All sorts of information at many times comes floating into, or is thrown back into, the Playpen, where Maeder Osler is re-learning the basics on communications in a digital age. The latest example is of a handwritten cursive 7 lines headed VISITORS penned by Morton W Barnes- Webb, the farm manager for a triumverate of rand lords . They were messrs Rhodes, Beit, Bailley (RBB), a syndicate which purchased some 45 farms in the nuwe Hantam grassy karoo area of Colesberg district, in the very early 1900’s. That was after their massive and risky investments in diamond and then gold minings, before the ending of the Anglo-Boer war, and before the 1910 colonial unification of (white) South Africa.

VISITORS - DISTINGUISHED VISITORS’ TO THE NUWE HANTAM

Here is what Morton-Barnes handwrote in the short paragraph in his memoir, headed:

This somehow reminds me now, of Sir Abe Bailey’s farm manager, Morton Barnes-Webb’s hand scripted note on ‘VISITORS’, as pictured above.

When I tried my short-lived revived rugby skills at the University of Oxford, during a refuge year pursuing a diploma in education, around 1967, it was exciting to get a handwritten invitation to a rugby practice, and the odd match even, in handwritten postcard(s) slipped into the University College post-box in the students’ foyer!

Just to emphasise the name dropping effect of the visitors selected for mention by the farm manager, this is the version typed by the syndicate manager’s daughter-in- law, the late Marie Barnes-Webb. (She was my neighbour Peter Barnes-Webb’s lively mother, and later a local Colesberg amateur historian when I farmed in the area – on one of the few farms which resisted the RBB buyouts in the early 1900’s). Here is the half dozen or so names, dropped in, for us to checkout.

I must immediately admit to a considerable confusion, as befits my occasional living in a playpen probably, when I dare to try to work out who is who and what is what, let alone when is where, in the list of distinguished visitors above.

Fortunately I am consoled somewhat by the qualifying words ‘amongst them’. These let me off the hook of having to work out British peerage and other landed governances of a once-empire. Puzzles like that should be forwarded to the next stage of growing up, perhaps to the Sandpits of different levels , not excluding codes of AI’s.

As far as visitors can go, seen from today, the namedrop selections , can seem to be a rather curt recognition , but nevertheless can speak volumes. The distinguished visitors says not very much, but quite a lot, at the same time. In jounro terms, in a digital age, the 5W’s we advocate are only minimally covered – the WHO’s, the WHAT’s, and a glance at the WHERE’s, a hint of the WHEN’s, and amongst all that , the shadows and shades of some WHY’s?

(You are cordially invited, if you so wish, to test out my theory above, on the world wide web by reference to : Dukes and Earls and a Governor General at the time, Selborne and his wife, Suffolk, Gladstone, Winchester, and a ‘Marquis De Hautford (French) – great friend of Edward V11 and Duke of Windsor’.)

BEATING A DRUM …

Beating a drum – no joke intended for the late distinguished Jim Bailley - even by African standards too, this seems to be a pitifully and impossibly sparse list of visitors, even by criteria of extensive karoo farms, and especially measured against manager Barnes Webb’s earlier reference to ‘many fascinating chats with old timers’. Even so, these few visitors can be of interest in themselves, once you can work out who is who is what, when and where - especially in the context of the very long and enduring mythologies and traditions about the importance of custom and ethics and politeness on any and all visitors in our human quests, of wise homo sapiens and of story telling homo narrans.

TEMPTATIONS FOR A SANDPIT

(I am tempted to add a more sobering note in the light of the elaborate RSA current governance structures of traditional leaders, let alone this week’s apparently self-proclaimed King from Nigeria, claiming special rights in the newly named East London city, as KuGompo city? No April fool’s jokes intended).

I happen to like the new name, inter alia, as being more accurate.