TRANSCRIPT: THE YEAR OF HAPPINESS
Those first years in Mozambique were years of elation for me. Revolution works, it’s the way forward for humanity, or certainly for third world humanity. My courage has come back. Everything progressive. I’m feeling a bit alone. I’m still using English; I’m learning Portuguese very, very slowly. And people are dismissive of us. They’re very dismissive of the ANC. Why do you people take so long? We started the armed struggle in ‘68 and ‘75 we’re independent. And you started in 1912 and you’re still struggling. I felt a little bit miffed by that. I even heard people using the word ‘Soweto’ as a way of criticising people who’re not very stylish. Ag, you know, you look like someone from Soweto. Now, for me Soweto was the children’s uprising and I’m hearing the word Soweto used in that sort of a way.
And I didn’t fit in completely. I’m very close to Frelimo, to struggle. And there [are] people from Canada and Britain and France and all the rest with their international left-wing ideas and they don’t quite get our struggle. So sometimes I’m trying to explain things and I’m not completely in sync with them. Very much influenced by the new left sort of outlook. And it’s not that I’m old left. I was in a sense a bit old left. But I’m South African. I’m ANC. And they’re also a little bit dismissive of the ANC. And these are people we eat with, we associate with. So that was a bit difficult. At times I felt quite out of things.
Mozambique for me was a country of revolution, of love and of war. And first it was revolution. And then the love – love is love is love wherever you are in the world. But somehow it was different for me there. I’m now separated from Stephanie. And the university was a very special place to be. And we did some astonishing work on the new approach to the marriage law. I remember flying to Pemba, which is up in the north, going deep into the bush to a little village. There were no lights, no electricity, no radio. We were the only contact with the outside world. A community of maybe a few hundred people. Only one person could read and write, that was the teacher. He had a big book, and he kept the record of their court cases. And a very horrible phrase came to me at that stage: the universality of matrimonial misery. And it wasn’t just my own unhappiness; I think it was a time when Prince Charles was having problems with Diana. And here were people deep in the bush in Mozambique having the same sort of problems.
One day I decide I’m going to pick up the beautiful petals from the jacaranda trees down on the ground, I’m going to buy some little silver trinkets, I’m going to put them in a letter. I’m going to write a love letter to Stephanie, just remembering what brought us together. And I write and write… the words just come pouring out. And it’s such a relief! And I send it. And I’m waiting. And two weeks later a card comes back, ‘Why you so late sending the money?’. That was it. I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried! A few days later, another letter comes. It said: ‘Albie, there was a postal strike in England. I’ve only got your letter today. It’s a very wonderful letter. Thank you for writing it. We’re not going to get together again but I do appreciate the letter.’ But I’d snapped. I couldn’t put the pieces together again. And… and… Stephanie did the appropriate thing for us because the getting on together... there was admiration for each other. But that ordinary daily love and interaction was kind of gone, and we were grinding each other down.
Every year they used to have ‘this is the year of…’ And sometimes it would be the year of education. One it was the year of collecting cashew nuts. And I couldn’t help smiling but nobody else smiled. But that was important for the economy. And I decided, this is my year of happiness. I declared it. Now I’m being very ideological about happiness. And I decide I’m going to be happy. If something happens that normally would make me feel a little bit marginalised, I’m going to smile. And it worked, it worked. A couple of weeks of induced happiness actually made life a lot easier. And I was nicer to be with. And I wasn’t sulking and feeling a little bit resentful. I’m getting my courage back. I’m excited.
And now I meet Fatima. She was born in Portugal. She came as a young girl with her family to Mozambique. She was involved with the underground, anti-fascist underground. Literature is a theme. We’re in the same hostel together. She’s got three young kids, two with one guy she never married but he was the father. One with another guy, they broke up. And I’m fascinated. She has a sparkle and an energy and a brightness. I’m just falling head over heels. She used to invite people round for dinner and people loved food there. The greater the shortages, the more we loved food. And what I found so strange was, you’d get all the food you could together, cook a meal and you discuss a wonderful meal you had at somebody else’s house. Now in the English culture you never did that because that sounds like you’re putting down your hosts. And then one day I’m leaving, and I say, ‘Well, Fatima, thank you very much, it was a very lovely meal’ – which any polite South African, English – whatever it is – person would say. ‘Ha! You English,’ she would say. I hated it when she called me ‘You English’. She said, ‘You think I’m not going to give you nice food. Next thing you’ll be saying it’s a lovely chair I sat in!’ And very dismissive, you know, of my kind of culture.
But I’m getting more and more involved and…and even obsessionally in love with her. And I’d never had that in my life. I would drive past her building and just to see the lights on, you know, would excite me! And she’s involved and she’s not involved and she’s involved and she’s not… and eventually she says no, she’s found someone else. And it turned out the someone else was an MK guy. So she couldn’t be public. I think I just met him once; his name was Chris. And I wasn’t jealous in the sense that I wanted her to be happy. But I was sad, sad for me, for Albie.
And then I meet somebody from Canada, but she was actually Peruana – from Peru. Had moved to Canada and come with the French speaking Canadians to Mozambique. And we’re very close, we’re very warm and we’re kind of living together. And then we split and I’m very downhearted and then one of Fatima’s friends comes to me and her face is bleak. She says Chris has been killed in Swaziland. Come… can you come and see Fatima. And I walk over to her house; it’s maybe a mile away. She’s lying prostrate, prostrate in bed. And I lie down next to her and I hug her and she starts screaming and she scratches me and she says, ‘Why was it Chris, why couldn’t it be you!’ And I understood what she was getting at, you know, and all I could do was just hold her and hold her and hold her. And she said, ‘MK, you had the best and the worst, there was nothing in between. And the worst,” she said, ‘were terrible. You won’t believe it, Albie, but there are terrible people in MK. But Chris was the best. He was very, very wonderful.’ And she was happy with him and adored him. And it turned out he’d been spotted in Swaziland, his car was attacked, it was set alight. He was shot and burnt to death. It was a brutal, ugly death.
I carry on. I’m involved with Lucia, my Peruana friend. And it breaks up. I’m very distraught. And I bump into Fatima and we’re walking and the whole idea is that I will go up to her flat with her and I just walk on. I say, ‘We’re getting nowhere, it’s terrible, we’re getting nowhere. This is my obsession. No, no, no, no, no, no!’ Sometime later I bump into her again and she tells me that Chris had left a gun behind, an AK and she's coming to get me… and I’m feeling, wow, what a way to go. But I say, I can’t be bullied back, we’re just kind of getting nowhere. But I mention this because it was another Albie completely in another kind of a world.
