GIVE A LITTLE LOVE
Rookoo’s daughter has an eye on my nephew. Kenna and I, as the senior uncles, were sent for ilobolo negotiations. So far, we are at ten cows and a curved screen TV. “Not on your bloody life,” screeched nephew’s educated mother. “We killed this dowry thing on the plantations.” We pleaded that culture had to be honoured.
Earlier in the week, we were among the whispering classes at a conference hosted by the Indentured Labourers Foundation Verulam. An erudite professor told the captive audience about the skewed gender balance among the indentured people. Considerably more men were shipped from India to Natal, something like two-thirds of the human cargo bearing the same dangling mating tackle.
“They was dalaaring. They brus,” Kenna stage-whispered to the cheap seats at the back. The fact of homosexuality was not disputed by the professor, who quoted from a colonial report. Kenna crossed his legs and folded his arms smirking at his own superior intellect. “Yol know how Logie choons he is a double o Naidoo, one ou behind the other ou,” Sarge chuckled.
These days, we are pretty grown up about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people in my beloved Bangladesh market district in Chatsworth. The part folks are less comfortable talking about is their colourful bloodlines.
“Give a little love,” author
Zenzile Khoisan gently urged at the #Hashtagbooks launch of his poetry collection at Goodwill Manor. There Are No More Words is the title of the Khoisan elder’s cutting compilation. We discover, through the Khoisan elder, that we are all related. Not just since 1860, when our forebears married among Zulu people. The mingling of our bloodlines goes to Cape slavery, and even thousands of years before, to the maritime adventurers who might have brought words like Komati, Karoo and let alone the host of Ramas into our lexicon. A reading of Cyril Hromnik’s Indo-africa: Towards a New Understanding of the History of Subsaharan Africa will surely tickle the imagination on that. So, if we are so closely related, ilobolo negotiations make perfect sense.