To be black and ghetto fabulous

By Sifiso Mazibuko

So what is it with us black folks and our overwhelming need to be down, ghetto, hood or kasi. This is the quandary that seems to face a black person who achieves any level of success and then as a result, God forbid, decides to move out the hood. He is liable to be derided by the people he is leaving behind as he heads for a better life of solitude behind high walls and electric fences to protect his newly acquired worldly possessions. So what is this black person to do in order to get the respect of his people back? What must he do to prove that he is still down for the team, he is still hood, that he still loves his kasi?

Though people of other race groups are only too glad to turn their backs on their poverty-stricken lives, we black folks seem to have this emotional attachment to poverty. We wear it as a badge of honour; we all want to have a story to tell about how tough we had it while growing up on the mean streets of whatever township we called home. Now I get not being ashamed of where you come from, that is not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about people faking a hardcore past in some misguided attempt to gain respect and possibly notoriety. People like hardcore pop artist Akon, who was exposed for grossly exaggerating his criminal past. In 2008 it was discovered that Akon overdubbed his biography with the kind of grit and menace that he apparently believed music consumers desire from hip-hop stars. I personally know people that grew up in very comfortable middle-class families who also felt the need to “Akonise” their past.

Now at this stage I feel it incumbent on me to mention that I, too, grew up on the mean streets of Umlazi back in the 1980s and early 1990s when the townships were ruled with an iron fist by ama’comrade and the only police we had were the Zululand Police or as some preferred to call them, Zulu Popayi. For my white readers, this was a derogatory term, Popayi, yes as in Popeye the sailor man, toot toot, was what any cartoon was referred to as. Thus relegating the Zululand Police to the less than revered status of being no better than cartoon characters. (Which is incidentally the way in which they treated members of the community. They seemed to believe that, like in the cartoons, real bullets wouldn’t harm anyone, but I digress.)

Umlazi in the 1980s was the type of place where it seemed like there was a “stay-away” every second week and anyone caught ignoring it was liable to pay with their life. To make for an even more hardcore story, we lived across the road from the home of murdered anti-apartheid activists Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge. They were murdered by the apartheid government. Of course what I must also mention is that I grew up in a middle-class home, a rather nice looking house, with both parents who worked their tails off to provide me and my siblings with a private school education. We even had M-Net! The only reason we lived in Umlazi was courtesy of the Group Areas Act, had it not been for that, we would probably have lived in some leafy suburb. Not quite the hardcore past you were expecting?

Now my situation was by no means unique. I happen to know many black kids who grew up pretty much the same way I did in those days. Of course we were the exception rather than the rule. The overwhelming majority of black kids in SA grew up in abject poverty and were provided with a less than sub-standard level of education called Bantu Education.

Now you may wonder why I have gone off on this tangent, as I am prone to doing sometimes. Well the first the point is this, I too, at a point in my life, was prone to waxing lyrical about my “tough upbringing” on the mean streets of the one of the largest townships in SA. But truth be told, though I did grow up in a very violent township, the only real tough experiences I had in my childhood were at the hands of my father’s very efficient use of his belt whenever I attempted to hit the mean streets in order to develop the stories for my future hardcore narrative.

But the main reason I raise this issue is the fact that this need to be down has often had the additional ugly consequence of tainting our political views. In the past I have often found myself defending the often indefensible actions of our ruling party, strictly on the basis that the criticism was coming from fellow South Africans that happened to be slightly less melanin-enhanced than me. I constantly felt the need to defend my “brothers in the struggle” from the white aggressors. How dare they attack my leaders for treating the treasury as though it were their own personal bank account? I defended them as time after time they deployed their clearly unqualified “cadres” to key roles at Eskom, SABC, SAA etc leaving the taxpayer with the massive bill of cleaning up the mess they left behind. I defended them because these were my brothers and sisters after all, besides, what do these whites know about the struggle?! It was now our time to shine … or something.

This is a feeling the ANC has very effectively seized on. Using it often to capture our support — using shameless emotional blackmail as their weapons of choice. Case in point is their election campaign in 2009 in which they often touted themselves as the “party of the people” while accusing Cope and any black person not voting for them of being the lap dogs of “anti-revolutionary forces”. I specifically recall an incident at UCT last year during the SRC elections. A rather fired up member of Sasco (a member of the ANC alliance) approached me and beseeched me to “vote for us in the election my brother!” OK, fair enough I thought to myself, so I proceeded to enquire why I should give them my vote based on their parent organisation’s methods. I don’t know why his reply surprised me. Without missing a beat “because you’re one of us!” he replied.

Needless to say, he didn’t get my vote, I voted for the white chick from Daso, the Muslim chick from Sasco and a mixture of white, coloured and black candidates that actually bothered to explain to me in detail what their plans for the following year were.

Now as for Cope, we can debate their effectiveness or lack thereof another time, but what Cope did do was give black people that, had for a long time, felt like they were voting for the ANC based strictly on legacy, another “black alternative” they could support. A party they could support minus the guilt-laden calories of supporting that supposed bastion of former National Party cronies, the Democratic Alliance. (Never mind the fact that the last leader of the Nats is currently a card-carrying member of the ANC and that the Nats were officially incorporated into the ANC following their dismal showing at the 1999 election. Shh, that’s a secret between you and me!)

In my humble opinion, it is high time we stopped the madness people. It’s about time we held ourselves and our representatives in government to a much higher standard than the one we currently expect of them and ourselves for that matter. I’m all for being proud of your past and not forgetting how hard you worked to make a success of your life, but when we continually make excuses for each other’s mediocrity and blaming some obscure conspiracy by the media and their “white tendencies” for painting an unfair picture of black people, there is definitely something amiss in the state of South Africa.

It’s high time we stop the madness. No more unqualified people in key posts that affect the lives of thousands of people. Posts based primarily on the incumbent’s “struggle credentials” or their acquiescence with the “Polokwane club’s” demands. It’s high time the sense of entitlement so eloquently summarised by ANC President Jacob Zuma on the campaign trail in Cape Town when he stated that “it is even blessed in heaven. That is why we will rule until Jesus comes back. We should not allow anyone to govern our city (Cape Town) when we are ruling the country” comes to an abrupt end. Enough is enough already! Let’s not forget that these “white counter-revolutionaries” that we deride so much, for better or worse, are also passport carrying South African citizens that also love this country, just like you and me. Let’s not allow politicians, who for the most part are interested only in furthering their own interests by using emotional hot buttons like our race, divide us any longer.

Steven Biko said that “tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security and prestige it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege”. I imagine that when he uttered these words he never thought that it would one day apply to the very people that were part of the struggle for freedom in this beautiful country of ours. I shudder to think what he would think of those freedom fighters of old who have fallen so far.

Sifiso is a young, Zulu gent hailing from Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, whose current mission in life is to find a wife that can cook samp and beans the way his mother used to.