Terence (1969) ( South Africa, Switzerland)

Something that reminds you of living, being at peace, feeling happy:

Just living? Fishing. I’m always at peace. I’m always in touch with myself, I’m in touch with nature. I’m always in the moment when I’m fishing. I don’t have work on my mind or anything. I feel like I’m in touch with the universe. 

You do sea fishing?

Land based sea fishing.

What’s your first memory as a child?

I’ve never really thought about it. One of my earliest memories is… probably me sitting on my fathers lap watching westerns on a Friday evening. 

Do you have a childhood symbol, in that sense?

I’ve never really been one for symbols… I don’t know if there’s a symbol but for me… just the difference from being a child to being an adult. Just the carefreeness of being a child…umm…Before I even knew about… Ahh actually there is one picture that comes to mind. Cow dung! Dried cow dung… It just reminds me of when we where very young. We used to go on these church picnics on this farm and as kids we used to play war. And our ammunition were these dried cow dung patties. That was in the early 70s.  

What pictures or thoughts come to mind when I say these following words?

Power: Police…

Protest/to protest: School. We did our Matura Exams under police protection because of school protests, school boycotts at the time. It was during the apartheid era where a lot of schoolchildren across the country were boycotting schools… umm they were protesting and the police were cracking down which is why when you talk about power, police. More like abusive power but…

Is it similar to how some of the police are acting in the protests of today?

Well… You’re speaking about America now? In Switzerland the police are actually fine. In America the police are… 

How was it in South Africa?

Brutal. Worse than the Americans. They had permission to go out there and use any force necessary to basically disperse people. They came with teargas, rubber bullets, whips, battens… everything… It was a brutal time. Friends of ours were locked up in jail for three weeks, we didn’t know where. You just knew that they were taken, but not where. And they came out, they would be beaten. You know, that’s the power the police had at that time.

Is it still the same when you go back?   

No… no.

Society: Closed. Well I mean it’s closed… it’s all… These are like my childhood memories. I grew up happy. But I grew up in my society, and my society was closed by nature by the whole… well. I only knew what was happening inside my little bubble. Life was fine but… as soon as you were confronted by the police, by the white police…Then you saw that your parents had fear. You learned to fear them as well… and then you… once you go to university you realise that there’s more to life than what you were exposed to. In your little bubble…  

How do you see the world in 50 years? (realistically) ( this was answered a week after the main interview) 

Can I speak about my “Verzweiflung”? …I mean the question was…How do I see the world realistically in 50 years time. And… I was caught between two poles. The one thing is that we just have the same situation that we have now but just worse…where people are more focused on themselves, focused on money, focused on what they can get out of things…And not looking at the more social environmental aspect of living together. But I think…in the end I feel that the more optimistic approach, I feel more optimistic about the young people of today taking a stand, taking up issues like global warming and the fact that we are consuming so many resources, well our resources at such an alarming rate. 

What about the LGBTQ+ Community?

Yahh, well I don’t really make a distinction between LGBTQ+ whatever you are…I just think the young people…I believe that world will have more acceptance. Acceptance of people for who they are but also an understanding of how we as people fit into the world. I mean at the moment we have quite an arrogance. If you look at it that way. We take a piece of nature and we put our little square on it and we say this is my house. Any animal that comes in there gets killed…You know. We displace nature and we try to keep nature out of it and we only have our tame little square of nature. But we’re not in touch with nature. We abuse nature in that sense and I’m hoping that in 50 years time that mankind will be more in touch with nature, and I hope that we will be able to reverse some of the changes that have happened. I mean these changes have happened as well before man, but I think we are just.., we’re accelerating a natural process… If you think about corona, corona is also something which the rate it’s spread now is because of how we as humans live. In an unnatural way. On top of each other, big cities…with all the flights and things we take and so on. Sometimes nature, I mean I believe that nature has a way of fighting back, nature has a way….Life will always…If you build a new piece of road, if you don’t maintain it, there will start to be cracks and stuff. Very soon you’ll start having plants…Life finds a way. The more they establish themselves, nature kind of tries to win back again that what’s been taken from it. I just really hope that in 50 years time we’ll be more in touch with our natural side, because we are a part of nature, a part of it. We don’t rule over it. We need to find our place within nature and we have to play our part in the cycle of nature…that’s about it!   

What does “being” human mean?

Being human… means caring. I think you can’t be human and not care for others. 

What do you believe in?

What do I believe in? …I believe in a higher power. I believe that I have the power to change things in my life. I’m not passive in this life in terms of… Life doesn’t just happen to me unless I allow it. Life can be… I can influence the life I have. I kinda live according to this: You have the life that you choose to have. Or you live the life that you choose to have.

Anything to add?

You started out by asking me about my childhood. And so a lot of these things are triggered by childhood memories. Umm, but the issues that I had as a child… facing these things are different now as an adult… As I say you live the life you choose to live. The journey from being a child to being an adult was finding out which of those issues that you’d been faced with have been of your own design and which things were just as the result of the situation. Things that you couldn’t have influenced… That might have affected you… and then revisiting them and putting them in the perspective of the situation in which you were. So reacting less from the position of the victim but more from the point of view from, ok I see myself in that situation and I understood how I reacted then. But I choose to react differently now because I could step back. When you are in it that’s it. That’s your reality. For example growing up as a child, the police where white. I always felt white people were superior to me because that’s how apartheid was built up. That’s just the reality we lived. And then going to university afterwards (in Johannesburg). At university you get exposed to so many different people from communities not your own… So basically we find that there are people that are interesting who haven’t seen… shall we say darker skinned people other than those who where working as service in the house. And you meet them as intellectual equals. Start exchanging ideas, start finding out that they are people just as everyone is. They have their own fears and insecurities as well…