GERHARDUS CORNELIUS OOSTHUIZEN

Eskom power-station engineer, Blue Bulls fan and the man who kept Kendal's lights on

The only thing Gerrie Oosthuizen ever said he could not forecast was the Blue Bulls. Everything else in his world, from the load on a turbine to the exact moment a braai fire was ready, he could predict to within a minute.

Born in Bloemfontein in 1948, the son of a railwayman, Gerhardus was a quiet boy who took apart radios and put them back together with parts left over. He attended Grey College, studied electrical engineering at the University of Pretoria, and joined Eskom in 1972. For thirty-six years he worked in the power stations of Mpumalanga and the Free State, among them Lethabo and Kendal, and ended his career as a senior manager at Megawatt Park.

His colleagues remembered a calm man in a hard hat, who could diagnose a failing boiler by the sound it made, and who refused to let a trainee near a control panel before he had spent a week learning to listen to the machines. He quietly mentored dozens of young engineers, among them some of the first Black graduates to join his station, and he never missed an opportunity to give credit to the people on the floor. In later years he sighed at the news of load-shedding, but never blamed his colleagues, only the decades of deferred maintenance.

He married Elsabé Joubert in 1974. He loved biltong made to his own recipe, Friday nights at Loftus Versfeld, fishing at Hartbeespoort Dam, and singing bass in the church choir. He served as an elder of the NG Kerk in Menlo Park for twenty-five years.

Gerrie died in August 2020, after a short illness, with only fifty mourners allowed at the service. He leaves his wife, three children and eight grandchildren. Rus sag, Pa.

“Listen to the machine. It always tells you the truth before the gauges do.”