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invisible barrier that exists between musician and audience; it seemed the better the music,
the greater the barrier, yet the closer the bond with the audience. I experienced a strange
sense of loneliness and rowed slowly home to my boat a little depressed.
Sunday dawned overcast and cool with a possibility of rain. I climbed out of my bunk and
looked through the porthole as I relieved myself in the boat's meager head. I made a cup of
tea and, turning on the tape player, went back to my bunk and lay back listening to a tape
letter from my father as I sipped my tea. At the end of the fairly, newsy letter, my father
had recorded some Vivaldi which I then listened to with eyes closed. Presently, I fell asleep
again and dreamed a long and complicated dream of my family on their banana farm back
in troubled South Africa. My father had filled me in on the political situation as it was un-
folding.
Nelson Mandela had been elected head of the African National Party, and the old, white,
apartheid regime and all like installations were to be dismantled. There were many South
Africans who were in total disbelief as to what was happening. For them, the Berlin Wall
was nothing compared to this historical event. The collapse of the Soviet Empire wouldn't
have made such news. Handing the commercial giant Hong Kong back to China was small
fry when seen against the revolution in Southern Africa, and the waves that its news had
made.
I was very thankful to be away from all of this. I had spent months doing national service
on the borders of southwest Africa and Angola. I had been shot at, contracted malaria, was
stung by a very poisonous scorpion, and had almost been bitten by one of Africa's most
deadly snakes (a “boom slang”). I had also almost been trampled by a herd of rampaging
elephants while sleeping in the bush. I had sweated miserably in the unnatural heat along
with my fellow troops, all for what? I felt very angry toward the U.S.A. for promoting
this revolution with her trade embargo and liberal double speak, not looking into her own
history on how the American government had dealt with her Indians. In all fairness to the
“apartheid regime,” no such devastating or underhanded practice was ever promulgated
against the black man of South Africa. Admittedly there was a string of injustices to answer
for, but never murder, not on such a genocidal scale. It was their strong belief that the black
man should live separately from the European man, as their collective cultures were so far
apart. They were extremely far apart, and the Afrikaners did what they felt was natural.
They couldn't imagine wildebeests cohabiting with the lions. They never saw a success-
ful community of antelope living with crocodiles or of spring-buck drinking side by side
with cheetahs. Both swings of the pendulum have been excessive, from apartheid to the
overthrow and subsequent installation of the dominant black government. Since then, there
have been very definite cracks, nay, large glaring gaps, appearing in the country's many in-
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