I’ve been writing things most of my life. Now, I’m finally starting on an actual book, and I need your help.
Snow is not something we know much about in South Africa. When it snows, it’s a talking point. (Indeed, there’s a whole website devoted to the subject: Snow Report).
So you might be interested to know that it snowed in Johannesburg in 1962.
It also snowed in 1963, 1964 and 1965, when it snowed twice. The snow in 1962 was the first such event since 1936. It did not snow again until 1968 and then again only in 1981.
Clearly 1962 was a big year in the snow department.
It was also a big year for me – I was born in the April of that year, in the Florence Nightingale Nursing Home in Joburg.
I was born into a South Africa that had no television, and which had, just the previous year, been declared a republic by one Hendrik Verwoerd.
Chilly times indeed.
It’s decades later now, and you might be wondering why I am meandering down these rather bleak old roads. Thing is – I’m writing a book about the history of our country, starting in 1962 and ending in 2024.
Children of the Republic: A History
The idea is to tell the history of those years through the eyes of the people who were born in 1962, who lived roughly half their lives in the apartheid era and roughly half in the democratic era.
I am looking for ten people from a wide range of backgrounds – all the colours, all the income levels, all the school and post-school experiences (so from white government schools to school boycotts, from university to an entry-level job, detention, from being drafted into the army to leaving the country. All the things.)
As I envisage it now – and of course this won’t survive contact with reality – I’ll interview those people and weave their experiences and memories together in chapters roughly divided into phases of life (birth to starting school, then school years and so on).
They’d need to be willing to be named (I will protect the privacy of anyone currently under the age of 18 who might need to be named) and to share their life stories. I don’t want private and intimate details but there will be a tracing of where people were during particular times in their lives and during important events and their feelings about those.
Where does the idea come from?
Some years ago, I had an idle thought: could I find people who were born in the Florence Nightingale on April 16, 1962, and somehow turn their stories into a tale about the years since 1962?
The impulse at first was personal – it would be interesting to find out what had happened to the people I was literally born alongside of, I thought. But over the years, as I returned to the idea every now and then, I saw that the people born in the Florence would all have been white. And that that would only a partial story. I began to think: what if I tracked down a more colourful group of people who were born in wider Johannesburg on April 16, 1962? And that’s as far as it went for quite a while.
In 2024, I set myself a challenge: just start on a book, any book. And went back to that idea of finding my birthday people. The shortest of Internet searches revealed that I was going to have trouble finding birth records or indeed any list of people of whatever race born on a particular day in Johannesburg. I could have hired a private detective (how cool would that be!) but decided that was going too far. So I broadened the criterion to anyone born in 1962.
I’ve written an introduction, I have a chapter outline, I’ve done one interview with a good friend who was also born in 1962. And now I need to turn my gaze outwards, to make this real.
Why is this important?
The idea of the book springs out of my own life and accompanying philosophy. I loved history at school, and have always been interested in the subject (to be clear though, I am not a historian; I am a journalist). Over the course of my life, I have developed some guiding principles, the things that I think are important for living a good and meaningful life. One of those principles is that individual people and their lives are the cornerstone of understanding “life, the universe and everything”, to use Douglas Adams’s phrase.
History is what “important” people like Hendrik Verwoerd think and do, for good or ill. But it is also the story of how those public and important thoughts and deeds interweave with our private lives, going from day to day.
My fledgling book project aims to record the arc of our country from pariah to darling to very ordinary failing state through the memories of the 1962 babies, who have lived it all.
Our memories of course may be faulty, eroded over time, perhaps not historically “true”. We all hold cherished beliefs about our lives and the people in it, and those beliefs are always coloured by our sense of who we are, who we were. We can hold grudges for years, only to find that the person who “did us dirty” has a completely different memory of what happened.
That doesn’t mean that a history based on memory is invalid. We may not remember the date on which something happened, or we may remember a sequence of events wrongly, or hold something as a sacred truth… based on a misinterpretation of what happened. But we remember our feelings, the way the light shone on a beach in the Eastern Cape, how a grandmother patiently tried to teach us to knit, how that beloved pet felt on our lap. How someone we love was lost in our terrible past. How, sometimes, there can be forgiveness and redemption.
It’s those lived experiences that give life and depth to the historical record.
So: do you know anyone who was born in South Africa in 1962? Or were you born here in 1962?
There’s a form to fill in: Children of the Republic: A History – Participant Information Form – or contact me here. I’d love to get this on the road.
Main picture: Me, in the snow in Johannesburg, possibly in 1965.
OTHER THINGS I’VE WRITTEN
Three things I have learned about starting to write a book – Many people want to be an author. But you can only do that by actually starting to write a book. Here’s how…
Why everybody counts, or nobody counts – Why everybody counts: The story of something extraordinary that has happened in our family over the last months.
How to find your writing voice – One of the more mysterious concepts in writing and editing is that of “voice”. Here’s how to find your writing voice (it can take a long time, but you’ll get there!).
How can I help you make order from chaos?
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