TOILETS
Jori Potgieter has another letter in die Volksblad this week (said Oom Willie) and he has the time now to practise as a journalist since his wife Marie went to visit her mother in Johannesburg two years ago. He has learned to go to Fruit and Veg on Andries Pretorius and AAA Meats as well but you should not accept his invitation to dinner, perhaps for another two years. Unless Marie comes home of course, then we all hope to be invited, perhaps by public letter in the Volksblad for Jori is coming quite the correspondent to the newspaper. He has toilets on his mind - or not so much toilets as the lack of them.
He wishes for the provincial MEC in charge of bathrooms to make sure there are toilets at reasonable distance and everywhere, like those emergency phones for the police on the N1. This is because he is now more than disgusted to see all the men who stand unzipped by the road and even in town sometimes. He says he knows the farm workers have to walk a long way to town – he has passed them many times trying to get a ride – and there are no toilets they can use. He is sorry for them not having a nice bakkie like his to speed quickly to the toilets at Mimosa and the Waterfront. He thought the library should let them use the toilets there but even as diligent a man as he could not find a toilet in the main library in town, only out at LHP which is double-far for them to walk when urgency is required. It is like trying to find books younger than 1982 he said; nothing in town, only in the branch but that is another letter.
So Jori Potgieter wants the government to shield away such men who are caught short by putting up toilets all along the way. Ja, but he has not been in such public toilets himself. If he did, he would know why it is the men go around the back and unzip by the wall. And he does not watch television or he would have seen that government, even in Cape Town, does not always do the right thing with toilets. How will his eyes be protected if there is a seat and a bowl there but without walls at all? Not only that but perhaps in his bakkie he would be caught up in the ANC Youth League riot that always comes with these open-air facilities. There may be tyres burning, porcelain smashing and other demonstrations of dignity to contend with. Better the men should face a bush. Toilets can be dangerous; you can ask my worker, Polomashwashe. You can ask me.
There is no compulsory military service time now for young men in South Africa as there was before the miracle. But it is a shock let me tell you to move from a nice farm and be put in a long building with a cold walk at night in winter to the ablutions block. And such a thing as the army toilet you never did see in the Orange Free State! There was a long row of little tin rooms, some with doors, and a duckboard to stand your feet on and a wooden seat with a long drop to half an oil drum. We had to share the duty to go behind the block and open a small door to take out the full container and take it away. We poured in petrol and burned it then. This was not a good duty. Jori Potgieter in particular did not like it and he always said after this job he would go to the cook and offer to peel potatoes for the potjie. His ideas for cooking are not these days any better I think.
But we were young then, the seven of us from farms and plots along the Verkeerdevlei road. We knew each other so well we thought we would fix the Communists and be home for breakfast. I also knew even in the first week that my six friends might be more dangerous than the Sizwe and those toilets were weapons of the struggle. We went on a route march and camped out for two days and we did not boil the water from the river properly. Back at camp I had to run from the lorry, hurl my rifle on the bed and then run to the block as there was trouble coming very soon. But the army had taught me well about not staying still in one place. I flung myself into the little tin room and never was so much done so quickly for I had seen my good friends following too quickly after me. It was up with the trousers and out of the door, just seconds before the flash grenade exploded in the drum beneath me and sent a geyser through the rusty corrugated roof and onto the heads of Jori and the boys as they were laughing and holding the little metal door closed tightly at the back of the tin house.
So yes, I know it for a fact and you can ask Polomashwashe if a toilet is not a dangerous place even today. Just yesterday he went to the outside room at our farm close by where my wife was pruning the proteas. You understand Polo cannot read Afrikaans but it is always good in that room to have some backup in case the roll is empty. So he took with him the Volksblad in there. Perhaps it was turned to Jori’s letter, for Polo may not read but he is a sensible man. He was beginning to settle in and look at the pictures in the newspaper when up comes his head and he thinks there is someone watching him. Impossible. But there is this feeling he has. And I told you he is a sensible man. So he carefully looks around the newspaper, side to side and up to down and there on the floor, settling close to his ankled trousers, is a puff adder. It is a big puff adder. Not long but very fat as they are.
Polo must now think what to do for if he was a snake, the folds of his trousers might be a good place to curl up. Now I have to tell you I have seen these trousers and my decision as a snake would not be the same at all. But Polo does not know if this is the kind of snake that would take such a chance and so he prepares for a leap almost as fast as mine in that army ablutions block. Then he remembers that my wife is standing outside not 10 metres away with a very sharp gardening tool in her hands. What now would happen if this hugely tall black man comes leaping at her from out of the toilet with all his clothes around his feet? He is torn between the snake and the woman and he knows this did not turn out too well for Adam. I think he forgot for a moment that he is seventy-five years old and my wife has known him for all of our married life, which is forty and some years now.
Which is why when finally he made the most Olympic of standing jumps out through the door, clutching his newspaper and screaming, with trousers and underwear trailing, my wife simply turned to him with the sharpest cutters and asked if he would just hold this protea branch still for a moment while she pruned it.
