Standstill
The day I closed down South Africa
Token-ring
In the mid-nineties I lived in Pretoria, in Hill Street, close to Loftus. Loftus Versveld is one of the prominent Rugby stadiums in the country. This was in the years immediately following the establishment of a full democracy in South Africa with Nelson Mandela leading the government. I worked for a token-ring company named Madge Networks as a Technical Account Manager. It was in direct competition with Ethernet, which would eventually become the dominant technology. The main competitor was Cisco.
One of my colleagues at Madge was Duncan Ogilvie. I was in contact with him when we stopped working at Madge and would often braai lamb chops and have a beer sitting on the stoep. During the pandemic he took his own life. Never knew that he was having mental health difficulties. He was a great mate.
The Madge offices were in Rivonia. My trip would start early mornings before seven as with heavy traffic the journey might take up to an hour. One morning I was driving in to work and was listening to a CD and switched to Radio 702 just before 7. Nowadays people rarely listen to CDs. The presenter on Radio 702 was John Robbie, an Irishman. The headline news was about major delays at Johannesburg International Airport which is now called OR Tambo that was reportedly caused by a computer problem. The country was at a standstill. I had worked at the airport for a major national airline installing many switches and CAUs and was very familiar with the environment. CAUs were token-ring hubs. I was coming up to the Buccleuch interchange and decided to go left to the airport instead of right to the office. Maybe there was something I could do to help.
A few moments later my mobile rang. It was the major national airline's IT manager who had heard the same news broadcast and asked me to meet him at the airport. He was as much in the dark about the situation as what I was. The two of us arrived at much the same time at the departure hall of the airport. The crowd and queues were extremely long. We walked to the front counters to determine from the staff what was the issue. Many of the passengers threatened us as the assumed we were hopping the queue and told us to get back into the line. Having struggled our way to the front we duly learned from the duty controller that there was no connectivity to the mainframe. Since my companion had walked over from the headquarters building, he confirmed it was not a general mainframe outage as the systems were all accessible and working from that building.
I had my laptop with me, an IBM Butterfly (one of the best laptops I have ever owned!) I attached my laptop using my Smart token-ring adapter to the network and loaded a good old DOS application called RingManager. I looked in dismay as RingManager proceeded to tell me that there were well over five hundred nodes connected onto the single ring (maximum should not be more than two hundred). The laptop screen then froze. Being a typical techie and not believing it the first time I proceeded to do it a second time with the same results by turning it off and on again. I conferred with the guys from the national major airline and told them that it was my suspicion that someone had looped the rings at the airport together. There was only one location where this was possible and that was the main fibre patching room. We proceeded to the patch room and at first inspection all was in order. However, when we started checking the patches, they were totally incorrect with the diagram pasted on the wall next to the cabinet.
The security guards confirmed that a cable installer had signed in and worked in the room at one in the morning connecting a new voice switch. We deduced that the patch cables were in his way, so he unpatched them all. He then installed his new fibre cables and then randomly patched the cables back. We started patching the fibres back to their correct position using the diagram on the wall. The technician who pasted the diagram on the wall was diligent and in today’s modern data centres this is never done. Nowadays you will never encounter diagrams present in patch rooms. When it comes to resolving problems, they are crucial. The assumption is you have it available electronically, but the fundamental problem is they were probably never created and not documented.
The airport network slowly started coming online as we worked through the patches and the departures were able to move from manual boarding to full digital ticket check-in and boarding.
After the crisis was over at around ten that morning, we had some strong cups of coffee. I asked the guys from the major national airline why there was no escalation as the operators had a network management alert console. No one had the answer, so we decided to go over to the operations area to work out the reason. The operator was sitting in his office blissfully unaware of the crisis. The network management console had a total of eleven million unacknowledged alerts. When questioned as to why there was no escalation the guy said that no-one had phoned him. He only does anything when someone phones him and since no-one phoned there was not any problem. He did not realize that his job was to tell people there was a problem. I never knew what happened to the poor bloke but there were some pissed off people ready to strangle him.
Change management
I have repeated seen changes done in isolation and not in an end to end fashion. In some companies each business unit does their own thing and does not consult with any other stakeholders. Change management will fail and cause outages unless there is a transparent end to end process where all stakeholders and their vendors within an organization have visibility to these types of activities.
Too often the changes are done in a fashion of need to know. I need to know and will tell you about it if I think you need to know. Murphy usually conspires to bring two changes together at the most inappropriate moment to cause absolute havoc.
Whenever I sit delayed in some airport, I often have the urge to go and ask the airport personnel who messed up the change process, because that is the most probable reason. The problem is not limited to a single national airline, in this case, South African Airways, but also countries as a whole. Ironically, South African Airways would go titsup due the cronyism in the post democratic South Africa under the control of the African National Congress.
The best example of a politician who was able to handle and manage change was Nelson Mandela. When I was at school at Grey College, Mandela was banned. We had no sight of him as his picture and words were banned and there is a famous Johnny Clegg song about it, Asimbonanga.
Braam Fischer
On the honours board in the Reunie Hall at Grey College under 1934 was the name of Braam Fischer. Fischer was a white Afrikaner, who was Mandela's lawyer and friend. Every hall period my eyes would drift to that name on the board. I knew who he was, and his name was cursed by the apartheid government in power. Some would have liked his name erased, but the school refused. Many famous people have matriculated from the school including Laurens van der Post, Denys Reitz and countless Springbok Rugby players. Of all these Fischer's ideals matched most closely those of the school's founder, Grey. He had died a horrible death in prison for his convictions and would not die in the comfort and praise of the nation. But his contribution was immense. Here is Fischer explained in the words of Mandela, delivered in that same Reunie Hall on 28 November 1997, where I sat:
Bram Fisher tel ongetwyfeld onder daardie klas van goeie mans en vroue wat op die wyse deur alle Suid-Afrikaners in verering gehou sal word.
Ons weet egter dat dit nie altyd die geval was nie. In sy lewe het hy voor die moeilikste keuses te staan gekom. En sy uiteindelike keuses, het hom 'n uitgeworpene gelaat in sy eie gemeenskap en in die geledere van sy beroepslui.
‘'n Man so hartstogtelik verbind tot die wet en die gereg het gesterwe as 'n gevonnisde prisonier. 'n Afrikaner in murg en been, sonder verskoning of voorbehoud, was soos 'n melaatse behandel deur sy eie mense.
Aan die ander kant: die seun van een van die mees vooraanstaande en bevoorregte gesinne in die samelewing van daardie tyd, het sy lot ingewerp met die van die armstes onder die armes.
Dit mag klink na 'n verhaal van teenstrydighede. Daardie teenstrydighede was egter nie soseer in die man Bram Fisher nie; dit was die teenstrydighede van die samelewing waarin hy, en talle Suid-Afrikaners, moes leef.
Ons regstelsel het in botsing gekom met die ideale van geregtigheid vanwee die onderdrukking van die meerderheid, en die verwording van die wet om die geregverdigde weerstand van daardie meerderheid te onderdruk.
Dit was die gedwonge skeiding van mense en die ontsegging van basiese politieke regte op grond van ras en kleur, wat daartoe gelei het dat 'n mens se respek vir sy medemens in stryd kon kom met sy sy trou aan eie gemeenskap.
Bram Fisher se durf en moed in die wyse waarop hy hierdie moeilike keuses aangepak het, het dit makliker gemaak vir andere om op daardie pad te volg. Sy beeld, toegewydheid tot die stryd vir vryheid en menswaardigheid, aktiewe bevordering van nie-rassigheid – daarin le die fondamente van ons huidige pogings tot versoening.
Pause for a moment. The words are in Afrikaans. Afrikaans was the predominant language of what Mandela classified an illegal regime. Ironically, it was a language more associated with the kombuis than the voorportaal. It was the language of JT Elliot. What is implied by this is that it had its origins amongst the South African coloured population and not the boers (Dutch language farmers). They placed a higher regard on Dutch. Afrikaans was the language of Die Stem, written by Langenhoven who had been my oupa's neighbour in Oudtshoorn. It was only in 1952, the year after the establishment of Bible House, that my mom's aunt was the first one to be married in Afrikaans and not Dutch. Donald and Margarite Munro were the first to have the language used in a wedding officiated in the NG Kerk. But the language became hated as it was assimilated by the ruling governments who introduced systematic racism in the form of apartheid. The words in Mandela’s speech are amazing but even though it reflects on Fischer, it reflects more on the character of Mandela. Here is a leader who when imprisoned, learned the language of those oppressing him and when he came to honour his friend he did it in his Fischer's native tongue, even though it was a language he should have despised. Mandela was better and more fluent in Afrikaans than me. He was more an Afrikaner than what I would ever be.
We often debated politics at school. I was not shy to make my views know and was branded a kommunis. The word was generically used to describe any liberal. It was difficult to intellectually justify apartheid and we all realized it. I went to University and many of my friends participated in the border wars. Like all wars, it leaves its scars. Colloquially we refer to it as being bosbefok.
I am a liberal and in the language of the conservative world it is still misconstrued as it is identified as what they are not, while it should be identified by what they are. It is one of the fundamental reasons I always feel alienated as I am classified by what I am not, not by what I am. An example is the branding of people as disabled. I feel it is hugely insulting as people are physically or mentally impaired and they are not recognized for what they are! During apartheid there was the binary classification of white and non-white. This was abhorrent but the inherent bigotry in other areas has not been irradicated.
Unlike the other leaders I admire like Amundsen, Turing or Flowers, Mandela was still alive in my lifetime. While I was in the navy, a few thousand kilometres away from the border wars, I recall the speech by de Klerk when he announced Mandela’s unconditional release. I was travelling on the road between Muizenberg and Stellenbosch and listened to it on the radio. For me it was a defining moment, as I knew that my views and debates from ten years previously had been correct. I was driving past a fishing spot known as the hole.
The actual event I remember the most about Mandela was the 1995 World Cup. When he walked into the stadium with a Springbok jersey, he won over the complete nation, including many of his former enemies, and not just those of the black people. Then there was the 747 flypast by South African Airways, and we won the Rugby World Cup against the All Blacks, but that always seems of secondary importance. It was a simple gesture, but he was a great leader who understood that small and simple gestures can change the course of history and that he did. The event has been immortalized in the movie, Invictus.
When Mandela died, I was in holiday in Mauritius. We watched parts of the funeral on the television in out hotel bedroom. Ironically, the speeches by world and political leaders was not what I remember. A fake deaf interpreter named Thamsanqa Jantjie had been appointed by the ANC for the event. He proceeded to stumble his way through the proceedings like a drunk seagull directing traffic. This was only a minor indiscretion by the government of the day that was focused on full scale looting which would make Mandela tun in his grave.
That trip in Mauritius was notable in that we went on a fishing trip and bagged a sailfin, as well as a few Dorado and Barracuda! The sight of a sailfin break and jumping out of the waves behind the boat was an awesome and lasting experience.
I am not a Mandela. When I am suppressed, I have images of carving up my antagonist into little pieces with a sword. A good leader, negotiates and engages. That is what made Mandela a great leader. He was able to resolve a conflict situation in South Africa in a few decades where in other parts of the world, similar conflicts have continued for centuries. Leaders like Mandela do not come around often, and in our lifetime, we had him in South Africa.
In the Reunie Hall at Grey College, the Honours boards became filled, and a new row was placed above the old ones. Above 1934 is 1984. Look closely and you see a name, R. BARTELS. That is me! It is a great feeling to be the company of a hero like Fischer, who was honoured by the great leader, Mandela. I was honoured.
Early Years in Johannesburg & the Flat in Yeoville
My early years in Johannesburg were a mix of ambition, adaptation, and unexpected challenges. Fresh into the workforce, I landed my first job at Datavia, a division of Transnet, in the bustling heart of Braamfontein. I was a programmer, spending my days wrangling COBOL, embedded SQL, and JCL on an IBM mainframe. The work was technical and demanding, but it felt like a rite of passage, a chance to carve out my place in the world.
I found a flat in Yeoville, a vibrant suburb with a bohemian edge, just a stone’s throw from Berea and the infamous Hillbrow. During this time period, my future wife, Kathleen (Kath), was busy clubbing in Hillbrow at the Bella Napoli. At the time, Yeoville seemed like a decent spot, lively, affordable, and close enough to work. I had no idea that Hillbrow was sliding into chaos, its reputation as an inner-city cesspool growing by the day. Braamfontein, too, would eventually feel the ripple effects of that decline. Yeoville held on for a while, but over the couple of years I lived there, I watched its charm erode. There was a decent restaurant that served a great t-bone and the pizzeria was liberal with the garlic, just the way I liked it.
My flat was modest, furnished with hand-me-downs from my Tannie Marguerite, a sturdy dining table, a creaky bed, and a few chairs that carried the weight of family history. The one modern luxury I allowed myself was a Sony Trinitron TV, its crisp display a small source of pride. Life was simple, but I was content, focused on my job and settling into the rhythm of the city.
That rhythm shattered one evening when I was attacked at my doorstep. A group of three black youths cornered me, demanding my mobile phone, a bulky Bosch brick. Before I could react, a blade caught my shoulder. The pain was sharp, but the shock was sharper. I was lucky—it could’ve been worse—but that moment broke something in me. Yeoville no longer felt like home; it felt like a trap. I knew I had to leave.
I wasted no time. I called my mate Jose, hired a trailer, and planned my escape on the weekend. With his help, I packed up my Tannie’s furniture, my prized Trinitron, and whatever else I could fit. We hauled it all to Randburg, a quieter, safer suburb that promised a fresh start. The move was exhausting but liberating. Johannesburg had shown me its rough edges, but I wasn’t ready to give up on it—not yet. That would come later.
As a result of this experience I went and purchased a Colt .45 Model 1911. I would have this weapon up until the boys were born when I decided the probability of accidental discharge was not worth the risk. My brother lost his best friend at the age of four due to a gun accident. I never told Kath about the stabbing, as it was demasculinizing and a humiliation. But I became vigilant about security situations and moving in dangerous areas. Aware of the threat when family members drove into inappropriate areas and subliminally it was even there when I was sleeping. Since I don’t have a Colt pistol anymore, I have a broadsword. I even brandish it in my dreams.
Network Interface Consultants | A Tech Adventure in the Netware Era
My time at Network Interface Consultants, a Novell Netware reseller, was a whirlwind of tech challenges and triumphs in the early days of local area networks (LANs). As an ECNE and MCNE, I was knee-deep in the world of Netware, installing and maintaining LAN servers with a precision that felt like conducting an orchestra of bits and bytes. My days were filled with the hum of servers, the click of keyboards, and the occasional beep of a Motorola pager clipped to my belt.
One of my proudest roles was being one of the country’s go-to experts on System Fault Tolerance III (SFT III), Novell’s high-availability solution. It was a beast to configure, but ensuring those servers stayed online through thick and thin was deeply satisfying. Beyond that, I carved out a niche connecting PCs across LANs to mainframes and AS/400 systems, bridging the gap between the old guard of computing and the new. It was like teaching two different languages to talk to each other, and I loved every minute of it.
Messaging was where I truly shined. I worked on email systems, digital telex, and paging—technologies that were the lifeblood of communication in those days. The star of the show was a DOS-based email system called Da Vinci, which later evolved into the mighty Groupwise. I even had the privilege of installing Groupwise for Multichoice’s TV stations across Europe, which meant jetting off to Amsterdam on KLM—first class, no less. Those flights were lekker, a rare treat in a job that was otherwise all about cables, configs, and coffee.
One of my standout contributions was building a rudimentary monitoring system for the LANs. This was no off-the-shelf solution; it was a custom job, cobbled together with grit and ingenuity. The system was tied into the Message Handling Service (MHS), which integrated with Da Vinci. To keep tabs on the network’s health, I set it up to send a heartbeat signal every eight hours if there were no alerts. If something went wrong, like a server crash or a connectivity hiccup, MHS would dial up a paging system known as Radiospoor via a trusty US Robotics modem, alerting us through the paging company in Midrand (whose name escapes me now). We’d get a buzz on our Motorola pagers, and off we’d go to troubleshoot, often lugging a bulky Bosch mobile phone for backup communication.
Back then, South Africa’s analogue phone lines and Eskom power were rock-solid, outages were unheard of. But that reliability could be a double-edged sword. If my pager stayed silent for too long, a nagging feeling would creep in: Is everything actually okay, or is the monitoring system itself down? That’s why the heartbeat was critical—it was our reassurance that the system was still watching, still alive.
Working at Network Interface Consultants wasn’t just about tech; it was about problem-solving under pressure and finding joy in the small victories, like a perfectly synced mainframe connection or a page that didn’t come through at 2 a.m. It was a time when technology felt like a frontier, and I was one of its explorers, pager in one hand, modem in the other, ready to keep the network humming.
I drove a Honda Ballade, which would eventually be replaced by a BMW 320i. I would often drive with the Colt pistol, loaded and wedged under my thigh. The memory of being stabbed still haunting me. I would only give up on that Colt once my sons were born due to the risk of a weapon being found and accidentally discharged by them.
COBOL Programmer at South African Transport Services
In the early days of my career, I landed my first job as a COBOL programmer at South African Transport Services, the predecessor to what is now Transnet. I was tasked with working on the Branch Line System, a network of smaller railway stations scattered along the branch lines. These weren’t the heavy-duty lines handling bulk cargo, containers, or city-to-city transport. Instead, they serviced the kind of logistics that companies like Value Logistics or The Courier Guy handle today, smaller, everyday shipments. In a single year, the system processed at least 12 million consignments, or what we now call waybills. A consignment could be anything from a couple of microwaves destined for OK Bazaars to thousands of steam irons headed to Stuttafords.
The technology we used feels like a relic now. Each station was equipped with a green-screen terminal linked to the local post office, or “poskantoor.” For the more remote stations without green screens, staff relied on carbon-duplicated books to record consignments. These paper records were later manually punched into the system at the nearest green-screen terminal. It was a clunky, labor-intensive process, but it worked—at least most of the time.
Looking back, it’s surreal to think about how those branch lines have largely faded away. Many of the railway tracks we served are now overgrown with weeds, rusted beyond repair, or even stolen for scrap. The world has moved on, but that first job, writing COBOL code to keep those consignments moving, was my introduction to the intricate dance of systems and logistics that shaped my career.
Graduation & the Call to the Big Smoke
The air was thick with anticipation at my Maties graduation. The ceremony itself was a blur of gowns, proud smiles, and the weight of years of hard work finally paying off. I was the second guy off the stage, my heart still racing from the moment my name was called. As I stepped into the foyer, a man approached me, James Flower, a recruitment officer from Spoorweg. He had a sharp, no-nonsense air about him, the kind of guy who could size you up in seconds. “What were your marks like?” he asked, cutting straight to the point. I couldn’t help but grin. “Nailed distinctions in Computer Science,” I told him. His eyes lit up, and before I knew it, he was pressing an airline ticket and hotel vouchers into my hand. “Come up to the Big Smoke for an interview,” he said, like it was already a done deal.
Back then, airline tickets were a different beast. None of this e-ticket nonsense, just red carbon copies, flimsy yet official. If you paid with a credit card, they’d haul out one of those wick-whack machines, sliding it back and forth to emboss your card details onto the carbon paper. The boarding pass came with a little sleeve to keep it safe, and the whole process ran on something called Galileo, I think—a clunky system with cryptic codes. Six or seven keystrokes, and boom, you had your pass. It felt like a ritual, like stepping into a world of possibility.
I flew up to Johannesburg, the Big Smoke, for the interview. Nailed that too. When I landed the job, it came with perks that felt like winning the lottery: an unlimited train pass and four free SAA flights a year. I could feel the world opening up, one carbon-copied ticket at a time.
From Total House to Braampark & Durban Adventures
During my time at Transet, I spent most of my days at Total House before we relocated to Braampark. My role rarely involved direct physical interaction with the mainframe, except when I found myself in Durban. Those trips were a unique blend of work and unexpected fun.
I’d occasionally travel to Durban with tapes in tow to run management information reports on the backup mainframe. This was done to avoid disrupting the live system. The Durban setup was different, more hands-on. While waiting for reports to process, which could take hours, we’d kill time in the mainframe room by playing cricket. Our makeshift ball was a bottle top wrapped meticulously in packing tape until it was just the right size for our impromptu games.
Over time, I grew comfortable operating the console myself, running tasks and monitoring the system. One memorable day, the shift crew decided they wanted to hit the beach and asked if I’d mind watching over things. I agreed without hesitation. Hours later, the manager walked in, expecting to see his usual staff, only to find me—an unfamiliar face—sitting at the console, managing the mainframe solo. The look on his face and the conversation that followed were, to say the least, quite interesting.
