Bafana Khumalo:BODY LANGUAGE
I got laid last weekend. Why, you ask? What woman would lack so much self-respect that she would allow a man of my considerably unattractive looks and who is truly devoid of any charm to impose my brand of unspeakable depravity on her (hey, having sex with me is by definition unspeakably depraved)?
Well, there are such women and I found one last weekend. Any woman who sleeps with a man who lost his virginity at the tender age of 25 is either the embodiment of ubuntu or can’t see what other women see. I think she is the latter.
I lost my virginity at this rather mature stage not because I had been saving myself for Ms Right – or Mr Right for that matter – but because all the women I grew up with in Soweto had something which the women in my later years did not have: taste.
What woman in her right mind would have willingly taken off her clothes in the presence of someone like me? Someone with geeky, gawky looks crossed with a touch of effeminacy – that’s what I looked like when I was younger, and I still do.
The difference is that back then no woman would touch me with a barge pole, let alone her genitals. Now some of them tend to think that my short-sighted peer into my beer as smoke gets in my eyes is an intense look. It seems to be a fashionable look, especially if you top it off with a shock of fashionable glamour dreadlocks.
This look seems to appeal to a certain kind of woman – either a properly colonised native negress or someone of colonial descent. Both these kinds of women seem to share the view that the dirtier looking the hair, the more attractive.
Not in Soweto in those good ol’ days. There, for a woman to get anywhere near you, you had to have at least a gallon of jerry curl gel coursing down your brow as it melted in the hot sunshine. I couldn’t afford that and, needless to say, I never got any.
I hit on the idea of stopping combing my hair and that didn’t improve my chance. Everyone referred to me as a “dagga-smoking vuil pop [filthy little bugger]”.
My state of celibacy lasted into the first quarter-century of my life when, at the height of apartheid, fornicating across the colour bar was considered to be an act of insurgency. Ja, those were the days, bra. Those Nusas girls were something else. A stint in detention used to improve one’s fuckability no end.
Perfectly apathetic folks like me had to feign young black anger. Anger at everything, including “the movement – they don’t understand the revolutionary aspirations of the starving, struggling, oppressed masses of our people”! Such an outburst would earn one a concerned look and a roll in the hay.
I think those Third World groupies found suffering and anger erotic. How else would they have slept with me, were it not for that and the fact that they had bad taste?
This state of erotic bliss lasted until that bald white man – FW de Klerk – ruined my life as a professional angry young black man, and the career of one Mzwakhe Mbuli as a poet of dubious prowess.
After the 1994 election white folk did not want to touch me at all. All the Nusas women I knew got civilised and started attending tasteful dinner parties, or they moved out of the country. I was left celibate until I discovered there are black women who find unkempt hair and scarecrow limbs attractive.
Now this is the kind of woman I was with last weekend. The kind who has made it up the corporate ladder and tries very hard to sound as unblack as possible. Who will, for instance, profess to hate the recently empowered black male.
I hate the nouveau black elite, too, because they think black empowerment is Cyril Ramaphosa empowerment. Theoretically, if they buy a mine the average mine worker should be able to derive some benefits from the unbundling. Don’t you just love rhetoric – like a slut, it does anything that you want it to do.
Ja, we can’t afford to be generous in desperate times like these. Like I said, I got laid last weekend. By a woman with truly bad taste.