From the point of view of any ardent, committed Black Consciousness proponent, our history of the past 500 years can best be described only as the history of assimilation.
Since Vasco da Gama and his band of merry men arrived on eThwekeni Beach (no typo) and arrogantly named it Natal without pausing to ask the WuTang Clan of purple-feather-duster vendors on the pier what the place was called, it’s just been an orgy of absorption.
It therefore boggles the mind how many authentic BC advocates I know who walk calmly among us, munching sedately on their McFeasts, sipping on Coke.
Whenever I catch up on my sports (imported from the tiny island that did most of the assimilation), my viewing is interrupted by an array of short films peddling products from some colonial master or another.
Forget about learning to ”read between the lines”. In television language this should be called ”reading between normal programming”. The ad industry is, by definition, an industry of smoke and mirrors; the industry employs subliminal hypnosis, brainwashing and Caribbean voodoo to part the gullibles from their cash. So far so good — and normal.
Where things get murky is when I try to make sense of the images streaming from the box into the recesses of my mind: a racially mixed bunch of guys in the grip of an advanced case of group bromance going around quad-biking, playing touch rugby and playfully teasing one another about quitting beer. The ad took me back to the Ohlssons Lager days. It reminded me of Brandon Huntley — amusing, yet oddly nauseating.
I have no BC credentials but I had to ask myself some tough questions. Who is this ad aimed at? Where do these people live? Because where I come from, I haven’t seen a bunch of guys displaying that demographic composition hanging out anywhere; not even in Rosebank. Twelve white people and the token black guy, I see every day. And 22 black guys and one white guy I have also seen — the Bafana team.
Here’s my thing. Black South Africa and white South Africa remain just that — two separate countries. Only people who fraternise across colour borders in Rosebank, Parkhurst, Florida Road, Hatfield or TamboersÂÂkloof (before the 6pm exodus back to Gugs) have alacritous objections to this simple truth.
I should know; I also move in these circles. But the Tembisa shisanyama and the Burgerland roadhouse in Brakpan are still significantly more representative of the realities of this nation than Design Quarter in Fourways will ever be.
Black people are still scavenging on about 20% of the surface area. Look, I’m not even arguing that these partitions are necessarily a bad thing, at least not from the point of view of the blossoming BC aficionado inside me telling me that these divisions are giving us, the black majority, space to fall in love with our Africanness before we storm the Bastille.
Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I have to assume that the ads I see on the telly and on M1 North billboards depict our aspiration to be one nation one day. But they also have a tendency to leave one with a hollow feeling; a feeling that this is a nation that has not done any serious root-cause analysis of our perpetual state of conflict.
I suppose I have just managed, in one fell swoop in this harangue, to bulldoze myself into that exclusive club of social pariahs howling at nonexistent racism like a rabid wolf during a full moon.
I hope the current members of the Race Card Club — the likes of Jimmy Manyi, Julius Malema, Thabo Mbeki, Andile Mngxitama, Leonard Chuene et al — excuse the tardiness of my arrival.
I’ll leave you with one of my notoriously retarded analogies. I cheated on a woman once. After I apologised, I was ready to move forward. But I had to relive my indiscretion every day of my life. The ”other woman’s” name started with ”B” and every time I wore a blue T-shirt I was accused of hankering after her. We finally saw a counsellor who told me: ”It will be okay only once it’s okay with her.”
With all due respect to the esteemed cleric in impressive robes who presided over the truth commission, perhaps we need a second instalment of that process focusing less on theatrics and more on frank talk. Otherwise, how do you explain why allegedly smart, balanced individuals get upset about TV ads?
Ndumiso Ngcobo is a writer, columnist and bestselling author of Some of my Best Friends Are White and Is It Coz I’m Black?