MICHAEL ERIC (Mike) OETTLE[1] was born in Cape Town in 1949 and has lived in the same house in Westering, Port Elizabeth, since 1979.
In between he has lived on farms near Vredendal and Oudtshoorn, and in Pretoria, East London and Queenstown, attended schools in Rondebosch,[2] Grahamstown[3] and Vredendal,[4] travelled in all four of South Africa’s old provinces and worked as an ostrich farm guide (at Highgate, Oudtshoorn), a civil servant, briefly as a farm manager and political canvasser, and a journalist.
He speaks English and Afrikaans (and a little German), has a reading knowledge of Dutch and German, and although he speaks no isiNguni nor Sesotho language, he has studied both language groups closely.
He did his military training at 6 SA Infantry Battalion, Grahamstown, in 1968, subsequently serving in Grahamstown’s kilted infantry regiment, First City, and spent three months in Owambo with First City in 1977.
He has been in journalism since joining Donald Woods on the Daily Dispatch in East London in 1974, subsequently moving to the Daily Representative (afterward The Representative) in Queenstown. From 1979 to 2000 he was employed by the Evening Post and Weekend Post/East Cape Weekend in Port Elizabeth. Since the beginning of December 2000 he has worked for the Eastern Province Herald (now called The Herald) following the closure of the Evening Post. He still works part-time for Weekend Post.
He holds a BA in history and biblical studies from the University of South Africa and a BA Hons (History) from the same university. He also studied briefly at the universities of Cape Town and Pretoria.
He has read daily newspapers since the age of seven, collected postage stamps since 1959, and been fascinated by heraldry since he was a small boy. To read about his family and the coat of arms they claim, see here.
His stamp collection covers the whole world, and goes back to 1840. He has not had the opportunity of travelling overseas, but “travels vicariously” through his stamp collection and through reading. He has been a member of four philatelic societies, and took part in reviving the Queenstown Philatelic Society (sadly once more defunct) in 1976. He has belonged to the Port Elizabeth Philatelic Society since 1982, and has been affiliated to the Philatelic Federation of South Africa since 1975. He wrote a weekly stamp column from 1981 to 2003 and briefly wrote a heraldry column in 2000.
He has designed several coats of arms, one of which was registered in 2001-02, and assisted in the registration of several existing coats of arms. He has been a member of the Heraldry Society of Southern Africa since 1998, and in 2006 devised a coat of arms for it, which it has assumed and hopes to register. In February 2003 he was admitted as a Novice Member of the The Association of Amateur Heralds, became an Associate Member in April 2003, and is now a Fellow. In June 2004 he became one of three vice-presidents of what is now called the International Association of Amateur Heralds, but quit this office in 2006.
Other interests include classical music, singing, indigenous flora and the control of alien vegetation, genealogy, South African history, the Middle Ages, Church history, biblical history, Arthurian legend and the works of J R R Tolkien. A second-generation blood donor, he has donated more than 100 units.
Raised in a Christian family, he went through a period of unbelief before becoming a committed Christian in 1978. He has also studied other belief systems in depth, including the other monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam, pagan beliefs such as Hinduism and European and African paganism, as well as atheist beliefs like communism. During the years 1989 to 1994 he wrote a monthly series of articles on Church history which in April/May 2004 became a website called Saints & Seasons.
He has been married to Glenn Massey since 1976 and they have two children, Andrew (born in 1982 and currently a BSc graduate) and Judith (born in 1986) both currently students (Andrew postgraduate) at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Summerstrand south campus (previously University of Port Elizabeth). Both were pupils at the Westering High and Primary schools).
