THE YEAR 1964 is the most significant in my life and I can remember many of the events as though they happened yesterday.
I was 7. The crisis of food supplies, and especially wheat, as a result of the raging war in Russia invokes my memories of surpluses in wheat supply in that year. As the saying goes: one man’s bread is the other’s poison.
The year had very exciting moments and one moment that became sad as I began to reflect on as years passed by. One of the most important of the moments was when my father bought a car – a Rambler Super registration number BE 442. It cost him £400 back then.
Standing outside and seeing the reflection of ourselves in different shapes was a marvel – sometimes broad, sometimes very lean – this was a real mystery, which only unravelled later in my life when I studied physics and the concept of refraction of light.
Related to the car, was a visit to Gauteng, Baragwanath Hospital, where we went from Lesotho to visit my ailing mother. This obviously was the main reason my father bought a car - to get my mother to medical care and visit.
What fascinated me was the amount of Lifebuoy soap that was strewn outside the cancer ward. Knowing only of blue soap that had no lather at all, Lifebuoy with its good scent was the ultimate. I wasted no time and started collecting it for use for when I was back home in Lesotho. But only to be terribly disappointed when my aunt Mamamello Mamoletsane, who taught at Merryvale in Nigel and our host, stopped me in my tracks with a tongue-lashing that the soap was contaminated and was not for use.
Within months of our return from our visit, my mother passed on in October. During the funeral my uncles showered me with coins and I wasted no time and had a steady supply of fat cakes.
Back to the wheat harvest of 1964, at times circumstances connive in one’s favour and a mistake is turned into a fortune, so is a tragedy turned into a fortune.
Diego Maradona won the football game between Argentina and England on June 22, 1986 at the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City with what was to be known as the Hand of God.
In June of 1964, the Hand of God caused it to snow heavily and there has not been that amount of snow before or to date. And for the first time I had the opportunity to touch snow. The period remains in the Guinness records as one that witnessed the heaviest snow ever.
In Lesotho it is referred to, in colourful language, as Lehloa la Bonya O Eme, which in English loosely translates to defecating standing. There was no possibility of squatting in these weather conditions.
The amount of wheat that was harvested in Lesotho in the December of 1964 filled houses to the roof. The harvest lasted for four years and bridged the drought year of 1966 when former South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966.
In South Africa the tonnage tells the same tale that 1964 spiked by 20 percent compared to the previous year and relative to the following year. Everywhere it was the ever normal granary. The reason for this was the amount of moisture that was spawned by the record snowfall in the lowlands of Lesotho and the Free State, which led to the bounty.
For the first time the thrashing of the wheat was centralised and the chaff reached sky high. We used to jump and down and roll on the chaff. It was bounty for cattle in the following winter and fuel for baking bread by mothers.
But misfortune struck. A cousin of mine who was using the chaff near the mountain of chaff to roast his stolen mealies burnt down that mountain in August of 1965. He then fled Lesotho to come to Joburg forever.
Perhaps the crisis of the Russia-Ukraine War, tragic as it looks like burning down the energy supply, animal fodder and gaming for children in its disruption in the supply of wheat.
The recent heavy rains South Africa and Lesotho have had, including snow from time to time this year, should invoke the memory of that wheat harvest of 1964 and spur us to make every inch of South Africa and Lesotho the wheat land – thus constituting our Hand of God in this crisis of bread and food prices.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University and the former Statistician-General and former head of Statistics South Africa
BUSINESS REPORT