Don't be sad about all the 'firsts' your kids will never experience

In his second reign as heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali made his 11th defence of the title he had famously won against George Foreman in The Rumble In The Jungle.

His opponent was a stocky fellow by the name of Leon Spinks, who looked like the product of unprotected sex between an alpaca and a crazy camel with a passion gap. The fight place took place in the wee hours of the 17th of February 1978 (South African time).

The reason I remember this so vividly, even though I was only six at the time, is that it was the very first time I watched television.

We didn't own a TV at home and my dad had woken us up in the middle of the night and driven us in his Toyota Corona (no typo) to the house of a colleague, Mr Nyongwana. And there in the middle of Mr Nyongwana's living room was this fat box connected to a car battery, beaming black-and-white moving pictures from a screen no bigger than an iPad's.

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When I tell my kids that I remember the very first time I watched TV, they look at me with a mixture of incredulity and heartfelt sympathy.

And then I have to explain to them about a bunch of modern-day dinosaurs called the Nats who refused to allow TV in South Africa until late 1976 on the grounds that it would morally bankrupt the population, stray from the Ten Commandments and make the natives uppity to the point of possibly even wanting to mate with pure, God-fearing white women. All on account of watching American actor Lee Majors speak perfect Afrikaans while running in slow motion in Die Man van Staal. Or from watching Willie Wallie.

Even our next-door neighbours in then Rhodesia would shake their heads in disbelief: "But we've had television since 1960!"

I have experienced many firsts that my children will never experience. That includes the very first time I switched on an electric light in my own house, later in the year that I watched TV for the first time. The sense of wonder from opening a tap and seeing piping-hot water spurt out.

It would be another three years before I spoke on the telephone for the first time, at the age of nine. I remember the internal turmoil I experienced while talking to my gran, 60km away in Umhlanga Rocks. How was this even possible?

I was pondering all of the firsts that my kids have never experienced. I even started feeling a little sorry for them. And then it occurred to me how silly I was being. That there was nothing unique about my first experiences. It is all simply a function of the technological gaps between all successive generations.

I bet that my gran, who was born in 1913, distinctly remembered the first time she saw an aeroplane. She died never having been on one. My mother, who was born in 1944, has a vivid recollection of her very first flight, well into her 30s. Even I remember my first flight, in my late teens. The kids? Unless they can remember to back when they were three months old, not so much.

And this includes the 12-year-old who insisted, when he was three, that he remembered "the day I was born", complete with a detailed account of how his mom was driven to St Augustine's Hospital in Durban in a blue Renault and how he "refused" to come out for 15 hours. No prizes for guessing which one of my children is most likely to become a fiction writer.

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We recently saw thousands of folks spill onto the streets to march for the removal of the president from the Union Buildings. There were many TV interviews of people whose eyes were filled with wonder because they had never marched on the streets before, and I watched these with a fair level of envy.

Let's ignore the serious question of how anyone living in South Africa can gerrymander through the litany of march-worthy issues for the first 55 years of their lives only to start marching now. That's a matter for double-chinned PhDs to deal with. I'm far more interested in how much I envied people who were experiencing the sheer exhilaration of marching against something for the first time.

I'm afraid I don't remember the first time I marched. It feels like I started marching before the umbilical cord had dried. Even though I grew up in a hectically IFP stronghold, I remember our football games being interrupted by youth leaders to join a march against the price of bread increasing from 15c to 18c or something like that. I remember complaining that this seemed asinine seeing as there were no bakeries in my hood, so we were simply running around complaining to each other.

I find solace in the knowledge that my kids still have a lot of firsts awaiting them. And I'm not just talking about that first kiss or first ice-cold beer. I think that in their lifetime they will experience that first ride in an unmanned car, being served a meal by a robot, or even a road trip to Mars. And they will look sadly at their own kids, for whom joyrides to Mars might be an everyday experience.

• Follow the author of this article, Ndumiso Ngcobo, on Twitter: @NdumisoNgcobo.