A Biographical Interlude

Tell me Ralph, how did you end up in Africa working down a mine? How did a middle class boy from southeast Kent, of distinctly average intelligence, end up in exotic places smashing rocks, and getting paid to do it?

Glad you asked. See.. I was lucky. Somewhere, sometime back in the 1980s there was a golden horseshoe flying about with my name written on it.

I graduated from a second-rate college which had a first-rate geology program in June 198…8…oh alright, if you must know, 1984. To my surprise, I landed a decent degree which gave me a few more career options than I might otherwise have had.

It’s Sporty From Brussels

But the hard fact remained, other than a few weeks geophysical work with the British Geological Survey*, I was an inexperienced geologist who knew bugger all about his chosen vocation. The career scrap heap beckoned one short month after graduation.

(*About 20 years ago, I tried to find the website of the British Geological Survey [the BGS] one day at work, only to land on a home page which showed a well muscled and tanned young man, racily clad in lunchbox hugging tight black speedos, diving into an open-air pool. Yes, the BGS.org web address is in fact owned by the Brussels Gay Sports organization. Who knew? Luckily nobody in HR was checking my web surfing history.)

There’s Better Ways to Spend 35 Quid

In a moment of financial frustration -I think I was getting £35 a week on the dole- I decided to buy a train ticket to London. I figured it was worth the fiver I’d spend on a day return from Broadstairs to London to go and knock on mining company doors. That would solve the problem – job offers would flood in and I’d be rich. Well, richer than thirty five quid a week, which wasn’t that hard.

My first port of call was the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square. Politically naive, I walked past the anti apartheid campaigners, went through the metal detector and made my way to the information desk.

I’m looking for a list of South African mining companies with offices in London. Says I.

Here you go. Said a nice-looking woman from behind the glass screen, handing me a large piece of paper with dozens of names on it.

Fuck me I said. Thanks.

An hour later I was trying to blag my way into the offices of Charter Consolidated (aka The Anglo American Corporation of South Africa) in Holborn. I tried really hard to get in, but the security guard was on to me, and was having none of it.

Can I see the human resources office please?

No. Sorry mate. You can’t come in. We’re not hiring.

But..How do you know? They might be?

No. Bugger off you oink.

Goodbye Mining, Hello Waitrose!

Disheartened, I was heading out the door contemplating a desperate future as a “replenishment associate” in grocery retail, when a man in a pin-stripe suit with an important looking briefcase asked me what I wanted at Charter Consolidated. I told him my story. Geologist blah blah… work blah blah…

To my amazement he invited me in for an interview, there and then. Sneering idiotically at the security guard, I followed him into the grandest offices I’d ever seen. Mind you, seeing as my dad worked in a textile dye house full of steam and pipes, I didn’t have much to compare it with so a portaloo would’ve look grand to me.

I did well in the interview because a month later I was on a plane to Johannesburg, convinced that I had life’s golden horseshoe stuffed up my arse.

Up Up And Away

My innate rectal luckiness was confirmed for me when Anglo sent me a business class ticket to Jo’burg. I’d never actually been on a plane before and would’ve been happy sitting on the toilet for 12 hours breathing in that blue toilet bowl cleaner, but no- my seat was upstairs, on the fabulously amazing bubble deck of the 747.

And… hell’s bells- there was an actual bar there, with a bunch of large South African businessmen standing around drinking martinis and smoking cigars. Yup. I’d arrived. I obviously had a gilded future ahead of me as a captain of the extractive industries.

Taking The Long Way Round

Back then, South African Airways couldn’t fly over mainland Africa because of anti-apartheid sanctions. Most African countries simply wouldn’t allow them to enter their airspace. That meant flying to Jo’burg the long way round – over the South Atlantic, down around the bulge of west Africa, adding a few hours to the trip. It also meant a refueling stop along the way in the Cape Verde Islands; a stop that became an important contributor to the island economy.

To be honest, my memory of the fine details of the flight is a little hazy. I was still in a state of euphoria at travelling so far from home. I was also getting steadily pickled on excellent South African wines and cognac. My newfound bubble friends had me wide-eyed with their Boys Own stories of Africa, gold mining and all the exciting shit I’d missed out on during my English grammar school up bringing.

I Really Was Incredibly Drunk

I think was 2 or 3am local time when we landed on the main island and it was hot as hell. I’d never felt heat like it in my temperate hometown.

We were poured off the 747, down a dangerously old mobile staircase onto the runway. In the dark, we followed a badly marked path into the terminal where another well-stocked bar winked at me seductively. The terminal was lifted piecemeal from from a Graham Greene book, and I swear to this day it was made of bamboo canes and old rope, with spinning fans down the middle of the ceiling. But that must be me imagining things.

The plane was being refueled and sprayed down with clouds of some nasty insecticide stuff by sullen, overall-clad technicians with plastic tanks on their backs.

The Russians Are Coming

Strung across the middle of the lounge area was a rope cordon, one of those sticky red velvet ropes that keep the punters in line outside nightclubs. Behind it, at the other end of the lounge, was a large group of motley looking Europeans. Most of them were chain smoking, and clutched plastic carrier bags and brightly coloured carryalls. They were eating sliced dark bread, massive sausages and peeling oranges that they grabbed out of the carrier bags. Despite my wine haze, I couldn’t help noticing the slightly amateurish-looking armed guards, clutching ancient rifles, who prevented us from going past the rope.

Who are they? I asked one of my red-cheeked, tobacco-infused worldly friends, while staring like a moron at the strangers.

Russians he replied with barely suppressed hostility.

Really? Wow, Russians eh? Hoo-wee. Gosh.

I’m An Idiot

He looked at me with obvious pity in his eyes– somewhere in rural England a village was missing its idiot.

But I couldn’t help it. I’d never seen a Russian before. As far as I knew, we didn’t have them in Broadstairs. If we did have them, they’d have to be spies, intent on helping Moscow win the coming nuclear war, and if they got caught the British government would shoot them or trade them for British spies who’d been snared in the east because that’s how it worked on TV with George Smiley, wasn’t it?

In fact, they were Russian soldiers, technicians and workers – on their way to Angola to reinforce the pro-Communist forces who were fighting a nasty bush war against the South African regime which, we found out a few years later, wasn’t going so well for Pretoria. Funny enough none of that got reported in the South African press, other than the odd South African victory.

Aeroflot was one of the only other airlines to stop in the Cape Verde islands. Our nocturnal stand off was repeated a couple of times a week when the scheduled flights landed a few minutes apart.

There weren’t many opportunities for 2 of the sides in the Cold War to look each other in the eye, but this was definitely one of them. The Russians glared at us, hostility radiating from them, while some of the rougher looking South Africans returned the compliment with extras. Sixty minutes later we were ushered back on to the plane, leaving Boris and the other sons of Lenin to their oranges and cheap cigarettes.

Into Africa

Hours later, we landed at Jan Smuts airport in Jo’burg and I stepped, hungover, onto African soil for the first time.

I was hypnotized. It still stands out as one of the truly life changing moments I’ve experienced, ranking up there with my first kiss (Amanda, I believe), my first proper pork sausage (Rooks The Butcher), and The Big Lebowski.

I was met by someone from the HR department. I think he could tell from my er… demeanour and odour, that it had been a long and arduous flight with abundant lubrication. A big athletic man (no, not from Brussels), he’d never worked down a mine, but boy, he knew how to fill in the requisite HR forms in head office the next day. When I thanked him for the business class seat his eyes narrowed, he frowned, and muttered Bloody idiots in Holborn, not again…

Hotel Motel Holiday Inn

He dropped me off at the Holiday Inn in downtown Jo’burg. I was still in in sensory overload -one amazing thing after another had happened- and in a state of mild shock. So, I did what the rules required; I buried the thousand questions I had till the next day and went to the bar for more food and wine.

One cursory look at the menu and my mental fuses finally blew. Fuck me does that really say “Springbok Steak in a Marula & wine sauce”? I hadn’t a clue what a Marula was but the fact that you could make a sauce from it and pour it over a dead springbok was encouraging.

It took me all of 3 seconds to order it, along with a stupidly cheap bottle of fine Cape red which I charged to the company account. I spent the next 2 hours sat at my window table watching as an African summer thunderstorm boomed and crashed around me, silhouetting the Jo’burg skyline with the most intense lightening I’d ever seen.

The End Of the Beginning

Two days later a driver dropped me off at the mine workers’ Single Men’s Hostel in the grubby little mining town of Orkney, 100 miles south of Jo’burg. I didn’t go home for two and a half years. It was goodbye transient-luxury hello back-to-reality.

And that’s how I started in the mining business. There was only one attempted murder at the hostel during my 3 months there.

Don’t Forget

We all have our “career start” stories. What’s yours? If you have a good one, I’d love to hear it via the comments below. Don’t forget to subscribe to urbancrows.com via the small town subscription box at the top of my home page. I’ll be sure to mail you a box of rotten marula fruit as a nice thank you.

1980s South Africa was an incredibly racist place, the definition of legally institutionalized racism, and that’s what eventually drove me away from that gorgeous, mystical place. Ultimately, there’s no place in civil society for racism -casual or institutional- and we all need to stand up to it when we come across it.

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