I must say, I was wondering how the Jews and the whites were going to get away with it this time. With the blacks having taken over the media in a general way, there didn’t seem to be much left that blacks couldn’t say about what they really thought about oppression, exploitation and all those other things that are said to have happened back in the bad old fairy-tale days.
So, when the Financial Mail, that last bastion of white economic power, fell into the hands of Barney Mthombothi and initiated an annual shindig to launch what it called The Little Black Book, a directory of who’s who in the stellar world of what might be called the “Niggeratti”, the rich, famous, and blacker-than-thou of the new South Africa, I believe I may be forgiven for thinking that knives were busy being sharpened and long suppressed agendas, gripes and sheer bloody minded invectives were finally going to be exposed to the light of day. It had, after all, been an all too easy walk to freedom under the rainbow star so far.
This sense was underlined when I found myself coming out of the lift on the fifth floor of one of those fancy new cavernous temples to Mammon that are rising up faster than cookies in your mother’s Welcome Dover these days, all dressed up in a fancy black tie with nowhere much to go except to follow the herd of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed few who had been invited to listen to a keynote speech on success by what has been dubbed “the Capitalist Nigger”.
Now, these are interesting times indeed if what had formerly been the bottom line in hate speech has become a badge of pride to be bandied out of the limousine in the car park across the road, your white spouse or significant other, preferably, on your arm, and you sit down to a lecture on why it is cool to call yourself a nigger these days, capitalist or otherwise.
It was all piling up too fast for my brain to take in. Those of us who were on a strictly substance-free regime at the time nevertheless became intoxicated by the relentless bonhomie that was wafting us into the hall to take our medicine. The medicine was to be delivered by one Dr Chika Onyeani (although the blurb never specified what line of specialisation he was a doctor in) and came highly recommended from overseas, where it counts, by the likes of Professor Ali Mazrui, the late Dr Albert Schweitzer and many others.
The keynote speech began promisingly enough: “This is the 21st century, [and we] believe, just like the Jews and others, that we must begin to wash our so-called dirty linen in public … What I am saying here,” he went on, “should not be construed as an invitation for xenophobic feelings towards the achievements of the groups I have mentioned here … I am not saying this for [them] to become objects of hatred, but rather of admiration.”
Interesting, I thought, leaning forward on the edge of my seat like others in the dramatically darkened room. Coming so soon after the emotional burial ceremonies for black economic empowerment high priest, the much loved and sorely missed umlungu wethu Brett Kebble, it seemed there could at last be some sort of cathartic outpouring of what it truly felt like to be the dark side of the moon coming out in its full, unflawed beauty and extravagance for the first time in history. I was thinking, for example, about that dark night more than 30 years ago when my sports teacher, a coloured chap called Vernon Meyer, punched out a white lout on the gravel outside the school hall in Zambia and forced him to say, out loud, “black man better than white man” in front of all the school children, who couldn’t believe their black ears, and who had thought, until that moment, that the white man (not to mention his wife) was invincible.
Yes, indeed. It seemed as if the day of reckoning had arrived and been made relatively respectable by the civilised setting Mthombothi had chosen for it in Sandton. If you’ve got a nigger message, don’t take it to Daveyton. Tell it loud and clear right here where white economic muscle has ears to listen (if that’s not mixing too many metaphors.).
In the event, it turned out that Onyeani had come all the way from America to let the South African white man and the Jew off the hook, in spite of his promising introductory words. By a series of self-inflicted slips of the tongue, the white supremacist term “nigger” had been reappropriated as a badge of pride, and turned, instead, against the hapless beneficiaries of the ghettoised, inner-city American dream, the Asian Tiger from India, China and Korea who had made slave-orientated consumer culture into a highly profitable business, and was deeply resented for it among the indolent, shiftless bloods in the hood.
Confused? So was I. But not nearly as confused by the message, such as it was, as by the sight of those well-heeled ex-bloods at the Sandton Convention Centre who seemed to lap it all up like ice cream.
Of course, it helped that the message was delivered by a foreign native. There are plenty of local wiseguys who could have made more sense of who we are and where we’re at for a fraction of what Mthombothi paid for this thinly disguised anti-Indian diatribe.
But how would some of us have titled our presentation? “Corporate Kaffir”? I somehow don’t think that would have gone down so well among the patent-leathered entrepreneurs gathered there on that night.
So “Capitalist Nigger” it was. And Capitalist Nigger it seems it’s going to be for a long time to come. You better believe it.