When I was about 12 or 13 years old, there was this guy about five or six years older who used to visit our neighbourhood and go through the garbage.
He collected cardboard boxes, or cartons as we called them, and plastic bags.
People in the neighbourhood said he was mentally ill because they could not see how a young man of sound mind could spend his days rooting through garbage, collecting used cartons and plastic bags.
Looking back now, I think he was really a recycler who was miles ahead of the modern trend, and not so much mentally ill as misunderstood.
At some point, the children of the compound in which we lived discovered that his name was Gordon.
I remember clearly that after overcoming our initial fear of the possibly crazy fellow attacking us, my friend Sande and I would talk to him and help him gather and sort his plastic bags and cardboard boxes.
On some days Gordon would be in a bad mood when he came on his rounds and we’d steer clear, but on the days he was interested in chatting, we would sit and chew the fat.
If memory serves me right, Gordon was in our lives on and off for a couple of years and then suddenly one August holiday, he disappeared and we never saw or heard from him again.
That was the August holiday of 1982, the holiday that came with a coup attempt, looting and a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
Eventually the number of dead after the coup came to at least 300. About 100 soldiers and roughly 200 civilians. Today I believe Gordon was among that number.
Because we didn’t know Gordon’s family or where he came from, we could do nothing about finding out what really happened.
I was thinking of Gordon and that weird August holiday as I watched the cities of Durban and Johannesburg experience the most serious outbreak of unrest and looting since South Africa’s democracy in 1994.
The unrest included some violent political protests, but it was mainly an orgy of looting and vandalism that left more than 300 people dead, 3,000 arrested and an already struggling economy in tatters.
I couldn’t help but wonder if there had been any Gordons who had died, or disappeared forever, in the unrest.
Meanwhile, here in Cape Town, the natives are getting restless.
They refuse to let the triple threat of inclement weather, taxi shootings and acceleration of Covid-19 infections and deaths keep them down.
As far as they are concerned, avoiding the plague, also known as the coronavirus, is part of an international conspiracy.
Therefore, on Saturday July 24, they took part in what was advertised as a “worldwide demonstration”.
The demonstration was billed as a “march for freedom, peace and human rights” and was a sequel to a similar protest held in March.
The protestors set out to reclaim what they called their “fundamental rights” and wanted the world to know that they were taking a stand against “excessive coronavirus restriction measures”.
So they had a maskless rally at Cape Town’s famous Sea Point promenade that will almost certainly be classed as a superspreader event in the weeks to come.
For me, the interesting thing was that despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent insistence that under the current Level 4 lockdown, anybody not wearing a mask in public is guilty of a criminal offence, none of the freedom marchers was arrested or charged.
Some here say no action was taken because the demonstrators were mainly white and middle class, but surely that can’t be it. After all, if an ex-President can be arrested, nobody is above the law. Or are they?