22. Pretoria, 1993 - Love at first word
In which Eleanor falls in love.
Sue jumping in with a quick note:
60% of you said you are getting into this serial format thing.
And 30% of you wanted the whole book now.
The wonderful thing is, we can do both! The full ebook is now available here.
Eleanor's bored. Life as a diplomat is…disappointing. So she jumps at a new opportunity. 
Eleanor
I’ve spent four months on the Ops Desk, my first rotation in the Department. And I’m so done with it. I wish I could rotate off of it already. But, I still have another two months to go.
The Operations Center is on the second floor of the Union Buildings, but you would never know it. It’s a cavernous open plan room, with desks for six staff, well spaced out. But all the windows are covered over, blacked out and hung with heavy floor to ceiling drapes so that there is no natural light in the room at all. The walls and curtains are cream colored, the carpet a dull beige—seemingly an attempt to make the cave feel less cavern-like. The blandness is oppressive. Even through the low hiss of air conditioning the air always feels deathly still and stultifying.
Against the far wall from the entrance sits the bank of computers and telex machines. Each is dedicated to one of the wire feeds—AFP, Reuters, AP, SAPA—and another is for incoming telexes from South Africa’s diplomatic missions all over the world. I’m on the day shift with Sizwe Magubane and two others. We’re all cadets, at various points of our foreign service training. I’m the most junior member of the group, and Sizwe is a few months ahead of me. We do a lot of the same classes together, and we’re both aiming to sit our Foreign Service exams at the end of next year. The exams only happen once a year, and we'll both be eligible by then if we get all our required courses completed in time.
Roger is the senior staffer who keeps an eye on us in the cave, while Dawie, the Ops Center manager, has an office with actual daylight outside of the Ops Center.
We all like Roger.
We all detest Dawie.
Roger is genial, patient and friendly. His round form spills out of his suspenders. His thick beard almost hides his smile, but his eyes are usually sparkling with humor behind his horn rim glasses. He has an uncanny sense of knowing which of the news stories are the important ones and he patiently teaches us how to work the machines.
Dawie is Bean to Roger’s Bunce: tall, lean, wiry, without an ounce of humor or patience. Rumor has it he’s been passed over for postings multiple times. Well, at least that would explain his sour mood. He supposedly marks the important stories to be summarized for the morning and afternoon briefings. In reality he stalks in twice a day, confers with Roger, stalks out and that is all we ever see of him. If he deigns to notice us cadets at all, he tips his head back and looks down his nose at us, as if we’re something rancid and distasteful.
Our jobs are to summarize the major news stories, at home and abroad, for the twice daily briefings that go to the Minister, Deputy Minister, Director General, Deputy Director General and Chief Directors. And, now also to a group of African National Congress (ANC) officers—who are likely soon to be our bosses. Including ANC leadership on the briefings had made Dawie almost apoplectic. Sizwe had made us all laugh when he’d called Dawie an endangered species: a verkrampte1 white male Afrikaner and die-hard National Party supporter. Roger had heard the slight but had kept silent. He, like Dawie and unlike the rest of us cadets, is also “pre-1990” in the Department: he joined before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. But his sympathies are clearly for the new South Africa that is in the final stages of being hammered out at the negotiating table.
Dawie and Roger wage a silent war over the briefings. Dawie pushes stories with a Nationalist angle, Roger quietly substitutes stories from the independent South African press, or with an internationalist, impartial angle. With the briefings also going to the ANC, Roger’s briefings have started to get positive reviews, which infuriates Dawie, but there is nothing he can do. The writing is on the wall: change is coming fast to the Department. People like Sizwe have already been placed, and we’re starting to absorb some officers from the TBVC2 states as well.
Supposedly the Ops Center is the nerve center of the Department.
Mostly it’s as boring as all hell.
But I have a glimmer of hope now. Last Thursday, when Sizwe came back from French class, he told us that the Department was starting up a new language program—Arabic—and that they were looking for an initial cohort. That very afternoon both Sizwe and I submitted our names, and I heard this morning from Francois du Plessis, head of the Levant3 desk, that we’re both in. I’m doing such a happy dance.
And it’s not just because of all the buzz in the Department about all the new missions that are going to start opening up post the elections, and how one of the big areas is going to be the Middle East. There’s something about Arabic itself that beckons me. Probably way too much romanticizing from Lawrence of Arabia and such like, but the Orient…the Orient…! Its mystery feels beguiling.
I wonder what studying Arabic will be like?
Yup, let me just say it. I am officially in love with the Arabic language.
Our instructor, Thom Poole, is as British as they come, yet his love of the language is infectious and I’m officially hooked. Given how junior I am I had fully expected not to get a spot. But it turns out that apparently it’s only a relatively small group of us who actually want to learn Arabic. There’s me, Sizwe of course, Francois du Plessis, Imaad Musa—who’s ANC and newly arrived back from exile in London, and a few others.
It’s like I’ve entered a whole new world. There’s the utter foreignness of it. And it’s not just about the alphabet. The entire grammatical structure of the language is different. You can speak in entire, perfectly intelligible sentences and not use verbs. Which I understand why given the complexity of the verbal noun forms. Not one—but ten—ten!—forms for each root word, each having an entirely different meaning. But all deriving off the three letter root. Thom says we get the guttural consonants more easily than the Brits he usually teaches. Apparently Afrikaans has its uses when you’re trying to get the hard Arabic consonants.
There’s a logic to Arabic that fascinates me. English is so idiosyncratic. Arabic feels like math—orderly, logical, clear, consistent. And yet it also feels mysterious, romantic. Like it has a love affair with place, with the sand and water, with the desert and distances and wide open skies. Take ahlan wa sahlan. Which in English just gets translated to “Welcome”, or “Hello”. But its real meaning is so much richer than that. Thom explained it to us and I was entranced.
Ahl—the root word—conveys family, people, belonging, being part of something.
Shl—the root word—conveys easy, simple, less toilsome. And is also the root word for beach, shore, coast. How delicious! That to the Arabic speaking world the coast is a place of ease and simplicity.
So ahlan wa sahlan—you are among your people, you belong here, this a place of ease and simplicity, your presence is not a burden and your visit is simple. And that just gets translated to welcome?
I’m entranced.
Afrikaans, literally translated as “narrow, cramped” but more broadly meaning Afrikaner Nationalists who opposed moving away from apartheid.
Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei, also called Bantustans—the supposedly independent black states declared by South Africa within its borders. They were just a manifestation of apartheid and by design could not function as fully independent states. They were never recognized as legitimate by the ANC or the international community.
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel