thiis

The Nyaope overdose that was my hair was safely covered by the doek, I had tied around my head as I paced like a black nurse through the deserted streets, thighs chicken-skinned by the early morning breeze. Only the roosters were around to see me in my embarrassing state, they boyishly cock-a-doodled as I passed, giving me an excitement I can only liken to how Mshoza would feel in Orania.

My pace increased as I slid my hips in and out the narrow passageways between shacks in my red satin nightdress, the one Ebenezer with the tenders bought for me on Valentines Day.

I reached my destination; the shiny glass sliding door of Mercy’s shack. I gave it a gentle knock, trying my best to avoid my own dreadful reflection in front of me.  Eventually, after a few minutes of knocking like a soap opera Damsel, I started knocking like a policewoman whose pants are too tight for her womanly figure.

“Who’s knocking on my door so early in the morning?” Mercy asked as she reluctantly opened the door.  Her white calamine lotion-covered face (which resembled the ghost of the Indian lady who sacrificed her hair for my last weave) sent streams of warm urine galloping down my thighs. I invited myself into her ornately decorated shack complete with the trademark pink ceramic dogs that sat on her “Bernadette” room divider from Price and Pride. I sat myself down on her Angelique lounge suite (whose couches still had the plastic covers 3 years after their purchase).

As soon as Mercy finished rubbing her eyes to consciousness I started telling her about my black-girl crisis.

“Mzala, I need your help” I told her in a voice heavily laden with embarrassment.

“I need to borrow the weave you had on last month, the one with red and yellow highlights”.

Her reaction was somewhat perplexing. She first gave a look of pure shock with both her hands covering her mouth and her eyes popping like Winnie Khumalo’s breasts at a Kalawa bash. Then she laughed until cakes of calamine cracked from her face and drizzled into polka dots on her cleavage. This schizophrenic reaction lasted for 15 minutes with Mercy alternating between the two reactions until she calmed down and settled with her “relate” concerned face.

“ Chomi what’s going on?” She asked, wanting to know what was going on. Why was the Princess Diana of the taxi rank in need of a recycled weave? Had she run out of big spenders with multiple tenders to entertain? Had Blackingham palace been broken into?

No, it was none of the above.

I was simply dating a S’khothane named Zwelethu, known to everyone in the S’khothane circle as Zwelectrifier.  He and I had been seeing each other for only three weeks, and I had not only exhausted my funds but I have accumulated debt. He would borrow money to buy the latest edition of the Carvella shoes, which he’d also use to cover my face with when we made love.

Sometimes he’d make me stick the payslips of his expensive Nike track pants on my chest during foreplay. That seemed to arouse him. On many occasions I’d catch him violently masturbating, while staring at his expensive Puma sneakers, but that’s beside the point.

The point is I was in a parasitic relationship with an unemployed boy with outlandish spending habits. I was in love with a boy who bought clothes and burned them quicker than you can say “cum”. Zwelectrifier made me sell everything to pay his debt with multiple loan sharks. My fridge was empty and I didn’t even have a can of lucky star in my cupboard because of him. When I’d ask him why he insists on this life; when he knows he’s not rich he’d get extremely offended. He would then recite the price of every item he is wearing from the R800 T-shirt to the R400 underwear and he’d end his recital with a self-assured  “just look at me!”.

I was wasting my time and I knew that very well. I planned to leave him but every time he came home in his blue floral pants, the ones so tight you can see every fold on his foreskin from a mile away; and whispered sweet words like “my Gucci Versace, my Armani beauty”. I’d melt and forget that by the time he leaves he’ll have my weave in a plastic bag ready to go sell.

That’s how I arrived here. A victim of S’khothane behaviour forced to wear the hair someone else had last month.

I wondered what would happen if Zwelectrifier stole and borrowed so passionately for his education. What if he invested that R 1800 he spends every month on a Diploma? Perhaps he wouldn’t have to steal his girlfriend’s hair to feed his bizarre consumer habit.

In fact, if every poor black woman substituted their notoriously expensive Tupperware or AMC with more constructive things like education of a better quality for their kids. I’m certain that the present sluggish state of progression in the greater black community would not be so.  I’ve noticed through personal experiences that as black people, particularly the financially disadvantaged majority of black people, are deeply ashamed of our own poverty, it is as if it was our fault that we were born into it.

We are so obsessed with the shame that is attached to it that we adopt excessive lifestyles instead of admitting that we are poor and finding efficient ways to change it. We adorn our teeth, ears and necks with expensive jewellery. We buy expensive clothes and hair and we laugh at those among us who aren’t able to emulate our wealth.

Isn’t that the crux of black issues? That our financial reality is so removed from our spending reality and the fact that I’m sitting in a shack with a glass sliding door is testament to that. The thousands of shacks with DSTV dishes precariously mounted on the corrugated steel roof also serve to prove the unorthodox nature of black spending habits. You could say consumerism has us by our designer panty, but we won’t change because in this world where everything depends on instant gratification it is easier to pretend to have than admit that you don’t. It’s a self-sustaining pattern of unsustainable behaviour and as long as it is perpetuated we shall constantly be sluggishly progressing and be a perpetual “developing” country.

S’khothane’s, through their vulgar display of outlandish consumer behaviour, exposed the stupidity of it all.

We all buy ‘things’ because we like ‘things’ and we’ll chuck away those ’things’ for the newer  ‘things’, forgetting why we even bought the older  ‘things’. We are all S’khothane’s in that regard and we have no right to criticise a heightened display of our own behaviour.

Mercy played a pirated Tyler Perry movie on her plasma TV. She stood behind me and sewed her dishevelled weave into my hair because like everyone else, I too would go as far as donating my lips to Helen Zille to prove that I have money for fake hair than admit that I don’t.