NATIVE TONGUE Bafana Khumalo
IT started on Friday afternoon when he came over to my desk and said I should go to the City in the Sun to cover the Miss South Africa beauty pageant. My first response was to get down on my knees and beg for mercy. “Oh exalted editor,” I said, hands raised in prayer and head bowed in submission, “please, not that. I swear if you let me off of this one I will file a front page story next week.”
He was not moved. Not in the least. The only things that were moved were his lips as he said, “Go.” This was on account of the pageant being the first contest in a democratic, non-racist, nonsexist, non-existent South Africa.
I thought of my friends in the trendoid circles I travel and of all the brownie points I would lose when I told them that instead of going to see Salif Keita, I was going to the gaudy Empire in the Sun. I also thought of my paltry paycheck. That made the decision for me.
His decision to send me to cover this event wasn’t entirely because of the importance of the event, it was because he knows that I am a sad, lonely human being — the kind who, on a visit to the garden of Garden of Eden, would come back with a litany of complaints describing the number and different types of thorns therein. He thought that I would come back from the sun with clouds on my brow. Because he was making me lose brownie points I swore that I would get him. “Vengeance will be mine! I will kill him with kindness,” said I.
My revenge started when I complied with the demands of the invitation card which said, as all the politically correct ones say, “Dress formal or traditional”. I chose the traditional option: a traditional Afro shirt, a pair of traditional American blue jeans, and a pair of traditional English Doc Martins. I think I was the embodiment of global tolerance.
It continued a day later. I was still at peace with myself as I listened to the strains of Prince’s song The Most Beautiful Girl in the World wafting through the Sun City Superbowl as the woman who had won that title had a shiny crown placed upon her head. I wasn’t going to complain, and I am still not going to. Instead, I am going to be downright bitchy.
I am not going to complain about an unremarkable woman. Unremarkable not because she wasn’t beautiful — she probably is, I don’t know, but she sure looked like the previous occupant of that position. They always look the same, I cannot recall a mental picture of any of the dozens of other Miss South Africas.
But I was about to lose it and start complaining, casting derision on the dress and impossibly high heeled shoes the woman had to wear to have a group of journalists ask her inane questions about her sex life. “Vengeance will be mine,” I remembered. In order to keep the promise I had made to myself, I tuned out all the people in ill-fitting tuxedos around me who had come to the pageant to stare at the lower part of scantily dressed women.
I thought about a better time when the pageant will have succeeded in shaking off its cattle auction label, where beauty will be an earned attribute and not a God-given gift.
In this truly new South Africa pageant the women will be truly remarkable. The contestants will be people like Tracy Chapman, Grace Jones, kd Lang. Interesting people who have earned some respect, not because they have huge mammaries but because they have some real talent and brains. Instead of trying to balance themselves on Eiffel Tower shoes they will have the option of using the most comfortable footwear they can come across.
The most trying part of the contest will be the “diplomacy/public relations test”. Here, instead of showing how gracefully they can pour a cup of tea, the women will be given a difficult test wherein they can show how well they can represent their country and deal with difficult situations.
One of the questions could be: “Miss Soweto. The president of your country is a paranoid megalomaniac who is given to thinking that the press is out to get him and constantly harasses his opponents. Recently he was shown on national television, running down the street — using language that would make a sailor green with envy — as he chased a political opponent. This has led to his image being tarnished somewhat. Tell us Miss Soweto, how would you rehabilitate his image?”
Anyone who is able to offer a convincing argument will win. That argument should not include denial and claims that the president was just jogging and the opponent ran in front of the president. She would still have to explain where the blood that was streaming down the opposition politician’s face came from. Remember the president in our hypothetical question is wearing a three-piece suit and he has a knobkierie in his hand.
Judges in my contest will be people who know the pain of having been found out to be charlatans and know about public scorn and, sometimes, the golden handshakes that accompany this discovery. It therefore would take someone with a particularly sick mind to be able to wiggle out of this one.
I was still dreaming of this beautiful woman who will never be, when a colleague from another publication asked me whether I thought the winner was beautiful. I just looked at her and smiled. I was going to be at peace with myself.