Thirty-One Years of Drawing With a Pencil, and the Winter I Built My Own Computer

The Last Drawing Board in the Building

When the mine closed the drawing office in 2019, I was the last man in it still using a drawing board. The others had moved to computers years before, one by one, like people leaving a party. I stayed on the board because I was fast and I was accurate and because, if I am honest, I was afraid. I had drawn shaft cross sections, ventilation layouts and conveyor details by hand since 1988, with a clutch pencil, a set of French curves and a parallel motion arm that squeaked if you did not oil it every Friday. I could look at a sheet of A0 and feel whether it was right before I checked a single dimension.

The retrenchment letter came in a brown envelope on a Thursday. They gave me a package, a handshake, and permission to take anything from the office that would otherwise be thrown away. I took the board. I also took nine cardboard tubes of original drawings that were going to the skip, plans of tunnels and headgears that had my initials in the bottom right corner, some of them older than my children.

A Man Without a Tool

For the first year I did almost nothing. I fixed the gutters. I painted the back stoep twice. My wife, Annetjie, who has been patient with me since we were nineteen, eventually said, quite gently, that I was getting under her feet and in her kitchen and possibly in her nerves. She suggested I do some freelance work. A small engineering firm in town had told me they would happily send me drafting jobs, but only if I could work in CAD and send files by email. Nobody wanted pencil on paper any more. I knew that. I had known it for fifteen years.

I bought a second-hand laptop from a man at church. It was slow and the screen was the size of a cereal box, and when I opened the drawing software for the first time, I sat in front of it for forty minutes without making a single line. I could not see anything. Everything was tiny. I was used to standing over a board the size of a dining table with the whole mine spread out under my hands, and now I was squinting at a corner of a cereal box trying to find a button.

Sipho Comes Back

Sipho was my apprentice from 2009 to 2013, the only one I ever had. He was a quiet boy from Phokeng who could letter beautifully and drew with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. When the office started going digital, he went digital with it, and then he left for a job in Johannesburg, and we sent each other a message on our birthdays and that was about all.

He came home to Rustenburg to see his mother in June, and he stopped by the house with a packet of koeksisters from Annetjie's favourite shop because he remembered. I showed him the laptop. He laughed so hard he had to sit down. Then he stopped laughing and looked at me properly and said, "Meneer, you cannot draw a mine on that. You need a proper machine. Let us build you one."

I told him I could not build a computer. He said I had spent thirty-one years drawing machines far more complicated than a computer, and that a computer was just a box of parts that each did one job, like a conveyor system. "You know how to read an exploded drawing," he said. "This is just an exploded drawing you can touch."

The Kitchen Table Becomes a Workshop

So that winter, on Saturday mornings, Sipho drove up from Johannesburg and we built a computer on the kitchen table with Annetjie hovering over us with tea and great suspicion. He made a list of what we needed and we ordered the parts online, and I remember being amazed that you could choose motherboards the way you used to choose a pump, by looking at what it needed to connect to and how much load it would carry. Sipho explained it to me in mine language. The motherboard was the main haulage level. Everything else came off it. The processor was the winder. The memory was the stockpile. I understood it immediately.

When the parts arrived I laid them out on a clean towel in order of assembly, exactly as I would have laid out components for a fitter. Sipho laughed at me again, but he did not change the order. I installed the processor myself with my reading glasses on and my breath held, because he had told me that if I bent a single pin I would have to sell the bakkie. My hands, which had not shaken over a drawing in thirty years, shook over that little square of silicon. When it clicked into place, I let out a breath so long that Annetjie came in from the passage to see if I was having a heart attack.

The Screen Was the Whole Point

The part I cared about most was the screen. On the drawing board, the important thing was always being able to see the whole sheet at once and then lean in close to a detail without losing your place. I explained this to Sipho and he understood immediately. We spent an evening reading about computer monitors the way young people read about cars, arguing about size and sharpness and whether a curved one would make my straight lines look bent. In the end we chose two, side by side, big enough that I could put a whole cross section on one and the details on the other. Like a board and a reference table. Like home.

The first time we switched it all on and it actually worked, Sipho and I just looked at each other. He held his fist out to me and I did not know what to do with it, so I shook it like a hand. Then he showed me the drawing software again, and on two large screens it was not a cereal box any more. It was a sheet of paper. A very strange sheet of paper that could zoom, but a sheet of paper all the same.

Learning to Draw Again at Fifty-Nine

It took me most of the spring to become useful. I made every mistake a beginner makes. I drew things in the wrong layer. I deleted an entire morning's work by pressing a key I still cannot identify. I swore at the mouse in Afrikaans, English and a little Setswana that Sipho had taught me years ago for exactly this purpose. But by October I sent my first freelance job to the firm in town, a small platform and handrail detail, and the engineer phoned me back to say it was the neatest drawing he had received all year. I did not tell him I had drawn it four times.

The Nine Tubes

The real surprise came afterwards. One evening I took out the nine cardboard tubes I had rescued from the skip and unrolled the drawings on the kitchen table. Some were from the 1970s, drawn by men I worked under when I was young, men whose initials I recognised and most of whom are dead now. It occurred to me that nobody else on earth had copies of these. I had the only record of how parts of that mine had been designed, by hand, in ink, by people who would never be in any history book.

I started scanning them, sheet by sheet, at a print shop in town and storing them on the new computer. Then I wanted to organise the originals properly, so they would survive me. Annetjie, who runs the church bazaar with military precision, suggested I get one of the small label printers she uses for the jam jars. Now every tube in the spare room has a neat white label on the end with the drawing number, the date, the shaft, and the initials of the draughtsman who drew it. Some evenings I go in there just to read the labels. It feels like reading the names on a memorial.

What Sipho Said at the End

In December Sipho came for a braai and I showed him the room with the labelled tubes and the digital archive on the computer. He walked along the shelf reading them, and he stopped at one with my initials and the date 1991, a ventilation layout I drew the year he was born. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, "You know, Meneer, you taught me to draw on a board. I only taught you to draw on a screen. I think I got the better deal."

I do not think that is true. But I let him have it, because he had driven up every Saturday for a whole winter to teach an old man that his hands were not finished yet.