The political history of South Africa during the apogee of apartheid in the 1960s and early 1970s is well canvassed, even if interpretations remain deeply contested.

Less attention is paid to the cultural dimension of living under a dour state-imposed Calvinism – no television, no Sunday sport or entertainment, and a draconian censorship regime which added to an officially decreed joylessness.

One of the few entertainments on offer that allowed childhood imaginations to roam widely was the commercial SABC station, Springbok Radio. Its epic series, from “No Place to Hide” to “Consider Your Verdict”, were the stuff of school playground conversations the day after broadcast.

Almost as well known as the programmes were the advertising jingles and tag lines promoting products, from washing powders to peanut butter and cough syrup.

Paying the price

I very recently, with rather extreme consequences, paid the price for remembering the slogan attached to ads for a cough mixture called Stearns Pine Tar and Honey. Hardwired into our childhood brains was its offer: “You can’t take every cough to a doctor, but you can take Stearns Pine Tar and Honey.”

I applied with adjustments the Stearns line, just before the recent Easter weekend. I felt feverish, fatigued, and gripped with stomach cramps. I put myself to bed, self-diagnosed a stomach bug and slept it off. I also had an incentive to will myself well since I was about to depart for Mauritius and to join a cruise ship to deliver some lectures on a segment of its world cruise. Feeling somewhat better on Easter Sunday and knowing the doctor’s room closed for the weekend anyway, I thought the worst was over and I would recover in Mauritius for a few days before the cruise departed.

The first mistake was to self-diagnose. But the second aspect of the saga was that I had taken out travel insurance, which I had never needed before but on the “just in case” principle. About the best investment ever made in my case as events unfolded.

Two days in Mauritius saw me moving from discomfort to extreme pain and high temperature, at which point my wife called the hotel doctor, and I was rushed off to a clinic where appendicitis and abscess were diagnosed after various probes and scans. Stringent antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and pain meds were then administered as I was now more than 3 000 km from home, in a strange environment where, other than my wife, I knew no one.

Reading about people’s ill health can be tiresome, but some lessons and perspectives were offered by this event, which might be worth reflecting on.

Amazing efficiency 

First, after my insurance broker (Garrun Group) activated the travel insurer (Europ Assistance), the wheels started to turn with amazing efficiency, empathy, and speed. The spiralling clinic costs were absorbed, the insurer’s representative, himself a doctor, visited me in the clinic and commenced proceedings to repatriate me.

This required air tickets for the two of us, plus an accompanying doctor in case of airborne disaster at the insistence of the clinic. No hassle and no objection, and the insurer arranged it all, and I was, after five days in the clinic, transported to the airport for the long – via Johannesburg – journey home. Lesson then: never leave these shores absent travel insurance.

Despite a near disaster at OR Tambo International Airport – too few immigration officials, inadequate wheelchair assistance and scenes of tumult and overall chaos – we just in time boarded the plane to Cape Town.

Finally, hours later, an ambulance took me to Kingsbury Hospital in Cape Town where extraordinary doctors and exemplary nurses continued the treatment for another few days until inflammation and infection levels went right down toward normal, and I could be discharged to continue the healing in the best and most therapeutic place of all – home.

I joked with one surgeon who treated me that I was advantaged by my treatment occurring before the government introduced National Health Insurance (NHI). His response was so chimed with my own experience at the healing hands of his colleagues:

South Africa is blessed by its people and has over the decades been cursed by its governments.

Exactly, and another lesson observed by practice.

The “advantage” of a health scare taking over your life, is that you become fixated on your own survival and wellbeing, and the preoccupations of the world, and the country recede into the distance. So that is a useful perspective.

And here was another. As I started to feel better and found an unaccustomed amount of time to hand, I began to read articles and books far more closely than my normal skim and headline surf of multiple competing titles.

Government’s defence of 30 years in power 

Instead of just dismissing it as the usual guff, I decided to read closely the ANC government’s defence of its 30-year record of governance. An example of this was published in Sunday Times by Maropene Ramokgoba, who is the Minister for Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation, whatever that might mean.

And quite how realistic her grasp of reality is open to doubt. She cites, for example, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) as “a strategy for fundamental transformation” but then fails to mention that shortly after entering government in 1994, the ANC abandoned the ministry for the RDP and little remains of it bar ill built “RDP houses”. And her report continues in this vein, cherry-picking statistics and illogical conclusions completely unsupported by any evidence. There are many examples. But one, perhaps the most bizarre non sequitur, serves for many others.

She writes:

South Africa’s labour market has expanded. The labour force grew from 11.3 million in 1994 to 28.3 million in 2023. This growth is due to progressive labour legislation.

What on earth does she mean here? There are ever more adults of working age entering the workforce – but how is this statistic linked to “progressive labour legislation”? It’s just a function of population growth. And how many of them, or how few, have a job? That is the key and only question.

Policy expert Ann Bernstein had just the week before Madam Minister’s defence was published, put matters into grim perspective.

Noting that “there is no other country in the world in which a smaller proportion of the total population is engaged in income-generating work than South Africa.” Bernstein then supplies the real data missing entirely from the minister’s defence.

“The number of people employed in South Africa has grown by 2.3 million since 2008, while the number of working-age South Africans has increased by 9.5 million.” (my emphasis).

In other words, the economy, after 30 years of ANC rule and “progressive labour legislation”, has, over the past decade and a half, generated fewer than one new job for every four entrants to the labour market.

Tension in the Western Cape 

And, of course, as has been endlessly touted during the campaign, most of those precious few new jobs have been generated in the sole province, Western Cape, outside the job-crushing grip of the ANC.

Still, the Western Cape and the fight by the DA to maintain its grip there has generated its own tensions in the broad opposition camp: collectively and with some common sense, the collective opposition should be able to seize on the material and easily demonstrate failures by ANC to march into government.

The current spat between the DA and Rise Mzansi is a modern version of the Borgias of 15th century fame and infamy, of whom was written “far more powerful when united, vicious when not..”

Songezo Zibi accused John Steenhuisen of “swart gevaar” – a serious charge in our country. But having again closely read the sole Steenhuisen speech on the topic of ‘political mercenaries’, the accusation of racism is entirely unsupported by evidence. Even inferentially.

And the point here, which seems to elude Zibi’s many defenders in the media, is that neither he nor his party is a precious Ming vase needing to be swaddled in cotton wool.

If you enter the political fray, expect your words (such as Rise Mzansi, premier candidate in Western Cape, stating in 2018, “down with white property power in the Western Cape”) to be parsed. Or indeed some scrutiny where your campaign activity is pitched. Thus, for example, days after the DA accused Rise Mzansi of targeting the opposition not the ANC in the election, Rise Mzansi sends a Cape Town member of its “national leadership collective” (take that in!) to launch the party campaign in KwaZulu-Natal. And of the 61 municipalities on offer in the province, most in an advanced state of dysfunction, which did Rise Mzansi choose to target? The sole DA-run municipality of Umngeni is headed by admired mayor Chris Pappas.

But meantime, I celebrate the sunshine, the autumnal colours, and the birdsong in the garden.