AFTER reacquainting myself with the adversities of my boyhood heroes Giacomo Casanova and Harry Houdini, I wondered how, save for their gruesome legacy, history was going to remember our own Colin Chauke and Ananias Mathe.
Outside the obvious fluency in their mother tongue - XiTshonga, that Chauke and Mathe suckled from opposite ends of the South Africa-Mozambique border - they contributed little to the body of language. This is unlike their kindred souls, the pioneers of prison breaks: Casanova and Houdini.
With his penchant for charming and seducing women, Casanova bequeathed his family name to lexicography which, says Ian Crofton in his book Great Escapes, came to be the definitive word for devil-may-care libertinage.
A precocious child, who entered university at age 12 to read law and then graduated five years later, Casanova turned out to be scum that his parents, both involved in theatre, did not set out to raise. But in 1756 when he broke out of jail, he was to give new meaning to the art of escape, something Houdini, Chauke and Mathe would later try to perfect.
While Casanova successfully escaped and lived - and died - to be a word in the dictionary, his South African understudies were eventually rearrested and their names remain a nightmare in the collective psyche of society.
Though not a career criminal, Houdini, dubbed "the greatest escapologist of them all", was something else. He entertained audiences in European capitals by freeing himself from ropes, handcuffs, police cells and under-water traps. Enthralled, the New York Times stretched his name further in 1923 to make it into a verb, long after it had first made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun.
Many years later, Frank Morris, prisoner number Az-1441, was joined by brothers John and Clarence Anglin to break a record: flee from Alcatraz.
They were not to be seen alive again and shortly thereafter Alcatraz, the infamous jail where Al Capone was once held, was closed for good.
Language would have been the poorer, had it not been for these enterprising gentlemen that convention prefers to label dregs of society.
Escape, in any thesaurus worth the pages it's printed on, is a word that teems with synonyms. Dictionary.com, for example, has the following list: abscond, avoid, bail out, bolt, burst out, cut and run, decamp, depart, desert, disappear, dodge, double, duck, elude, emerge, evade, fly the coop, get off, go scot-free, leave, make getaway, make off, make oneself scarce, run, run away, run off, shun, skip, slip, slip away, steal away, take flight ...
Through the years, escape has come to find meaning in the myriad acts of desperate souls, like one Leo Bretholz who, in December 1942, was aboard a train, Freight Transport N. 42, which left Dancy, a holding camp in Paris, destined for Auschwitz.
He'd never reach the gas chambers and for six long years would run the gauntlet of Nazi persecution.
His heart-rending story is contained in the book Leap into Darkness, which he told only in 1999, at age 78.
Enterprising gentlemen or mere dregs of society?
AFTER reacquainting myself with the adversities of my boyhood heroes Giacomo Casanova and Harry Houdini, I wondered how, save for their gruesome legacy, history was going to remember our own Colin Chauke and Ananias Mathe.
Outside the obvious fluency in their mother tongue - XiTshonga, that Chauke and Mathe suckled from opposite ends of the South Africa-Mozambique border - they contributed little to the body of language. This is unlike their kindred souls, the pioneers of prison breaks: Casanova and Houdini.
With his penchant for charming and seducing women, Casanova bequeathed his family name to lexicography which, says Ian Crofton in his book Great Escapes, came to be the definitive word for devil-may-care libertinage.
A precocious child, who entered university at age 12 to read law and then graduated five years later, Casanova turned out to be scum that his parents, both involved in theatre, did not set out to raise. But in 1756 when he broke out of jail, he was to give new meaning to the art of escape, something Houdini, Chauke and Mathe would later try to perfect.
While Casanova successfully escaped and lived - and died - to be a word in the dictionary, his South African understudies were eventually rearrested and their names remain a nightmare in the collective psyche of society.
Though not a career criminal, Houdini, dubbed "the greatest escapologist of them all", was something else. He entertained audiences in European capitals by freeing himself from ropes, handcuffs, police cells and under-water traps. Enthralled, the New York Times stretched his name further in 1923 to make it into a verb, long after it had first made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun.
Many years later, Frank Morris, prisoner number Az-1441, was joined by brothers John and Clarence Anglin to break a record: flee from Alcatraz.
They were not to be seen alive again and shortly thereafter Alcatraz, the infamous jail where Al Capone was once held, was closed for good.
Language would have been the poorer, had it not been for these enterprising gentlemen that convention prefers to label dregs of society.
Escape, in any thesaurus worth the pages it's printed on, is a word that teems with synonyms. Dictionary.com, for example, has the following list: abscond, avoid, bail out, bolt, burst out, cut and run, decamp, depart, desert, disappear, dodge, double, duck, elude, emerge, evade, fly the coop, get off, go scot-free, leave, make getaway, make off, make oneself scarce, run, run away, run off, shun, skip, slip, slip away, steal away, take flight ...
Through the years, escape has come to find meaning in the myriad acts of desperate souls, like one Leo Bretholz who, in December 1942, was aboard a train, Freight Transport N. 42, which left Dancy, a holding camp in Paris, destined for Auschwitz.
He'd never reach the gas chambers and for six long years would run the gauntlet of Nazi persecution.
His heart-rending story is contained in the book Leap into Darkness, which he told only in 1999, at age 78.
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