Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
HI there, South Africa! Are you still freezing your watchamacallits off? Here in the Big Apple, the sun is shining and the people would make Albert Einstein feel like the slowest student in a remedial education class.
I am here as part of a group of eight journalists from Africa, each representing a different country. They say travel broadens one’s mind and I agree — my mind has been so broadened that I now can suffer fools. Contrary to my belief, I now realise that they too are children of God/Allah/Jehovah/Buddha. (Choose the appropriate religion to avoid being offended.)
The first phase of educating a South African abroad started just after my arrival at John F Kennedy Airport. I was sitting in a chartered car with a couple of my colleagues when the driver — in an attempt to make us feel comfortable in the US of A — made a threat that is usually reserved for the most violent of encounters in a darkened alley somewhere far away from the eyes of the law and decent folk. He turned around and asked, menacingly, “You guys wanna hear some American music?”
I was dismayed. I thought that by getting out of South Africa I would be spared American music. You see I thought that the music we always hear on our radio stations is the low-quality stuff the Americans don’t have any use for. I was, however, too polite to tell the man not to touch that radio, and I am just as glad I let him go ahead, because he tuned into some jazz station. The man has taste, I thought to myself.
My first real violent encounter of the American kind came a couple of days later at a buffet dinner organised by some of our brothers and sisters in the media. Here I was nearly lynched by a middle-aged sister who seemed to hold me responsible for Winnie Mandela’s lowly position in the government of national unity. This woman felt that the former Mother of the Nation was single-handedly responsible for “the freedom you people are now enjoying”.
There was no way I was going to tangle with her any further for no matter how much I tried to remonstrate with her, her mind was made up; her hero had been sold down the river and she was going to give a piece of her mind to anyone who was responsible for that act of betrayal. I was the nearest she was going to get to the guilty parties.
A man who told me that he was from Trinidad saved me from the sister’s wrath by handing me a glass of lemonade at the crucial moment. But as I was breathing a sigh of relief, he too launched into me with the subtlety of the hammer tribe. This man’s gripe was what he saw as my and the ANC’s closeness to white people and American business.
Actually that is the same kind of argument I advance whenever I am doing my angrier-than-thou-young-black-man routine, but in this instance I could not agree with him. The man was way out of my league, asserting quite confidently that South African black people should stop trying to be part of the Western world and go back to traditional economies.
I was stumped! I really do believe that South Africa and the rest of the continent should take control of its destiny (come on, admit it, you are impressed by the way I use hoity-toity words like destiny), but I wonder how workable such arguments are. There is just no possible way we — at the moment — can afford to indulge ourselves in stupid experiments like going back to some utopian past some Trinidadian read about in a Tarzan comic. I said this to the gentleman and he stopped talking to me. I wonder why. I could have sworn that we were getting on famously together.
At the end of the shindig a woman from the black-owned radio station, WBAI, expressed an interest in interviewing the eight of us and we duly agreed. But when we got to the studio a couple of days later I learned all about respect, African- American style.
The woman decided to interview us in groups of three, and get to have a real intimate conversation. There was nothing wrong with this — apart from the way she chose to address the people in the studio. Instead of getting her African-American tongue around African wonder names like Haruna Attah, Dismas Nkunda or Deogracias, she came up with a personal shorthand: she called everybody by the name of the country they came from. She, the proud daughter of the soil, was innocently saying things like: “Let’s hear from you, Mr Ghana. Mr Liberia, can you tell me ? and Mr Nigeria, what is …?”
Before she got to “Mr South Africa” I chose to walk out of the interview. I was afraid that if I spent any more time in her presence I might find myself getting used to the disrespect.
Well, I am running out of writing paper. I will drop you a note again, this time from Capitol Hill. I hope to get to talk to President Clinton — or is it President Clint Eastwood? I don’t know, these white names sound the same to me.