Bafana Khumalo
Black, White, Coloured, Indian … these categories don’t exist. There are only two races of people in this country: reasonably normally dysfunctional people like you and me and a sector who should not be out on the streets.
I had the pleasure of meeting a member of this race last week when I went to a shopping centre for the launch of a fashion magazine. No, I haven’t become sartorially with it. The only reason I was there was to shoot links for the television show I work on.
It was a good shoot, apart from the fact that an inordinate number of people kept mistaking a colleague on the production team for a servant of the shopping centre. Because she is not black, I could not take up the cudgels on her behalf and say, “How dare you? Do you think every black woman is your maid?” Black women need my protection, you see.
Well, after fluffing my way through the script, I was ready to escape all those people who wear clothes which should never be worn off stage by a sane human being. That’s when one of the stranger things in my life happened. I was about to leave when a woman, dressed for that particular occasion, spied me walking by and shouted, “Why haven’t you called me?”
Now, I knew that there isn’t a single person I should have called in the past six months, so I thought she was talking to someone behind me.
She had to be, right? After all, there are very few people who know me in these I’m- beautiful and-I-think-I-am-in-Pret-%-Porter- circles. So I walked past — only to have her reappear in front of me posing, with urgency, her question of my tardiness in calling her.
What do you do when a person you know no better than a bar of soap asks you why you haven’t called her? You stare and ask who she is.
I was still staring, about to go to the next phase, when she beat me to it. She, quite aghast — at me, not herself — asked me, “Who are you?” This question was posed with the tone that is reserved for total strangers who accost you at parties and say; “Hi, I think you are good looking and would you like to sleep with me tonight?”
No, I haven’t had that happen to me and neither have I done it to anyone. I imagine that if I were to do it to anybody, though, they would be justified in asking me, quite horrified, “Who are you???”
Oh brothers, I must say I was thrown. I would like to say that I riposted, “Am I? What is being? Surely we have to establish first whether I am before we even begin to entertain the question of who I am?” But I did not. I merely stared at this high fashion apparition in front of me as I stuttered,”… Well … I’m no one … really …” Before I could say anything further she told me that she was the fashion editor of a magazine — not the subject of the launch — and proceeded to command me to call her for she wanted to interview me. Why?
“Why not?” she answered, giving me her business card. She thankfully stopped short of saying something typical like “Dahling”. I know this is typical of her, given my profound insight into people.
As I looked around at the people I was with, wanting to get a witness that this was happening to me, she turned around and started talking to people she seemed to know and who seemed to know her.
Would you say that this woman is normally dysfunctional like you and me? Or am I about to be discovered, have my name up in lights?