Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
‘I HATE these bloody coconuts, I wish somebody would shoot them,” she said as she viciously ground out a half-smoked cigarette with the heel of her shoe. I had never come across this word coconut before and I was certain that my companion would explain its meaning to me.
Her name is Faelicia and she spent 10 years in America. She and I were, let’s say, very friendly, before she left. We thought we could start where we had left off until we realised that I was over the hill and could not keep up with her.
We have since settled for quasi-intellectual discussions as a way of keeping our friendship alive. From time to time we reminisce about the past until we discover that lost youth is a particularly painful thing to think about.
She is a quarter native: in her veins courses a curry- flavoured tinge from the east, some Zulu porridge, and some Scottish haggis. So she is a real rainbow of nations. She could teach the rest of South Africa a thing or two about co-existing harmoniously. She has to co-exist with this pot-pourri of influences inside her.
The coconut who had so offended my dear friend was a young black girl sitting lotus style on the grass who had asked for a light. It was at a party and we were standing outside as the host did not want us to smoke in her house. The girl had spoken in that typically nasal manner that is so common among black South Africans who have had the benefit of a multi-racial education. She was in the company of two white girls.
“May I please have a light,” Faelicia mimicked the girl, magnifying every gesture — like the way the girl had flicked back her hair extensions to get them out of her face.
“Some of my best friends are white,” continued Faelicia. My eyes wondered off in the direction of a beautiful woman with whom I did not have a snowball’s chance in hell, but I thought I should let my imagination go all the way with her. “Excuse me sir, do you want to reserve your perving for some other time? I am talking to you,” half-screamed Faelicia as she took my tongue and tried to strangle me with it while drowning me in the lake of saliva that had accumulated on the ground.
She started where she had left off, trying to impress upon my dirty little mind what a coconut was. “Those bloody people who are white inside and brown on the outside,” she explained, reiterating that they should be shot on sight. In fact Faelicia thought that a posse should be put together to hunt down and string up these people in a good ol’ fashioned lynching.
“They hate being black so much they have made it their calling to out-white their white friends, they try to out-liberal all the liberals in the world. They make me wanna puke,” she spat.
I thought I should remind her that she sounded terribly American using bad English words like wanna and the coconut might want to lynch her as well for that, but I thought better of it.
“You will always find them in the company of whites and they will not have a single black friend,” she said as she proceeded to tell me a story of a coconut whose mother had worked her backside off so that she could get a good education. When the coconut was in matric she told her mother that she should not answer the phone in their house lest it was the coconut’s friends on the line and she would be embarrassed by her parent’s inability to speak English properly. “I would kill her,” said Faelicia who obviously was in a killing mood.
I had been quietly listening to my friend and I thought that I should say something here lest she think that my brain had also been affected by age. I feebly proffered my Introduction to Race Relations argument: “But is it not the society that we live in?” I stammered. “Surely they are not wholly to blame for their attitudes — if you spend all your life in an environment that said that white is better and black is definitely ugly, you would have the same attitude as well.”
She looked up and I ducked as I thought that she was going to spit in my face, considering the contempt in her eyes. Spittle came not my way but words as vile as the worst of phlegm. “There goes another black victim analysis from South Africa’s foremost social commentator and as usual it is as deep as the depths of the deepest sea.”
I have never felt so much contempt from a fellow human being and I promptly kept quiet.