Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
I am sitting in an apartment in Hillbrow and opposite me is a white man dressed in a hood that is similar to that of some medieval monk. He hands me a bunch of metal coins with holes in them and tells me to shake them in my hands and throw them on a table that is littered with tarot cards, incense and all manner of strange Euro-ethnic accoutrements. To spice it all up there are some Asian cultural icons.
On my face is a particularly sceptical expression as I think back to my days as a very young man in a Roman Catholic Mission school in that township that lies on the other side of the mine dumps, Soweto. I can see a white nun, Sister Magdalene, telling one of my classamtes to get rid of his goatskin bracelet as it was a heathen symbol and it would bar his path to the Pearly Gates for ever.
I sit in the classroom and I nod approvingly at Sister Magdalene’s sermon about forgetting our heathen past so that we can all go to heaven.
I look at myself and I think I should not have a problem waltzing into heaven as my family doesn’t perform any of the savage rituals that other children in the school sometimes talk about. “Mhm, I am going to heaven,” I think. “It will be great there for there will be singing all day and although I hate singing, it will definitely be a better gig than that other place wherein one becomes a permanent braai.”
“I see a very bright future,” comes the overly dramatic delivery from my white companion and I am jolted back to the temporal present. My presence here has nothing to do with my tattered life and me trying to find an answer beyond science and technology.I am here doing a story for television on fortune telling and I am surprised at the number of people who ply this trade. Equally surprising for me is that white folks are really into this hocus pocus. Hence my thoughts about Sister Magdalene. She had me going those years ago — I believed her when she said that white folks don’t indulge in this garbage. And here I am now, throwing white people’s bones — he calls them I Ching — on to a table and the white man professes to see where I am going.
He is about the fourth one that I have seen on this day and, from what they have all told me, I am going to have a great life, a charmed one. None of them can see that in a few days’ time a cheque that I have deposited shall not have been cleared and I will find myself in a bank screaming at some poor woman whose job it is to take abuse from people like me with a smile.
I wish the fortune tellers would tell me that as I hate going to that automatic teller machine on a Saturday morning and, with a queue of about 10 people behind me, I confidently punch in an amount. The damn machine starts screaming, in bold red letters, telling me “sorry! transaction has been cancelled! please contact your branch staff!” The machine then proceeds to spit out a piece of paper that tells me how rich I am and that I cannot get hold of a penny of that money.
I suddenly feel as though I am on an amphitheatre stage and the number of people behind me has grown to 10 000 accusing persecutors, who look at me with eyes that say: “Taking chances huh? You know very well that you don’t have any money but you still come here to waste our time.”
I seethe as I promise myself to acquire a pistol and shoot a bank manager. I wonder when is a good day to do that. Today seems to be a good day, but gun shops are not in the immediate vicinity.
I wish at least one of these fortune tellers would have told me what was really in store instead of different versions of what will become of me and my love life in the next five years. Some told me that I may not get it for a very long time. Some told me that I will get loads of it for the rest of my life.
What is common however is that I will be travelling in the near future. Of course I will be travelling in the near future — to Soweto. That’s a long way away for these folks whom I find in different areas, from Rosebank to the Southern suburbs via Hillbrow. At least they are getting something right.
A day later, after the last person, number seven, has foretold my bright future I know how many desperate people there are out there. I realise that whatever validity there is in dealing with life in an alternative manner, there is just no way one can measure it because, like mainstream medicine, psychiatry or science, there is an aspect of belief that ensures that one is cured of one’s ills. If you believe in it, it may happen.
In the meantime, I wish Sister Magdalene had tried to save these white people’s souls. They sure look like they are in need of a major dose of salvation.