Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
I HAVE cut my hair. “Who cares?” you say. Please, can’t you be kind to me just this once? I really do need a shoulder to cry on and yours looks as if it was meant to be a weeping post, it’s all creased and damp from the tears of all the other people who have used it before. Can’t I use it as well? Besides, if you do not offer your shoulder, I might stage a sit-in in your lounge and demand that the state president come and address me — you wouldn’t want that now, would you?
Anyway, I digress. I was telling you about shedding my mane and what it has done to me. It was quite a traumatic experience, considering that I had had dreadlocks for well over five years. I had got used to people walking up to me and — in what I regarded as a threatening gesture — raising their fists at me and saying: “Ahoy, Rasta maan.”
There were many hairy adventures, some of them fun and some, let me see, less than flattering.
I started growing my hair because I figured that I would become top of the pops with the revolutionary babes. They were supposed to view my hairdo as a statement of emancipation from our Eurocentric oppressors.
It didn’t work out quite that way, for the babes saw me as a supplier — not of passionate nights in candle-lit rooms with bean bags on the floor, but of that green, grassy stuff.
The first time I realised this was at university. It was one of the few occasions when I joined the brothers in their lunchtime struggles and we were singing, toyi-toyiing and threatening to march on Pretoria and all manner of other things which I have since forgotten. Dancing next to me was a white fellow struggler who kept a careful watch on the lips and the feet of the other strugglers; a split second later he, too, would move his lips and lift his leg appropriately. Yeah, we were happy revolutionaries and models of nonracialism, black and white together singing about killing the boers.
Always on the lookout for sweaty passion in my life, I spied a pair of really healthy women staring in my direction. In my revolutionary state I thought that the poor ignorant, affluent whiteys were intrigued by our pain and anger and that I looked like the man who could tell them about it. I was quite prepared to tell them about the anger and, as far as I was concerned, there was no reason why the relationship should stop at my reciting a badly written United Democratic Front pamphlet; it could progress to reciting a badly written Mills and Boon novel.
Well, I never got to recite any of it and the two ladies, who looked like kugels slumming it on the university campus, waited patiently until the lunchtime struggle was over. They had all along been looking directly at me, making crucial eye contact and talking about me. I, on the other hand, had been drafting a fiery speech that was going to conscientise them and, of course, excite their loins.
As the struggle slowly wound down and the brothers and sisters were complimenting themselves on a successful protest that was going to shake the settler regime to its foundations, the two women approached me. I put on my intense revolutionary look, shook my dreadlocks and nonchalantly placed a cigarette at the corner of my mouth.
“Excuse me,” said one of them hesitantly. They were not particularly comfortable talking to me and I could understand their fear — I was a mean revolutionary brother and you had to approach me with the appropriate respect. I decided that I should put them at their ease; what I had in mind for at least one of them was something that would require the greatest of ease.
“Yes, my dear sisters, what is it that I may have the pleasure of helping you with?” said I with what I thought to be a broad, sensual yet intelligent smile.
As she saw my welcoming smile, she relaxed somewhat and she too smiled at me and started speaking. Her words single- handedly destroyed my faith in the white race. Her discomfort gone, she blurted out what she been planning to ask me for about an hour: “Do you have any dope?”
I had been planning to emancipate this woman from her SABC- imposed chains of ignorance, and all she thought I could help her with was obtaining an illegal substance. Damn, I thought to myself, the white race is really in bad shape.
The white race was not the only one that assumed I was a strange being because of my hair. When I had dreadlocks, young children would suddenly lose all respect for adults and come up to me and say: “How about da spliff maan?”
In another instance, I had children follow me in the street and sing a popular song with words that went: “I’m in love, love, with a rasta maan. Reggae maan.” After this encounter, I started using the phrase “lost generation” quite regularly. The black race has no hope, I said to myself.
I therefore am quite glad that I have lost my hair, although I am not so sure how I feel about losing all the attention. I now walk down the street and not a single person says a word to me. Could the reason be that I now sport a Wallmannstal-MK-pre-shopping-reconnaissance-mission look?