There’s a legend in Naidoo family lore that tells of the spotting of a UFO near an orange-wine farm somewhere between Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal (just Natal back then) and Mbabane, Eswatini (Swaziland back then).
We were on our way home from fetching my brother Anton, a boarder at Southern Africa’s first nonracial school, Waterford Kamhlaba United World College, a school known as much for its diversity as for being perilously perched on the top of a hill in the Eswatini capital Mbabane.
In the early days, we made the trip at the beginning and end of term, with my parents usually tacking on an extra few days if it was in their school holidays.
My mum and dad were teachers who sent their children (three except me; I guilted them about it regularly) to a school out of the country in the hope it would better prepare them for a racially integrated world. It didn’t, but that’s a topic for another column.
We were too poor to book into a hotel — but we could have if we’d wanted to — and we would not have been turned away for being brown. This was Swaziland where we had the right to stay at The Foresters Arms, a colonial hotel I thought grand, with rolling lawns and the dark brooding of encroaching woods.
Instead, we stayed with my mother’s cousins Uncle Joseph and Aunty Mary (the names set off fits of giggles) in Mhlambanyatsi in the heart of the Usutu Forest, one of the largest plantations in the world.
It was on this drive home that my mother was the first to spot a disc hovering in the sky above our green Ford Corsair, spinning in place. Such wonderment and awe; I can still see her face, transfixed at the apparition in the sky.
Of course, we stopped to gawp at it, my parents clutching each other and drawing us close, fuelled no doubt by fears of alien abduction.
Of course, we were forbidden from telling the story ever again after Uncle J roared with laughter, slapped my father on the back, asked if he’d been drinking; after Auntie M rolled her eyes and tittered behind her hand at my mother’s recount of the event.
My parents were mortified by the ridicule of their friends. Go figure.
A weather balloon; a weapon test from the nearby army base, a light aircraft … they were all possible explanations for what we saw — or thought we saw.
So, it moved into our lexicon of coded family secrets, although, looking back on it, it was strange that my educated, usually cynical parents would jump to the least likely scenario to explain a spinning saucer in the sky.
But then we were a family given to flights of fancy. My father, by way of example, created Anasberg, a Walter Mitty-like character whose prowess and strength were the stuff of legend and whose adventures I grew up thinking were historically accurate, so precise was my father’s placement of information.
For some unfathomable reason, Anasberg — the hero of my childhood — was Chinese and lived during the Ming Dynasty, overseeing part of the construction of the Great Wall at some stage in its 2 300-year history.
Our time traveller also met intrepid early explorer Marco Polo in the 1200s and entertained Greek mythology’s Andromeda, chained to a rock because her mother boasted her beauty rivalled the vain sea nymphs, the Nereids.
And so you see I’ve had much exposure to far-fetched stories that fire up the imagination, which blur the line between real and imagined; between truth and almost-truth; between wishing and being.
I’m good at living in undefined spaces and comfortable with suspending belief.
But there are some stories that beggar belief — such as the burglary at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala farm in which an astonishing $4-million is rumoured to have been stolen.
But that’s not even the most incredible part of the story: Imanuwela David, the chap who allegedly stole the money, apparently fled to Namibia by crossing the Orange River in a canoe! A canoe?
I’ve never seen $4-million in cash, but I would think that there would be a considerable amount of paper notes involved.
So, imagine a bag of dollars balanced in a canoe … Now picture David paddling fast as possible across the Orange, dodging those tailing him. Is this not the stuff of farce?
Here’s another story that would fall into the realm of gross exaggeration if it were not true.
I have been forced to postpone my trip to London, a holiday I’ve been meaning to take since I was last there in 1999.
I wanted to be there for the queen’s jubilee in early June but I couldn’t get a visa appointment until late April, had to hire an agent and pay more to book a private lounge for the appointment, then waited nearly eight weeks because they were processing Ukrainian refugees.
By then airfares had moved into the comedic realm: R10k to R15k economy flights shot up to R26k (33 hours travelling time with punishingly long layovers). Direct flights cost between R46k and R52k.
But nothing — not my family’s sighting of a UFO nor my father’s telling of the tales of Anasberg nor Cyril’s couch-stuffed missing millions nor the unbelievable prices of air flights in June — seemed as far-fetched, as unbelievable, as inconceivable as the reversal of the 1973 landmark judgment Roe vs Wade in the United States.
In that history-making case, heard almost five decades ago, the supreme court ruled that the Constitution of the United States “generally protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion”.
It gave women the gift of choice.
Last month, the supreme court voted to strike down the Roe v Wade decision, taking away that choice and turning back the clock half a century on hard-fought-for, harder-won women’s rights.
As a practising Catholic, I am profoundly aware of the dilemma about abortion that rages in the hearts of people of faith.
But I draw the line at taking away women’s right to choose; their right to make decisions for themselves, for their bodies, for their lives.
It’s as simple as making decisions that suit you and not legislating rules for everyone.
We laughed initially when a friend looked at her phone during lunch and announced the court’s decision to reverse Roe vs Wade.
The story felt as far-fetched as being told that Donald Trump had been voted president of the US.
Suddenly, my family’s flights of fancy seem mundane.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.