Imagine a time without cars, movies or the matchbox. A time when children respected their parents and Saturday evenings were spent playing guitar and dancing with the family. Disagreements were resolved with talk and not fists; swearing was off limits and everyone was truly equal (well, almost).
Imagine a time without cars, movies or the matchbox. A time when children respected their parents and Saturday evenings were spent playing guitar and dancing with the family. Disagreements were resolved with talk and not fists; swearing was off limits and everyone was truly equal (well, almost).
This is a time that 104-year-old John “Johnny” Pikes remembers, before the horrors of apartheid began and his favourite foods were umbona (white corn) and umngqusho (samp and beans).
Pikes was born on 15 December 1908 and he’s the oldest person in Grahamstown. Well, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it until someone comes forward to prove us wrong.
Growing up on a farm in Cradock, young Johnny didn’t go to school but rather worked as a shepherd and says he got his education from the veld. He also worked for his folks as a builder and bricklayer.
With no motor vehicles around at the time, this Afrikaans and Xhosa Christian man used to get around on horseback or by donkey cart.
He kept himself entertained with his dog named Wagter and his “blik kitaar” – a three-stringed, home-made guitar made of an old fish-oil can and a wooden neck.
One of the songs Pikes remembers playing on his kitaar was a traditional tune the coloured and black people sang, about fearing the white man.
“Papa ek is bang, ek is bang, bang vir die goue slang,” he sings. They were afraid the white men would devour them, he says.
He tells us “his” people, coloured people, were here first and “the white man was still under water, under the sea”.
Before apartheid took root, he says white men still called black and coloured men “Outa”, a sign of respect. “We were all one, all God’s children,” he says as a tear runs down his cheek.
Although at some points it visibly hurts him to speak of the past, Pikes tells us how different things were before the white man and modernity took over.
“Birthdays were about getting together and celebrating as a family. Everyone always helped each other and looked after each other."
“People back then were like a swarm of bees – they didn’t kill each other, they worked together and lived like a community,” Pike says.
He also gives us a piece of his mind about the young women of today.
“Girls are having children before their breasts are even properly formed and now the girls are chasing after the boys. When they want you, they want you,” he says with mischievous wink.
There was only one woman in his life, Pikes says, his wife Anna who he was married to for 21 years before she passed away here in Grahamstown.
Pikes has eight children, all living nearby, who sometimes visit him at the McKaiser Old Age Home in Currie Street. All he wishes for is to go back to the days and the old ways he so fondly remembers.
