| Sports |
Familiar, forgotten ‘broken horn’
A corporate
icon’s name in the news conjures up childhood memories, writes
JACK METTA
IT’S being long years between but the
name of the corporate icon in the news has jolted the old memory
box and conjured practically the vaguest memories that you
harboured.
Those were the early years of your life, where you were just
getting into the personality things and discovering the world,
even if it was confined to your immediate surroundings.
You picture two young boys – one white, the other black –
playing in the former’s backyard when disaster struck.
The black boy had stepped on a broken bottle and cut himself
badly. A 2cm gash on the sole of his left feet was bleeding
profusely and he was running his feet back and forth through the
manicured lawn in a desperate attempt to stem the flow.
The white boy, seeing the blood, dashed off towards the house
shouting for his mother, who responded as if her son was in
danger.
The ensuing moments were lost in a flurry of tenderness, the
washing and the dressing of wound followed by a meal of
sandwiches and lemonade. It was the most wonderful feeling a
native 12-year-old boy had felt in his entire life apart from
the love and care accorded him by his own parents.
And to happen to him on this occasion in the home of an
Australian family was something he could not fathom today.
A complete stranger had ministered unto him and he, a complete
stranger to the family.
His friendship with a white boy was struck on a spur of the
moment and lasted as long as the hours of their childhood capers
in the white folks backyard, the dressing of the wound and the
meal of sandwiches and lemonade and gentle, loving assurances
from a white woman.
The black boy had never ventured into this part of the world but
when you’re discovering new things, naturally, you wanted to
satisfy your curiosity.
He had seen the white boy cavorting in his backyard and decided
on the spur of the moment to join him. Boys will be boys, bar
the colour.
That one-off encounter was filed in the back of your mind like a
passing moment in time never to be revisited until Hornibrooks
starting making the news.
You remember distinctly the big company that was actively
involved in the production of steel. You remember the company
well because there was something about the name. It was carved
out of Pidgin English, which you had come to accept as your
second language after the original Toaripi of the Gulf province.
Some names were accepted into your memory bank of names without
question because you never think of questioning the name.
Hornibrooks took the cake.
It was an era of discovery, of confirming one’s personality, of
movie houses and Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies, of care-free
flamboyancy and of the strict White Man and his stern laws. In a
phrase, it was an era worth growing up in.
Johnny Weissmuller on the big screen at Festival Hall as Tarzan
and Jungle Jim with the ever-reliable Cheetah in tow was all we
lived for. Because all the movie themes were in Africa, there
were a lot of animals in the scene and that is where we began to
discover the different animals in the natural habitat for the
first time in our lives.
There were the elephants, the rhinoceros, the buffaloes, the
various species of deer including gazelles, gnus, antelopes,
etc. And one thing about most of the animals stuck out like a
sore thumb – they had tusks, horns and antlers. But in our lingo
at that time, they were horns, period. And when these “horned”
animals fought each other, some ended up with broken horns and
in our lingo that automatically became horn-i-bruk. Hence, how
easily we identified with the company name. There was a tacit
understanding that the name was deprived from a “broken horn”
and no other explanation was necessary.
That tenderness shown by a white woman towards a distressed
native boy back in mid 1960s happened in the backyard of a
Hornibrooks worker’s home.
As mentioned, the boy’s neighbourhood was an industrial centre
with all sorts of big industries established in the area. He
could remember some of these as NGI, NGG, Monier, Chards, Tutt
Bryant and the list goes on. But he remembers NGI (Sawmill),
Hornibrooks and Monier well because they were his stomping
grounds literally.
He’d go hunting birds in the premises and lived to tell the
tale. As big as this industries were, the gates were never
locked. In fact, there were no gates as there were no fences.
You could go right through the sawmill or the factory without
detouring.
Somehow, there was respect for property, a conditioning perhaps,
imparted to the natives at the time by the White Man’s strict
laws.
I’m even surprised now at the realisation that passing through
the NGI sawmill those years ago, none of us dared touch the many
boards of push-buttons located at strategic points in the
building.
Maybe, it’s not hard to guess where the discipline in later life
came from.
Hornibrooks may be a company name of which we know not of its
origin, but I know it figured somewhere in my early years and
would be always in my vocabulary as the horn that broke.
And I am reminded of the Wise Counsellor’s words: “The only
people you should try to get even with are those who have helped
you …”
 
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