Letter To My Old Self.

Dear Freshman
As I sat on my desk last night reading about your first few weeks in university, I nearly fell off my chair with uncontrollable laughter coupled with moments of shock and endearment. A truly gagging experience for you, it felt like a walk down memory lane for me.
What would you have done? Mom and dad came out off their bedroom satisfied with the arguments and counter arguments they have been throwing back and forth at each other without much success for weeks on end. Dad suggesting UCT and mom hell burnt about sending you to UKZN, she used to say: “We will easily monitor his progress here”, the famous last words. I remember the sullenness that filled the room as they switched off the TV to break your future down for you (in layman’s terms). The “verdict” was out: Rhodes University was going to be the destination. The bewilderment in your face just said it all.
All the hours you spent on the internet browsing for Rhodes University, all the calls to the student Bureau staff, printing out residences; may have helped you out in coming to terms with what you were to encounter in real life, but alas! Arriving in Grahamstown on its own has a way of calming down people, in a special way that you talked about in your letter. When you said that before coming to Rhodes, the colour purple was not really an element you ever thought would be so much part of a town, not even an educational institution for that matter, it struck me that this is the colour to ever dominate anything else in this town, except for churches. It is the same colour that I got to associate with the town’s weather, which is basically winter with sprawls of other seasons at any given time.
At this point, I will have to praise you for your interesting observation about the “ripping—off” done by the societies on students. You did a good thing by avoiding them, even Trevor Manuel would not mind roping you in, judging by your general thriftiness. That is one of the aspect you can gladly pass to the coming ‘freshmen’.
For the whole duration of your stay at Rhodes, you will still be moved by many things, like having dogs roaming around in lecture theatres; witnessing weekend long drinking sprees—as you correctly put it that a day without a drunk person seems like a day out of town. But the people are nice here; some of them go out of their way to make this place as enjoyable as it possibly can.
You see, it was not that harsh a decision that the parents made. All you ever had to do was to arrive. Everything else is chilled.

Yours in reflection.
Sizwe Hlatshwayo