AN ADVENTUROUS LIFE.
My good friend Charles Dumbwin once stated that I have had an adventurous life. What that basically means to me is that I was up to the neck in the sewerage most of the time. Where I reside I spend most of my time being in sewerage over my head. A rather smelly adventure I dare say. The following “adventure” may rile some but that is not the intention of this article. The intention is to display how crazy and feeling less people can actually become under certain circumstances. Circumstances we as apprentices in 1969 were experiencing in an unknown surrounding. Years later I , when thinking back, can only label myself as just plain crazy, daft and belonging in an asylum.
I and about six others were in technical college at the time. Friday comes then all the appies go to Joeys to see the lights and glitter of the city, to see the flicks and girls. Booze and ride free on trains from Joeys to Germiston and I must admit, ashamedly, find the Gays or as we said: moffies. Gays had the aura of being well-off and prepared to share that wealth with those that were prepared to live with him and be his partner. They were seen to be weak and easily commandeered for the contents of their pockets and wallets. Of course apprentices from distant Windhoek were not quite the brightest spark on the streets of Joeys. We were divided into 2 groups, naturally, and set out to search for this golden Eldorado..
Easy: we overpower the gay and take what should come to us. Astute appies never realised that bullets at quite a lick can also come to us while fleeing down the streets of Joeys. Jinne broer we ran like hell but the guilty group overtook us easily and so we could blame everything on them. The obvious place to run to was the station and in answer to fervent prayers there was a train, I am still sure, awaiting for us appies. We boarded and collapsed in the cold leather seats thinking that we could, too, have been just as cold. This episode in my life made me stop and think about options and where the hell do I want to go from here: gasping my guts out on an empty train between Johannes burg and Germiston.
Later I thought about the consequences had we actually robbed those guys that were different to us simply for that reason. What would the outcome have been had one of us been killed or severely wounded. What we were doing was pure criminality but to our frame of reference, we were entitled to do so yet at that age we could not define that entitlement and could never separate it from the criminality. Our only salvation was to grow up and older. Finally: should anyone know persons who had a harrowing experience in the streets of Joeys in 1969 by a bunch of thugs then please tell them that we ask for forgiveness.
Today I know several persons having different sexual orientations and see them simply as other people and just like myself even though I am not gay.
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