Please be so kind as to stay in your lane
Kholiwe was a young Zulu woman raised in a good Christian family in rural Zululand. Overcome by a burning desire in her heart and loins for her newfound beau ahead of the Easter weekend, she concocted the perfect plan. She was going to attend a Christian youth camp in Durban to spend Good Friday mourning, Easter Saturday worshipping, Saturday evening on the night vigil and Sunday morning celebrating the Resurrection. As it turns out, she was with her boyfriend, gallivanting on the
Golden Mile, culminating in her being eaten up by the Indian Ocean.
This is the plot of a fictional short story titled IPhasika, in the Uthingo Lwenkosazana, a collection by one of my childhood literary favourites, DBZ Ntuli. Like most Zulu novels, short stories and essays of the time, the writing is dripping with the honey of lessons designed to impart nuggets of morality and virtuous living. And the lesson here was, “Nothing ends well when you find yourself where you’re not meant to be”.
About eight years ago I was dropping off someone at the Pinetown Taxi Rank when I spotted a distant acquaintance’s Mercedes Benz M Class. Slightly concerned, as one tends to be when someone’s car seems out of place, I called him. He told me he was actually physically there. I parked my car illegally, on the pavement, and followed the ruckus. And there he was, in his fancy medical-looking outfit, blowing on a set of dice before rolling them on cardboard panes, clicking his fingers and yelling, “Come on seven!”
I was transfixed. Around him were taxi drivers and professional hustlers dressed up in Brentwood pants, Florsheim shoes and goatskin bangles, betting on dice while stuffing their faces with vetkoekand-polony and Russian sausages. Much later, it would be revealed to me that he was hooked on gambling with dice. He is a medical practitioner and apparently, when I spotted him there, he had actually closed his practice early to participate in a “hot stake” that day.
He even has a nasty scar on his arm from a stab wound inflicted by one of his “friends” during an altercation over dice. When his wife discovered that he had been harmed, she naturally panicked and rushed to Crompton Hospital, where he was. After she was satisfied that he wasn’t in any danger, she refused to visit him throughout the week that he was hospitalised.
The human brain is generally a totally messy place consisting of neurons firing off pretty randomly, but our minds are incredibly organised when it comes to placing people in their appropriate settings. Being the scruffy, underdressed individual I am, I cannot enumerate how often I have nearly been ejected from functions because I just didn’t belong there. In fact, without the proper dress code, we wouldn’t be able to discern who is a member of the National Assembly and who is a vagrant loitering on the pavements in the parliamentary precinct.
I have seen it all. At the Alan Taylor Residence of what was then Natal University, I once ran into a former Bantustan leader in the corridor with only a towel around his waist. I’ve had the awkward task of pretending to not recognise a mate’s dad inside the bathroom of a female residence at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Westville campus. A friend of mine had an uncomfortable conversation with his uncle when they ran into each other at The Summit Club in Hillbrow. I’ve also had an extremely uncomfortable exchange with a Catholic priest busy misappropriating the power of the Holy Spirit on a slot machine at the Wild Coast casino.
It’s not all doom and gloom. I’ve also run into an extremely famous songstress at the discount bin, buying three vests at Mr Price. This is when she explained to me that she makes a separation between her public persona and her personal self. And her personal self is but an employee in the company owned by her public persona entity, from which she draws a salary. This is my way of saying that if you ever see me standing in line to receive my R350 grant outside some Sassa office, do not be too quick to make a judgment.
I’ve had the awkward task of pretending to not recognise a mate’s dad inside the bathroom of a female residence at the UKZN Westville campus