When I was 16 - 1981, Johannesburg

When I was 16, it was 1981 in Johannesburg. I was in my 7th school – My Daddy was a traveling man – and I was missing the sea badly. I think I always will.

FASHION:
That year, and for awhile afterwards, I wore Doc Martens lookalikes with white anglaise flowing dresses. Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone was due to arrive and complete my wardrobe with a love of fish nets and religious warding symbols as jewellery; and everyone was either ripping or tapering their jeans, and wearing only one earring. Cacharel’s ‘Anaïs Anaïs’ created in me an enduring passion for the smell of lilies and roses. Synchronously Bette Midler was singing The Rose, and Umberto Eco publishes The Name of the Rose (in my opinion, his best book).

FILM:
Brooke Shields had just destroyed her career in Blue Lagoon, and was quickly joined by Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu. Richard Gere’s career was being launched with American Gigolo; as was Mel Gibson’s in Mad Max. A Cult fetish with blood seeping out of lifts was being created by Stanley Kubrick, and Jack Nicholson, in The Shining. Star Wars had gone Oedipal in the previous year with the Darth Vader’s right hand enemy turning out to be his own son. Thereafter Michael Jackson wore a white glove on his right hand, & Harrison Ford had to escape to Raid the Lost Ark with Steven Spielberg. Christopher Reeve was still flying (although not as stylishly as Flash Gordon to the strains of Freddie Mercury), & Sir Roger Moore was still James Bond. Chariots of Fire, was about to launch Vangelis’s music into Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner version of Philip K. Dick’s novel, with Harrison Ford; in which Rutger Hauer’s improvised death speech would have us all forever after searching for the Tannhäuser gate.

FANTASY:
Douglas Adams was in the middle of Hitchhiking Across the Universe, & Terry Pratchett was about to create the Discworld to take over when he left off. I was doing the first of many J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien readings.
Marion Zimmer Bradley Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffery, Ursula K. Le Guin & David Eddings were doing fantasy for us; and L. Ron Hubbard was taking a momentary break from cult hell to write Battlefield Earth - much to my own and (apparently) John Travolta’s enjoyment.

FAR AWAY:
In world news, Mark Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, after being convicted of murdering John Lennon – someone I had not known about before he was murdered. A singing duo: Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel were also made known to me for the first time by their one-off reunion concert in Central Park for approximately half a million people.
Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales got married and the whole of SA stopped to watch them do it!

AIDS was ‘discovered’ that year, making us the last teenagers to grow to sexual maturity outside its shadow.
The first Space Shuttle Columbia was launched.
Alvin Toffler published The Third Wave, predicting a post-industrial Information Age to come, and as I was not even allowed to write my final Maths exam with a calculator yet, and floppy discs on PCs with Pegasus mail had yet to happen – I cannot know how prescient a prophet he really was!

CLOSER:
Locally, in SA, a little film about the noble savage busmen in the Kalahari being started on the road to a capitalist mentality by having a coke bottle littered from a passing plane, - called The Gods Must be Crazy, made it big!
Andre Brink’s, A Dry White Season was banned, and J. M. Coetzee wrote Waiting for the Barbarians – which became famous once he’d received a Nobel Prize for literature. I could not finish it because of the violence.

The ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, originally formed by Albert Luthuli and Rolihlahla Mandela (both later to receive the Nobel Peace Prize!) began a campaign of terror on white South African civilians – and bombs became something all school children knew how to identify, because they started to go off in public all around us.

South African troops invaded Angola. All white males were conscripted for two years into the army after they left school, and so my brothers & my boyfriend all disappeared out of our lives into a war for 2 years. The lucky ones did not go to Angola. Dan Heymen wrote the lyrics for the anti-apartheid freedom song, Weeping, for all of us - as a protest against being conscripted into patrolling the black townships. He & Bright Blue would have a worldwide hit with it – but not yet.

Peter Gabriel sang Biko in protest against the killing of apartheid activist Steve Biko in a Port Elizabeth jail.

AT MY FEET:
But, growing up white in SA meant being protected from a lot of this. My parents’ favourite Neil Diamond’s Jazz Singer showed us how insipid Western jazz was by comparison to local jazz, but still there was Billy Joel’s “I may be Crazy’, AND THEN CAME ‘The Boss’ with his “Hungry Heart” & now you can play Bruce Springsteen at my funeral as the iconical image of my youth.

Pink Floyd's ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ was banned because the government feared that it might be used as a song of liberty by black school children. (Who rioted anyway,) & the song went underground in SA & really turned out to be more of an awful foreshadowing of Columbine.
Queen was at its zenith, and our favourite school war cry was “We will; we will ROCK YOU.. ba ba boom; ba ba boom…” And in that limbo moment between childhood and adulthood in a country where, despite the bombs; we white kids were not yet aware that a civil war had begun that would change everything we knew; we still worked out on our own that if everybody in the school hall stamped their feet at the same time; the foundations could be made to move!

Wow, Sharon, you get the trophy for Best Write-Up! I can't imagine how much time you spent on this. Thank you so much for sponsoring such an evocative trip in the Way Back Machine, it was wonderful!

I've always wondered, btw, how white SA citizens felt about your total cultural and political upheaval... thanks for the glimpses through your eyes.

Ahh, thank you for the compliments, Jennifer

I love the song Biko. I listen to another version of it however. I'll need to check my iTunes momentarily. Lovely write up Sharon!

Oh, Hatte, it breaks my heart to listen to it, still.

Sharon amazing all the things you added. Gave so much information and also what is in common. Felt like when I went in late 80's to Cry Freedom with my friend Sandra and we went ton the movie a lot and always at the end of the film talked and talked and talked en when we saw Cry Freedom we were totally silent. And could not talk about it for days. Then we felt for the first time a glimps about S.A. We knew things were not completely ignorant but we could not feel it. And then we felt it like lightning hit us. But I knew (too) little about SA anyway and 2 years back we had a Dutch author who made a tv program of SA (he stayed there many years ago) and got back to visit friends, black friends, white friends and was very open minded) and he let us see al sides of SA and that was an eyeopener too. and than I realized living far away its easy to have an opinion, but everybody tries to have a live.