The official review was conclusive: a slither of tomato from Candice Chetty’s frying pan must have set off the fire-alarm aboard the 1,450-tonne military submarine SAS Charlotte Maxeke.
One minute Chetty was flipping onion rings in the kitchen galley, the next she was stuck inside a wartime horror fliek, sirens wailing, lights flashing, bells ringing, seamen in a state of undress running around like mole rats. “It just made a little curl of smoke — that was it,” says Chetty, remembering the fateful tomato that caused all the fuss.
Of course, Chetty owned up right away when she found the commanding officer: “I said, ‘Excuse me sir, I think it was me.’ He said, ‘Relax — it might just be a real fire.’ So they went through this whole procedure and there was nothing.”
But, if Chetty thought she was off the hook, she was mistaken: the false alarm was the least of her problems. “The captain came to me and said, ‘You made the fire alarm go off — so you’re going to dive the boat’.”
That’s how it goes in the U-boat business: one minute you’re flipping onions, the next you’re at the wheel of a R2.5bn piece of German-engineered stealth weaponry.
“There are a lot gauges and stuff that you have to watch,” says Chetty. “You must have lizard eyes that move all the time to check everything.”
That Chetty and the other nervous seamen of SAS Charlotte Maxeke not only survived that unorthodox dive into the bowels of False Bay, but are now giggling about it, all wide-eyed and breathless at a quayside of Simon’s Town naval base, is testimony to a new-look South African navy of the kind Jan van Riebeeck might have seen only in his most fevered dreams.
I thought it was, like, they were going to teach me to drive ships then take me to school. I didn’t think about running around, or queuing to eat or being shouted at. I didn’t think about that.
— Ntombizanele Mohloboli
For a start, all the submariners, within sight as we climb aboard the SAS Charlotte Maxeke, are black — and three of them are women. This in itself is nothing new; women make up a sizeable chunk of defence force personnel and have done so for years. Petty officer Chetty, 29, is in her 12th year of active naval service, admittedly most of them in the kitchen, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to run and jump and make her bed tighter than a parson’s purse strings from time to time.
What is new, however, is the female submariner — a new species in the traditionally male underwater world of icebergs and ultrasound.
Chetty says the reason for the gender imbalance goes without saying. Women know a good boat when they see one: “I don’t think anybody was interested until the new boats arrived.”
Even interior-décor-challenged men would concede that South Africa’s three new submarines, while hugely controversial in political skulduggery terms, score big in terms of both diesel-electric engine power and sleek German engineering. Add to that eight state-of-the-art torpedo tubes, impressive length and girth (size certainly counts), and a nifty red and yellow logo on the conning tower (the protruding bit), and it’s easy to see why women are at last taking their place alongside men to patrol the murky contours of the country’s offshore domain.
“There wasn’t another woman to whom I could speak with to ask what submarines are like,” says Chetty, now quite at home as she guides me along the gangway onto the deck of SAS Charlotte Maxeke, where we get a beady eye and pointedly bone-crushing handshake from the male senior officer whom one suspects doesn’t much like the Sunday Times reporters snuffling around so close to his torpedoes, or his women.
Then it’s down the hatch and into the belly of the beast.
German engineering or second-hand underwater skedonk (jalopy), submarines are not comfy places. Each square centimetre has its purpose, sometimes three or four purposes.
The recreation area is also a locker room and complicated sonar-reading zone; dials and bulbs and gauges hang from the walls like spaghetti; a TV-screen is lost against an incomprehensible tangle of life-saving and — presumably — life-terminating pipes, poles and torpedoes; no windows. Not everybody’s idea of sea travel, in other words.
But neither complicated plumbing nor electrical gadgetry holds any fear for baby-faced Ntombizanele Mohloboli, 20, whose high school ambition was to be a mechanical engineer and who joined the navy in the hope of furthering her studies. Expecting a crash course in applied science, Mohloboli had a rude awakening — at 5am — to the more physical side of military training: press-ups and jogging. “I thought it was, like, they were going to teach me to drive ships then take me to school. I didn’t think about running around, or queuing to eat or being shouted at. I didn’t think about that.
“You have to make your bed and it has to be straight. It was like Survivor South Africa 3.”
Rather than quash her career, the rigorous basic training at Saldanha naval base propelled Mohloboli towards her dream job: to be a submarine driver. She may not look the part yet — her curvaceous build and soapbox smile is anathema to the grizzled, tight-lipped stereotype of U-boat movies — but she nevertheless commands plenty of attention as we move deeper into the steel lung, where in every corner are groups of men peering into screens and looking back over their shoulders as we shuffle past.
I always wanted to drive something big and different; I’ve always had that thing in me. Maybe it’s because of how I grew up. I always wanted to be different to prove a point somehow.
— Zintle Skele
Though the male gaze might struggle to picture Mohloboli bench-pressing an 80kg bazooka under the hot sun, seamen, male or female — the term “seawomen” is still verboten, and “sea-girls” sounds too much like “seagulls” — must pass stringent twice-yearly fitness tests, and there are regular group jogs along the winding roads of Simon’s Town.
Mohloboli is refreshingly frank about her reason for switching to the submarine corps: “I come from the Free State — there’s nobody driving submarines there,” she says, deadpan.
Neither are there many submariners in Johannesburg, the hometown of my third female escort, pint-sized Zintle Skele, who joins our group as we inspect the sleeping quarters of SAS Charlotte Maxeke. If Mohloboli is the embodiment of a friendlier, sexier submarine corps, Skele is proof that the new generation of South African seamen are nothing if not determined; she credits Leonardo DiCaprio as inspiring her conversion to matters submarine: “I was watching Titanic and I saw those vessels when they were going down, and I was so interested in these things moving around under the water. I told my mom I wanted to be a (submarine) captain, but I didn’t have any idea how I would become one.”
Skele’s initial foray to military headquarters in Pretoria didn’t augur well: she was turned down by the air force because of her height — she is only 1.55m — and missed an interview with the South African Maritime Safety Association, because her official invite went Awol in Soweto. By the time she arrived for her appointment, it was navy recruitment day and she went along just in case; a few weeks later she was scrubbing floors alongside Mohloboli and the other new recruits at Saldanha naval base.
Skele says she too was naturally drawn to submarines: “I always wanted to drive something big and different; I’ve always had that thing in me. Maybe it’s because of how I grew up. I always wanted to be different to prove a point somehow.”
Down the alleyway and into the ops room, our submarine tour continues, past a thousand knobs and switches with labels like “HP Oil Pump” and “Life Raft Compt 2”; past a water fountain and a coat rack and a noticeboard that says “I love my submariner”; then it’s back onto the bridge where the wind howls a lonely tune around the conning tower.
A seaman of starched blue snaps into salute as I step back onto the gangway, but when I look around he is already chatting up my female escorts, his cellphone drawn to get numbers, his eyes ablaze with national fervour as one by one Skele, Mohloboli and Chetty waltz past. Not for the first time I pack away my reporter’s notebook with a dizzying and uncontrollable addiction to the bubbly submarine search for South Africa, and to the men and women holding their breath to make it happen.
And as my car leaves Simon’s Town, the future a dappled windscreen, the past a glint of a half-billion-rand warship receding in my rear-view mirror, I remember Chetty’s slither of tomato in the submarine galley and the smoke that leads us to false alarm.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.