Union Buildings

Union Buildings

Wednesday 11 January 2017

Evening under African skies ...


Tom Wheeler
Meintjeskop Courier Volume 3, 1993

While my wife and I were sitting in the amphitheatre of the Union Buildings the other warm spring evening, sipping a glass of wine and enjoying the Artium Chamber Quartet playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the Martin Luther Kantoeri, a black choir from Pietersburg, singing an amusing action song in which the words "1940" and "bisikili" seemed to dominate, I could not help wondering why it had taken (members of) the Department over sixty-six years to realise the potential of this wonderful facility.

Was it because the cadets of today who arranged the occasion and invited members of the diplomatic corps to attend, are a more assertive and imaginative bunch than we were? Was it because authority in those days was intolerant of anything but the strictly formal and correct and of anything colour-blind? (Would the Chairman of JFSOC - if it had existed in the 1960s - have invited Dr Verwoerd to a Spring Day function on the lawn and would he have responded as elegantly as his successor did in 1990?) Was it because there were less of us and of the whole Department had not turned out, we would not have had an adequate audience? Or was it because women diplomats were unheard of 30 years ago?

I never did come to a conclusion. The atmosphere, the music, the wine, the cheese, the conversation, soon overwhelmed such serious musings.

As we wandered back to our car and the MLK gave encore after encore, filling the amphitheatre with joyful sound, I concluded that generally we live in a better, less regimented world today.


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