Two years of transition: A series by leading South African authors, celebrating the second birthday of our democracy and exploring the nuances of a changing society
Andre Brink
AT a literary lunch the other day Tim Couzens of Tramp Royal fame came up with the perfect after-dinner opening gambit. Whenever he is invited to speak in public, he said, both he and his wife go into a panic — his wife because she has nothing to wear, he because he has nothing to say. The difference between them, he said, is that his wife never turns up at a social occasion naked, whereas he often finds himself without words. (The last part is a lie, he is a wonderful speaker; but right now that is beside the point.)
My problem today is different. I have been invited to a very special celebration on April 27 (Two Years After) in Cape Town, and I haven’t the slightest idea of which shirt to wear. The choice is overwhelming, but there is also something wrong with each: some show signs of over-enthusiastic wear, while others have grown too small; several are spattered with all manner of suspicious substances.
The occasion really calls for a simple, stark white shirt, but I find I have not a single white shirt left (nor, strangely, are there any to be found in the shops, presumably because of drastically increased import duties on what must be regarded as unnecessary luxury goods). And it must be a shirt, the invitation specified: the shirt has become the defining garment of our time and place.
My first impulse, soon rejected as too obvious, was my Sarafina II shirt. It certainly is colourful, to the point of gaudiness. The problem is that the colours are not fast, and may start running if April 27 turns out to be a rainy day. Also, as it grows older, it becomes more noticeable that it has been overprinted several times, which spoils the effect.
If one looks closely against the light the legend Woza Albert! is still faintly legible on the back: now that, if I remember correctly, was a real shirt, a shirt one would have expected to last well into the new millennium. Sadly, it did not survive for very long, and the once-bright black letters have now faded to the sickening green of an American dollar bill. The garment started off, I believe, as regulation hospital wear, filched by persons unnamed from some provincial institution; incongruously, it also bears, quite boldly, an ANC Stamp of Approval right across its front, and that I find frankly alarming, apart from the fact that it spoils the design.
Even so, I thought, I might still give it a try: I still rather like the ANC logo, provided one could obscure the Stamp of Approval bit. But the real problem is that when I last wore it I was on a railway station with a huge crowd awaiting the arrival of a special festival train; and as it happened the train we were all so fervently looking forward to (impressively bedecked in gold, green and black) never stopped at the station but roared on towards some unknown destination, and as the dining saloon came past us, some passenger inside must have had a mishap as a great splash of gravy came swooshing from the open window and that really messed up my shirt.
I console myself that it might have been inappropriate anyway, as I have just discovered some other stains on the fabric, and these have proved particularly stubborn: blood, notorious for its persistence since the time of Lady Macbeth. Presumably they date from the time the garment was still used in a hospital. Some patient with Aids, I believe.
There is also a Penguin shirt I’m very fond of. It was offered to me by a student leader at one of our tertiary institutions which shall remain nameless. It is situated in a region of the country where chicken is part of the staple diet, for those at least who can afford it; and in the dining hall serving this particular institution it used to be dished up every day as part of a package negotiated between the student body and the authorities.
Then, suddenly, one day last year, the students went on a food strike and started trashing the campus until it looked as if the Assyrian had come down like a wolf on the fold. This continued until there was nothing more left to be demolished; and then, as it behoves a democratic institution, negotiations were entered into between spokespersons of the students and spokesmen of the authorities. The bottom line of the students’ grievances was that they had been conned: raging against what they regarded as the dying of the light, they accused the authorities of starting to serve them penguin instead of chicken.
This was truly mind-boggling. The mere logistics of transporting enough penguin carcasses from the coast to that remote inland spot to feed several thousand students every day must have been daunting. But the students, not to be duped by a bunch of authoritarian white racists, stuck (literally) to their guns; and suddenly, out of the blue as it were, their point was proved when a truck came driving past the negotiations hall and pulled up at the kitchen entrance. It was a food delivery truck, and on its side was emblazoned a large sign depicting a penguin and bearing the logo of a firm called (with due apologies to whom it may concern) Penguin Food Supplies.
Now my penguin shirt is still a possibility for the reception on April 27. The only thing I don’t like about it is that the image of the penguin on its front does not go well with the crossbones taken quite obviously from a chicken’s thighs. As incongruous as a springbok jumping over a protea hedge.
I’m not sure, either, about an assortment of recent gift shirts from tourist friends, all made in Taiwan (the shirts, not the friends) of diverse synthetic fibres masquerading as pure cotton, proclaiming Ich liebe dich, Sud- Afrika, Je t’aime, l’Afrique du Sud, Eu te queiro, Africa do sul, etc, as for some reason not one of them fits properly. Either one arm is longer than the other, or the neckline plunges too revealingly, or it stretches too tightly across the more southern regions of my torso.
I was recently given a rather special black shirt inscribed in dark grey, almost invisibly, with the legend Protected Witness; but a friend borrowed it and was shot on his way to a restaurant, and now I’m still waiting for the shirt to be returned (the police have mislaid it).
What I do still have is my bright orange Mango shirt, bought in KwaZulu-Natal, and I know it is bound to make an impression on some people (even though not many of them will openly say so unless they are surrounded by hefty bodyguards); but this one is so messy with blood, some dried, most of it still fresh, that it may be better not to sport it at such a glittering occasion.
Also, the collar motif may not go down so well, consisting as it does of the letters SADFSADFSADFSADF… repeated all the way round the kind of cross-stitch once popular on needlework items at National Party Stryddae.
Perhaps my Human Rights shirt would do the job. It has proved a winner at many occasions over the last two years, especially when I wore it in Nigeria, in Cuba, and in the United States; but when I took it out of the cupboard just now I discovered to my horror that someone had daubed, in large black uneven letters, the slogan Racist across the chest. So perhaps it won’t do this time, after all.
I used to be nostalgically fond of an old AWB shirt I once picked up in a dustbin in Mmabatho, but since no one would recognise it today, there isn’t much point in wearing it.
And the T-shirt with the picture of an old Ford on it, printed to celebrate the return of the company to our shores and distributed at a revival performance on the shop floor of Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, I simply cannot risk wearing in public for fear of being hijacked. In which case I may end up dead or in jail while the hijacker may be promoted to a senior government position in Gauteng or the Western Cape to deal with the distribution of funds from the EU (another shirt that has become rather shop-soiled).
My Michael Jackson T-shirt, I discover, has fallen apart; the Whitney Houston one somehow ended up in a modest four-storey house Hazel Crane presented to Winnie, and I’m frankly too scared to try and retrieve it; the Pavarotti one had pasta sauce spilled all the way down its front. My Olympics 2004 shirt is coming apart at the seams. A very special Telkom shirt I ordered from a TV ad (interrupted 11 times by newscasts) was lost in the mail.
And the PC shirt I’m also quite partial to came out of the last wash in a state which can only be described as dimensionally challenged, with its colours distressingly faded, so that’s that. My Terror T-shirt works only in the Free State, so it wouldn’t do at the function in Cape Town, where it may get Hernus into an orange-white-and-blue knot which not even Martha Olckers can undo.
One shirt I cherished especially was sewn from a Danish flag, but unfortunately they have now asked to have it back (it seems Alan has worn his to the wrong occasions and they are getting quite uppity about that, so now they are all being reclaimed).
If only this year’s festivities were to be held another year from now — or, to play it safe, two or three years from now — I’m sure I wouldn’t have any problem, because I’ve recently been to a tailor in the Bo-Kaap who is now working on a whole array of new shirts, each more splendiferous than the other.
There is a Foreign Exchange Shirt in the colours of the R200 note (although I’ve been warned that it may have changed to a deep R100 pink by the time it is delivered); and a very solid Housing Programme Shirt with a complicated pattern of squatter shacks, very tasteful; and a particularly beautiful shirt with a design showing a black child and a white child sharing the same school bench; a WitsWits shirt bearing the legend Entente Cordiale; a very snazzy Saldanha shirt sporting a series of slagheaps against a background of setting suns and slick-covered seagulls; and my personal favourite, an ample shirt bearing the very simple emblem of a small smiling child with a bowl heaped with food.
But all of these turned out, at the first fitting, to be hopelessly too tight. And now my tailor has informed me that it would take time to have them all altered as his business has been temporarily crippled by industrial action led by his two assistants whose union is demanding to be nationalised so that its members can receive pay packages based on those of the private sector. He assures me, however, that once the infrastructure has been set up (and it seems there is a lot of goodwill in this respect) the actual production of the shirts won’t take long: 1999 is the date he personally has in mind, but he has nothing on paper yet.
There is a very obvious remedy for my predicament, of course. I can simply wear my Number Six jersey — or, for that matter, my green cricket outfit or my amazing BafanaBafana multi-coloured coat. All of these have done wonderful service over the past year and can be counted on to produce instant enthusiasm, raucous chants of Shozoloza!, slaps on the back, and rainbow smiles all round: no garment I have ever seen before can so instantaneously create bonding and sharing. (On one occasion, travelling abroad, I discovered that wearing one of these so bedazzles immigration officials that no one even thinks of asking for your passport: they simply know who you are and wave you through; the only hitch is that you are then expected to solve all their problems.)
But when I last took the Number Six out of its plastic wrap I was alarmed to note that from so much wear it was beginning to get threadbear; heaven knows for how much longer it will still do the job. So maybe, however difficult it is going to be, I should consider using it more sparingly in future.
As you can see — even though I must hurry to point out, please, that really, deep down, everything is just fine and that, after all, finding a shirt is a challenge and not a problem — my choice seems disconcertingly limited this year. In a moment close to despair I have considered simply going without a shirt, but that would be chickening (or penguining) out; besides, I’m scared there may be children at the party too and I wouldn’t survive the occasion if one of them were to address his mother in the kind of stage whisper children are such past masters at — “Mummy, why is that silly man naked?”
So what is to be done? I can see that I shall end up wearing, once again, my Mandela shirt: the only one which never seems to get crumpled or soiled. My only concern is that everybody else at the celebration on April 27 may turn up wearing the same shirt.
Andre Brink has had an acclaimed writing career of three decades. His latest novel is Imaginings of Sand (Secker & Warburg)