I met a purple man on the hills above the sea on the Transkei coast over Christmas. Now what does this mean?
Well, it was Christmas (whatever that means). And these were the hills of the Transkei – some of the most beautiful we have in this undiscovered country. And it was the Wild Coast sea that was breaking over this haunting part of our shores.
And I say it was the Transkei because that piece of our country remains a remote and seemingly forgotten ‘homeland” within our complex territorial space, in spite of all the changes that we have lived through. Just look at the roads, and the way the people continue to live, to see what I mean.
The Transkei seems to have defied the elimination of boundaries established by a previous order and remained the same — treacherously narrow roads slicing through rolling hills whose green slopes give way to endless scars of soil erosion, the legacy of desperation and overpopulation. Cows, sheep, dogs, donkeys and mules roaming across the roads with mute abandon, blissfully unadapted to the perils of the mechanised age.
So it was in a remote part of this beautiful, stunted wilderness that I came across the purple man.
It became evident to me that the man himself was not purple. His face was purple. The man had been born with a birthmark that had covered the whole of his head with a purple cowl.
It could have happened to any of us. But if he had been born into a black family, of course, the birthmark would not have showed up in such a vivid shade of purple. To all other intents and purposes, therefore, in spite of the remarkable purple mask that covered his face, he was a white man.
Well, I was coming up the hill to look at the house the purple man had been staying in with his family over the Christmas holidays, with a vague view to buying it — well, you know, black people like you and me don’t tend to own holiday homes on a timeshare basis, or any other basis, for that matter, anywhere in this country, despite years of talking about liberation and reclaiming our grandparents’ heritage. So I was taking up a local (white) man’s challenge to consider this possibility.
So, anyway, here was this purple man standing in his faded blue shorts and naked yellow torso on the crest of the hill in the green Transkei, yelling at his whitish-yellow children outside a brown wooden house with an incredible view over the ocean, which I did not necessarily intend to buy. The purple man was somewhat taken aback when I hove into view.
That was the thing. The thing was, the purple man refused to see me. He could see the white man who was climbing up the hill with me, and who was bringing me to see the brown wooden house, with serious interest in having me buy the place.
But the purple man refused to acknowledge my presence (potentially the man with the interesting money) and would only acknowledge that he was seeing the white man at my side, to whom he was prepared to offer a civil and exclusive greeting in these wildly beautiful surroundings.
Now, we have all sorts of problems in this country, and most of the time we would prefer to ignore them, considering how far we have already come. But when a purple man who is really a white man has a reality problem with a black man in what was formerly a black Bantustan, we have to stand back and look at what kind of situation we are actually sitting on.
But I have another question: do I blame the purple man and his people for hogging the country on their own behalf, or do I blame myself and the rest of the black bourgeoisie for failing to turn the country (and indeed the century) back over to the black people who still live here but have no stake in it?
Let’s look at it again.
I met a purple man on the top of a hill overlooking some of the most dramatic land and seascapes in the country. We had nothing in common. We Christmassed with our separate families in our own separate worlds, in the same native space. We pretended that we couldn’t give a damn about each other.
He couldn’t chase me away, as he might have done in the old days, and I couldn’t chase him away, much as I might have wanted to in these new times. We were locked together in an unresolved space.
But that nagging question arises once again: to whom does this space belong?
We have easy solutions. Land and property are going begging out there. White people are building and buying into the hinterland like there’s no tomorrow, quietly extending the frontiers of the laager.
The black bourgeoisie, on the other hand, prefers to ignore our rural splendours and spend their Christmas holidays on crowded beaches in Cape Town, along with the rest of affluent Johannesburg.
Something has to be done if we are to turn our political transformation into something more meaningful. It is not enough just to take your cow with you when you move from Zondi to Bryanston and think you are making a powerful Africanist statement when you decide to slaughter in a white suburb. And it is not enough to drive around in a luxury 4×4 (one you know you cannot possibly afford) with a bumper sticker that says ‘Thanx God I’m a Blackman, amen”.
So next time you meet a purple man with an unreconstructed white brain in an unexpected place, remind yourself of this: taking back the country demands engagement of a higher order. Nobody’s going to offer you those spectacular timeshares, or anything else, on a plate.
The country is being painted overseas as a spectacular land of opportunity. And spectacular it certainly is, when you get out there and look at it.
Now we have to be prepared to go out and get it, before the whole thing gets taken away again under our noses.
I rest my case.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza