I saw God the other day. He was a builder. I saw him plastering a wall at the coffee shop Nino’s in Rosebank, Johannesburg, at about eight-thirty at night. I stopped for a good five minutes and watched him plaster that wall. For that length of time, nothing mattered in the world. Not the conflict in the Congo. Not HIV/Aids. Put it this way, if a truck came shuttling down on me at that very moment, I would have hardly looked up, even if the driver were hooting. God was busy, you see? And I was watching him.
When I was a kid, I experienced this God on Earth and working in front of my very own eyes every time my father cleared the kitchen table and used it as an easel to paint. I love my soccer. And as a kid growing up in Soweto, there was no better time to be outdoors than in summer when your street had a soccer ‘chuylence” against another street, and you were in the team representing your street. We would play until you could hardly see the made-of-plastic-paper-and-rags ball in the dark. We would play until our mothers screamed us back into the house to bath, eat and go to sleep, in order to be fresh for church or school the next day. We would stop playing only when we had to. Even then, we would do it grudgingly.
But when God was working in my kitchen, you could never drag me out to the street, even if you said there was ice cream for free to go with the soccer street challenge. The only time I heard someone accurately describe what the feeling of watching my father paint was like was on CNN’s Larry King Live. Paloma Picasso told Larry King on that programme that watching her father paint was like magic, one minute there was a blank canvas and, when you looked again, there was an explosion of colour! Nothing could be more fascinating for a kid.
My father was not a Picasso. As a matter of fact, he was a Miyeni. Anthony Njakeni Miyeni, to be exact. But when he painted or drew, it was like he was following lines that were already on the blank canvas. He was fast. He was furious. He was totally possessed. He was God possessed. He made everything other than his painting disappear into complete insignificance. Watching him work was truly magical.
I remembered this as I watched God plaster that wall at Nino’s the other night. He was wearing well-polished, pointy black shoes. He had neatly pressed black pants on. Over his non-builder shirt, he wore a bluish overcoat. He was squatting as he plastered that wall. He was a white man, poor looking. But the way he plastered that wall was with so much love, so much care, so much precision, you could have sworn he owned Nino’s. A black man was watching as he worked. The black man was dressed to plaster. But there he was, watching like I was. You got the feeling that God arrived and said, let me give you a hand here. Let me show you how it’s done. And then went to work.
It occurred to me there and then, as that white man’s image reminded me of my late black father, that there is no better way to make colour acceptable than to do what you do extremely well. There is no quicker way to shut down prejudice than to be an expert at what you do. There is no quicker way to bring out the God in you than to do what you do with intense honesty, love, focus, passion, concentration and total spiritual commitment. You see, Mandingo, God exists in all of us. Bring him out to play.