Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
MOTHERS of the world, a terrible thing is about to happen to your sons, again. The Seventies are coming back! The fashion — flared jeans and high-heeled shoes for men — and the music.
Those were terrible times. The best we could do for intense entertainment was to listen to some Swedish people singing inane songs like Dancing Queen.
I will make a confession that will probably completely destroy my chances of being a real trendoid. In the 1970s, I liked … well … I hummed along to songs by … uhm … Actually I had a number of recordings by Neil Diamond.
These are not the only social sins that are on my back, for not only did I listen to the good ol’ Diamond, I also committed the worst sartorial crime to ever have been visited on this century. These sins, I am glad to say, were committed en masse — from the poorest township house to the most affluent of suburbia. Helped along by the marketing machinery of Hollywood, we found ourselves watching Saturday Night Fever. This was not to be the end of it for we were caught in the inarticulate fashion statement of the decade. That was The Suit. That white thing, with huge lapels, designed to be worn with a black shirt, the shirt open right down to the navel. This type of wardrobe was not limited to this in its inelegance but came along with high-heeled, thick-soled footwear, otherwise known as platform shoes.
Many a grown man would be seen sauntering down the streets of our dear land, his head rhythmically moving to and fro, to the beat of some loud song he heard in a gaudily-lit disco. The problem with these shoes was the wearer was supposed to walk, run and dance, while wearing them. And did we dance or what? A lot of us were seen one finger pointing to the heavens and the other to the ground below us.
Are you cringing with embarrassment yet? I am — and so should you. If not, there is no hope for you, dear brother. I was caught up in the fever as well. The only thing that saved me from the worst excesses of this terrible period was my dear father who had a number of responses, depending on the degree of insanity of my request.
If the request was slightly off centre but could be forgiven, the blame being placed on the ignorance of youth — like asking him to purchase a pair of high- heeled cowboy boots — he would ask me: “Are you drunk?” Like all parents my dear father would ask this question in a manner that required a serious answer. Even if I was in a state of inebriation, there is no way I could have said: “Actually I am. It must be the remaining effects of those beers I drank in the morning.” So I would have to tell him that I was not and that would be the temporary cure of my insanity.
It was very temporary, for soon I would be requesting another social suicide garment, like platform shoes. The degree of mental disturbance would require much stronger therapy and the question in this instance was: “Have you started using drugs?” At this point in time, many of the designer drugs which are now the rave were unheard of and, after serious consideration, I informed him that I was not using any recreational pharmaceuticals, but I did not remember seeing any in the house, did he see any? He looked at me in a manner that suggested that I needed to be rehabilitated.
I never got the shoes and, with the wisdom of hindsight, I am quite glad, for had I been forced to run away from the police for some pass offence wearing those shoes, I would have been caught.
After this encounter of the sartorial kind, I waited a couple of months trying to make sure that the next request did not come too close to one that was so insane. If it had I would have graduated to the next serious degree of insanity, requiring radical action on the part of my parents. I should not have tried to pace my request, for, even at that ignorant age, there was a voice that kept on telling me that no sane human being would want to wear what I asked for. I brought a picture of the man from the movie in full pose and asked him to look at it and buy it.
“You are mad,” he said to me. He was not going pose it as a question this time for he knew that, as a mental patient, it would have been presumptuous of me to participate in my own diagnosis.
To this day I do thank him for his help in regaining my sanity, somewhat. If he had not, I would have been seen in the 1980s wearing one shiny glove and screeching and miaowing in the streets while humming the strains of the song Thriller. I don’t think that my coffee house cred would have survived that. It might survive Neil Diamond because I can always blame SABC radio which churned that type of music out, but not the glove.
It seems that I am the only one who was cured of this fashion disease, especially when it comes from the 1970s. Clouds from that decade have begun to gather on the horizon, in the form of the music from the decade, like some revamped Abba hits. This has been accompanied by some items of the dress code — I have seen some men wearing flared trousers and high heels. Dear God, are we going to have to wear The Suit again?