On the pavement, surrounded by a tangle of pruned rose branches that would defy a tank, our cousin, Di, has nearly finished a day of rose-surgery. They’ve been mega-bushes, climbing our wall. I’ve just got home. I’m awed. I’m saying “Di, can I get you tea, can I get you coffee, can I get you a whiskey, can I get you band-aid...”
While I talk, branches fly out of the mobile hump that is Di under bushes. She keeps on working: “No. No. No. No.”
I know her No's will all be No's, but there is the hostly instinct. Seffricans are good at that. We over-offer instinctively, same as we instinctively say “how are you” to everyone from the speedcop to the talk-show host who has just said “fine” 14 consecutive times to the same question.
I run out of hostly offers, and at last recognise her No's as “will you let me get on with it now”. I step back and I bash into a passer-by.
It isn’t a big bash; no bruises or pain, but I’ve definitely invaded someone else’s space. I offer the sheepish “sorry” of a person who belatedly discovers that it is not clever to walk backwards into the public walkway of a busy pavement.
The passer-by is a woman, twenties, nice-looking, bluejeans.
We disentangle, mildly humorously. I catch her eye. She gives a fleeting no-problem grin. Fresh attractive face, expressive. She gestures to Cousin Di, attacking bushes, and says: “a worker, that one, look after her”. She flexes her arm in a ripply airpunch like when your team scores a point, gives me a nod, and walks on.
I’m left standing on the pavement, staring after her, on a high. Anyone driving past would presumably see an old goat ogling a young chick. They’d be wrong. I’m on a different high; a public high, you might say.
This was a milestone; another milestone. We have milestones all the time, new and fuller ways that we mature into being a richer society. Some milestones you see coming, like the dropping of “baas” and “boy”. Some milestones, you irritatingly wait for, like the overdue dropping of “mlungu” as an appellation to pale people.
This milestone took me by surprise. Until now, I’d though that communication with the previously disenfranchised was coming on alright, nothing much lacking.
But this vivacious melaninned face saying “a worker, that one...” was new.
She was black, by the way. Did I fail to mention? Well, that figures. Those epithets become backward, now, used so much more often than they are needed.
I don’t think her mother ever spoke to any white guy like that. There was always some recognition of blackness and whiteness and a gulf. There was deference, or there was distance, or there was resentment... There was something; to talk across races was to talk a different way.
Whites, too. Maybe whites most. The tone of voice switched, whether to a peremptory bark or to a syrupy patronising tang. In my world the syrupy version ruled. I could cringe at it, and feel snootily superior, until one day in the 1980s I put the phone down and my wife said “you were talking to someone black, weren’t you?” I shouted much-better: “You’re calling me a racist! How dare you!” But the evidence was in her ears. I was mortified.
That was those days. But not so very much has changed. I still catch myself, sometimes, speaking in that way that my wife would identify. I don’t mean where there are language difficulties. You can have language difficulties with someone from Spain or Bulgaria as much as someone from Nongoma. That’s different. It’s the speaking across the gulf of our history.
Some elements of that shrink, but not all elements. Some grow. Some people think they hear new things in the voices from the other side, things like “old-guard” and “relic” and “how long are you lot still going to hang around here?”
It’s in this context that I loved “a worker, that one...”
That's an odd comment, you note, not socially licensed. I can imagine that if 60-year-old Bruce is on his pavement in Brisbane and 20-year-old Sheila gestures at someone who appears to be his wife and says “a worker, that one, look after her”, Bruce might not be charmed.
But if his brother or his neighbour makes the same gesture with the same comment, there would be all-round chuckles and warmth and quiet appreciation, right?
Well, there you have it. To me this young woman in her 7 simple words was saying two things. One thing was: “I’m out of that black-white crap, you and I are two people sharing a country, simple” and the other thing was “I don’t need conventions that measure age and status and introductions to be someone’s friend; I’m your friend automatically”.
Maybe there’s a third thing, too: “and what is more, my friend, I’m your future”.
Fine grounds for a high, I’d say. But tinges of low arise out of it too. I think how long we kept people like this at a distance, and feel a pang. Worse, I think how many people I know are still holding up the shields, walking around with their feet on the soil of 21st-century Africa and their souls in the ethos of 19th-century London, seeking security from distance and solace from disdain.
To me, the uncertainties we face are soluble things, not things that we are destined to wail about forever. Dealing with them starts by embracing our environment.
Give Africa love; Africa returns it with interest.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
written by NHL Hockey Jersey , March 22, 2012
written by rolex sea dweller replica , April 11, 2012
written by LV monogram denim bags , April 28, 2012
written by Replica Tag Heuer Link Calibre S Watches UK , May 07, 2012
http://www.storereplica.co.uk/hublot-c-126.html
written by omega de ville replica watches , May 08, 2012
written by replica watches , May 17, 2012
written by replica watches , May 17, 2012
written by ronsonik , May 19, 2012
