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| Foreign Minister Eric Louw |
It was August 1956. Those of us who had been on Parliamentary duty at the Cape were back in Pretoria, and I had just been given news of my posting to London as a Second Secretary, when I was called in by the then Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bob Jones, for a "special assignment". With me was Derick de Villiers, then in charge of the Department's Africa Section; but he was to leave his Africa work, and I my Economic Section temporarily, both to work full-time on the logistics of the State Visit of the President of Portugal, who was to be in South Africa for three days at the beginning of September. He would be spending a much longer time than this in Mozambique, and our directive (privately) was to ensure that anything the Mozambicans did, we would do better!
Derick took on the responsibility for the visit as a whole, during which he would be attached to the Portuguese party as a sort of civilian aide-de-camp along with the two uniformed officers similarly attached. I was to take on the State Banquet, everything from sorting out the guest list and seating-plan (for 600) to getting the menu correct in three languages and having adequate cooking facilities installed in Pretoria's City Hall. There was of course music, with an orchestra conducted by Edgar Cree, and one of the first completed details was the music programme, decided upon in consultation with Paul Bothma of the SABC, mainly over the telephone between Pretoria and Johannesburg.
This was submitted to the Foreign Minister, the late Mr Eric Louw, and some days passed before he found time to have a look at it. When he did, he gave it his somewhat reluctant approval, suggesting that it should include rather more music of a typically South African character. A Ministerial suggestion is a command to a Second Secretary, so something had to be done, and at once, since by this time, the eating-and-drinking part of the menu had also been approved, and the whole thing, with the music programme as its last page, had to be sent without delay to the Government Printer.
I got hold of Mr Bothma on the phone once more, and he promised to make some suitable changes and ring me back. It was no great problem, and within twenty minutes, he had telephoned again with his proposals: to eliminate two of the original light-classical items, and replace one with a selection of popular South African tunes, the other with the traditional "Vat jou goed en trek, Ferreira".
I thanked him, wrote in the changes, and drove straight down town to reach the Government Printer at literally the last possible moment before he completed setting-up he menu as a whole. It was already the last week before the visit, and I had so many more details still to finalise.
The guest lists and seating-plans came back from the printer's on the Thursday, to be gone through with the utmost care to ensure that no one was omitted or wrongly placed, and with them the 600-odd menus neatly and nicely printed. In fact, I was so proud of the finished product that I sent one specimen through to the Minister's office in the afternoon for him to have an advance look at.
Soon after he had come in to the office at eight on Friday morning, Derick de Villiers was summoned by the Minister, and what transpired he described in more or less the following terms. Mr Louw glared at him across his desk and asked if he was responsible for all the arrangements for the presidential visit. Derick said he was. Did that include the banquet arrangements, including the menu? It did. And who then had actually drawn up the programme of music? Derick explained that the items had been selected in consultation with the SABC - upon which the Minister told his secretary to "Get me Gideon Roos", and while waiting for the call to come through, shot Derick to ribbons with a barrage of harsh language in which "incompetence" and "idiocy" rubbed shoulders with "subversion" and "sabotage".
Having not even seen the menu or music programme at that stage, Derick simply sat bemused, and then listened as the deep voice over the phone from Johannesburg acknowledged that, yes, it was Gideon Roos, and yes, the SABC had been glad to cooperate with the music programme - only to be overwhelmed in mid-flow by the same fire of withering words. He too had no idea what the trouble was all about, how he was supposed to have sabotaged Portuguese-South African relations; but listening in, Derick finally got the message: in studying the menu at his leisure at home, the one example I had so proudly sent him, Mr Louw had noticed the inclusion of "Vat jou goed en trek Ferreira" (“Take your stuff and buzz off, Ferreira”)- and realised that the presidential party included no less than four members with that name!
Having so spectacularly "blown his top", the Minister's instructions were simple: eliminate that item; but how to do so was now my problem. My first desperate call was to the Government Printer, only to learn that there was nothing that could be done there - they were fully occupied that day, they did not work on Saturdays and Monday (the day of the Banquet itself) was Settlers Day, so they would be closed for the public holiday too.
A few other possibilities were considered and rejected, and in the end, five Cadets in the Department and I, each armed with a bottle of black ink and a thick pen, spent a large part of the Saturday morning literally "eliminating" the offending musical item and trying not to make too much of a mess of the menu in the process.
In their "amended" form the menus were in place in front of all the guests when they sat down in all their finery at the City Hall on Monday night. There was a longish wait before the presidential party eventually came into the main hall on cue, to a specially-written fanfare, a wait spent in the usual desultory conversation over a glass of sherry, as the guests found who their companions at table
were or recognised their friends.
But the obvious and most persistent topic was naturally the thick black line through an item on the music programme, with all sorts of theories being aired about the reason, and people holding the print up to the light to try and see what had been obliterated.
It continued to be a talking point throughout the meal, and one guest commented afterwards that she had found it odd how often her companion at table kept drawing her attention to the fact that the orchestra were only now playing such-and-such a number, so that it was obvious that the programme as printed would have been much too long and had simply had to be shortened.
The lady happened to be Derick de Villiers's mother-in-law, who of course had no knowledge then of the drama; but her neighbour certainly did - he was Gideon Roos, doing more than he needed to cover up. The actual "cover up" had not been totally effective and there were undoubtedly some menus on which "Vat jou goed en trek Ferreira" could have been made out by a searching eye. The identity of the missing number did in fact become known to representatives of the press too. But they and everyone else who found out were good enough to keep quiet and spare our embarrassment, and it was ten days or more later, when the highly successful visit was safely over and done with before I saw in an Afrikaans newspaper column a good-humoured reference to the terrible gaffe that someone had made and which had necessitated so drastic a last-minute rescue effort. Whether any of the visiting Portuguese would have noticed and taken offence, to the detriment of our relations with Portugal, I do not know; but it does seem that even in its use so many years after first becoming known, "Vat jou goed en trek Ferreira" could not be entirely free of controversy.
Published in the Meintjeskop Courier 1/1996
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