I started teaching in 1959 in a primary school and worked my way up to lecturer in a teacher-training college. My late wife and I also reared three children, seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
This preamble should establish my claim that I have been involved with children all of my life, counting in family, siblings, friends and neighbours.
My reason for starting this way is the laceration of my psyche when I saw a photograph of a mass funeral for the burial of young people who had died mysteriously at a tavern. It crossed my mind that an adult’s involvement with a child is much more than feeding and clothing.
The responsibility reaches across vast areas of involvement and commitment, which include scenarios which we cannot even begin to anticipate. At birth, the crucial umbilicus is severed, and the child floats freely in a foreign world without any instruction or guidance as to what is or what is still to be. No manual, no Google, no internet, no encyclopaedia.
All that the child can be sure of is the tacit acceptance that someone will care for him. There is a poignant saying that reminds us that when we are born, someone will be there to wash us. And when we die, someone will be there to wash us again, one last time. Everything in between is as fickle as Russian roulette, or an experience that has joy unbound.
Twenty-one young people died in a tavern, one as young as 13 years old. The tavern was declared “the scene of a crime” after the unfortunate events. Isn’t it more accurate to say that the tavern was a scene of a crime before anyone died?
Why was there a protracted investigation and speculation about the absence of the owner when this tragedy occurred? And, finally, after working through such a shattering event, we, the parents of this country were shown pictures of the coffins of these young warriors lined up to be placed in a mass grave.
I do not wish to speculate or pontificate on this sad event. It is not grist to my mill as a columnist. I just wish to do my duty and ask some questions, not as an investigative journalist (which I am not), but as a parent who has a platform from which to launch notions that have the health and well-being of every citizen of this country as a primary imperative.
The Holy Qur’an gives a very clear indication regarding the young. The highest place in Jannah is for those who speak truth to children. The Christian Bible gives a clear injunction for us to lead the children to Christ, for “of such is the kingdom of Heaven”.
I have no doubt that other faith-biases have strict instructions about the welfare and care of young people who seem to come from nowhere and when they leave, leave massive gaps in our lives.
In a novel I read, a mother sees terrorists blow up children with a deliberately-placed bomb. Her words will remain with me for the rest of my life. She writes an open letter to the killer, stating with passion, which only a mother can muster: “You and your bombs leave boy-sized holes in the fabric of our lives.”
That is what I am talking about. It is enough that we as adults have neglected, abdicated or denied our duty to the young, leaving them from terror-struck youngsters dodging bullets in the 1970s to “statues (and fees and everything in-between) must fall”, to the burning questions asked by millennials of old fogies like me: What did you do – or neglected to do – that has given us this mess we have inherited called our world?
* Literally Yours is a weekly column from Cape Argus reader Alex Tabisher. He can be contacted on email by [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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