1. Growing Up. Before my father had opened his string of small ‘general dealer’ shops in our district, I’ve been growing up as the son of a ‘goldminer’ on one of the richest gold reefs of South Africa. My father’s designation at the time was that of a ‘shaft carpenter’, and we’ve been living in a bustling mining town in a stereo-typed (but fairly decent and comfortable) company ‘bungalo’ at the time of the following incident that involved three of my ‘dear’ friends:
2. The Ambush. It was in 1959 when I was going on 12 and we were having dinner when two of my friends, Wayne and Bill (aliases), came up to us to proposition my father for me to go and play some game on an empty plot at the back of our house; my father acquiesced and within minutes I jumped the wooden ‘split-poles’ that gave access to the empty plot of land and where my two school-pals were already waiting for me.
3. The Opening Volleys. Without any prior warning and for no (known) reason whatsoever, they jumped me and started beating me up. I was so shocked that, within seconds, I turned into a frenzied tornado of energy probably sparked by the adrenalin rush from the fight-or-flight impulse. I was actually doing quite well when welcome help suddenly parachuted in from an unexpected source.
4. The Tide Turns. My mother had, a few months earlier, given a temporary job to a migrant (domestic) worker from Witsieshoek in Lesotho. She had a son my age with whom I shared a name and with whom I had been playing in the yard for months e.g. some boxing, wrestling and what I can only describe as ‘African stick-fighting’, never realising that I probably had been honing my rudimentary 'martial arts skills' for this momentous day.
Through my tears and the barrage of blows and kicks I looked up only to see my skinny, golden brown little Sotho* pal jump that fence like the proverbial ‘bat out of h…ll’ and boy, did we give my two ’assailants’ a thorough thrashing. We stood and watched amazed at the rattled pair, with Wayne's chubby little legs and Bill's skinny little knock knees (like an emaciated heron) carrying them over their fence home.
*Sotho: "The Sotho /ˈsuːtuː/[2] people, or Basotho /bæˈsuːtuː/, are a Bantu-language family ethnic group of Southern Africa who speak Sesotho. They are native to modern Lesotho and South Africa. The Basotho have inhabited the region since around the fifth century CE and are closely related to other Bantu-language family speaking peoples of the region.
"The modern Basotho identity emerged from the accomplished diplomacy of Moshoeshoe I who unified the disparate clans of Sotho–Tswana origin that had dispersed across southern Africa in the early 19th century. Most Basotho today live in Lesotho or South Africa, as the area of the Orange Free State was originally part of Moshoeshoe's nation (now Lesotho)." [Wikipedia].
P.S. 'fifth century CE': '5 A.D.' ('Anno Domini').
5. All Lives Matter! The Bible rarely if ever mentions the skin-colour of the various folks involved, though race by nationality ('Ethiopian', 'Greek', 'Parthian', 'Jew' etc.) is often implied. When the chips are down, however, we’re all the same of only two possible ‘colours’, i.e. on the side of either KIND or UNKIND; DECENT or UNDECENT.
Acknowledgements
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