I was with Ali G the other day. I had collected him from the airport as he landed from Kazakhstan, and he was carrying a magazine with its title “i” turned upside down so it looked like an exclamation mark. Nifty. On the cover stood four young, black people in designer suits. The headline read: “The Colour of Money”. He informed me that this was “breaking news”, in a Kazakh accent — charming. How this story could be considered “news” perplexed me. What exactly is breaking news, I asked him? He said something about breaking things. Does breaking news have to be new news, I continued? I mean, whose ignorance has to be relieved for news to be news? What if, like, we all know about something that some other guys don’t? You know, the more socially-challenged ones. Again, he mentioned that thing about breaking things and “punani”. Mind you, this was a highly sophisticated conversation. Anyway, the cover story was about YBPs, that is, Young Black Professionals in South Africa. Their existence can’t be breaking news, really. To illustrate my point, I read Ali an essay about my past experience with a member of this species, which he luckily helped me edit, expressing his firm goal to one day win a “Pulizer”.
So: “I intended to leave him, his life, our life, his friends, our friends, his attitudes, our attitudes. It’s not easy being an esoteric chick, without altering some practical aspects of your life. Actually, I am both over and understating this, but one is inevitably confronted with defining in clearer terms for oneself who one is, and things in line with that, in general and specific ways. You know that feeling when you are bored out of your mind? People do strange things in a state of boredom. They are very dangerous, actually. My primal yawns could be heard in Timbuktu, infecting even the insects of the Amazon. To avoid this imminent disaster, I left.
“A successful investment banker by profession, he lived the life of this genre as if it had a genetic prototype that only a few could lay claim to. To an extent, his beloved belief was true: South Africa’s political democratisation led to an economic liberation that only a few were perfectly positioned and timed to make something significant of, creating a genre of YBPs, wholly unique to any other newly created, socio-economic grouping in the country. These black guys (and girls) are around 33 years old, hectically compelling, well-accredited, internationally trained, follow global best practice, shop at Pink’s in London and diligently stock men’s fashion and Wallpaper magazines. I was a huge fan.
“From families that weren’t exactly members of the Wanderer’s Club (Ali sends his sympathies), inescapably influenced by apartheid and its many injustices, I seldom heard them talking easily about this or naturally related subjects. I suppose they are exploring success and, esoterically speaking, that is okay. But esoterica asks just a little more of one. It asks one to integrate the understanding of “as within, so without”. In this case, there was a lot invested in occupying the throne located, supposedly, outside — and seemed like a work-in-progress in perfecting this first. I was impatient to take the road less travelled and had little to go on, except a sense of heeding the call on a two-way super-highway to the bottom of the ocean somewhere. He didn’t think I would do it.
“When burning my incense (and not even imphepho, the version which is indigenous to Africa and smells more pungent, that which I have come to love), he would say, ‘Are you burning that voodoo shit again?!’ I guess he thought it didn’t go with his decor and, you know, a lot of people are just like that. A lot of people are suspicious of that world, imagining perhaps that one will invoke bad spirits to take everything away from them. This is Africa, after all, and these things are often disliked because they are indeed possible anywhere. But that is not what the Diamond Age many are ushering in is about at all, it’s better. It’s a more galactic best practice than that. It’s far more compassionate and, therefore, globally developmental. What kind of man does it take to get that?”
When bidding Ali “More Green Champagne Pleez” G farewell at his Melrose hotel haunt (mmm…?), he toasted the YBPs for being “flush in GP” and “representin’ good ol’ bling-bling decadent values … Booyakasha!”
Well, yeah, almost. Almost.