Cool river? Cool guy! A tribute to Steve

The hall was full of what Archbishop Tutu would have called, the rainbow people of God. The air was filled with pain mixed with faith mixed with gratitude mixed with extraordinary hope. There was deep mourning and much open weeping. Occasionally, the sombre mood was punctuated with brief nervous bouts of defiant laughter. Spirit-lifting songs, heartfelt prayers, moving and at points, humorous tributes from friends, colleagues, students and family — all combined to turn the Anglican Cathedral into a place and a space where the ugly hegemony of death was seriously contested.

Earlier in the week, I had spoken — well, sort of spoke — to the parents. That was before they left to join the search party. But what do you say to a father or a mother whose son is no more? I will never forget how — upon receiving the news that her son had died in Johannesburg — my aunt threw herself to the ground, wailing and cursing, writhing and rolling in the red dust of rural Limpopo in the madness of sorrow, until eventually she lay flat on her stomach, groaning like an injured animal. Members of the delegation that brought the news, sat speechless on the makeshift veranda, elbows on knees, heads held between both palms.

My first and much earlier encounter with Steve was in heated debate — how else did one meet Steve? He took issue with an article of mine suggesting that US-originated clinical approaches to counselling were unsuited for the South African township context. He cautioned that I might have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater and I reckoned that we could do without both. Since then, we have laughed, agreed, disagreed and still collaborated.

“Pretty” might be an evocative adjective, but certainly not the only way of describing Mooi River (Pretty River) — where Steve died in a freak tube-boat accident. When the Boer settlers arrived in the area in the eighteen hundreds, they saw the river and instantly named it Pretty River (Mooi River) and thus it has been known ever since. But the locals who have lived long with the river had named it after an antelope. They call it Mpofana — young eland. This was not to say the locals were oblivious to the breathtaking beauty, I wish to suggest. For the local people what stood out about this river was not so much its beauty as it was its youthfulness, boundlessness, unpredictability. For them, it was a river that could dazzle like a young eland; leap like an antelope and swarm like a herd. Its tributaries meander like the twisted horns of a male eland all the way into the Tugela River and finally into the sea.

Now we know why the locals admired the beauty of Mpofana but were in awe of its latent energy — energy that could leap, pierce, swarm and swamp. In one of the best world music albums I have heard, Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon (of Graceland fame) sings of a clearly metaphorical Cool, Cool River of anger that moves like a fist through the traffic. “You feel it in the creases and the shadows, with a rattling deep emotion,” he sings. Simon was neither singing about Mooi River nor of Mpofana. But Simon captures something of the awe of which I speak above. He almost describes the danger hidden in the apparent beauty of the “cool, cool river”.

Steve knew this. He was much aware of water as life and of water as death. That is why — as an academic — he researched and wrote about water as a scarce and diminishing resource. That is why he wrote of sewage and human dependence on water not merely for food but for the “management” of their daily bodily waste! We too know how key water is for our survival. Water is the central reality and metaphor of our lives. It is economic, it is spiritual, it is cultural, it is essential, it is scarce and it is dangerous. We sing songs and tell stories about the river, the sea and the fountain. Though we live thousands of miles away from the locations, we sing about the crossing of the River Jordan and of the waters of the Red Sea. These waters that stand between us and life; between danger and opportunity. We know of the water that divides people — water that will soon send them off to war if it is not happening already. Surely, this is part of the story behind the story of the Samaritan woman. That feisty not-so-squeaky-clean woman who dared to refuse to give water to Jesus? Such was the importance of water; our ancestors knew the importance of the art and science of making rain.

I remain captivated by the gesture Steve gave to his son just before his disappearance — signalling that he would be OK. Maybe he meant his son would be OK. Maybe he meant we would be OK. We continue to grapple with the meaning of this. Whichever way we look at it, Steve was probably correct. I think he is OK. That is the sense I had as I sat in the Cathedral on Saturday, February 27 2010. Just because we are not (yet) OK with his passing, we must nevertheless remain open to the very real possibility that he is indeed OK. This I say, not only because he died doing what he loves but because he died loving — loving family, loving humanity and loving earth.