Friday night : Charl Blignaut
It’s Friday night and you’re driving through Pretoria – the new, improved Pretoria. If it weren’t for the lingering scent of Jacaranda blossoms, you’d hardly recognise the place. There are trendy cafs and happy, shiny people where once were butch Tukkies engineering students with bad hairstyles. (Once I witnessed a female Tukkie with an alarming poof of hair leading a real, live pet duckling across the hot tar. I swear. Another time I saw a female Tukkie with very little hair, a big bum and tight tracksuit pants crush a beer can against her forehead. I swear. She was bonding with four other Tukkies.)
Nothing’s the same anymore. Where once were Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging warriors there’s now a gaggle of the finest looking black whores any city could hope to boast.
There’s even a lesbi-gay centre called Ikhaya Lothingo (It’s Zulu for “Home of the Rainbow”. I swear. It was started by a group with the most unfortunate acronym in the history of fag lib, the Gay & Lesbian Organisation of Pretoria.)
Anyway, it’s Friday night, you’re driving through Pretoria and you’re feeling cautiously optimistic. So far no one’s looked at you threateningly at a stop street, not to mention beat you up because you have a funny hairstyle. You’re heading for a Boom Shaka concert in Sunnyside, at Club Ellesse (a kwaito joint where once was the Christian Lighthouse).
Then that all-too-familiar feeling … a mix of fear, loathing and derision. Cops. Six of them, leaning out of their cars with that expression, because 300 black kids have gathered on a pavement waiting to be let in to a club. Ah Pretoria, forever home to the most vulgar-smelling trees, the meanest cops and the worst drag queens in the country.
So you decide to let the cops disperse calmly and quietly and you get a bite to eat at Peter’s Pancakes (a cruisy, lesbigay establishment where once was a family restaurant) before heading across the street to Ellesse.
Inside, the place is packed. You can just make out two hip hairstyles bumping on stage. You consider wading in, but then spot your photographer having to be carried towards the stage by the crowd. So you head for the bar, but can’t see. You try the stairs. No good. You turn to the video monitors, but by the time the cameraman has found focus, some crazy fan is waving his arms in front of the camera.
So you dive onto the dancefloor, coming up inside a slo-mo mosh. Damn, the band is fine. The sound is fine, the tunes are fine. Then some drunk kid decides to play “moer the honkie” and you get an elbow in your gut.
Just as his friends pull him away, you get that perfect moment when the singer’s looking straight at you and singing just for you.”Don’t be ashamed of your colour,” she croons, “we’re all in this together …”
Then she cackles, pulls a boy onto stage and simulates raping the grinning dude. Junior smiles slyly, then mutters “Hallelujah”.
– Charl Blignaut is a freelance writer on culture