Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
I BOUGHT a book this week. Yeah, I did. You probably think that it is a trite observation on my part, but I will have you know that it was a watershed moment for me. It was the first time in a very long time that I had bought a book for reading purposes. I must say that it was a strange feeling walking into a small, almost dingy establishment on Trendoid Boulevard in Yeoville — Rockey Street for the linguistic virgins — and looking around at all the weird and wonderful titles they had on their shelves.
The youngish assistant asked me whether I needed any help and I told her that I wanted to off-load some of the loot that I have been accumulating from people who have bought into the con of the century — that yours truly can write and therefore deserves to be paid obscene amounts of money to do that.
“Well, at least the money will be spent on a good cause,” she said approvingly. “Ja,” said I, proceeding to tell her that if she thought that I needed the books for reading, she was wrong. “Oh, so they’re for the decor,” she responded with a knowing giggle. She obviously thought that I was becoming a bagel in the sunset years of my life. I was offended but I was not going to fight with her because of a resolution that I made about being happy this year. “No,” I responded and added glibly, “they’re for my sex life.”
That is when I succeeded in ruining my image in her eyes for I am quite certain that at that point she thought that I was a pervert with a fetish for books, getting off by doing unmentionable things with them — something many a reader would find sacrilegious. An uncomfortable silence followed as she politely helped me find the type of book that I was looking for.
This glib remark was an honest knee-jerk response, a throw-back from the days when I bought books for precisely that reason, to improve my sex life — without opening any of them. I did not buy any of the “how-to” books, but did they improve my sex life or what? This is how it worked: I came of age at a time when all the people in my small circle of friends had been nerds in high school but had now become intense types. Now, because most of us had not exactly been in the inner circle of the primary school playing ground cliques — we never got to know that Mary was found necking with John in the home economics classroom — we showed a profound lack of a sense of humour later on in life. We read books which the rest of the world thought to be too turgid, depressing or just plain nonsensical. Books like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Dang! That was turgid. I read it and found the exercise to be painful.
It was here that I discovered that while all the kugels of this country — black and white — were measuring the value of the men in their lives by the type of car they drove, we former nerds and now intense types were measuring each other’s value in terms of what was packed in our bookshelves.
With this discovery came a moment of true emancipation for yours truly, for I stopped fantasising about a BMW as a precursor to nights of unbridled, sweaty passion.
Nights of passion I discovered could be prefaced by a visit to a bookshop. Here I would get all the titles that sounded radical — you know, things like Mayibuye: The Struggle of Rural South Africa and the Might of the Apartheid Regime — thumb these liberally without even reading them once and then place them conspicuously on the bookshelf. These of course would be in the same place as the then banned Freedom Charter. (Does anybody remember what happened to that mantra we were supposed to live our lives by in the new thingy?)
When these were placed in the bookshelf they would be a perfect albeit corny pick-up line. Instead of inviting somebody back to your dorm room to see your etchings one would invite them to come and see your amazing collection of subversive literature. This I thought was an amazing aphrodisiac.
Back then it was easy for me to walk to the centre of town and buy all these erotic aids and it was bloody convenient too, for upon discovering that somebody I had designs on was a radical black nationalist feminist I could go and get a book by somebody like Maya Angelou and I would be made. I even went so far as buying Women’s Press books and — apologies to all my feminist friends who thought I was a liberated man — I did not read a single one of those books, but they worked for me.
That, however, was a long time ago and I have since grown up and discovered that buying books for the purpose of reading them can be as pleasant as buying them for my warped reasons. There is a problem, though, for one cannot go to the Johannesburg city centre and pick up a good read. Exclusive Books has closed its Hillbrow branch and even that ultimate trendoid bookstore, Phambili, has moved from the city centre all the way to the ultimate trendoid suburb, Yeoville. Indeed, there are a few bookstores in downtown Johannesburg selling academic books and some pulp but none selling any truly depressing stuff.
I have just rediscovered reading and what do the booksellers do to me? They move to places that I find inaccessible. I think it is a plot to keep this black man uneducated and ignorant. Tokyo, do something about this.