‘Jeremy vannie Elsies’ rich in love

HERMY Adams rorled most times like he was tuned into the bass-line of Betty Wright’s Tonight.

“I’m gonna make you a woman”. I watched him do a bouncy quick-step up the slight incline to the Deanery: a step forward, stepping lightly on to the right, Jarman-shoed foot, a jigging pause as the left leg rhythms along.

He greeted me with a “Djy moerit lies”, as he slapped a copy of Jeremy vannie Elsies in my hand.

“I had a dream,” Hermy half whispered over the brim of his tea cup, “in which I die and I end up at the entrance to heaven. It looked like your area. A lotta white people walking their dogs and running about in shorties”. But even more disconcerting, he confided, was to see that God was white and that Jesus looked like Aron Gunnarsson, the captain of the Iceland team at this year’s Fifa World Cup.

Hermy said he felt a panic attack and shouted, “Steve Biko, Mangaliso Sobukwe, Reg September are you there?” And before he could add the name of Frantz Fanon he woke up to the gentle snore of Gabeba, reassuring him that he had not died.

“What is the colour of love, my brother, and what did the women look like?” I asked, to buy some time to formulate a comforting response.

“Gottallah, why do you bring up sex at the time? En losai Rumi gedagtes!” We spoke about how our dreams were often conversations with ourselves. A timely surfacing of our anxieties and fears. For instance, the Tunisians scored the first African goal of the Fifa World Cup 2018 but still lost to the English, our erstwhile colonisers.

Does his dream speak to our fear that we will never overcome? “Nou karasa,” noted Hermy, “check the Tunisians in relation to all this talk that we, of the Khoisan, were here first and now we are nowhere to be found”. This comment resonates with the view of coloured apathy of a given time referred to in an Adam