The blonde looked around her to see if anybody had overheard our nasty little conversation. People remained unaware of what had passed between us. I stood with a scowl on my face, anticipating her response. She finally summoned up enough courage to speak and stammered: “My gosh! Why on earth do you think I’m racist? I was just –”
“Because you are white,” I answered.
“So that qualifies –”
“Yes. I know the likes of you and I’m sick and tired of pretending. When you see a black man like me I know you don’t see a man, but a black boy.”
“I’m sorry if you feel that way. I was merely saying that maybe she would be more comfortable being assisted by you.”
I clicked my tongue. “Ag! Voetsek, man! What made you think she would be comfortable being helped by me and not you or anybody else in this queue, including the security officer over there?”
“Oh jeez, I mean –”
“Yeah. It’s because I’m black just like her, isn’t it? And you think you are different from us,” I snapped.
The blonde made some attempt to absolve herself but I turned to face the ATM. The security officer had helped the black lady and I was now second in the queue.
When my turn came to use the ATM I found I had three hundred and thirty rand in my bank account. I withdrew three hundred rand and headed to the nearby Moosa Supermarket to buy some groceries. As I walked away I could feel the blonde’s eyes on my back.
Themba, one of my township friends, had finally got a job as a cashier at the Moosa Supermarket. From the shelves I took as many goodies as I wanted without even bothering to check their prices. At the till Themba would either pass my goodies through without ringing them up, or he would ring up a lesser price. As he was doing this he would say, “The rand is weak, my friend, we must save money when we have a chance”.
The total that flashed up on the cash register was forty-seven rand and eighty-one cents. The groceries that I had filched were worth more than one hundred and eighty rand. In order to hoodwink the shop manager, who was sitting at the other till, I tendered eighty rand in tens and twenties. Themba then gave me more than thirty rand in coins. At the door was a black security officer, I folded a ten rand note and handed it to him underneath my receipt; he smiled at me and ticked the receipt.
Along the way back to the Y and not very far from the Moosa Supermarket was a bottlestore. The change that Themba had given me at the supermarket was jangling in the back pocket of my jeans. I walked inside with my grocery bags and within a few seconds I had increased my load by twelve cold beers.
At the corner of De Korte and a small street that I didn’t know the name of, I started feeling the weight of the heavy plastic bags that I was carrying. My fingers began to twitch as if I had cut off the blood supply.
I stopped by the robots opposite Damelin College to see if there was a car coming. There was nothing on the road, so I crossed before the green man appeared on the robot and sat down on a big stone under a giant tree next to the College building. I looked inside one of my bags and saw some appetising biltong curling up at me like a snake.
I put my hand inside the plastic bag to pull out the biltong. But instead I touched the ice-cold Black Label dumpies. My mouth started to water. I tried to swallow the saliva, but my throat was too dry. I spat out the saliva and watched the blob fall noisily on the tarmac while my hand groped inside the bag again. With a mind of its own, my hand bypassed the biltong and came out with an ice-cold lager. I laughed at myself, but I didn’t put the beer back in the bag. After all, the Y is still far away and I am tired of walking. Who’s going to see that I’m drinking a beer under this tree?
As I twisted the top off my dumpie my mind landed comfortably on the very first glass of beer that my father gave me. That was way back in the late 1970s.
My father was a good musician. Unfortunately none of his children took after him, but in drinking I think I outclass my old man. My mother used to complain a lot about my father’s drinking and his late homecomings; sometimes she would even accuse him of having an affair. But later I found out that my father was just enjoying playing his music and drinking beer at the bottlestore, where he could find good drunken backing vocalists to accompany him when he played his Xizambi.
This traditional Shangaan instrument was made out of a thin cane which was bent into the shape of a bow. A melodious string would be fastened from one bent end of the wood to another. A short carved stick would then be struck against the cane, providing percussion and melody at the same time.
My father was brilliant at carving and he used to make his own instruments as well as other things. He would often go to the countryside and fell trees from which he would carve wooden spoons, wooden plates and things for home decoration. He would sell those things for profit at the train stations during his spare time.
Most of my father’s followers were drunken women that he met at the bottlestore. Every Friday night we would hear him coming from afar with the crowd behind him singing along in carefree tones. But by the time he reached our home the crowd would have disappeared. His food would be ready on his carved wooden plate, but he would continue playing his instrument. Sometimes he would ask my mother to join him in a tune. She would join in if she was in a good mood. She knew all of his songs.
My father sang his songs when he was both happy and sad, or when he wanted to make a point about something. There was a particular song that my father used to sing when he wanted to tell a troublesome tenant to leave our home. Its Shangaan title was “Nghoma ya makhalibode”, “The song of cardboard boxes”, and it went like this:
| Ayi gube ya makhalibode | (Take your cardboard boxes and leave my house) |
| I khale mi hi nyagatsa | (It is long that you been troubling us) |
| Aho chava ku mi hlongola | (We were afraid of chucking you out) |
| Hi nghoma ya makhalibode | (This is the song of the cardboard boxes) |
After singing that song we all knew that someone among my father’s tenants should leave the house, but my father was a very kind man and although most of the tenants in our home were our relatives, they never paid rent.
One day my father arrived home late, singing as usual. My mother was very angry because he had spent most of his money on beer. What made matters worse was that earlier the same day she had come home with her hand torn and bleeding. She and her friends had been bitten by the dogs at a farm near Pimville. A white farmer had set the dogs on them as they were trying to collect cow dung to smear on the floor of our house. Only one of her friends managed to escape, by jumping the fence. My mother was caught by the arm by one of the dogs, while her other friend was caught by the leg. After enjoying their plight the farmer instructed his dogs to leave the “kaffirs” alone, but the scar is still vivid even today.
My father used this as an opportunity to compose a song about white people. The song ran as follows and was in English:
You, white man, leave my family alone
This is the last warning
I worked hard and paid lobola for my wife
Unlike you, who just give them a ring to put on their finger
I have eight children with her not just two
But that night we were woken up by a serious argument in my parents’ bedroom. My brother and I were sleeping in the sitting-dining room. We listened very quietly. My mother was threatening to leave the house because my father didn’t spend enough time at home.
The following day, a Friday, my father came straight home from work sober. After dinner he told me to come with him. I didn’t ask where. We went to the local bottlestore, and that was the day he gave me my very first beer. The first ever glass