As I have mentioned before, Durban in winter can be magical. The days are sunny and warm, the evenings cool, and there is no humidity to contend with. To get here I travelled from Norwich to Amsterdam on 12th June. Getting up at 4:30 am to catch the six o’clock flight to Amsterdam remains a pain, but I had time to visit the lounge before boarding the Johannesburg flight. I was lucky enough to have three seats to myself on the long-haul segment.

The flight seemed, as ever, interminable. I spent it reading, dozing and watching films. It really is a positive aspect of my new, retired (or unemployed) status that I do not have to carry papers I must read, but of course, I am not being paid. I persuaded myself that I was allowed to watch Barbie on the plane, it was being shown anyway! It was quite fascinating as a commentary on coming of age and what the ‘ideal’ is from a Western point of view. I am sure the producers and script writers had their tongues very firmly in their cheeks for parts of it, for example, “We have to be thin but not too thin, and we can never say we want to be thin, you have to say you want to be healthy. But also you have to be thin.”

The contrast was Dunkirk, the story of the evacuation of the retreating British and French troops from the French beaches between 26th May and 4th June 1940. Four years later, on 6th June 1944, the allies landed in Normandy and within the year the European war was over. If the soldiers had not got away from France, the course of the war would have been very different. The story of the 338,000 men being rescued, famously by many small civilian craft, is quite remarkable. I was prompted to watch the film by the D-Day commemorations just before I left. I had seen the film previously, but it was well worth it. The aforementioned D-Day commemorations were the ones which Rishi Sunak ducked out of early, and it has certainly come back to bite him! One additional blemish on his premiership.

The last film I watched was The Blind Side, an American ‘feel good’ movie. It is based on a book by Micheal Lewis. It is the story of a talented young black football player, Michael Oher, who is adopted by a white family and makes good on the field and academically. The fact that it is a true story is interesting. Sadly, according to a Google search, it has ended up in the courts with Oher suing the Tuohy family to end their conservatorship over him. It is not an accurate telling of his story, it implies they taught him how to play American Football and portrays his story of overcoming adversity as a white saviour narrative.

I just read Lewis’ most recent book – Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (W W Norton & Company, New York 2023). This is the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest billionaire who made and lost a fortune in cryptocurrency through fraud. At worst he was a criminal and, at best, totally naïve about how the world works and how to interact with people. The book is fair, but it makes for hard reading to see how many people lost everything and were otherwise damaged by these events. Crypto is not something most people understand, and this, evidently, includes those promoting it.

The plane arrived at 10pm and I stayed over at the OR Tambo City Lodge. The next day a driver took me to the Cradle Moon Lodge, in a conservancy on the banks of the Crocodile River. The river is dammed and so there is an expanse of water in front of the lodge. The wildlife is free to wander through the grounds between the chalets.

I was invited to the Lodge by a Waterford colleague, Yunus Peer. He was the year below me. He disappeared from the student body in 1971 when he was prevented from continuing his education, in a cold, senseless act of brutality by the apartheid regime. They banned him from travelling across the Swazi border to the school. He ended up in the USA after spending time in India. For the last 26 years he has been teaching in Hawaii. He was not the only person at school to be treated in this way by the South African authorities.

Our paths crossed many years later at a reunion in Swaziland. Subsequently I was able to post him a copy of our school textbook The Choice of Poets. I spotted a copy at a car boot sale in Hellesdon in Norwich. I bought it and to my surprise when I opened it, there were the names of two classmates from Waterford in the front cover, Yunus being one. I have no idea what route it followed from Mbabane to Norwich. I told this anecdote in a blog in 2016.

Yunus runs a project known as Teachers Across Borders Southern Africa. The mission statement is:

“To assist teachers of math and science in rural Southern African schools to meet and exceed the National Curriculum Standards as well as sharing methodology, techniques, and pedagogy in subject areas.”

I am not a huge fan of mission statements, but this encapsulates what they do very nicely. They are highly regarded by the local teachers, who give up time during the holiday, to attend the workshops. And remarkably no one gets paid for it: there are no per diems for locals and the US team gives time and energy. The flights are no joke and Yunus and his wife, Laurie Lee travel across the world from Hawaii!

What he has done for STEM education in Southern Africa is amazing. He began bringing teams of teachers from the US to run summer schools (their summer and our winter) to support our teachers in 2001 and has done so every year since. I am full of admiration for this excellent, selfless project. There is a profile in the Punahou school magazine.

I spent two nights at the Cradle Moon and gave two very brief presentations, one on the HIV pandemic in Southern Africa. At least I know something about that! There were about 17 American teachers and a South African educator, Thokozani Mteshane, the assistant director, who works closely with the project. The problems TAB-SA faces are not unique. It is based on buy-in from the provincial education departments and that is not given automatically. It very much depends on personalities and an appreciation that there are no hidden agendas. Yunus and Laurie are central to the programme, and succession, as they recognise, is going to be crucial to protect the programme. We will have a conversation and I will try to provide support.

I signed up for a fundraiser for Waterford last year, but then had a few health issues. The reason for doing the challenge was because I was diagnosed with angina. The medical advice was to embark on ‘aggressive risk factor modification and lifestyle change’. My challenge was to walk 250 km over a month, 30 days! I planned to start on September 6th, 2023, Swaziland Independence Day! Unfortunately, I then had an additional health issue that, I am told, is now resolved. I began in earnest on 16th June 2024. Up to the end of June I have managed 168 km, so I am hopeful I will manage to complete it. We will then call in pledges, and inform those who gave in advance, and in blind faith, I have met the challenge. Please also consider supporting this.

This is a political time. The national and provincial elections in South Africa on 29th May gave an amazing result. While the ANC are still the largest party, in the national results they only got 40% so have had to enter a coalition. The KwaZulu-Natal provincial results are more complex. Although the new party Umkhonto Wesizwe (MK), led by disgraced former president Jacob Zuma, won the most votes (45%), the other parties, particularly the ANC, the Democratic Alliance and Ikhatha Freedom Party have come together in a coalition (along with a number of smaller parties – known as the ‘rats and mice’), to form the government. Generally, everyone is happy with this, it means more accountability and less taking the electorate for granted.

The UK’s general election is on 4th July and we are confident that the Conservatives will be given a well-deserved drubbing. Not to mention the US election is approaching slowly. I will write more on these momentous events in my next blog, hopefully with good news.