kagablog

The very first one: standing by the front door, looking at the paisley pattern in the frosted glass, and thinking: ‘I will always remember this’. I still can, over 40 years later. Most of my memories are traumatic. Pissing in my pants just before I acted as Noddy on TV. They had to be changed in seconds. Cutting my thumb as I ran my hand along the fence while riding my bicycle, but proudly not crying when I present the bloody hand to my mother for fixing. Jumping off the garage roof with my friends and my sister and her friends – that rush as you leap off - and pick up speed so quickly. The tree we climbed to get there had triangular-shaped branch ends. Falling into a pit filled with burning rubbish. Stumbling around screaming as the skin on the soles of my feet disappeared. The gardener rescued me. Being driven around in a pram for weeks, until my feet healed, which was intensely embarrassing. Deciding that I didn’t want my friends to play with my new gun at my birthday, and having it taken away by my parents, who then gave it to my friends. Cutting out a face from a block of wood, painting it, and giving it to my father for his birthday. He beat me for damaging his prized wood as I sawed off the block. Being hit by a car as I crossed the road to my house. Landing breathless in the driveway. The x-rays reveal no damage. Being broken into, my aunt wouldn’t let her handbag go as it went through the window. The cop dogs couldn’t follow the scent, we had tobacco on the lawn. The family pet vomiting blood on the carpet, Fluffy had to be put down. Drinking the milk left on the doorway when I got home from school before my mother got home from work. Sitting on the backseat of the volksie while blood spread from a cut on my backside. I had fallen into a pit and cut my ass on the way down. My mother didn’t believe I was hurt until my sister told her the car seat was filled with blood. Screaming as the doctor sewed up my butt before the anaesthetic took full effect. Running in terror from a bullterrier at a friend’s party, falling as I turned around to face the dog and hitting my head on a wall. My father called the lump an egg. Seeing my father cut his beard into the basin, chuckling, leaving the hairs there for my mother to clean up. Proudly showing my father my erection on the porch, and being heavily scolded. ‘Running away’ from home after our parents discovered our provisions under our bed – torch, food, clothes, carefully packed into bags. Reading crap comics filled Dennis the Menace and Billy Bunter. Being beaten with a hairbrush by my mother; my father only ever hit me when I was bust for shoplifting as a teen. Hoarding a piece of biltong given to me by my grandmother, so that it lasted longer than my sister’s, in the back of a station-wagon. Oupa was a stinking whisky alcoholic who would throw his piss out as we drove and it splattered along the side of the car. We would steal his ground-up powdered biltong, he had false teeth. Being caught playing doctor in the cupboard, we were inserting ballpoint pens into each other’s bums. Breaking a frog’s legs, I can still remember the tiny snapping sound it made. Dropping an aunt’s poodle off the porch. It broke its leg. I denied any responsibility, my first big lie. Putting a hamster in my pocket, catching its skin as I zipped up the pocket. The hamster was cut from the jacket and taken to the vet, anaesthetized in a plastic tube with gas, cut from the zip, stitched. Shooting countless hundreds of small birds in sheer boredom. Shooting my parent’s friend’s neck with my pellet gun as they had drinks in the garden. My gun was confiscated for weeks. The horror as the lights blacking-out during my parents’ reading of Lord of the Rings, just as the line ‘and the lights went dim’ was read. Clutching a tennis ball in my hand as we crossed the Limpopo, thinking how I would teach my new schoolmates how to play stingers in South Africa. They already knew how to.

this article first appeared on joburgcentral.co.za

We’ve known about the dangers of smoking for more than 50 years now
But smoke still hangs from the ceilings of bars and clubs
We all know that drinking is for losers
But the drunk still lies against the curb on the morning corner
There is counseling available for those domestic problems
But the papers still ooze stories of wife-beating
Dealers still find junkies
Junkies dealers
The rich still pay police poorly to protect their property
The underpaid cops still go crooked

No one listened to Bob Dylan back in the sixties
And look where we are now
TVs full of shite music videos
Demure babes rub themselves up against so-called sensitive sods
Sex still allures, still sells
Its everywhere
Like none of us ever once had a decent fuck

Idiots still ponce around in shades and head scarves
And cut-off shirts and chunky bling
Like all it takes to be a man is some weight training
Some tattoos
Some bluster
Someone else’s cloned style

Egos strut their tiny dance
Forgetting we are just porcupine quills
Standing out at every angle
On a planet we have stabbed dry
Fucking off through space at millions of miles an hour
Significant as ripples on the lake surface made by raindrops in a storm
And as long lasting
Even Mandela, the Mahatma, Attila, Caesar,
Are they known in, let alone beyond, the Milky Way?

Does it matter that the muso plays to 30 people or 30 thousand?
That your art is seen by 10 people or 10 million
If it moved someone on the other side of the earth
That you never knew about
Is it for yourself or your soul or your self-respect
Is it really for the other? It cannot exist without the other
Perhaps it is the dance between the two

Why have I just paid R20 for a R2 scrap of chicken?
I know
It’s because this burger is wrapped in franchise gaudy branding
And this is the only place open at 2am

If only
I could think of a way
To get out of this hum drum
If only it didn’t make me so tired
Each day of slaving at the coal face
That I ever can’t think of a way
To get out of this hum drum
If only I wasn’t recovering
From the hum drum
Each time I relax
It just goes past
It goes so fast
So slowly

If only …

Never tell a cop you are innocent. That one doesn’t work. They’ve heard it so many times before, it’s like the inmates of asylums insisting they are sane, no-one is really interested and frankly, it’s quite boring … irritating even.

This thought comes as a retrospect, but at the time I thought it was worth my while to protest my innocence, as I had just been arrested by cops for public drinking when in fact I had moved on to drinking water by that stage of the evening, and I was merely holding my friend’s drink while he went to look for a missing member of our rather inebriated party. Ja, ja.

The scene is the parking lot opposite Roxy’s in Melville. Saturday 10pm. We are perhaps the most elderly party attending the Joburg Burning event, where about 30 bands play at six venues around Melville and shuttles transport the patrons from venue to venue, presumably to prevent them from being arrested for drunken driving. But the cops, who cannot catch the thousands of rapists and murderers running rampant across our country, are hovering around hoping to catch patrons swapping venues with bottles of grog clutched in their pubescent paws. Well done, guys.

I wave the bottle of water in the cop’s face and tell him I’m not drinking, and come on, show a bit of mercy and all that, which angers the righteous constable so much he slaps cuffs on my wrists and accuses me of resisting arrest. I realize that the charges are adding up too fast and climbed into the police Golf, waving goodbye to my by now slightly anxious friends.

Cop number one takes off my cuffs and tells me that I haven’t even apologized. I apologise to all concerned, which is three cops – two in front and one sissie in the back. What’s going to happen to me? You’re going to spend the night in jail and pay a fine in the morning. Will I be spending the night with criminals? No, just other people bust for drinking in public. I ask what else they want to me to do or say and they tell me its best to shut up now. So I shut up.

We’re driving up Beyers Naude past the graveyard when the cops notice the taxi in front of them has something slightly fishy going on inside it. To me, it looks like someone is smoking crack midway along the taxi windows, but I’m not sure if anyone would be that stupid. The cops pull the taxi over and all three of them get out and search the occupants, who start lining up along the sides of the taxi.

No one is paying me any attention, so I start checking the doors. The one next to me has some sort of childlock on it, but the opposite door is open, so I climb out and start walking back along the way we came. Was I being given a gap? Or were the cops just stupid? Or hoping I would just sit there and wait for them? And why didn’t they search me? I could have had a gun for all they knew, and blown their brains out when they returned to the car.

I start walking away all nice and casual, but lose my nerve after about 30 meters and leap the fence into the graveyard, which cost me quite a few cuts across my palms. I start running through the graveyard, which is pretty dark and scary at this hour of night, and begin phoning my friends to pick me up. No one answers for the first five attempts, but eventually they reply and come to pick me up, whooping with joy as if I have won some kind of major victory.

We head for the next venue in time to catch more of the disgustingly un-original, egotistical, if highly competent young rock bands who seem to make up the event. I am laden with shots for my bravery or foolishness, I am not sure which, does it matter to drunken friends? Short of antiseptics, I splash whiskey across my wounds as you see done in any western worth its salt. We roundly condemn the cops for being useless sods who can’t catch a fly and who have become as corrupt as those they are supposed to put away behind bars. Then we watch the music. Some of the party pass out.

I resolve to never watch rock music again, and realize that my spring-driven desire to get wasted with pals on a night on the town has run its course. I walk back to my car, checking out the fences all the way to see how easy they will be to scale if the same cops happen to drive past and recognize me. I’m getting too old for this shit.

There’s something very different about doing a long-distance motorbike trip. From doing it in a car. In a car, you are sitting in a padded throne, sealed off from the passing environment, with music and temperature control and the ability to talk to your passengers.

On a bike, there is no throne. There’s a narrow little strip of seat which eats into your backside after a couple of hours, even if you stop each hour to relieve the pain. Temperature regulation is controlled only by what you wear, and there is no music or conversation. On a recent trip to Swaziland from Joburg the only way I could communicate with my loved one was to squeeze her left knee – my right hand was holding the throttle open at all times. I learned to put a lot of affection into those knee squeezes. In return, she would squeeze me with her thighs.
The only sound is that of the wind wooshing past your helmet and the drone of the motor between your legs. So why put yourself through all that, the uninitiated might ask. It’s not so easy to explain: perhaps it’s because there is nothing between yourself and the elements? Because the horizon is huge, unbroken by windshields, it just stretches out in front of you? Because without music or words, there are only your thoughts, which sometimes disappear for a few blessed seconds . . . and you become one with the road, and the place you are passing through.
Your concentration has to be absolute – there is no room for error – if you come off at high speed you are dead meat. So you have to be completely focused . . . and still be relaxed enough to enjoy it all.
I guess, like most things in this life, you have to experience it … to know that feeling of complete freedom. To know how it cleanses, as if the wind steadily whips away the cobwebs that have gathered in the corners of your soul …

So this morning just after I did my little ritual of thanks for the day in the riverbed I see this guy approaching me and my dog with his daughter and his two dogs, one of which is a fucken huge husky. It’s a really stupdendous animal that I greet each dawn as I walk past it but it doesn’t appear at all grateful for all that acknowledgement and sinks down on its haunches, preparing to attack my staffie bitch, who is really the sweetest old mutha and wouldn’t hurt a fly unless its getting more attention than her, cause that’s just the way staffies are. Last time this dude and his overfurred beast encountered us on the path next to the Braamfontein spruit just outside ‘Pawkhurst’ as my bassist friend calls it his dog attacked mine, but for some reason on this sunny and slightly warmer than winter morning I don’t take any evasive manoovers. I don’t know why, although I am not sure what I could have done, wrapped my arms around the dog? Perhaps I’m just too trusting that I am a nice guy and if I do nice things the universe will be nice back to me. I’m learning it’s not always. Going to be nice to me. The husky comes out of its killer crouch and runs full tilt at my cringing staffie who is desperately trying to hug the ground and say in dog language that she represents like, fuckall threat. The husky almost wipes out one of those extremely brightly dressed latex apparations that slither past in great numbers on Sunday mornings hogging the path and exchanging business ideas at top vollies called cyclists. Hits into my dog, takes a fat dog bite. His owner does fuckall, like this is normal Sunday morning stuff. I’m outraged, on my moral high horse, shouting at him to check out the gaping wound left in my dog’s neck, which is fortunately a staffie neck and could probably survive a great white bite or at least a crocodile but he says that he’s seen many wounds like this and it won’t need stitches. I’m saying that if it gets infected then he will have to pay but he’s wondering off with his little girl and his dogs and doesn’t seem overly concerned.
So I check out the wound again and it’s almost an inch long and a centimeter or two wide and doesn’t look like its going to heal without stitches. And I’m at this stage really fucken gatvol (the Afrikaans term for fed up, meaning literally “hole-full”) of being abused by assholes and criminals who just walk over me and my little world and my friends, loved ones and pets. I know where this dude lives so I go and wait for him to return. While I wait, which takes over half an hour, I meditate by the river, saying over and over to myself that I won’t get angry, but I won’t take this lying down. Eventually he returns, this time with his dog on a leash, examines the wound and repeats that it’s not serious and won’t need any attention and he won’t pay for any vet bills and that I’m just over-reacting. No apologies or anything like that. He just dismisses my indignity. I accuse him of not taking responsibility for his dog’s actions but fuckface is by this time returning to his house, and when I tell him he will receive a letter from my lawyer he remarks in leaving that I won’t be able to afford one.
Actually, he’s right on this one. When I phone my lawyer conneco he tells me that I only have a 50/50 chance of winning this case, because my dog wasn’t on a lead either. He charges 12 grand a day so the old saying that the law protects only the rich is once again proved. Karma will have to deal with the mannerless man. Fantasies of smashing his windscreen or breaking off the husky’s teeth of course cross my mind as I try to swallow my anger down but of course I am too well bought up to do anything like that which is why I am not made for this city of gold that I have lived in for 20 years and which seems to run afoul of me like far too often these days. I realize when recounting this story to my colleagues at work that my tales of doom are emerging with such frequency that their mouths turn up a little at the corners with something approaching pity and they’re probably thinking that I attract shit to myself because my life is so boring that I need drama to survive. I’m hoping that the blogspot readers don’t think the same thing.
Bad news is good news for newspapers. Which is where I work. For now.

What to say this time? Another gun shoved in my face, right outside my door. This time I was just so pissed off I started shouting, instead of co-operating. Unfazed, the gunman ran into my house and stole a cellphone before he disappeared.

We have no idea how he got into the property, which is surrounded by razor wire. Or how he got out. Or why the dog didn’t even budge. Perhaps black magic indeed surrounded the mystery man.

If his gun had been loaded, he would have surely shot me. But I’ve had enough of lying down for these guys. And so have the neighbours, who ranted and screamed at the totally useless cops when they finally arrived 20 minutes later. So has my landlord, who first put in razor wire, and is now belatedly putting in electric fencing.

“Perhaps you should shoot them,” commented one cop. It’s a tempting thought.

So now I have to move. I have to give way to these chancers, leave my own home. To find somewhere “safer”. This much is clear. My woman is beside herself, and I cannot blame her at all. What is not clear is, where is a safer place? I cannot live in a flat, as I am a drummer. Do I need a guard on 24-hour duty outside my window, because I want to live in a house? I refuse to be a victim. I refuse to be robbed again. I am at a loss about what to do next. This must be getting really boring for readers to read about. I think I must consult a sangoma …

There’s this big guy in front of me. He’s about three or four years older than me and he’s going to win the cross-country race. So I cut across a field instead of running around it, which puts me in front. He screams at me: “Davey! Hey, Davey! You cheat! Davey!” but I ignore him and we enter the earthern oval which has the parents inside it with me gloriously in the lead. He pounds along behind me, catching up all the way, but I’m too far in front and win. He’s out of breath and gasping to the teachers that I cheated, but he’s one of those throwbacks who were kept in junior school forever because he kept failing (but he sure as hell boosts the rugby team) and no-one really like him or wants to believe him anyway, so I’m declared the winner of the race. It’s the last time I ever win anything, because straight after that I am pitted against the best cross-country racers from the other schools in the area, and I realize if I win the next race, which is unlikely since I won’t be able to cheat, I will have to compete in local, then provincial, and then who knows, at national level, all for the glory of the school, my parents, my country and everyone except, I reason, myself.

So I stopped competing and became the most useless teenagers any parent could not wish to have. I filled every available time period, be it break or before sport or after or between prep (I was at boarding school) or before going to bed with having cigarettes, reading Asterix and Obelix comics and later, smoking joints and that great Cape Coloured invention, the pipe, a broke-off neck of a bottle filled with marijuana, and occasionally with a ‘cream’ of Mandrax. Holiday times consisted of stealing cars, smashing post boxes, breaking off car aerials, stabbing tyres with knives, tossing stones through any window myself and my mates thought was too big, racing around on 50cc motorbikes stoned out of our heads, driving through stop streets when you couldn’t see who was coming across them, sniffing spray n cook, pursuing horrified straight teenage girls … and endless hours on empty plots getting wasted on whatever myself and my mates could afford or steal or bum.

Unsurprisingly, I did not obtain a university exemption in my finals and it was the army for me, but my call-up was only in June, so I had six months before I went to fight for white privileges, which I filled with ever more drug consumption between trying to hold down a job at a hospital. I was out every night getting high until three in the morning and had to be up at six to take the train to work. I was drawing and cutting and pasting on an artist’s easel which was stacked at 45 degrees, a very convenient angle to pass out on, which I did almost every day until I finally got fired by my totally disgusted boss.

It was somewhere in this foggy period that my drug buddy and I decided we should go and ‘score’ and ‘arm’ of weed from Crossroads township, because the tiny packets we were buying were just too expensive and didn’t last long enough. We divided this in half and I returned home and opened my stash upon my bed. I took out a bit and smoked it and went for a very satisfied walk. Meanwhile, my parents returned home and my mother, who never usually went into my bedroom, went in to put a shirt on my bed, which she had bought as a present for her errant son. Not knowing what the mass of green stuff was, which was about twice the size of a soccer ball, she called my father, an ex-cop, who identified it immediately as ‘drugs’. When I got home they were cramming my hard-won weed into the bin, which really pissed me off. I was so far from normalcy that I didn’t even think about how upset my folks were, I just wanted my weed back. Evidence of how fucked my mind was emerged clearly the next morning, when my sister raced into my bedroom to tell me that my father was having a heart-attack. I had gone out on my usual binge, smoking my buddy’s stash, the night before, and I could see no reason why I should get out of bed. My sister managed to get my father to hospital, where he underwent a double bypass. Half of his heart had died, but he was such a fit old bugger that the other half kept going. Later I went to visit him in hospital and he asked me if I knew what I was doing, so I wrote out a thesis on marijuana to prove that I did – how it cures glaucoma and reduces nausea for cancer patients and things like that – all the positives, as well as the negatives, such as that it can produce real psychosis.

My father has since died, bless his soul. It took me 30 years to give up cigarettes. I still smoke marijuana, but in really tiny, respectful amounts. I got three degrees when I finally got to university. Now my teenage son is struggling to find the required motivation to do his assignments, and I don’t know what to say to him; that it’s not for us that he must do them, its for himself?

HI all

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Check out our new swamp set, refined and honed in the Okovango Delta.

Where: At Expresso Jazz, 60 4th Avenue, Linden (near Red Pepper)
When: Friday night, 22 May, from 8.30pm
Why: Why the fuck not? It’s time to dance, china!
Who: Dax Butler on guitar and mad Irish vocals, Derek Davey on drums, Richard Bruyns on saucy slide, Bronwyn on squashbox and flutes, Joel on bass and size 9 linefish..
What: read the above again, for more understanding. Again. Ok? Bring R40 and a shap attitude. Expect some gypsey, blues, attempts at swing, polkas, backbeats, skiffles, folk and country ..

c u there!

From now on I’m only buying cheap shoes, watches and cellphones. These are the first things thieves steal from you, and I seem to be their target right now. The latest robbery on the growing list took place on Tuesday night at my own home. Five guys, just out of their teens, one with a gun, and there is nothing you can do – even Bruce Lee can’t do much against a pistol. Myself being the only male in a group of four women, they made for me right off, but knowing the drill I kept my head down and lay on the floor as instructed. The mother of the four-month-old child gave them backchat, and for this she was pistol-whipped. My hands were tied behind my head with electric cable, and I lay on my stomach hoping nothing violent would happen. These were relatively ‘nice’ burglars, who did not stab or punch me, but they really took their time. They turned over my place and my friends completely, taking everything they thought that could possibly have value, eating, drinking, smoking – clearly not worried about being caught. I lay on my stomach for an hour, praying that the baby would not wake or that one my friends did something stupid. It was the longest hour of my life. I had just smoked a spliff prior to the arrival of the thieves. Music played for the first half hour before that appliance was carefully packed into a bag. I stared at a patch of carpet and recanted yoga mantras while my muscles shook with the strain of my un-natural position. Trying not be angry. There are no jobs out there for youngsters, after all.

Eventually they left and the whole process of reporting the matter to totally disinterested cops and replacing locks and contacting insurance companies and retrieving my cellphone number had to be done. What am I doing in this place where we have forgotten how to live with each other? It’s really easy to succumb to hatred and fear and racism as a means of coping. But I gotta keep that love channel open.

It’s becoming clear I have to leave my house: the only question is, how far do I move? Out of Joburg? Out of South Africa? Out of Africa entirely? I mean, fuck the programme Survivor. Why put yourself in danger deliberately when it’s right here already?.

Molepole folk singer Malefo Mokha, otherwise known as Stampore, has a completely authentic and unique style of playing guitar, with the left hand held above instead of below the neck, but still creating chord shapes. I saw him perform at the Maun Festival, held for the first time this year in Maun, the supply town for the Okovango Delta, Botswana. Stampore has released one CD but he does not survive off his music … and is often forced to beg or busk on the streets.

These days I wear my safety belt when I drive around Joburg. It’s a sign that I have grown up, I suppose. Like the way I am always fucking working. I used to do sweet fuckall, I’m not sure how. It would drive me nuts now. Anway, there was a time that I never wore safety belts, and one of those times was when I used to pick up street-walkers. It just didn’t seem appropriate to be buckled up when you knew that the makgosha was soon going to unbuckle your belt. It was somehow too lawful. In those days I also used to smoke, which made the whole interaction easier. I mean, have you ever heard of a prossie who doesn’t smoke? Like, they are worried about their health and complexion? And what would they do in between Johns – brush up on their literature? So I used to offer the makgosha a smoke after I had blown my wad, and it made the drive back to the pickup point just that much easier. Smokes are great for that – they ease the spaces up between and after things have happened, they mark the space with a little brown burn. You feel naked without one when you quit; you have to face the space all naked and alone. Life without filters and all that. So there was this makgosha who used to stand on a dimly lit stretch of road opposite the Brixton graveyard. Behind her was the old age home which was supposed to get a fence put up by council to keep out the night rabble, but that never happened. To get to this blonde, who was in her late twenties, one had to pass the flying squad headquarters. She would stand just a few meters down from where the squad cars emerged. I dunno why, I guess she felt safer knowing the cops were right there. She said they even knew her name, which I forget now, but I wouldn’t tell you anyhow. She said they knew her story, which was that she was raising a baby on her own. Well, not quite on her own, she apparently had her mum to help her, but no man. Her mother must have held the infant and fed it and shushed it up when it yelled, when its mother was out looking for Johns. I never knew if it was a girl or a boy, and I never asked. But I always gave her a little bonus, and a smoke on the way home, cause I felt sorry for her and her kid. If it was a true story. Somehow, I believed her. There were nights when I was bored and would drive past, just to see if she was there. If she was, it gave me a little thrill to know that I could have picked her up, but I hadn’t. If she wasn’t there, it was a relief to know that I wouldn’t have to make the decision. Either way, it made the trip home a bit more spicy. The blonde before her was a little bit shorter, and she had a great manner. She would make the whole transaction fun, which helps, because it’s always a bit nerve-wracking having sex behind someone’s house or in a park or a dark alley and not knowing who or what could disturb you. The little blonde was a crack addict. The faster she got you to give up your little bit of white semen, the faster she could score her little bit of white rock. She was really funny, and you felt really relaxed about all of the fifteen minute interaction, but she was a hectic racist. Anything black that drove past pulled a comment from her. The last time I saw her she was going to make a big score, one that would set her up for a while. Maybe something went wrong with the deal, because I never saw her opposite the graveyard again. Just the mother, who was a little taller, and always walked real slow and languid, turning to look at you as you drove past.

The following are words which have become accepted terms on the massively-selling tabloid known as the Daily Sun, through everyday usage, but which spellcheck has great difficulty in coming to terms with:

Bakkie: bake, bookie, bike, biddy, buddy, buggy, beakless, bookish, backless, bookcase, bakehouse, battle, beauty, beak, body, bogy (a bakkie is a car with a small cab at the front and an open section at the back (the ‘bak’, prounounced ‘buck’) for holding goods, also known as a pickup).

Bliksem: botulism, balkiest, bulkiest, blitzes, batsmen, blacksmith, blitzing, blitzed, botulisms, bulgiest, backslide, boldest, backslid, backside, bloodiest (to bliksem someone is to hit them, hard).

Condomise: condones, condoms, comedians, comedowns, condense, comediennes, continues, contemns, conjoins, Cantonese, contumides, condemning, condolence, Canadians (to comdomise is to wear a condom when having sex; it’s a term frequently used in campaigns combating HIV/Aids, as in A,B,C: Abstain, Be faithful, Condomise).

Gogo: go-go, gigo, gaga, gauge, toga, goody, good, dodo, dojo, gage, googly, agog, gigolo, gauge, Diego, Gouda. (a gogo is a grandmother).

Inyoka: inky, Yankee, innate, unity, annoyed, nook, unlike, India, ingot, into, enmity, inmate, amnity, noddy, unlock, Yank (inyoka literally means ‘snake’ but is the common term for people who cost the state millions by stealing copper electrical cables – plural izinyoka)

Malema: mammal, mama, Malayan, mélange, meanly, Manila, namely, manual, Miami, manly, menial, memo, malign, melon (Julius Malema is the vocal leader of the ANC Youth League. After he maligned Democratic Alliance Leader Helen Zille of being ‘racist, colonial and imperialist’ she countered by accusing him of being an un-manly ‘inkwenkwe’ – an uncircumcised boy, a deep insult for the Xhosa – and an academic melon, who failed his woodwork course at school, and should perhaps be involved in menial labour, rather than politics).

Mkhulu: meekly, muddle, mutual, module, moduli, milky, mutely, medulla, mulch, meddle, mettle, middle, multi, mould, moult. (an mkhulu is a grandfather).

Msholozi: mashies (Zulu nickname for Jacob Zuma, ANC president and soon-to-be president of South Africa. It means ‘you can’t sneak up on this guy’ or ‘be careful, this guy can sneak up on you’).

Muthi: mushy, mouths, mouth, maths, meths, moths, myths, mashie, moth, myth, mashy, meshy, muzzy, Meath, methyl, mush (muthi is medicine that witch-doctors use in their spell-casting and muthi (often made up of human body parts) is often buried in people’s yards, sometimes to invoke tokoloshes – see tokoloshe).

Sangoma: samoan, sanguine, snowman, sangria, seaming, synonym, slamming, salmon, seamanly, assuming, someone, summing. (a sangoma is a healer. Their primary task is to heal – if they use body parts for spells, or do harm to others, they are not sangomas but witch-doctors).

Takkies: takes, toadies, teddies, toddies, tykes, tackles, tickles, titties, tattles, tidies, tattoos, daddies, takeaways, teaches, attacks (takkies are canvas sneakers).

Tokoloshe – ticklish, toehold, touchholes (a tokoloshe is a small, evil gnome, often sent by jealous rivals or witch-doctors, which sometimes has sex with the unfortunate affected person and glows with a bluish or greenish light).

Venda: vend, veined, vandal, viand, vended, fined, veins, evened, find, fanned, vented, vent, fanged, fawned, finned (Venda is a small place in the North-Eastern corner of the Soutpansberg in Limpopo).

The innocence of a new psyche
Soon with scars is laced
The fresh pink skin grows stiff and tight
Wrinkled from a thousand fights

An old dog tethered in a yard
Snarls softly, yet it winces hard
Keeps it gaze upon the ground
As master’s blows come raining down

Once the scars joined up and met
There was no give between
Death was welcomed, even sought
The day was lost, the battle fought
The lesson that this soul was taught
Cannot be sold, should not be taught.

It’s an expensive business, getting mugged. Especially when you are stabbed, because for that you have to see a doctor or go to hospital, get stitches and pain-killers and antibiotics and anti-inflammatory pills.

But I have the means to finance all this, as well as being able to replace my stolen carkeys, shoes and various other small things like watches and bits of jewelry. Perhaps this is why I was treated the way I was, when these items were forcibly taken from my person, during the mugging of my girlfriend and I on Melville Koppies, central Joburg, by two so-called blacks, one of whom was wielding a pump-action shotgun.

I was clobbered with said gun on the back of the neck and punched and stabbed with my own penknife, although I handed over the above goods without argument – I just didn’t want to lie down on the ground in front of these two. So I was basically bludgeoned to the ground.

Much harder to replace than the material items is the hurt pride and the sense of optimism for Africa and South Africa which, as I have been robbed several times in the last few years, is becoming rather difficult to maintain.

And it’s really hard to believe that the cops care when you go report yet another crime to your person and goods and you are told that you shouldn’t be out walking in the open in the first place. The insinuation is that it’s your fault. If you would only stay in your home, or rather walk around a mall, then you will be safe, they insisted. But I don’t believe that either, having suffered several attempted break-ins at my own residence of late.

I was also told by the cops that I was “lucky” to have got away with relatively minor injuries. I guess it was my lucky day. It could have turned out much worse. They could have attacked my girlfriend, in which case, they would have had to kill me, or I them. I am truly thankful.
What is going on here, as part of the low-level war previously mentioned on the kagablog, is actually a turf war. I live on the ‘fringe,’ which is why I am getting hit. I like to walk in nature. I live next to a river. The underlying rule is becoming: live in a secure complex, not a house by the river, and don’t walk in unpatrolled areas.

The two men who have conducted their reign of terror on the koppies have become the rulers of this territory by default. It’s just too dangerous to walk there, and the cops can’t or won’t catch them, so it’s now their turf.

So far this pair have assaulted and robbed about 60 victims, and still nothing has been done. They bury the gun after hitting people with it and disappear until the heat dies down. Then they return, dig it up and wait for the next suckers.

There is a contingent of reservists who are determined to nail these guys. I was phoned by them soon after my ordeal and went to look at some identity photographs. Some of the people photographed were in the process of being fucked up, so they didn’t look too good. Others were just photographed because they looked suspicious, which isn’t exactly legal, but then again, this guy explained, a lot of what they do isn’t legal. The hands of the cops are tied, he said, but ours are not.

I’m not sure who is more nuts, the muggers or the reservists, who now send me sms messages about the ambushes they are setting.
Well, the break-ins at my house only stopped when the local community policing forum became involved. So this is what it’s boiled down to: vigilante groups, who are standing up to the thugs, because the cops won’t. Are they racists? Do they get a thrill out of beating possible thugs, or are they just trying to protect the community? I don’t know. At least these guys are trying to do something about the situation.
Perhaps I must accept the fact that I am likely to be an ongoing victim of crime, and violent crime at that, simply because for 500 years my white ancestors oppressed and robbed the black residents of this country. If I am going to stay here, I must be prepared to be a sacrificial lamb to the slaughter. Perhaps I am already giving way to despair and resignation, as Ian Martin wrote …

Funny thing is, I felt no rage at the time. I felt absolutely no pain – that only came later, when the adrenalin wore off. It was more like, oh, here we go again. So I’m becoming used to being robbed. Does this mean I am becoming a victim?

I did notice as I drove the streets afterwards, that I was looking for my assailants. But I don’t know that if I see them, I will leap from my car with whatever weapon I can find and do serious bodily harm. My anger has been delayed, which is dangerous, but I know that to exact revenge won’t bring real satisfaction; it will just lower me to the level of my muggers.

It’s a complex thing to be the victim of what was at least in part a racial attack. I am a white heterosexual male, so I haven’t been the object of violence that women, so-called blacks or gays often are or were. On the other hand, I only weigh 60kg and I’m not nearly six foot tall and I am approaching 50 pretty fast. I have been fucked up many, many times, and there wasn’t much I could do in retaliation.

It’s actually quite laughable (if it wasn’t also tragic) how literal a racist/sexist attack, or any attack motivated by prejudice is. Being told to get on your knees, so that that the attacker feels taller and therefore superior. Your ancestors did this to mine, now the roles are reversed; see, I’m the baas now. The rapist puts his victim into a submissive pose, etc etc

There is also the dehumanizing of all involved in such scenarios. The perpetrator knows deep in his soul that he is actually proving how inferior he is by having to do such a debasing action, in order to feel superior. At the same time, in a Sartre-ian sense, there is moment of bad faith, where the perpetrator ignores this former knowledge and pretends that the violent action is worth it, for that temporary sensation of feeling superior.

This is why it’s best not to look the attacker in the eye while the attack is taking place, because you mirror the real inferiority back to the attacker as he does his attack – and he (or she) really doesn’t want to see that.

Both the attacker and the victim add to the collective pain body of the planet. For more reading on this topic, consult Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth.

One also has to see all this in context. South Africa is an extremely violent country, and most of the violence takes place between the working class, black inhabitants, who don’t have razor wire and security companies to rely on, or the resources to replace stolen goods with the relative ease that middle or upper class whites do. Hello, wake up Derek, welcome to the Africa of the 21st Century, now colonized by wars and crime.
And the suffering of the working class is far, far worse. I work on the Daily Sun and watch the flow of gore go past with unrelenting monotony, day after day, week after week. What is my little scratch compared to the father who had to watch his son’s door being kicked down - and his son shot to death - while he watched through a keyhole? Or the mother whose shack was burned down in inter-foreigner tensions, who could only rescue her baby, but not her six-year-old daughter, from the flames?

our “peace” is actually a thinly disguised low-level war which keeps the public happily producing because we have a “democracy” which is not in an all-out “war”.

We had six attempted break-ins two weeks ago at our house, and it felt a bit like the Gaza strip. The cops don’t give a fuck; we were lucky in that we are ADT members and could call for help; the landlord put razor wire on our fence and the break-ins stopped (touch wood). Life goes on …