Child licenses

Just recently I have had cause to question the ability of the human race to rear children decently and responsibly. I therefore propose that we implement legislation to enforce child licenses. Psychiatric evaluations, home inspections and competency tests should be compulsory on prospective parents to ensure that children brought into this world are brought into it by loving caring people who will give children stability and love.

It’s difficult to adopt a kid, right? There are all kinds of procedures involved to ensure that the orphaned child in question doesn’t end up being abused by the adoptive family, trafficked into a child sex ring or enslaved. So where are the checks on people who just go the easy route and just manufacture them themselves?

Unless you are Angelina Jolie or a person who is infertile but really desperate to have a child, you are not going to adopt. Why go through all the trouble and paperwork to prove that you would be a fit parent when you could just knock yourself or your partner up?

The sad reality is that all the sick paedophiles and child abusers out there are parents themselves and are quite happily using their own children as punching bags or pawns in their little sick games. So if we are really so concerned about preventing child abuse, why not implement child licenses?

The social services in any country can only step in AFTER some kind of terrible, noticeable abuse or neglect has taken place. The damage is already done by that time. There is no cure for a child who has been abused, so why are we not paying attention to prevention?

Children grow up to be the society of tomorrow. Today’s society is already filled to the brim with the damaged children from yesterday’s abuse.

Letters from the brink of madness

Yesterday, while my seven-year-old daughter was at school, I decided I would write her a little letter to tell her I loved her and leave it on her pillow for when she came home. After completing the letter (along with a very badly-drawn pumpkin in it), I decided to fold it up in the shape of a heart. She would really like it if I did that, I thought, seeing as how she is such a girly-girl.

Then the realisation struck: I had lost the ability to fold pieces of paper into hearts! Calamity! This is the slippery slope to old age, people, the slippery slope!

This made me think back to my high school days – yes, this was before the age of the cell phone, and yes, I really am that old, shhh! – when my friends and I used to write letters to one another, seemingly incessantly, then fold them up in our own unique ways and give them to one another, usually in the mornings before we all went to our separate classes or just before it was time to go home (that’s what Accounting was for - don’t you judge me!)

So I thought to myself, I should go into my little shoebox and go through the letters to see if there was a heart-shaped one there, and this would perhaps help me veer away from the seemingly-inexorable path I am travelling on towards Alzheimer’s.

I didn’t find any heart-shaped letters, but I did end up going through the lot and reading some of them. I laughed hysterically at most of them. I have always picked my friends on the basis of their kookiness. They have never, ever disappointed me on that level.

There were a few letters I opened that brought back some awful memories. Adolescence – it’s awkward, there are pimples and you mostly crave death. All the time. Mental note: have daughter induced into a coma from the age of 13 to around about 25. That should do it.

I thought I’d post a picture of some of the most interestingly-folded letters. Most of them are from Michelle. Coincidence? (Click on the images to enlarge)

Freedom fighter extraordinaire

WARNING: this blog post has been written from a sardonic point of view. If you find yourself running low on humour, please visit the SABC’s website and you should be fine after a few minutes.


I have been a veteran in the struggle against apartheid since 1993. Yes, the year I arrived in this country, at the tender age of twelve. As young as I was, I was nobody’s fool. Although I was slightly disappointed to be unable to see any Zulus throwing spears up at the aeroplane on the way to Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg, I figured that since it was a public holiday, even Zulu warriors needed a break from throwing spears at the whites.

No, you would never catch a bright person like me, brought up in God’s own country (just to make it clear, this would be England), being ignorant about African current affairs. Although I will admit that when I heard the news about Nelson Mandela being released from prison after 27 years, I struggled to understand why everybody was making such a fuss over a convicted criminal. But I was only a pipsqueak of eight back then. To be sure, I knew by the time I moved to South Africa in ’93 that Mandela was a very dangerous man.

Since we were brought over by a white South African family with whom we were living, I had the advantage of being able to learn a lot about South Africa very quickly. Yes, I learnt all about the kaffirs, and how they were all ready to kill us in our beds and take our BMWs.

We had two maids, Pinky and Mabel. They used to speak Afrikaans very oddly, I thought, with all sorts of funny clicking noises and no-one could understand them when they did that. I gathered that it was some kind of secret code. Eugene Terre’blanche will tell you that there are enemies everywhere, and boy, was he ever right.

Since the elections were fast-approaching, there was little to do except instruct the women and children in combat shooting. We stocked up on baked beans and candles, sandbags and ammunition. We kids were told to practice re-loading firearm magazines until our fingers bled, for it was us children who would be relied upon to reload for the adults when the bloodshed began.

The time of the elections was nearly upon us, and we went on what could possibly have been our last holiday. It was a long and weary trek in our air-conditioned BMW down to Richards Bay, and we outspanned when we got to the lobby of the hotel. For some unknown reason I became embroiled in a political discussion with a black man sitting in the lobby. Fancy me, an educated Englishwoman of twelve, imparting my erudite political views to a savage!

Nevertheless, I asked him politely who he would be voting for in the elections, to which he replied he would be voting for the National Party (an old party from the times of apartheid and the last bastion of hope for the whites). I was very pleased with this man’s valour and common sense, and I remarked that the National Party was the ideal party to vote for, because as I put it, “things will stay just exactly as they are”.

I think that from the way the poor man's face dropped in utter horror, that he probably made sure that he was the first person in the line at the polling station on the first day of voting, and I’m almost 100% certain that the tick he made was next to the box that read “African National Congress”.

So you see, I really was doing my bit for freedom even back then, when I had more pimples than common sense.

Death of a Beatle

At around the very time that I was conceived, an event occurred that was to send the Western world into shock and mourning. On the 8th December 1980, across the Atlantic from the place of his birth - and the place of my impending life – John Lennon was shot in the back four times in New York City and was pronounced dead on arrival at the nearby Roosevelt Hospital.

It has been twenty-nine years since the death of one of the most successful singer-songwriters ever to have lived, but it is an anniversary I still comemmorate with countless others throughout the world. The Beatles have been the largest single influence on modern songwriters today.

I often ask myself what it would have been like had John Lennon lived to a ripe old age like Paul McCartney, but I know, and always have known that even at the age of 40, Lennon had reached his expiry date. Somehow, when I think of the song “When I’m Sixty-Four”, I can imagine Paul losing his hair, sitting by the fireside, but John Lennon’s existence was so full of creative angst and tortured emotions that it was almost impossible for him not to become immortal by dying a tragic death.

Growing up, my entire life from the age of about five was affected and influenced by the Beatles. My brother decided to take up the guitar at school, and our headmaster, Mr. Hill, was a huge fan of the Beatles. Simon came home from school one day with a tape Mr. Hill had given him, and I remember that the first song we listened to was Strawberry Hills. From that moment onwards our home in North Yorkshire became an effective shrine to the Beatles. When my brother taught me to play the guitar soon after he took it up, it was mostly the Beatles that we were playing.

I recall when he obtained a book which contained the concise anthology (music and lyrics) of the Beatles’ works. On the front cover were pictures of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. There was something about Lennon, though, that was different from the rest, a piercing look that the others didn’t have. Simon asked me which Beatle was my favourite and I remember being devastated when he told me that out of the four band members, I had to pick the one that was dead.

As I grew up, my passion for the Beatles - their music and their lives - was never tempered. I devoured as much information about them and the period that I could lay my hands upon.

I know every single lyric from every single song. I wished and longed to travel back in time just to wallow in the glory that came from their songs being on the charts. This was perhaps one of the reasons I was such a loner growing up – I have always felt that I was born in the wrong decade.

Yes, Lennon is a true and typical immortal. A man with an intensely troubled childhood, he was determined to make his name in music. But upon achieving superstardom, the pressures and pitfalls of fame almost destroyed him. After leaving the Beatles in 1969, Lennon’s new identity and life as a somewhat unconventional anti-war activist, influenced greatly by his equally eccentric wife, artist Yoko Ono, brought him once again into the spotlight.

Just eleven years later his life was taken by an apparently deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, who had been stalking Lennon for months. The world continued to turn, the sun continued to shine and the mountains, for the most part, stayed where they had been put. But perhaps little pieces of Lennon’s soul flew into places where they could not be erased, and I would like to think a little piece of him embedded itself into the depths of the heart that would belong to me.

La Sezon Kreol

I’ve never been rich. Ever since I was small I remember feeling very envious of all my friends in primary school who had televisions and telephones in their bedrooms and thinking I was the poorest kid in the whole school. We lived in a council house, had a black and white television in the lounge and didn’t have a telephone.

My mother sewed all my clothes and I envied the other children their Disney merchandise and the latest Barbie dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids and Care Bears. I coveted all these things wantonly and I was never grateful to my parents for the two times a year I would get a present – Christmas and my birthday.

Not that my brother and I didn’t have toys, but they were generally hand-me-downs. I used to look forward to seeing my grandparents or godparents because they would squeeze a couple of pounds into the palm of my little hand as they were saying goodbye. It was the best feeling in the world.

I’d never spend the money, unlike my brother, who would blow it all on sweets within a week. I would always carefully salt my gift money away together with my princely pocket money of 50p a week (which was payment for a list of household chores I did for my mother). When my money tin was full I would go down to the bank with mother and deposit it in my savings account. When I left England with my parents at the age of ten I had managed to amass a fortune of a thousand pounds.

Then my father used my savings in Seychelles because we were in a financial mess. Well, my parents did put me through school, feed me and clothe me throughout my childhood so I guess I am the one that still owes them.

I thought we were poor in England but Seychelles introduced me to a new world of poverty. We lived in a house (for want of a better word) in the middle of a rainforest. The “house” was made of tin, or corrugated iron, the walls and the roof. The floor was cold concrete. We had no furniture and my parents slept on the floor for a year and a half. My brother and I slept on deck chairs, the long type that can be set out straight. They often collapsed or snapped shut in the middle of the night, leaving crooked limbs sticking out unnaturally, bruises to be counted the next morning.

Our stove was paraffin and we had no fridge. We also had no hot water, so my mother would fill a large kettle and boil it, then put it in a large plastic bucket and we would wash ourselves like that.

When you live in a rainforest one thing you will get tired of very quickly is, er, rain. And humidity. If you wash your clothes and put them out to dry on the line little black spots of mould will form on them before you have a chance to take them down.

Even though I am still not well-off enough to stop having panic attacks about the end of the month, I now live in South Africa, and although it’s not first-world, we have all the amenities here (unless you are unfortunate enough to be one of the millions of people in this country who live in an informal settlement). But in urban areas, we do enjoy the trappings of modern life. We have televisions, fancy cars, brick and mortar houses, high-speed internet access, geysers, electricity (most days - ha!), refuse removal and all the rest of it. However, if you asked me which kind of life I preferred, I would take the rainforest in Seychelles any day over this over-sexed, over-stressed rat race.

The Seychelles is not a utopia. It has many problems associated with your typical third-world country. Corruption, nepotism, inflation, socialism with all its pitfalls and an unstable food supply are just some of those things. It’s tough to make inroads in a country where the entire population is about 75 000, everyone knows one another and they are distrustful of outsiders. It’s a bit like being a mouse living in a cattery.

However, it may just be one of the best places in the world for your kid to grow up. Mahe, the main island, boasts pristine white beaches around the coast and lush, diverse rainforests inland. The islands abound with unique flora and fauna which cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

Three languages are spoken in Seychelles – the native Creole, French and English. A working knowledge of French is recommended, but the Creole language is one of the easiest in the whole world. Imagine, no masculine or feminine! No “le” or “la”! What joy abounds in my heart! Everyone and everything is an “it”…

Every weekend, my brother and I used to explore the stream running past our house. We would take large sticks to break down the cobwebs (in Seychelles you get orange-and-black spiders as big as dinner-plates) that would stretch from one side to the other. We hopped from one rock to another while our dog Churchill would forge ahead in the icy water ahead of us, urging us on with incessant yaps of joy.

The rainforest was full of cinnamon trees, and the smell of the bark was indescribably delicious. I would often pick the hard, bright green leaves and break them in half just to drink in the smell of cinnamon. If I close my eyes I can still get the outline of the smell in my memory.

My mother’s parents had an estate near Anse Boileau, and everything you could possibly imagine was grown in that place. Jack fruit, oranges that looked like lemons, bread fruit, zamalak fruit (my personal favourite and unique to Seychelles), coffee, tea, coconuts, bananas, pamplemousse (a sort of sweet grapefruit) and so much more. The smell I associate with the estate is coffee beans, being roasted slowly in a large Marmite pot on an open fire by my grandmother.

Just a short walk and you were at the beach, where my uncle would go out in his boat, wearing only his underpants (cringe). Every evening he would return with the most beautiful fish you have ever seen or tasted in your life, lobsters, crayfish, crabs, octopus and small sharks. The fish would be grilled and served with plain rice and sometimes vegetables. My mother’s family’s estate was one of the few truly self-sufficient farms I have ever seen. The only foodstuffs they ever needed to buy were things like rice and perhaps oil and flour.

There are two things which were quite difficult to obtain in Seychelles – milk and potatoes. I hated milk powder with such a passion that I still can’t drink it today. I’m sure that these days the Seychelles Marketing Board imports long-life milk from South Africa or India, so I could probably live with that. And potatoes… how this little English child longed for fried chips! They tried to make chips from bread fruit, which was deliciously sweet, to satisfy my craving but to my mind it was, well, close but no cigar.

The schools in Seychelles are big on corporal punishment. My headmistress, Miss Lize, was a lady who, if you had met her socially, would never seem the type of person who would stalk the corridors with a large cane gripped in her dainty fingers, searching for a suitable child to beat the living crap out of, but there you go.

This is actually a huge improvement on my mother’s time at the same school I attended, Baie Lazare School, which was back in those days run by nuns. When you think of nuns, you invariably conjure up a picture in your head of humble, wrinkled, smiling old ladies doing the Lord’s work. But if you were to believe my mother, they were sado-masochistic agents of the devil, continually devising new methods of torture upon any children unfortunate enough to draw attention to themselves.

If a child was caught doing anything funny in class, his or her offending head would be cracked against the blackboard. If two of them were caught talking in class, two unfortunate skulls would be cracked together. Anyone caught speaking Creole instead of the more “civilised” French would be made to stand outside all day on one leg holding two large bricks up in their outstretched hands while the tropical sun beat down on them. Cries begging for mercy or water went unheeded and if the child lost his balance or dropped the bricks a public caning was in store.

Every day beatings were handed out left, right and centre, rained down upon hands, heads, buttocks and any other area of flesh available. This is probably why my mother was never very interested in pursuing an education.

It continually amazes me that my mother still thinks of herself as a devout Catholic. My experiences with the Church were enough to put me off for life, but she is a real keeper, for better or worse.

All in all, I am proud of my Seychellois heritage. I am proud to be a Seychelloise citizen. Not many people can say their country’s president visited them at their house. Hardly anyone can say they grew up in an island paradise. And very few people even know where the Seychelles is. They don’t know about our traditional Sega music and dance. They don’t know what it’s like to live off the land and make soup from clams dug from your very own beach. So perhaps I was not really poor, perhaps I was rich and just didn’t know it at the time.

©Hajira Amla 2009 – all rights reserved.