Footbridge

INTRODUCTION

On Monday the 23rd of August 1999, Roger Russell set off from Cape Town planning to walk 4200km alone around the Republic of South Africa. A South Africa where not only was the crime rate one of the highest in the world but where the police themselves were considered to be corrupt and inefficient.

Some few weeks before he started this the BBC had televised and broadcast an incident in which suspects in the process of being arrested were brutally beaten by members of the Johannesburg Flying Squad. The circumstances and actions depicted shocked the world.

Roger does not believe that this kind of news always reflects the full picture. Roger believes in the essential goodness of people: the goodness of the majority of the staff of the Police Services of the country and the majority of the people that live in it.

The next day he was confronted by four armed youths and the little equipment he had was stolen. He had walked approximately 17 kilometres.

Despite this he was determined to carry on. The event and his decision to continue became public property. Media all over the world covered the story. His courage inspired many South Africans and some of them came forward with offers of help. The walk was to continue!

This is the story of that walk; it is not a story of one man’s determination but a story of many people, a story of a country, a story of courage and failure, of commitment and disappointment. But above all it is a story of the other side, one for the good guys, a story that tries to provide a balance in the picture of an emergent society.

DEDICATION

This book is for…

People who had the humanity to reach out when I was walking the streets looking for support before I was robbed:

A lady at the second hand camping shop on Long Street who gave me a gas stove, Andrea Weis of the Argus who ran the first article, Alan at AM-2-DAY for the interview on morning TV, Logans who gave me a poncho and some large discounts, CADAC who supplied a sleeping bag and 7-Eleven who sent me a cheque for R100.00. I have had this cheque framed as it was the only sponsorship I received in cash before all the publicity, and last, but not least; a backpack from Ken at Cape Union Mart.

Jeremy Pender, of Pender Designs, for a supply of highly effective T-shirts. My family: Anny and Brian, Carol and Diana, Jane, Jill and Jacky, Mom, all of whom are supposed to support me anyway but do it with such faith and concern that I carry them in my heart where ever I go.

The team (those that came on board once they knew and stayed for the trip);

Arthur Gillis of Protea Hotels who told me that I would not want for anything and saw to it; including a cellphone and food vouchers for Panarotti’s and Spur Restaurants.

Barbara, his personal assistant, a veritable solar system of contacts and efficiency and kept the walk a joint effort.

Ken Lazarus: Thanks, it is not easy to go to someone that has given you something and say, Hell Ken, I have lost it, have you got another one? I did not have to, Ken got hold of me and said, I demand the right to continue to support you… Thanks Ken and Cape Union Mart.

Thanks to the public… To Victor who apologized that a member of his race had robbed me and has vowed to do what he can to change things. To Robyn at Logans who was very worried about my feet. To the staff at Pick ‘n Pay, Kenilworth who provided me with thousands of Rands worth of vouchers from their own pockets.

To so many, many people along the road who sometimes did nothing more than walk across the street and shake my hand but unwittingly carried me around the country. To those that fed me, drove me here and there and provided a roof over my head.

Thanks to the SAPS and the staff of the many Police Stations I visited around the country; sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but always the best they could.

And, of course the press – you people were wonderful. We all take a beating about what we do sometimes and you come in for your fair share of that. The truth is that you are as concerned about this country as all of us and I saw this demonstrated in a very real way from the 23rd August 1999 until the 2nd May 2000.

Then finally, thank you to Cynthia Ayres for this book – She deciphered my writing, typed it and then made it into English. She has been as much a part of the final product as all of the people mentioned on its pages

Note from the author:

The story is written in the format of a diary and the events are authentic. However in order to protect the situations and families of some of the people I met along the way, I have written some stories as commentaries. These appear at the end of each section that defines an area through which I walked. The stories do not necessarily have a geographical relationship to the area after which they appear.

THE CROSSING

This land…

This green and gold and its constant beauty,

It is part of me as it is part of us.

This strength…

This unity and its desire to grow,

It is I, as it is my brother.

These people…

These hearts and their dreams of greatness,

They are mine as I am theirs.

No thing, no mediocrity, no self….

Will take from this land, this strength or these people,

Its beauty, the brotherhood or our dreams.

JOURNEY TO THE START

All my life things have gone wrong. Recently I was told that this was because I have a masochistic aura. I apparently draw attention to myself through personal tragedy. I wish I had been told this long ago. I would have worked hard to change it and saved myself a lot of pain. However in my mistaken belief that I was just one of the unfortunate, I developed instead, a philosophy that catered for disaster, and it was needed.

I love to sit and listen when other families discuss their history;

Do you remember when Joan did this…?

Look here is David. This was just after he was given that bursary to…

"Remember when we had that holiday…

My family raises their eyebrows when my life comes up. Photo albums bring out comments like;

This is the Humber; you know the car that Roger fell out of in Eldoret….

That is the flat in Kisumu, the one where Roger got into the bath with all his clothes on.

By the time that most boys were being selected for the first team I was no longer allowed to play sport at all. I had already cut my left leg through to the bone, broken both arms, nearly drowned twice and had had my left arm crushed by a motor car. The fact that I can walk at all is attributable to the co-incidental visit of a famous surgeon to Kenya at the time of the leg cutting and my father’s insistence that I spent hours every day walking up and down the balcony forcing my feet to stay straight.

He played a bigger and reputably even more unreasonable role in the salvation of my arm when it was about to be amputated.

His, You will not cut it off before you have tried to fix it! sent the only available surgeon into the operating theatre muttering about impossibilities and people that knew no better.

It was a miracle of faith that kept me largely in one piece and I learnt a great lesson from him then: never give up, try something else!

Of course people that attract problems should be careful about the careers that they choose. I was born with a caul over my head. My grandmother, who knew about such things, said that it meant I would never die by drowning. If I could not drown there was not much point in going to sea, so I went underground instead. I spent seventeen years in the depths of the earth. I learnt about sweat and grit in your underwear, about brutality and death. I fought fires and drove huge earthmoving equipment. I lost my finger in a fight and was caught in a mud rush in which another man died. I joined the rescue team and dug other people’s bodies out from under the rocks. I saw strong men break down and soil themselves while supposedly weak men went in where there was no hope of coming out again.

I learnt that it is not what is around you that matters; it is what is in you. This went on for a long time. I did not have to stick it out, but when I started an Afrikaans miner told me that Englishmen never made it in the mines. Many years later I looked around to see if I had taught him a lesson but I could not find him.

It is one thing to write light heartedly about these events but the reality of such experiences is measured in terms of shock and disorientation, of immense pain and people that will not leave you alone. In needles and the smell of ether and cold steel that probes and pushes where it hurts. In terms of decisions made for you and about you but not by you. It is measured in lonely nights spent crying while grief and frustration rages, futile, through your body. It is measured by vivid memories of darkness with the sounds of nurses clicking their way down silent corridors in the small hours of the morning; by hours of painful exercise and determined effort to learn to be whole again. This reality costs, and it is the price of life. The product is so incredibly worth it that it defies logic.

Every setback creates new targets to achieve, new destinations for the road ahead. This truth has turned many a life of trauma into one of great beauty and personal gain. I love myself and what I have become. Because of this I love creation and the created. I love people and triumph. I am saddened, not by evil, but by the belief that evil is destructive. Evil, failure, whatever is negative, call it what you will, is part of a perfect harmony. Seen from a broader than immediate perspective, every aspect of our existence is there to promote and refine that existence.

No one ever told us that we had a right to be happy, just that we can be happy. Life has always been and always will be a fair mix of joy and despair, of laughter and grief. But beware! Life is not balanced by having some good things and then some bad; it is balanced at any point in time. Each event contains its own balance. To believe that you have suffered enough so now it’s your turn to be spoilt is a concept that has no meaning to creation. What does have meaning is the freedom to view life as you choose, to take from it what you will. We should not refuse any of the experiences that come our way, but rather use our energy to work through all of them; laughing when we can, crying when we must but always with the knowledge that what will remain with us is what we have freely selected.

This philosophy was to be severely tested in the early 1990’s. Some twenty-five years before this I had met and married the essence of life. A person who loved and cried with an intensity that put me to shame. She was my dawn and strong sunshine. She was almost my entire day but her sunset was not to be mine. Her name was Sharon.

She developed breast cancer and it was supposedly curable. I developed lung cancer and it was supposedly not so curable. The eventual outcome was her death in 1993 and after some radical treatment, a cure for me. The effort of living in that time was very costly to all of us, the returns difficult to understand.

What do you select from such anger and despair?

What do you take with you from a situation where everything physical undermines anything spiritual?

Remembering those times brings deep pain still. But the picture I have of her and the people around us at the time is one full of love and strength; of wonderful moments and quiet sharing.

A short time ago I wrote…

Paint me a picture. Fill the skies with rain and thunderous clouds, the corners with darkness. Draw pain and grief in every shadow. Then put yourself in it; as small as you like, far to one side or big and right in the middle. But paint yourself in full colour, as bright as I have known you to be and I will take this picture with joy and hang it on every wall in my house.

In her new and enlightened state I am convinced that she walks often through the rooms of my mind. She sees the pictures that she painted hanging everywhere. She knows that it will always be so. I am sure that she treasures still the pictures that I painted for her. At the time it was not so easy, but now, now I understand that the gifts received from earlier pain and other growth were there to see us through.

Never give up, try something else! After she had gone I found myself without purpose, without her. My children were anxious to get on with their own lives. It was going to get very lonely.

…try something else! – I started walking.

Sharon and I had discussed it often before her death. Whilst in the midst of our struggle we had been overwhelmed by the love and sheer humanity that had risen like a forest all around us. Care and concern were offered without reserve and we had used much. We wanted to share what we had learned with others. Somehow the idea of walking to say thank you to Hospice and the Cancer Association was born. The concept was part of our joint struggle and after her death it became a way for me to stay in contact with the idea of her for a while.

So in July 1993, five months after she died, I caught a train to Beit Bridge. The Beit Bridge crosses the Limpopo River and is on the northern border between South Africa and Zimbabwe. The intention was to walk from there to Cape Town at the country’s southernmost tip. The most sensible of my friends advised me against it. I knew little of walking and even less about the country. I was warned that the political mood was violent and crime out of control. South Africa was facing its first truly democratic election. It was not a good time to be white and alone on the road. I was told that I was not rational and I should wait a while.

It was all true: there was much grief in the decision but I had just lost half of my life and I was not prepared to be reasonable. The whole project seemed doomed from the start.

The first few hours of the walk did nothing to dispel that impression.

The train conductor promised me that the train would stop at the customs post and let me get off just this side of the border. Of course it did not stop and I found myself inside Zimbabwe with no passport, no papers and no right to be there.

The Zimbabwe Border Police were known for their enthusiasm in locking up white South Africans if they could find any kind of an excuse. I was facing months of incarceration in appalling conditions if I was found. I spent several cramped and lonely hours hiding in a railway toilet. The South African Railway officials put me there whilst they tried to find a way to get me back across the border. Eventually, sometime in the middle of the night, I was put aboard a diesel locomotive and quietly smuggled back across the bridge and offloaded along the tracks.

So it was that at 2.00am in the morning I found myself back in South Africa. I was alone in the bush, standing beside two gleaming ribbons of steel. The rain was pouring down, which worried me, but did not seem to worry whatever it is that makes all those noises in the bush in the dead of night. Ignoring the strange sounds I pushed my way through bushes and trees, climbed over a fence and walked out onto the tar of the N2; the national road that cuts South Africa in half, from top to bottom.

I looked to the South… I could not see much, it was dark and the road disappeared quickly into a black, wet nothing. It was the way I was supposed to go.

I looked north and could just make out the lights of the customs post. I could see the silhouettes of several large trucks. They indicated people, perhaps shelter and warmth. I could start tomorrow, who would know; who would even care?

Find another way… I turned my back on the lights, on the comfort and faced the future. I moved one foot forwards and the other one followed.

Sometime around 4.00 in the morning I found a culvert and crawled into it. I dropped onto the sand and pulled my sleeping bag over me. I did not have the strength or the inclination to climb into it. I fell asleep crying. I woke with the sun shining. I could hear birds singing. I crawled out from under the road and looked around me with wonder. Everything was fine. I was going to make it. Not just to Cape Town, but me, as a person; I was going to make it.

Since that time of change, it has become a mission in my life to focus people’s attention on the power within them and therefore in society. We have become too dependent on possessions and forgotten the inner gifts that fill our souls. In older times, when technology played a subservient role, people admired and encouraged heroism. Challenges were sought out and taken up. Human triumph was the measure of success. Even the telling of it was dependent on the vigour and sincerity of the narrator and not on the gimmickry of special effects. The excitement of technical advance has taken from us an understanding of the courage needed to live. The role of money has made it seem second rate to possess nobility in spirit. Success is measured in what we own not what we are. Achievement, it seems, is not about proving ourselves; it is about sealing ourselves off.

We have to learn about ourselves all over again and to do it we must come out from behind our artificial barriers and electromechanical defences. We must put the unfeeling, the inanimate, where it belongs, and measure our excellence in human terms.

Where hate stands up and screams abuse, love must bring peace. Where anger tears down and destroys, compassion must build and where greed takes without regard, generosity must provide. In this way we will give ourselves a balanced perspective of mind and soul. We will see, as we once did, that victory lies in the vastness of the heart and not in the depth of a cheque account.

The walk, the cancer, Sharon’s death? Something had changed my life. I returned from the walk full of admiration for my fellow man, and it was not the special people that I had met, but all the people that I had met that had inspired it.

The need to earn a salary and demands of parenthood required a stable