A man with no clothes on is bound to be slippery. When I called Beau Brummell on the cell number at the bottom of his hand-written press release, it took some time for the man himself to come to the phone. The lady who answered (his long-suffering wife, perhaps) politely asked me to hang on while she located him.
When Brummell arrived neither of us could make head or tail of what the other was trying to get at. It was the usual case of bouncing cellphone syndrome, so we spent the next five minutes shouting incoherently at each other while he tried to manoeuvre himself into a position where there was sufficient coverage.
Between annoying crackles in the stratosphere, he explained that he was in an apartment block in Amanzimtoti, down in ever-balmy KwaZulu-Natal. There was no land line in his apartment, he said, and I should be patient until he was able to get outside on to the lawn, where the signal might be stronger.
“Where’s the keys?” I heard him calling to the lady at the other end of the flat. When he finally managed to let himself out, he kept up a running commentary on his progress down the stairs to the garden door. Then he said: “Oops, I’d better just put some clothes on before I go outside.”
He might have been joking, but then again, maybe he wasn’t. After all, this is the man who still revels in having been known as “the naked freedom fighter” (or so he says), cheekily claiming his rightful place among the ranks of Albert Luthuli, Helen Joseph, Tsietsi Mashinini and Nelson Mandela. A man who could dangle his raw manhood in the face of the then all-powerful Dutch Reformed Church is unlikely to be daunted at the prospect of appearing in the buff before a few bored maids and madams at an Amanzimtoti apartment complex.
All the same, I was keeping my options open. Having taken the precaution of covering my earpiece with a convenient piece of latex in order to avoid the accidental exchange of body fluids over the microwaves, I asked him about his latest tirade against the Jewish cabal that he claims has been even more successful than PW Botha in sending him packing with his tail (or something closely resembling one) between his legs. This cabal, he claims, drove his freedom-loving Beau Valley nudist colony at Warmbaths into bankruptcy.
Brummell’s allegations are rather slanderous, so I will avoid mentioning names. But the drift of his argument rests on a supposed conspiracy hatched by some of his long-standing naturist clients who apparently took exception to Brummell’s decision to open the previously whites-only resort to all races, following the release of Mandela in 1990. So incensed were these gentlemen at the thought, in Beau’s words, of “blacks, Muslims and gays” romping into their coveted haven of flagrantly rosy delights that they accused him of being “a naked Nazi”.
“The Jews held secret meetings ? to raise money for Jewish lawyers to attack Beau seven times in the Supreme Court,” said the self-styled Nude King of South Africa’s agitated press release. “Eighty Christian nudists were threatened with litigation by the Jews if they did not give money and support the cause of liberating the whites-only nudist paradise from ‘kaffirs, Muslims and moffies.’ The Christian nudists packed their bags and fled in terror after South African police raided the nudist colony with instructions from the Jews ?” Etcetera, etcetera.
However, it seems that Baas Beau is inclined to be as parsimonious with the truth as he is extravagant with his anatomy. Some ex-Beau Valley clients have pointed out that, far from Brummell being the champion of rampant rainbowism, he himself was at the forefront of moves to stop the dark invasion, personally supervising an escalation of membership fees whenever a non-white made enquiries about joining. Apparently, when a black applicant showed up at the gate, the entrance fee suddenly shot up from the advertised R200 to R2000.
Brummell nevertheless insists on claiming a place on a pedestal in the New South Africa for having heeded Mandela’s personal call for all parts of the country, including nudie parks, to be opened to all races. But he immediately contradicts himself when he starts to explain what happened at Jane’s Jungle, his next nudist project, out on Durban’s north coast.
The wiser for his recent experience at the hands of scheming Jews and cowardly Christians, Beau urged his partners in the new venture to go back to the old ways and keep Jane’s Jungle a strictly whites-only affair.
Why so? I asked.
“Even for white people,” he told me, “it’s a huge mental transformation to go around naked among other white people. Introducing other races makes it much more difficult.”
I was expecting him to tell me about naked Zulu warriors prancing about the lawns, waving cultural weapons of the more unacceptable kind. But it seems that the Zulus stayed away in droves.
The local Indians, however, apparently did rock up, albeit in limited numbers.
“The trouble is Muslim women aren’t allowed to go around naked in public,” says Beau. So either the Indian guys would come by themselves ? which made the white guys angry because they thought they were just coming to ogle at their white women ? or Indian guys would show up with their white girlfriends, which for some reason made the white guys even madder.
Brummell is unrepentant. “Beau always said it is his birthright to be naked in Africa,” he concludes.
It’s an odd reversal, given that it is black people, who today wouldn’t be seen dead in his nature resorts anyway, who originally started the kallgat trend? before the missionaries came and told them to grow up and get hold of a serious pair of trousers.
And so, as Mr Beau Brummell urges the authorities of the new South Africa to roll back the tide of history and reintroduce whites-only beaches for the comfort of visiting German nudists, you reluctantly start to wonder all over again to whom this continent actually belongs, after all.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza