When your time comes, make damn sure you pass it on!
Help! Millionaires are sinking me with random acts of kindness!
I try so hard to live a life of enough-ism — no yearning for my ship to come in laden with properties, shares, annuities, businesses, millions stuffed in Ankole horns, motorcycles, wine and exotic holidays.
I live in the simple, stark moment: humble lodgings close to the surf, only two motorcycles, cozzies and goggles, no animals except when daughter travels, just a lone ranger living off my writing and trying to keep it honest.
But no, despite me railing against the one-percenter global oligarchs who are dining out on mass ecocide, millionaires arrive at my gate, 10 minutes early at 4am, and wait patiently and humbly for the penniless writer.
I was so the m***-in when my multi-millionaire mate in Gatstad did that. I was on time but he was early, because that is the kind of guy he is, and also because he won’t tolerate himself being late for his three or four retail chain stores.
And how we would pass the time riding under the starlight of the narrow, bendy tar road surrounded by gothic shadows of aloes and euphorbia, haasies eyes lit up by our predawn headtorches, or even the click and clatter of silent ships in the night, the majestic kudu. Such tremendous, earthy fun.
Friends have been pulling in around me of late. They do not flash their wealth, they do not talk about money, they talk about helping others, cancer sufferers, kids in burn units, but I know their successful professional business lives have put them in the millionaire bracket.
And I am glad for them — and they know my feelings about crass materialism, about
living lightly, going easy on the eco-verse.
Yet there they are slipping in the help quieter than those huge kudu roaming in the gloaming.
And what is it with Christians? The more I proclaim my atheism, the closer my Christian friends pull in. What am I not doing to distract you?
And Jewish people — how do they know I had a Jewish grandfather? Why has there always been a Jewish family member or friend to jam a yarmulke on my head at an amazing Friday night meal for a lost teen in Bunkers Hill in 1975, or knit me a thick jersey in my then-favourite struggle colours in 1983, or give me a safe home when I came out of detention and was banned?
In my business life, running East Cape News, why did a local banker and lawyer with deep English settler roots decide to pull in and chair us through the legal and business rapids for absolutely no reason other than he was having fun and wanted to help. He was supported by a Jewish mate who held our hand from Johannesburg for no other reason than altruism, the public and personal good.
How do you explain the kindly Matthew Goniwe and his wife Nomonde showing us around their Lingelihle township, all roses and geraniums in 1984-ish, journalist-activist Mono Badela ushering me into his family home in Kwazakhele, lounge furniture covered in plastic, homes opened up in a time of great danger, kindness in a time of killing.
When I look around at the horrifying culture of patronage, enforced by a sufferance of lies and angry violence, I wonder what is happening to random acts of kindness?
It’s just me-myself-I to misquote poor Joan Armatrading, just narcissism, ruthless
hedonism, autocratic, macho traditionalism, appeals which slide through gutter immorality to force abeyance. Buses on fire.
Other day, while doing my arriving home on motorcycle dance — dismounting, off with gauntlet gloves, undoing my damn helmet strap, sometimes having to stagger in desperation to the wall and well, moving on. I glanced up and there he was, the hooded, thin shadow, scraggy pants, tatty tackies doing the dodgy walk.
It was dark and I was outside my garage in the shadows. He never saw me, but man, did I see him. As he sashayed past the hotel opposite me, there was a sudden left turn straight at the alley on the side of the building.
He was going straight at the gate and in a second I could see him up and over.
“Hey! I can see you! What are you doing?” I roared (edited version since this is a family newspaper), and without so much as a how’s your auntie this tsotsi-in-the-making, this wraith, spun on his heel and resumed his tack through the hood and onwards.
Did I feel pumped with self-righteousness? No. Just whatever.
Then again while hanging in my camp chair on the corner, a similar looking hooded character came cruising, literally looking in cars.
You had to admire his slick moves, so purposeful and yet sinister.
I was up in my chair roaring like a circus lion. The dude literally swung towards me. I know it was me, him and hidden blades.
As readers know, I don’t intend to go down without a fight, no naffy notions of non-violence when confronted by a criminal who will snuff you out with less regard for life than blatting a mosquito.
These are tough, complex issues, and wokus pokus waffling about ideology and fluffed up histories have nothing to say about life on the street, the here and now.
We are on a sharp edge in SA. Eskom is our metaphor neglected, corrupted and now used in factional warfare. Don’t delude yourself, we are bouncing along the bottom of the sewer.
And yet, when I wake to the sound of southern bou-bou shrikes, the flapping of takkies on tar as runners go by, surf sounding on a bedrock of ystersteen (dolerite) and Shelley’s putting out umbrellas and bowls full of water for passers-by and their dogs, well, you just got to choose your reality.
We are a beautiful country. Travel and find out. You might be overjoyed to be returning home, because the good, the marvellous, the amazing country will await you.
So we are ninjas, we move between the zones reading spaces, finding new connections with people, digging down again and again to find those lovely roots of home. We must struggle on — for this.
Yes, trauma and death will be around every corner, and at times it can feel overwhelming, but there is a depth of kindness in our society which needs to be stoked up time and again, like the embers of your braai on Heritage Day.
Soak up that kindness but enjoy responsibly — I work on a sliding scale of their estimated millions to my paltry pension, and make absolutely sure I pay my tithe or more as we groove along — and make absolutely sure that when you are in a position to offer kindness to someone with less than you, pass it on!
* This piece was inspired by Tony Cox’s rendition of Weeping and