John Matshikiza:WITH THE LID OFF
It’s late at night. I’m sitting at a bar in suburban Cape Town, minding my own business, when a bunch of formerly white men come bundling in, some with their wives. They are all badly dressed: grey shoes, flannel trousers, cheap leather jackets, white shirts and tacky ties. They are all too loud.
Since I am invisible, they ignore me, so I go on thinking my own thoughts, although I idly look them over from time to time. One man stands out. He is an angry little guy who doesn’t seem connected to the rest of them.
After a while he breaks away from the group and hoicks himself up on a stool near where I’m quietly drinking my Guinness.
He sits there, ruminating angrily at my side. Then he strikes up a conversation, opening with the statement that he has no intention of striking up a conversation with me, but he is going to buy me a drink since he’s buying the whole bar a drink.
Now that he has bought me a drink, he’s in a good position to carry on with the conversation that wasn’t supposed to be started.
He explains that the paunchy crew are actually the middle management of one of the country’s most successful bar/restaurant franchises, and that this franchise is celebrating the opening of a new outlet at Newlands Racecourse. They have come to this place, a branch of the same franchise, for an after party.
My new interlocutor, Piet, is the builder who creates the environment for these yuppies and their customers to bop in.
The only problem is, the builder and the yuppies hate each other. They come from different clans, different classes, different tribes. He is a simple Afrikaner from Pretoria. They are university types from Joeys and Cape Town who speak a language that is distantly related to English.
They have no point of reference with him. They felt they had to invite him to the launch of their new facility at the racecourse (“seeing as how I built it for the bastards”) and although he would much rather be on the plane back to Gauteng, he felt it would be impolite if he turned them down.
So here he is, sitting next to the only black customer in the joint. He stares at me, slowly waking up to the situation. “I came here tonight with these cunts, but I can’t stand them. They’ve got too much money and they don’t know what they’re talking about. What is weird is that the only person I feel comfortable sitting with is you. Where I come from I don’t even see people like you. I only see people like them all the time.”
He lifts his bearded chin to point bitterly towards the white laager, a bevy of over- earnest, hairsprayed yuppies that he is not about to be part of.
Then he looks at me again, still pondering the situation. “I’m not being patronising,” he says, spilling his beer. His look and his speech become snail-slow with sincerity, and his blue seafarer’s eyes fill with pity. “But I have to tell you this. I’m not a religious man. My daughter’s religious. She’s training to be a missionary and go off into Africa. I keep telling her she’s going to get herself killed up there, all in the name of a God who doesn’t exist. God doesn’t exist and I don’t believe in him.”
He is struggling to find a thread back into what he was saying. Then he finds it: “But every day,” he says, “I thank the same God I don’t believe in that I wasn’t born black.”
I brace myself for the impending slur against my people. Yet his face is full of some strange emotion as he stares at me.
“Christ,” he finally says, “don’t get me wrong, but if I was born black … I don’t know … I think I’d have killed. Many times over. I think I’d have killed because of what people had done to me.”
He is on the point of tears as he studies my pitiful black face. Then he sighs. “This is really weird,” he says again. “Here I am, sitting with you. I didn’t come and sit next to you because I wanted to talk to you. I came and sat next to you because I didn’t want to talk to those cunts over there. But now I’m talking to you.
“Can I buy you something to eat? Have whatever you like, I’m paying. I don’t want you to think I’m …what do they call it? Patronising you. I just want to buy you a drink because of those cunts. Yassus, they’ve really upset me tonight.”
I beat a retreat soon after. Reconciliation can be really quite unnerving.