the front of class and, as we took our places, told us to open our textbooks. I wasn’t even sure I had one! ‘What’s going on here?’ I thought. ‘Have I been reprieved?’ Thoughts of switching from a phoney Jew to a phoney Christian entered my head.

Apparently the deranged woman had gone too far in her attempt to kill me. Not even Bruce Lee could systematically beat up half of our class without eventually meeting some serious resistance.

It was the borders that told us day boys what had happened; Johnson was too proud to say anything. It turned out he had phoned his folks at the end of lessons the previous day. In doing this, he broke the golden unspoken rule. ‘You don’t go crying to Mummy and Daddy’, but this time he had the backing of the other boys.

His folks didn’t mess around; they drove over 200 kilometres to the school, and threatened the Headmaster with a law suit if that lunatic Boer woman’s head wasn’t served on a plate and given to a pack of Rhodesian ridgebacks to eat.

Some nosy boarders, with jack shit else to do but hang around the Head’s office, eavesdropping, reported that the meeting later between the head and Ouma Smuts must have been a really dramatic session and as she stormed out the head’s office an angry voice followed her,

‘Touch another pupil again, Mrs. Smuts, I will fire you.’ And she knew he meant it.

Game over.

I won! With a little help from my friends. One day, Johnson, I’ll find you and buy you a beer.