Not the white stuff for the politically correct

IN THE euphoria after the election of Nelson Mandela, a beautiful person sewed the colours of the new flag on to a black bow tie and gave it to me.

I loved this tie but it was dangerous to my health. It electrified people. They’d clutch for it dangerously.

They also proffer banknotes. So for a decade or so we ran a micro-business making bow ties in variants of the flag.

Our subtlest model, gently wavy, the six colours understated, came up near the end, as the business faded for lack of time.

One remains, and is hauled out perhaps twice a year when I have cause to recall the concept “a tie”. Odd; a little strip of cloth, smaller than a handkerchief, way up among the things precious to me.

Trouble is, its neck has become loose and floppy. On Wednesday, I took it to the tailor. As usual, our greeting exercised all 20 words of my French. With pleasant- ries over, outside on the pavement I’m hit by existential shock. How staggering a thing has just happened!

This was a completely ordinary human exchange, which for most of my life could not have happened.

The tailor could not have crossed the Limpopo, coming from west Africa. He could not have a shop in the suburbs, barred by his colour. And we took that as normal. Whap!

In my generation, heirs to three centuries of separation “whap” moments can be big.

We can do the tiniest routine thing and be unexpectedly smacked by a flashback to when it was unthinkable. Fences that were formerly immutable have fallen now, for us, in our time.

It’s astonishing. Those moments need breather space. The task I’m on must wait. I make for a coffee shop, to bask a little in the feel of progress, not always conspicuous, and read newspapers.

I am struck by a headline, “DA’s white independent experts forgot to ring the alarm bells…”

The story is on Cape Town’s water shortage, making a case that the city’s eyes have been closed. It looks plausible, but it’s one of those stories where telling the tale is patently secondary to ensuring that the reader correctly identifies the bad guys.

The sentence about white experts is in the story. Even in small print it’s a jolt, echoing the accounts of early 1930s German newspapers making “Jew” a chilling title, “a Jew editor”, “a Jew dentist”. Or of 1990-1994 Rwanda retrogressing to savagery via making “cockroach” the word for Tutsi.

How does the writer, designated an ANC spokesperson, knead “white” into this? How does a sub-editor pick this sentence for elevation to the headline? I’ll bet that both of them not long ago genuinely believed the ANC stuff about non-racism. They took it seriously. Does that capacity progressively vanish after the jackboot moves foot?

Last week, two apparently sober people occupied an air wave to determine the rightful fate of white males, who, it became clear, are now reclassified as one of nature’s mistakes, like mosquitoes and Hartbeespoort hyacinth.

For several sentences, I took it this was satire, but no, here were self-proclaimed standard-bearers of non-racism pontifically puzzling out whether culprits of wrongful birth deserve forgiveness. Such cheeky sods, pitching up with testicles and no melanin, just like that!

Original apartheid never went that far, though it would have had a better excuse. When it was born, the world was only in year three of climbing out of the race prison. Sixty-nine years or 3 000% further on, it’s rather disillusioning to find apostles of rectitude hatching routes to barbarity.

That can put quite a crimp in a buoyant, whole, African day.