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BOOTS, shoes or pants? The quote is usually attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” or to Winston Churchill as “…before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”.
But actually, the Terry Pratchett iteration, “A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on”, is closer to the original, which, according to the Yale Book of Quotations, is: “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” (CH Spurgeon, Gems from Spurgeon, 1859).
Today those lies travel at nano-speeds around the world before Truth’s synapses have a chance to register the thought, “Must put boots on”.
And we have plenty of evidence of the impact those speedy little lies have on us. They are the skeletons that become the stories we tell ourselves: “Stories are the secret reservoir of values. Change the stories that nations and individuals live by, and you change the nation and individual.
"If they tell themselves stories that are lies, future generations will have to live with the consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that confront their own truths, it will free their histories for future flowering,” wrote Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri (he won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road).
Recently, I came across a prime example of skewed values supported by skewed stories. A ‘friend’ of a friend of a friend on Facebook wrote: “There were no such things as informal settlements under the APARTHEID GOVERNMENT (NP). They only started appearing after 1994. Prior to that they lived in townships build [sic] by the NP which included every amenity needed for a village.
"The village I know was Natalspruit (now Katlehong) which also had its own hospital.” She added: “…unless our domestic was lying, Natalspruit had schools, creches, clinics, bus and train stations, police station, play grounds, shops, hospital, houses, tarred roads…”
Sounds cosy, doesn’t it? Like some semi-mythical village just outside London, with a bobby on the beat and Thomas the Tank Engine pulling up at the gleaming little station, and young men in white playing cricket on the village green. No wonder some people yearn for life under the kindly NP government, which created such pleasant village communities for people.
Except, of course, that it’s bunkum, a story which enables the writer to avoid confronting truths about the toxic foundations of her prosperous mid-20th century life. Kathorus (Katlehong, Vosloorus and Thokoza) was a dormitory settlement housing labour for industry, a product of forced removals and the migrant labour policies of both colonial times and the apartheid government, which drew tens of thousands of single men to work on the mines and inhabit the 29 hostels in Kathorus, far from their wives and families.
Yes, there is and was a hospital and some amenities such as sports fields to serve the hordes of mineworkers. As in other apartheid townships, the only shops would have been ‘Indian’ shops or a rare white-run shop under licence – the supermarkets and malls of suburbia would only start to move into townships in the early 2000s.
People had to shop in ‘white’ areas and schlep their shopping home on the train or minibus. And during the 1980s, police stationed in Katlehong probably looked very little like bobbies on the beat and more like something out of a darker imagination – Orwell’s 1984, perhaps?
Historical evidence shows there were informal settlements growing on the outskirts of every city in the country in the 1970s and 1980s, as impoverished people followed the Yellow Brick Road of opportunity from farm to town in a stream that was turbo-charged when the Pass Laws were finally removed in 1986.
Here’s another example of shakily grounded stories we tell ourselves. I can’t give you the exact words because, like so many ephemeral posts on social media, I now can’t find it, but Nathan Geffen of Groundup posted some impressions from a UCT embroiled in FeesMustFall action, in which he noted talking to a young protester. She was indignant that she should be forced to share her campus space with things named after people like “Verwoerd and Molly Blackburn”.
I gasped when I read that: Molly Blackburn was a solid, committed hero of the struggle (the car accident that killed her, some suspect, may have been engineered by the apartheid state) and she was a personal hero of mine – to place her name alongside Verwoerd’s takes one’s breath away (although I do doubt that anything on UCT campus is named for Verwoerd).
Just a simple Google search for ‘Molly Blackburn’ would have turned up this information. Instead, this young woman allowed herself to believe a ‘story’ which had turned up – where? On social media? In a misunderstood text message? Chatter among the protest backbenchers?
Perhaps all of us could make this a New Year’s resolution: to ensure that the stories we tell ourselves are evidence-based. When you hear or read something – especially if it slots sweetly into your existing beliefs and supports your stories – try to find out if it’s true or not. We have such powerful tools for this today – literally in our hands, in our smartphones.
Let’s use them. Let’s tell ourselves stories that confront the truth, no matter how much it hurts or how much it demands of us, and free ourselves for future flowering.
* Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
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