Dear Nelson,
I write to you in a great hurry and with much regret to tell of a terrible misfortune. Returning home recently from the Push-a- Bottletop Challenge Cup for Veterans at the Orlando community hall, I happened to see the postman struggling to push what appeared to be several envelopes into a drain pipe. I stopped to give him a hand and after much shoving, kicking and cursing we managed to get the material inside. Shaking hands in mutual congratulation I inquired, conversationally, as to why he was pushing letters into drain- pipes. “That,” he said importantly, nodding towards the drain, “is the future; it’s the information superhighway.” Striding off purposefully in the direction of the next drain-pipe he added, over his shoulder: “It was old man Sisulu’s mail”.
A trifle upset at this description of myself — I had, after all, only just been pipped to fifth position in the Challenge Cup and would no doubt have done better if Mrs Khumalo had not stepped on my bottle-top — I went inside to recover from the afternoon’s exertions. I was in the process of devouring one of Ma Albertina’s chocolate biscuits, washed down with a cup of cocoa, my mind wandering around the great issues of the day — Who created the universe and did he need a mortgage? Why is now, now and what happened to yesterday? Why does Major Gregory exist? — when suddenly I was hit by a thought. Rushing outside and examining my letter box from every possible angle it was confirmed: there was no link between it and the drain-pipe! I did not appear to have been connected to the information superhighway!!
To cut a long story short, after various telephone calls to Pallo Jordan’s office and inspections “in loco” by computer experts and teams of plumbers I was finally presented with a soggy mush which, it transpired, was my mail for the last year, inadvertently lost in cyberspace. Over the last couple of nights Ma Albertina and I, with the help of huge quantities of chocolate biscuits and cocoa, have been painstakingly piecing it together. And, of course, we have discovered — amidst such as appeals from the World Wildlife Fund to save an endangered species and adopt FW de Klerk — your wonderful, tragic, joyous and above all courageous letters.
“How did he survive such desperate times?” is the question Ma and I kept murmuring to one another as we pored breathlessly over them. What next in the extraordinary saga that is the history of our beloved country? What more can happen to those larger-than-life figures which flicker so briefly across these pages of time? Will the mysterious disappearance of Richard Steyn ever be explained, or has the Irish desperado, O’Reilly, disposed of the body in a vat of tomato sauce? Will your guru, Peter “Hawkings” O’Sullivan, solve the central riddle of the universe he has set himself and establish once and for all whether there is life after Mandela? Will you ever succeed in delivering the divorce papers and at what horrendous cost in terms of human lives? What happened to the Second Coming of Castro and will Princeton Lyman succeed this time around in having him defoliated? Will the South African Secret Service crack the deepest secret of the Great Game and establish the whereabouts of Nigeria? Will Alfred Nzo ever wake up again? Can Tokyo Sexwale’s aunt’s daschund, Wors, kick the cocaine habit and survive the increasingly desperate attempts by the drugs barons to kidnap him? When will Robert Mugabe emerge from the closet and what will he be wearing?
It is a correspondence which I shall long treasure and which, I am sure, will go down as one of the great contributions to contemporary history, not to mention literature; a graphic account of the momentous events through which we have been living and — Ma Albertina’s chocolate biscuits and cocoa allowing — through which we will continue to live. God help us all.
How saddened I am that I did not have the opportunity to offer you succour when you were living through those crises, old friend. But rest assured I will stand by you in the New Year, when both Albertina and I will be eagerly awaiting the postman’s knock. Just try and remember to put a postage stamp on next time. Otherwise it plays hell with the drainage system.
Your comrade