Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
`TIS a season to be jolly. `Tis time for even an angry young black man who is fast becoming a cynical old fart to dispense with the vitriolic poison pen and embrace all of humanity with enthusiasm, in a spirit of peace and love. I am happy. So much so that I am going to write a happy column with not a single whinge in it.
Happy because the natives have stopped killing each other wholesale and deprived the media of our stock headlines. Last year at this time newspapers were heralding a bloodbath and the collapse of civilisation as we had known it through 40 years of apartheid. This year? Well, there is such a dearth of hacked, bleeding and dead bodies that the best the Weekly Mail & Guardian could come up with a few weeks ago was a front page mention of God’s gift to mankind and womankind — particularly womankind — in an African version of that great Afrikaner contribution to the world of cinema, the epic adventure, Boetie gaan border toe. This one was called Bafana goes bungy jumping. This front-page highlight was followed by another one, this time on me cutting my hair.
Two front pages, one for throwing myself off a high platform and another for doing something that really normal human beings do on a weekly basis?
That shows how desperate we have become for the bad news which is believed to be good news for the newspapers. Whatever happened to headlines like “Crisis deepens” or “Bloodbath beckons”? We couldn’t even come up with the cliched “Activist assassinated”.
Okay, we are still killing each other in muggings, break- ins and drunken brawls, but not as much as we were doing this time last year. That, and the fact that there are so few foreign correspondents around, is — in my less than humble opinion — something worth celebrating.
It has been a good year lately. There aren’t any more reports about Zulus killing anyone. The only activity in the media featuring Zulus has been the sight of one of them greeting a relative in the middle of a television interview. Even that encounter did not result in anything more painful than a fractured wrist, and that was a result of a vigorous handshake, not a cultural weapon. Even when the Zulu’s critics wanted to use this event as a knobkierrie to flog him with, there was a logical explanation; he didn’t know that the cameras were on. So there is no reason for any 10-cent commentator to claim that this year has been a bad one for press freedom.
Why shouldn’t I be happy? I am so happy that I will not say anything about my passionate fans who have a Fanakalo understanding of both the English and the Zulu languages and send me abusive Christmas cards, lovingly accusing me of racism for using the referent term whitey. I would like to say something like “Dear Whitey — `whitey’ and `kaffir’ are not equal terms of endearment”, but I will not, for I am elated. Besides, I love them too, for they have contributed to science by donating their brains to research at such a young age.
I am so elated I hum along to all the jingle bells music. I even went to a shopping mall and I did not, not once, feel like strangling a black private creche brat who was throwing an as-seen-on-a-television-soap-opera temper tantrum. I just smiled. Not an our-father-deliver-me-from- evil-smile but a real season-to-be-jolly smile.
I even smiled when I saw a snow-making machine in the Sandton City shopping mall. A patch of the tiles that always threatened to make me slip and break my neck had been treated by a refrigerating mechanism and “snow” had been produced. It was frozen water actually, but hey, this is Christmas, Jack, and I am going to get into the spirit of things as well. Not once did I feel like saying anything derisive — even when I saw that the “snow” became as hard as a Casspir-denting rock when fashioned into a highveld summer snowball. I did not feel like calling the child protection unit when I saw a couple of the little angels break into heart-rending cries when a little snowball landed on their rosy cheeks and probably stung like hell.
I didn’t even wonder about the shape we would be in if the culture that held sway were not the northern European one that says a great Christmas is a shivering cold miserable one. Imagine the danger if the hegemonic culture were one where seasonal volcanic eruptions accompanied by hot molten lava cascading down the hill and destroying houses signalled the coming of the little only begotten one who grew up to become the holy one. Our shopping malls would be transformed into fire hazards.
I will not wonder about these things for I am happy to be alive in our beautiful South Africa and I will share my happiness with you, dear sisters and brothers.
I am happy and I will take this time to wish you a merry Christmas and order you not to do anything stupid like dying. I hate funerals.