In my 38-years of holding down different jobs from the CEO, to Business Director, to General Manager, to Business Analyst, to a financial consultant, to apprentice electrician in a local factory to working weekends filling out market research applications, to working in a clothing store, to selling fruit and vegetables on the busy and sometimes raucous township streets in Cape Town, to doing what I do now. I’ve travelled the length and breadth of South Africa in the heyday of Apartheid and during the halcyon days post the elections in 1994 and the Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki years.
I have had the pleasure of staying in top hotels, where the looks of the Bellhop reminded me of my place. I snuck into guest houses late at night, fortified with copious amounts of my favourite libation, woke up in bed & breakfasts, shared private homes with dear friends, greeted the rising Sun in swanky apartments, and sprawled out cold in flats with uninvited guests that only show their presence when the lights go out. I have indubitably met more people than all my friends combined. The locals in my neighbourhood, Xhosas, Zulus, Indians, Coloureds from the other province, were amazed to discover still more Coloureds from Zimbabwe, back when it was still Rhodesia. I’ve had dinners with people that refer to themselves as Malay, countless barbeques with ruddy and mostly racist Afrikaner, had inquisitorial dinners with snooty whites and English who were more concerned by my accent than the content of the conversation.
I met and dined with people from Europe, had my favourite pairs of shoes mended by Ghanaian cobblers, who looked like they belong in a GQ magazine, and not on the streets of Hillbrow. I exchanged pleasantries with Tunisians, broke bread with Egyptians, debated with Pakistanis and Indians from the subcontinent, but not in the same room of course.
Bought my first pair of Sendra cowboy boots from a West African had coffees with Ethiopians and silently agreed with Solomon of the bible about their beauty and drank homemade brandy with Serbians during the war in what was once Yugoslavia. I’ve met White captains of industry, White executive directors who treated me well enough, even though I was never invited back to their exclusive think tanks again. Chatted on busy street corners with “lower-class” Black people, shared beers with coloured people, had so much Mainstay with Indian people, we could’ve raised the Titanic and boy have I met the bold and the beautiful of all hues.
Among the mix I’ve met priests and scoundrels, the honest and the dishonest, Black, Coloured, Indian and white, Catholics and Muslims, Christians and Baha’is, Hindus and Buddhists, agnostics and atheists, Marxists and communists, tribalists and spiritualists and all sorts of vegans, gipsies, the bohemians, nudists, star people, tree huggers and children of fairies, but…
I’ve never met a more beautiful heart than that of a black person, because despite their wholesale persecution because of the colour of their skin, they still smile, offer a firm handshake, a warm hug, a shared plate of food if you’re hungry, and a voice of reason, and, at once I realised, our country stands only by virtue of their forgiveness and NOTHING else folks…
