In the name of my green and hairy testicles, would someone please answer Metro FM’s ‘What makes you black?” ad campaign! ‘Black” nowadays seems to be the epitome of cool, hip, interesting — the other. Ngempela kakhulu, my homeys. Should Good Hope FM start a campaign, ‘What makes you coloured?” (translated as ‘Is jy Duidelik?”) As a green person — and therefore not black, white or coloured — these questions trouble me deeply.
A few Wednesdays ago I saw Phat Joe chilling in the Blues Room, Sandton, after he had done some shooting for his TV show. I found this strange because Phat Joe Live was meant to be well, live, and at the time used to be on Thursdays. Phat Joe is definitely part of the South African black iconography, but is he black? Is he any more black than a Good Hope FM DJ? Is he even African? Are coloured people black I wonder?
Undaunted, I went in search of a black culture. I went everywhere. I called the black market, found out who was blacklisted, all with no luck. I met a white Afrikaans guy who drives a mini-bus taxi on the West Rand, and speaks Zulu. Is he black? I have been agonising over whether Happy Sindane is black. He was raised by black people. But then with all these nannies and domestics around, who wasn’t? If it is about race then you have to be born with it, like the Jewish race. If your mother was Jewish you are Jewish, even if your dad’s Yasser Arafat. But if you are not Jewish, you can enter the fold if you ask the rabbi enough. Can you become black if you ask Phat Joe enough?
It is the way of the world that Jewish people can tell Jewish jokes, black people can tell black people jokes, ‘niggers” can tell ‘nigger” jokes, and white males can piss off. And rightly so, because in my opinion white males are a bunch of looting bastards — with the exception of Michael Jackson, of course. I would like to know how many different kinds of black we have in South Africa? From the outside it seems that you get the wealthy, cool Afro-American-returned-from-the-diaspora black person and on the other side of some unspoken fence I see the stuck-in-a-township-not-seeing-much progress black person. Oi vey! But I find this very, very confusing. While I have met ‘coloured” people who distinguish between ‘coloured” people and ‘skollies” and white people who distinguish between white trash and white people, I’ve never heard of anyone saying ‘black trash”.
If I have offended any black people in saying these things, I’m sorry. If I have offended any white people, I’m sorry you are white. I suggest we put down the guns — or, for the Saambou executives, put down the chequebooks — and agree that all humanity was birthed in Africa, so, eish! We are all blacks here (with apologies to Phat Joe).
An extract from Laugh it Off Annual