Bafana Khumalo
‘Ahm tellin’ ya, that’s one fahn hoe!”
Fahn Hoe!? No children, I have not decided to make my column more relevant. Nor am I trying to write about the plight of white farmers and the scarcity of hoes. In fact, I am sitting in a downtown bus eavesdropping on a conversation between two children of African extraction.
They seem to be around the age of 16 and they are dressed in that manner which has become the international custom for children of all ages who have seen a rap video: basketball shoes, baggy pants that reach just below the knees; one is even carrying a basketball. They have just swaggered on to the bus and their exchange is at full volume.
The “fahn hoe” under discussion is not a particular brand of a farming implement, it is in fact a “fine whore”. I am mildly irritated and amused by this exchange. Irritated by the fact that it took me more than 10 minutes to work out what a “hoe” is and amused by the figurative American flag that has been unfurled in the bus.
The street patois rattles off their tongues, machine gun-style, at a rate of a hundred profanities per second. I wonder if they can understand each other; they probably do. I am also wondering which brand of American these “fahn” young men are: the Cape Flats kind who have watched a lot of rap videos and seen Boyz ‘n the Hood 39 times, or the real thing whose parents wanted to get back in touch with the mother land and are now living here, seeing that Liberia will always be at war and Gambia doesn’t have too many tarred roads.
I can’t work it out and decide that they might be the real thing. But my irritation grows above the acceptable level as their conversation starts becoming more and more Boys ‘n the Hood. Surely if their parents wanted to escape drive-by shootings, the boys would have been educated in the proper manner, not to take the hood with them, especially the part that feels that the only way to refer to a woman is to call her a “hoe”?
Hey, I stop myself, language is a tool. There is a great deal of sub-text in language. “People, especially an oppressed people, take language and make it their own, subverting its original meaning.” I try to remember the words of my fashionably subversive sociology lecturer who would, in the coldest of winter days, be shod in flea market sandals. There is however something hollow about these reassuring lefty sentiments in relation to these two young people onto whose conversation I am eavesdropping.
They are now quite animated in their discussion, but I fail to follow it as the words become less familiar, and I have discovered that not everything they say is to be taken literally. However, my irritation rises as I hear one of them say to the other: “You was not there nigga. You was not there to bone her …”
Nigga? I rarely think, now you know that, children, but this is one of the times that my brain went into gear and I thought.
I thought perhaps I should get up and ask the young men if their role models were Southern rednecks. That had to be it; otherwise the word would have not lovingly rolled off their tongues with such ease. I could have, but I decided that they would have probably called me a mutherfucking “hoe” and that would have led to black-on-black violence.
I move to the lower deck of the bus, ashamed by every black American who calls himself an African, and every African who thinks he’s American.