This is the second in a series of excerpts from my memoir, The Uncontainable. One piece at a time. No rush.
Part One — The Wound That Made The Man
My soul decided to launch its short journey into this world in a family by the name of Robbertze.
I have thought about that decision many times since.
We lived in Troy Street, then Water Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria. Middle class homes in a middle class suburb — the kind of streets where appearances were maintained and doors were closed before voices were raised. My father, Christian Johannes Robbertze, was an educated man. Several degrees in economics. Eventually city treasurer of Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. A man of standing. A man of expectation.
He abused alcohol. What that did to the interior of our home was not visible from the street.
I remember a plate of food hitting my mother’s face because it had not met his standard. I remember being stripped of my clothes and put into the backyard for the night — a boy, alone in the dark, learning something about power and about shame that no child should have to learn.
My mother, Maria Hendrika du Toit moved through this the way women of her generation were taught to move through it — with endurance, with silence, with the particular dignity of those who have decided that survival is its own form of resistance.
We were three boys. Dirk. Chris. And me — Johann. T. Robbertze. The T has never been explained to me. To this day I carry an initial whose meaning no one has accounted for. There is, at the centre of my legal identity, something unnamed. A man is always partly illegible — to others, to himself. What we cannot name in ourselves is often what drives us furthest.
I was the eldest. And I was not built for containment.
At ten years old I ran. The police caught up with me in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia — a child who had hitchhiked across borders, sleeping rough, moving toward nothing except away. I was expelled from schools. I absconded from boarding houses. I hitchhiked the length and breadth of South Africa, sleeping on beaches and shoplifting food to survive.
I was a boy who had learned that the inside of things — homes, institutions, families — was where the damage happened. The outside, however dangerous, was at least honest about its terms.
Boystown changed something. Not dramatically, not overnight — but something real shifted there. They gave me what no one had thought to give me before: the direct equation between responsibility and outcome. You own your actions. Your actions determine your life. For a boy who had been acted upon, this was not a small thing. It was the first framework that made sense. The first door that opened inward.
That impulse — raw and unrefined as it was — would turn out to be the most reliable compass I ever owned.
The Navy
At eighteen a man is conscripted, whether he is ready or not. I was not ready in the conventional sense. What I had in my favour was the water.
When the opportunity came to apply for the South African Naval diving course, I took it. Not out of patriotism. Not out of any particular attraction to the military. I took it because it was the hardest door available, and I wanted to know if I could walk through it.
I could.
The demands of the course were immense — physically, psychologically, and in ways that are difficult to fully account for in ordinary language. They break you first. That is the design. You cannot build what has not been emptied.
My father had told me — not always in words, more often in punishment, in contempt, in the naked backyard and the slammed plate — that I was insufficient. That I would not meet the standard.
The diving course answered that directly. Every successful dive, every navigation in zero visibility, every moment of controlled breathing when the body is screaming and the darkness is complete — each of those moments was evidence. Not proof offered to my father. Proof offered to myself.
Underwater there is no performance possible. The water does not respond to charm or bluster. You are either present and skilled and calm, or you are in danger. That binary — that absolute honesty — was the most clarifying environment I had ever entered.
Every institution that had failed me had imposed its terms. The Navy’s terms I had chosen. That single distinction — consent — made all the difference between confinement and freedom.
The difference was simply that it was my choice.
I have lived by that principle ever since.
Next: Underground — from the Navy into the earth. Anglo-American. Kinross. Evander. Gold mines.
— JR