An early start

Nobody seems to have kept a record of any kind, so I’m just guessing when I claim that my mother’s side of the family arrived in South Africa with the settlers of 1820. Her name is distinctly Scottish, but with a slight alteration in spelling. I think this occurs commonly when large numbers of immigrants are admitted to a region all at once.

I don’t suppose it matters, really. If anything Scottish arrived with the immigrants, it found its way elsewhere long before I arrived. Only the gist of a name and a strong dose of Highland obstinance survived. The latter possibly amplified by immersion into the local strain of mule-headedness.

Mule-headed obstinance was my maternal grandfather’s forte. It may have been the key to his prowess as a fighter, but he was adamant that the sport of boxing was the key to restoring the family fortune his father had squandered. It became such an obsession that there was no consoling him when he broke his hands in a fight and had to find another way to pay the rent. I got to know him as a bitter, old man on pension from the South African Postal Service.

The house he shared with my grandmother in Grahamstown was built by the settlers of 1820. It was a little house with one step between the road and the front door. Inside the door was a passage with a bedroom door on either side, leading to a small sitting-room adjacent to an enormous kitchen. The back door, just past the big, cast-iron coal stove, led to an enormous back yard divided with a gate into a general recreation area with a fruit-tree garden behind.

My mother was the first of their three children; all girls. I was the first grandchild, but I was also the first boy in two generations. I could do no wrong through my grandmother’s eyes. The first four to five years of my life are shrouded in memory-resistant fog, but some of the clear moments include great family dinners at a big table in that huge kitchen where the coal stove, and its oven, had been fed coal and pine cones all day.

I remember my grandmother finally winning a long-standing argument about me being allowed wine at the table, and then her careful explanation of how wine was for tasting, not drinking. It was what I loved most about my maternal grandmother. She seemed to understand, without judgement, how big and confusing the world was for me. She seemed, in fact, to have open access to my every thought.

I was a year old when my father’s shop in my birthplace, King William’s Town burned down. He wasn’t insured and was left with nothing. He worked for other people after that. When the time came to think about sending me to school, it coincided with instability in my father’s employment.

They decided, most likely under coercion from my grandmother, that I should live in Grahamstown until my parents stabilized. After moving in with my grandmother however, we discovered a miscalculation. The law was quite clear: children were to be sent to school at the beginning of the year they turned six (no problem there), but, if a child was born in the second half of the year, they were to enroll at the beginning of the following year (and here we come adrift).

With all arrangements made, but being born toward the end of September, I got to spend an initial schoolless year with my grandmother. It was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. It is during this period that my childhood memories come into sharp focus.

My grandmother’s general philosophy with regard to child-rearing was fundamentally different to that of my mother. From my mother’s perspective, children are born wild and must be forcibly manhandled with extreme prejudice into a civilised state. My grandmother seemed to have been more of the opinion that children are born neutral and their behaviour depends entirely on subsequent experience.

From my point of view, it was simply heaven. I had resigned myself to the observable fact that adults were bullying tyrants and my grandmother’s softer approach took me by surprise. After a little adjustment, I found I liked being responsible for my own actions. Every now and again, my grandmother would point out some or other error, but would always include an explanation as to what made it so.

Mornings were a special time for us. The newspaper (Daily Mail) was always available early, and she would permit me to read to her from it. Other things I had her permission to do included things like unravelling her wool and other skill developing activities. Most of the day would be spent out back with the storage shed (and all its secrets), the fruit trees, a very cocky rooster, my wheelbarrow, and other toys.

Eventually, after a year of anticipation, my first day of school arrived. I donned my brand-new school uniform, snatched up my little brown school-case, and stood waiting for my grandmother at the door. It was a pleasant walk, but best of all was the driveway of the school itself; an avenue of Oak trees, strewn with fallen acorns. I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to explore this new environment, and couldn’t understand the tear-streaked faces of my peers who seemed to want to return home.

I found a classroom I suspected would be ours and marvelled at the colours and pretty pictures on the walls. I understood the purpose of most of the teaching aids I saw, with the exception of a set of elongated blocks. They were all the same thickness but were of different lengths. Similar lengths were painted similar colours. The teacher seemed very busy that day, but I did eventually manage to ask her about these blocks. She found a very complicated way to tell me they were for illustrating fractions.

After that first day at school, my memory dims immediately. Only a few highlights remain, but they are usually missing at least one sensory element. The memories I have that are in full Technicolor, complete with tastes, smells, and emotions, are almost all from that last year with my grandmother before starting school. I have a special room now, hidden in the deepest recesses of my being, that captures the essence of that year. It has been my refuge through a spate of dark and ugly times. I am convinced I could not have survived without it.

Where does it all begin?

I come from a long line of Europeans.  Everyone I know with any certainty is from British Europe.  There is one, however, who we all know is not British at all.  This is the mitochondrial Out-of-Africa Eve described in Stephen Oppenheimer’s book ‘Out of Africa’s Eden’.

The theory goes that a migrant band of fewer than a hundred souls were forced out of its homeland by increasing salinity in the Red Sea.  This would have been around 80 000 years ago.  The mitochondrial evidence seems to indicate that all non-Africans today are genetically connected to a single woman from that group.

If we include Africans, the DNA traces back to a woman from over 150 000 years ago.  This means that, after a good 70 000 years of staying put, a small group finally decided (or was forced to decide) to leave Africa for greener pastures.  I might explore the implications of that someday, but what I would really like to know, is what possessed my father to bring our bit of the line back to Africa.

There can be no doubt that the 80 000 years have taken their genetic toll.  Even dogs seem capable of discerning the physical differences between Europeans and Africans.  It would seem, however, that the differences are all cosmetic.  I don’t believe there is any evidence to prove that either set of racial groups is, other than superficially, genetically poorer than the other.  Culturally, however, we tend to be very different indeed.

I think we often overlook just how powerful a tool our imaginations are.  We forget that everything we know, or believe that we know, is a construct of this mental faculty.  We know nothing of the world other than what arrives as impulses from our varied sensory equipment. 

We have built ourselves external sensors which prove that our built-in sensors are severely limited.  Our eyes detect only a particular range of colours, our ears only certain frequencies, and taste is additionally limited to particular areas of the tongue.

As new-born infants, trying to make sense of the world, we know nothing of these limitations.  The world we build in our imaginations using the data at hand, is the whole world and nothing but the world.  The foundations built here and over the next few years of our lives will be difficult, if not impossible, to change.  We are not only creating the world we will spend our lives living in, we are also creating ourselves and our own personal methodology for relating to that world.

The environment in which we make these cognitive connections is crucial to the process.  More so, in fact, than I believe we are capable of comprehending.  I heard a story I haven’t verified, but true or not, it will illustrate a point. 

The story is about a man who is blind from birth.  As an adult, he agrees to a surgical operation designed to restore his sight.  The operation is a physiological success, but a cognitive disaster.  The blind man has never learned the cognitive processes that make sense of the swirls of colour and light, and is too old to ever do so.  He spends the rest of his life wearing a blindfold to keep out the light he experiences as pain.

Unless we have religious beliefs to the contrary, it should be obvious that we come to consciousness in a sea of seemingly random sensation.  It is initially a cognitive process which allows us to detect the patterns which make our senses sensible, but it is imagination with which we create meaning for those patterns.

We often think of the imagination as a process for the fabrication of previously non-existent material.  In fact, the best we are able to do, however great our imaginations may be, is to reconstruct existing material in new ways.  The process is entirely empirical.  It begins with the cognitive process of transforming seemingly random sensation into an ordered interaction with our environment.

It would initially be much like seeing things through a very powerful pair of binoculars.  We would see more of the detail than of the object the detail makes up.  The precise details, and what those details make up, will influence the cognitive process.  I believe the process begins in the womb, but let’s conjure up a couple of scenarios.

A newborn has left the hospital in its mother’s arms and is tenderly transported to the mansion it will learn to call home.  It is placed in its pristinely white crib with all its silk and satin and is allowed to drift off to sleep to the sound of gentle classical music.  Try looking at this through your sensory binoculars.

Now, without removing the binoculars, turn 180 degrees.  You’ll see another newborn without the need of any such trip.  This child was born at home in a corner of a makeshift, tin-and-lumber, smoke-filled shack.  It is lucky to be alive at all, and lies in a cardboard box filled with newspaper.  Three other families live in the shack and, now that the excitement of the birth is over, they have returned to their squabbling over whose turn it is to fetch water from the dirty stream almost a mile away.

The cognitive processes in each case will probably be similar, but will yield completely different perceptual results.  Allow them to develop in those environments for fifteen years and then swap them around.  Neither one will be comfortable in their new environment.  It will be a long time before either one even begins to understand their new environment.  The longer we leave it before making the switch, the less likely it will be for either to make a successful transition.

The examples are purposefully extreme to illustrate my point, but even mild differences would make a difference.  Take the first scenario, and change the colour of the crib to a bright red and switch the Beethoven to Leonard Cohen.  Now take another look through those binoculars.

Even as we build our cognitive foundation, we are building a perceptual framework.  The perceptual realities of our immediate family and later our peers will hang from this framework like drapes.  As adolescents we’ll begin the process of rearranging these drapes.  We may even attempt removing them altogether, but it will be with limited success.  At best we’ll hide some behind others while rearranging those others in previously unthinkable ways.

We are influenced by the paradigms of our parents who are, in turn influenced by those of their parents.  I come from a long line of Europeans who started out to wander and explore the world 80 000 years ago.  My father wandered us back home where my flesh and blood family has been tending the home fires for 150 000 years.  Other prodigal sons arrived before me bearing, not gifts, but war and enslavement.

Why do we find it so surprising that my local brothers and I seem to have a little trouble understanding one another?  Why am I here at all?  How did I get to be this unwanted, uninvited guest in the country of my birth?  What was my father thinking?

So what is Po-haanism?

It is not at all surprising that so little is known about Po-haanism.  It is easily the least evangelistic of the philosophies and religions I have come across.  Po-haanism, in fact, inherently cautions against such behaviour.

But Po-haanism is not deliberately secretive either.  The essential doctrine is both accessible and simple.  Unfortunately, this doctrine can also be abhorrent to many who have allowed others to do their thinking for them.

So I prefer simply living my own Po-haanism, allowing my conduct to provide the clues I might otherwise distort with an attempt at explanation.  I believe the same would be true for this blog.

My blogs will make no attempt at explaining Po-haanist doctrine.  I would rather spend the time examining my own confusion caused by the seemingly untraversable rift between the psyche of a Po-haanist and that of Africa in general.