MANY moons ago, when I was footloose and available, the most wimpish thing one could ever do as a possible suitor was to read poems to a new flame.
To spite one, the garrulous among the girls couldn't wait for the torture to end so they could go regale their BFFs with the tale of how one read recitations to them, as they were wont to refer to the stanzas.
After this faux pas you'd show your acne-laced face in the school grounds the next day at your own peril!
Born at the wrong time.
Fate would have dealt me a better hand had it made me a peer of Ronnie Kasrils and his late wife, Eleanor. He read line after inspired line to her and she didn't think less of him. In fact, they recited their wedding vows to each other - courtesy of Robbie Burns' pen.
This is a couple after my own heart for they met in a bookshop, Griggs, which in 1963 was Durban's finest literary haunt.
It was owned by her parents and this is where Eleanor, God bless her soul, in her small way, contributed to the struggle against apartheid.
In his book about her, The Unlikely Secret Agent, Red Ronnie tells the story of how they'd rendezvous at the bookshop for a peek into such banned material as Che Guevara's book on guerilla warfare.
Eleanor would recall that this man was "clearly keen on purchasing good books" and, at one time she recommended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he immediately bought and returned to discuss with her.
She soon found that he would ignore the other assistants and buy his books only from her: page 40. Cupid works in mysterious ways!
If the insult that suggests the best way to hide information from a black man is to put it in a book holds any grain of truth, then the Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa had their own too.
If treason was plotted in a bookshop, they wouldn't have had the foggiest clue.
Griggs was a place ANC and SACP comrades frequented to receive or deliver messages and money to advance the cause of the struggle. It became the frontline, Kasrils writes.
"If the contact was delivering a document it was handed to her with a book for purchase. Similarly if she had a document that the courier was collecting, it would be hidden within the pages of a book already packaged and handed over as a purchase."
The infamous security branch police were none the wiser. All they saw were people coming in and out to buy books!
It never occurred to them to read Che Guevara when the book was, as it were, flying off the shelves with Kasrils once ordering 20 copies at a go.
All the police knew was that it was banned literature.
Always, the transfer of secret documents could only take place once the recipient whispered a code: "Well, let me take both books."
She'll need to jog my memory; where did I meet with the woman who now wakes up next to me each morning?
Story depicts subtle role books played in the struggle
MANY moons ago, when I was footloose and available, the most wimpish thing one could ever do as a possible suitor was to read poems to a new flame.
To spite one, the garrulous among the girls couldn't wait for the torture to end so they could go regale their BFFs with the tale of how one read recitations to them, as they were wont to refer to the stanzas.
After this faux pas you'd show your acne-laced face in the school grounds the next day at your own peril!
Born at the wrong time.
Fate would have dealt me a better hand had it made me a peer of Ronnie Kasrils and his late wife, Eleanor. He read line after inspired line to her and she didn't think less of him. In fact, they recited their wedding vows to each other - courtesy of Robbie Burns' pen.
This is a couple after my own heart for they met in a bookshop, Griggs, which in 1963 was Durban's finest literary haunt.
It was owned by her parents and this is where Eleanor, God bless her soul, in her small way, contributed to the struggle against apartheid.
In his book about her, The Unlikely Secret Agent, Red Ronnie tells the story of how they'd rendezvous at the bookshop for a peek into such banned material as Che Guevara's book on guerilla warfare.
Eleanor would recall that this man was "clearly keen on purchasing good books" and, at one time she recommended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which he immediately bought and returned to discuss with her.
She soon found that he would ignore the other assistants and buy his books only from her: page 40. Cupid works in mysterious ways!
If the insult that suggests the best way to hide information from a black man is to put it in a book holds any grain of truth, then the Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa had their own too.
If treason was plotted in a bookshop, they wouldn't have had the foggiest clue.
Griggs was a place ANC and SACP comrades frequented to receive or deliver messages and money to advance the cause of the struggle. It became the frontline, Kasrils writes.
"If the contact was delivering a document it was handed to her with a book for purchase. Similarly if she had a document that the courier was collecting, it would be hidden within the pages of a book already packaged and handed over as a purchase."
The infamous security branch police were none the wiser. All they saw were people coming in and out to buy books!
It never occurred to them to read Che Guevara when the book was, as it were, flying off the shelves with Kasrils once ordering 20 copies at a go.
All the police knew was that it was banned literature.
Always, the transfer of secret documents could only take place once the recipient whispered a code: "Well, let me take both books."
She'll need to jog my memory; where did I meet with the woman who now wakes up next to me each morning?
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