/ 5 October 2007

Township celebrity

In many ways, being white [in the township] meant I was safer than anyone else, mainly because the colour of my skin brought me a strange kind of celebrity. For instance, I might walk into a shebeen in Site C, over 5km from where I lived, and be approached by a patron who’d tell me he’d heard I played a good game of pool. Soon I would be drinking in a group of five or six, all of them rooting for me at the pool table, with countless challengers lining up coins to take me on at the game. I began to notice that I seemed to be good for business: word of my whereabouts would spread, and shebeens that had been empty would fill to capacity half an hour after I arrived. And the victory dances that went on after I’d been beaten at the pool table suggested that whipping a white man at the game was something to be celebrated.

Very soon I felt that I had known this place and its people my whole life. I felt that I had returned home, home to a place I’d always pined for, but had never managed to find until now. I had always been mindful of the fact that as long as I felt like a white, English South African, I would be guilty of ignoring the truth of my identity. Although I couldn’t speak a word of German and couldn’t remember anything from the short time when my family lived in Austria, I had always identified more closely with a European identity than an African identity. My move to Khaya forced me to realise that I had far more in common with Africa than with any imagined European roots.

There were friends everywhere, even if I’d only met them five minutes earlier. On almost every train journey into work in the early afternoons I would meet acquaintances, old and new. The women were the most caring, many of them domestic workers on their way to scrub a white home in the suburbs. They would interrogate me warmly on my feelings about Khayelitsha, my opinion of the Xhosa people, and they would listen intently to my response. Their concern for my well-being was genuine and strong: I was often escorted on foot to my township destination by a motherly matron.

But it was more than humanity and a sense of cam­araderie: there was a naturalness about relationships and public gatherings that was unlike anything I had experienced in the white world, and this was never more evident than on a pumping dance floor in a packed tavern, like Lulu’s Tavern in Site B.

On one particular evening, Mzondi had taken advantage of my fame to try to organise a lift home from Lulu’s for the two of us. He was getting restless, and although it was late — well after 10pm — and we’d been drinking all night, I wondered whether his eagerness to leave perhaps had something to do with an appointment with a girlfriend that he hadn’t told me about. For my part, leaving was the last thing on my mind — jiving was what I wanted. I’d chosen Mapaputsi’s Intro Umgan’wama Cala as one of my two songs on the jukebox, an impossible track to waste, and just as Mzondi started yawning, it began, booming through the tavern: ‘This is the police!” rang out in the guttural English of a uniformed boertjie. ‘You are surrounded!” it blared. ‘Come out with your hands on top of your head!” It was my battle cry, and before Mzondi could say a word I sprang up and headed for an empty spot on the dance floor.

Being a white boy on the skinny side of thin, I had soon found myself very under-endowed in the backside area in the township. Indeed, my complete lack of any kind of rear end had made me the butt, so to speak, of endless jokes from my friends. But tonight I wasn’t letting my genetic handicap slow me down: the irresistible kwaito beat gave my bum a life of its own.

I had always been a self-conscious dancer, but a month in Khayelitsha had changed that. White men couldn’t jump, I’d been told on countless occasions; did that mean they also couldn’t dance? It was a friendly jibe, but it had a serious undertone. Dancing is central to Xhosa culture, from Nelson Mandela doing his famous shuffle in front of the global media, to disgruntled work­ers toyi-toying, sticks in hand, to the director’s office. For men it is an instinctive expression of rhythm and strength, while for women it is a chance to flaunt their beauty, with sensual gyrations and clever hands. In Khaya, it is common to see toddlers, only walking for a week or two, being coaxed by their elders to dance. Many of their moves, enhanced by pronounced nappy bums, were enough to make me lose any confidence I might have had left. However, as the weeks and months passed, I had stopped worrying about how I looked to others. Here, the forms of beauty dictated by glossy magazines were not important.

The dance floor was overflowing with all shapes and sizes; men with massive beer bellies joined their more muscular fellows in dancing with the ladies, some of them enormously fat, others rake-thin. Everyone smiling at everyone, something I’d only ever seen years before among dancers stuffed to the gills with LSD at Cape Town’s outdoor trance parties — but the difference here was that the smiles would still be just as wide in the morning.

This is an edited extract from Khayelitsha: uMlungu in a Township by Steve Otter (Penguin Books)