Personal Insights: A childhood roadtrip in South Africa which resonates to this day

Life teaches us that key events which shape our futures can happen at any moment. 

In this personal reflection - to launch a new digital series called ‘Personal Insights’ - Dolan O'Hagan reflects on growing up in South Africa and Northern Ireland and in particular a childhood road trip which began a journey through which the division and violence which acted as a backdrop to his life could be filtered and ultimately understood.

LIFE and fate teaches us that key events which shape our futures can happen at any moment. 

My first came in 1969, two years before I was born, as my shocked parents surveyed the brick which lay amidst the shattered remains of their east Belfast home’s living room window.

They and their five young children did not seek sanctuary from the north of Ireland’s latest outbreak of sectarian violence in one of the Catholic enclaves located in the west of the city, however.

A soldier on lookout in Belfast shortly after British troops were deployed onto the streets in response to growing sectarian unrest in 1969. Picture: PA

They would look further afield and ultimately escaped to a new life and fresh opportunities in South Africa.

That is why, 18 months later in November 1971, I entered the world as their sixth and final child.

While the memories of the 12 years I spent in that troubled and beautiful country of contradictions have become increasingly faded with the passing of time, one childhood roadtrip remains an exception and is often recalled in vivid techni-colour despite the passing of four decades.

The year is 1981 and my brother and I are, once again, ignoring increasingly annoyed calls to the dinner table despite the unforgiving deadline of the setting sun as it casts its orange glow over our South African home.

“You can’t tell us what to do. You are just a kaffir,” I finally explode as our black house maid, Ruth, approaches angrily, demanding we come into the house at once.

Kaffir. A horrible label routed in Arabic culture which under the colonial South African sun had become the worst insult you could ;possibly direct towards a black person.

A label I had learned amidst the exclusively white Afrikaans, English, Irish and US faces as we played endless games of bare footed rugby and searched for snakes and scorpions under bakingly hot rocks.

The insult, however, had been spoken within earshot of my mother who - having returned early from work - emerged from behind Ruth with ferocious intent, wooden spoon in hand.

My reddened ear and smarting backside still resonate clearly as does the memory of Ruth’s disappointed face.

Ruth was our ‘ousie’ - as live in house maids or nannies were known in South Africa. An arrangement which was then, and remains, the norm for many white households.

The author pictured as a toddler being carried in traditional fashion by the family's 'ousie' (or nanny) in South Africa

The following Sunday I was forced to stand in akward silence in the shadow of the local Catholic Church as the story of my outburst was relayed to a clearly disappointed Irish missionary priest who oversaw weekly multi-racial Sunday services.

The following weekend my brother and I were told that we will be travelling with the priest to visit what was then known as the Kwa-Zulu bantustan.

Kwa-Zulu is at the heart of the famous pre colonial Zulu kingdom but under apartheid was one of the so called ten ‘semi-independent’ black homelands developed to facilitate the separateness of races, a founding principle of apartheid.

So it was, armed with little more than red faces, we clambered into the black shirted chain smoking priest’s pick up van and set out on our adventure.

It was not long before we were bouncing our way across Kwa Zulu’s blood red dirt roads with the world renowned Drakensberg Mountains acting as our backdrop.

I recall clearly the warmth of the welcome as a large middle aged woman, wrapped in traditional blankets, ushered us towards a white-washed indlu at which we had arrived.

The weather beaten face of the elderly man who is enjoying the sun and slowly pulling on a clay pipe at the door of his indlu also remains perfectly imprinted on my mind.

As does the coolness of the hut and the incredible smoothness of the polished mud and cow dung floor against our bare feet.

Undimmed too, is the smell of the wood fire and smoke which snaked upwards and around a three legged cast-iron pot.

I recall clearly the faded Saturday Night Fever t-shirt worn by a young boy who I am introduced to and the corn meal, known as mealiepap, and the spicey stew which emerged from the pot still lingers on the tongue.

I can still clearly hear the laughter of neighbours, primarily woman, as they run their fingers through my blonde hair and can still feel the tired silence of our journey home and the warm embrace of my parents with day long having given way to night.

At breakfast the next day, Ruth shows me a picture and explains the boy I had met was her son, the woman her mother and the elderly man her grandfather.

The label, ‘kaffir’, never escaped my lips again.

Within a few years of that trip we left South Africa and returned to my parents native city of Derry.

The author, on left, pictured on St Patrick's Day in the late 1970's a few years before his road trip to KwaZulu. Picture here with his cousin, Frank O'Hagan, whose family were on a visit to South Africa

Post hunger strike Derry was a much troubled place and demonstrated its grief and tears in a greyness which seemed to hang over everything and everyone as it endured one of the most brutal periods of the northern troubles.

It was to be an entirely new set of labels, this time based not on race but on religion and age old cultural allegiances, which were to act as the back-drop of my teenage and young adult life.

South Africa and the north of Ireland are much different places today and in the years that have passed since I have read widely, listened intently and debated at great length in pursuit of an explanation for the divisions and inequality which continue to blight those and and many other societies around the world.

It was in that context that I finally came to realise the true significance of that road trip to Kwa-Zulu.

It was, I realised, the day I began to understand that irrespective of the political, social, cultural or religious ideologies which frame and divide us, the journey towards eradicating social division and conflict in any society can and will only begin with an acceptance of our shared humanity.

Perhaps that is what Ruth, my parents and that priest had hoped for as they planned that childhood roadtrip.

Zulu maidens dancing. Picture: Getty