First Assignment - Serial Story

Previous memoirs:
In 1969 Nick, from Cape Town, arrived in Namibia like a stranger in Jerusalem. As a young teacher he was faced with many new scenarios in the tiny town of Aroab, none of which he could have planned for...

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On the way to start my first teaching assignment of my career, we entered the small village of Aroab at a crawl, still accompanied by the dust that had diminished to a swirling of powdery particles of terra firma. From the corner of my eye I could discern a blue light up against the wall of a nearby building: the police station. At the intersection was a filling station. The pump attendant, joined by a scraggy dog, was leaning against the wall, either dog tired or bored.

We turned down the first dirt street towards the school and hostel buildings. A few yards beyond where the street ended, and the countryside began, on a slight incline, was the church. The steeple proudly pointed upwards as a symbol of Afrikaner faith; an emotion I was sadly lacking at that moment.

We came to a standstill in front of the hostel entrance and as I got out of the vehicle, I was struck by the queer silence that reigned. Only a few faint voices that sounded far off, could be discerned.

It took me a while to take in my surroundings and I noticed a smallish patch of lawn and a few shrubs. The rest of the enormous hostel grounds boasted some more widely-spaced shrubs at the fringes of the buildings, and that was just about the sum total of my observation of horticulturist creativity.

Sometime later I found myself in my apartment at the end of a lengthy passage that led past the boys’ dormitories.

The wooden furniture consisted for most part of a few Morris chairs, a table and chair that would serve as my workstation, and a few loose mats on the floor. The bedroom sported a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a bedside table and a bed. Everything was clearly marked: SWAA, South West Africa Administration, even the curtains and the blue bedspread. Quite Spartan and uninviting, but my new home, nonetheless.

I sat down on the bed with its SWAA bedspread, with my feet on the SWAA mat, and peered through the window between the partially drawn SWAA curtains. After a while I realised that I was looking at the tall posts of a rugby field, but without the greenery. Maybe kikuyu does not do well here, I thought grimly as my mind wandered off to reminisce and process the information that had been fed to me thus far:

The school had approximately 65 pupils (“learners” was a foreign word then) and a personnel quota of three. Substandard A and sub B were combined and so were standards 1, 2 and 3 (“grades” only existed in America). I would be responsible for the latter combination, which meant that more than half the school would be in my class, thirty-five in total. And, being left-handed, I would have to teach handwriting skills to junior primary pupils. What a recipe for disaster.

The principal was responsible for standards 4 and 5 – but he would be absent for the duration of the first quarter due to a medical condition. Never before had I felt so utterly surrendered to the unpredictability of fate.

We had never been taught or trained how to cope with such a scenario and it severely rattled my cage.

God forbid... But the end was not yet to be.

I had to take cognisance of the fact that the source of power for the school and hostel was a colossal Lister engine, housed in a smallish brick building some distance away from my sleeping quarters. It would be my bounden duty to turn it off at 10, 11 o’clock each evening, I would have to check the level of engine oil and diesel daily, and report any abnormalities to the principal.

I did not even know how to start that monstrous collection of green steel, let alone how to diagnose any abnormalities. I wanted to teach, but certainly had no inclination towards investigating the oily intricacies of mechanics of any kind whatsoever...
To cap it all, as one of three staff members at the Aroab school in 1969, I would be burdened with the responsibility of waking all and sundry every morning at six o’clock sharp. At my disposal was a hefty piece of steel of extremely obscure origin dangling from a piece of steel wire in the walkway near the dining room. Close by was kept an equally obnoxious steel bar with which to strike the afore-mentioned to effect the desired noise that might very well raise the dead. I conjured up images of young Buddhist monks hammering out a weird cacophony of sound on gigantic perpendicular drums to please the gods.

The very next day I was summoned to the official telephone near the girls’ dormitory and kitchen. There was a call for me. I was flabbergasted. Who in, heaven’s name, would call me? The local inspector, one Mr Nico Barnard, was calling from Keetmanshoop and in his professionally polished voice he welcomed me to the Directorate of Education under the auspices of the Administration for Whites in South West Africa. He expressed his sincere hope that I would find my teaching experience here very enriching and pleasing. I liked that, and was just beginning to relax at the sound of his soothing, fatherly voice, when he unexpectedly switched off my lights.



Nick van Zyl