Edith Piaf sang about having no regrets, while Frank Sinatra crooned that he had too few too mention. I think both lied as their lips moved.
We all have regrets and my one over-riding lament is that I regret too many things that are not worth regretting. In fact I go colder over my more stupid actions than I do over my infinitely more damaging ones.
Indeed, I think for most of us, our regrets are pretty minor, but it seems that it’s the little ones that bother us most.
So okay, I’ve made some serious mistakes in my newspaper reporting career – thankfully, none that have got me into a court room (so far, touch wood) and I’ve made some terrible mistakes with women (who no doubt say exactly the same about me), but I happily chalk that down to the university of life. I’ve also made some wayward decisions in the way I treat friends and family and casually debit that to experience even as I repeat them.
Yet one of the biggest regrets I have is so minor that it would not register a blimp on the Richter scale of existence. But even today, it still haunts me.
It happened during my matric year at school in Johannesburg, when I didn’t jet home for the holidays as I was selected to go on a rugby tour of the Eastern Cape.
I was staying with a friend who lived in Bryanston, in those days a suburb slap on the northern border of Johannesburg and consisting of either farmland or huge mansions.
Nowadays, the far border of Jo’burg is Pretoria, but in 1970 it was still quite a trek along the then-called Jan Smuts Highway to the north of the city.
Every morning we had a three hour rugby session at school, after which I would hitchhike back to my friend’s house. That also dates me, as few people hitch in South Africa today. It’s far too dangerous, yet in those more innocent times, it was my main form of transport.
Anyway, it was one of those dreaded slow days when no cars were stopping and eventually a motorbike pulled up. The driver was a Zulu guy doing pharmaceutical deliveries on a tired 125cc Yamaha and told me to hop on.
I did, and we sped down the motorway, me hanging onto him with one hand and my seat with the other. It must have been an unusual sight back then, a black man and a white youth on a motorbike, as 1970 was the apex of the apartheid era, soon after Sharpeville and six years before the Soweto uprisings.
Cool runnings
I thought it was cool. We couldn’t chat much as the noise from his battered thumper was too much, but he did say that he came from Msinga. My new-found friend dropped me off right outside the house where I was staying and I decided that in the spirit of universal brotherhood, I would speak his language.
‘Thanks ‘mfana,” I said.
He looked at me for a brief moment, face creased in disappointment. Then he shook his head and sped off.
I wondered about it for years. Why had he been so saddened?
It was only when I actually came to live in Zululand that I realised I had mistakenly said ‘thanks boy’ and should instead have said ‘mfo – the equivalent of ‘bro’ or ‘bru’.
In other words, I as a 17-year-old pimply kid had called a grown man who had gone out of his way to do me a favour ‘boy’, the most paternalistic word in South African idiom. In my defence, at the time I thought ‘mfana meant ‘dude’.
I wished I could retract it, but I’m pretty sure my friend of that day is now dead. I really hope not – I hope he’s back in Msinga playing with his great-grandchildren in the sun.
So somewhat belatedly, I now say, ‘ngiyabonga ’mfo’ for that kindness shown in days of hate. And hopefully, the regret will go.
