Regularly I keep the company of Lino, a dreadlocked Mozambican migrant who’s a tenacious laybuilder and many years my junior. He’s black, doesn’t speak a word of English and his Xhosa is a crude creole of isiZulu mixed with Shangaan, meaning we often have no idea what the heck we’re going on about. But inasfar as one can call somebody who showed up in parched heavy-duty boots and a bike in need of tightening-up to do a revamping job on my mother’s house a friend, then he is definitely mine. So every now and then we hang out.
Nothing to write home about until like a scene from a gripping documentary on racial tensions, the K-word offensively disrupts the moment. With its charged connotations, and obvious reasons, it remains one of those epithets I’ve never really taken a liking to. Right up there with those derogatories reserved for people’s mothers in particular and the womenfolk in general, the slur is more common than many would imagine in Mzansi. No, this is not the one that put Vicky Momberg behind bars or the one Adam Catzavelos was spewing live on video faster than he could say ‘baklava’ on some Greek beachfront.
This one is the de facto reference casually used both in jest and insult at dark foreign nationals so much so that many don’t seem to realise that ‘kwerekwere’ is actually an offensive racial slur that no South African should ever use without a sense of shame. Especially those South Africans whose history of racial subjugation found them labeled by a k-word that is nowadays ‘considered extremely offensive hate speech.’ Follow its origins and you’ll see nothing endearing or funny about it, even though those who are on the receiving end of it might cackle in resignation.
The use of our colonial and apartheid-era k-word has led to protests, put at least one woman behind bars, earned prime time TV coverage, got social media fired up, had people fired, saw businesses going under. It’s a serious offence with dire consequences, the word k****r, not unlike the N-word in the US which is seldom rendered in print and has in the past itself been cause for extensive debate in that part of the world.
The more publicised of these is an old interview between the rapper Shawn Corey ‘Jay Z’ Carter and the media mogul Oprah Winfrey. The African-American hip hop community has traditionally embraced the word which, according to Carter, was done precisely with the intention of taking away its power. Winfrey’s rejection of the term is premised on the memory of black people who were lynched and ‘that was the last word they heard [as] they were being strung up by a tree.’
In SA, the new k-word (k****kwere) is an invent of the post-apartheid influx of foreign nationals who were in pursuit of happiness in Nelson Mandela’s bloodless miracle on a continent otherwise marred by coups and civil war. With them, they brought their labour, entrepreneurial grit and unfamiliar languages. That’s the traceable genesis of the word: the newcomers had strange names and spoke ‘funny,’ as in a series of kwerekwere gobbledygook, thus they were – rather unflatteringly – soon christened as such. Essentially the word is meaningless but ask a foreign national what it entails at a social level and he might proffer references to xenophobia, a land where the foreigner is here to steal jobs, women, pimp out youth girls and feed drugs to the youth.
As such they often become the scapegoat for the nation’s failings especially on the issues of unemployment and worrisome social ills. But virtually every economist one reads is adamant that deporting every single foreign national in the country will hardly put a dent on the statistics of joblessness. If you ignore those foreign nationals who are prepared to take low-paying jobs in the trucking, restauranting and security sector, a vast majority of the foreign nationals down in places like Colesberg work for themselves.
They are wholly in charge of the spaza industry and, for some reason, prefer employing Malawian and Zimbabweans in their stores. A controversial 2017 report from the Institute of Race Relations would have us believe that this is because locals tend to have long fingers and are not quite keen to put in the extra hours. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that many of these shop owners usually start out in those countries, gradually working their way down south. There appears to also be a religious determinant to their employment ways in that Muslim shopkeepers (which a vast nuber of our spaza shop owners tend to be) favour workers of that faith.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the foreigner, especially the dark-skinned one from East and West Africa often walks under a cloud of severe discrimination. He has a particularly bad rep. More than the Bangladeshi or Pakistani, he is the one most ‘othered.’ This is just a lazy thumbsucks, I hear you say, but next time you’re out and about, listen out for the k-word and ‘my friend.’ The k-word, you’ll soon notice, is mostly used for the patently African foreigner with the frizzy hair and dark features whilst the latter (my friend) goes to the East Asian with the kinky crown and brown face.
The downside of this new discrimination is how people who deploy the slurs are often ignorant that they are discriminating. But even worse is how they unwittingly deprive themselves not only of an interesting cross-cultural experience but bits and pieces of their own history and culture as Nguni people. Some of the tribes are historically brothers and it is interesting to pick up a word here or there in Lino’s dialect that is of some significance in my own language. More exciting is the Shangaan Electro I’ve recently discovered on his playlist which is said to owe its origins to Tsonga disco and Kwaito house. Although it’s been around for years, to me it’s fresh, vibrant, the sort of music that makes the grass seem greener and the days beautiful. Without Lino, I’d probably never heard of it and because music stirs the more benevolent aspects of myself I would never have attempted to publish something in some faraway mublication. They never published it but I think the effort (especially with a brother from another mother) always counts for something.
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I wrote: When I first meet Lino he is not handling the brutal South African platteland winter too well as he doubles down, steadies himself, and begins to dig up the foundation to what will be my mother’s new house. Like me, he is black. Unlike me, though, he’s a Mozambican immigrant who doesn’t speak any of the local dialects, fluffs his Portuguese and can’t understand a word of English.
But he and his team are exactly the sort of builders one needs: assiduous blokes who come rapping on your door before the sun is up, take quick lunches, and are never done until the sun is down and it’s too dark to see. Also, in a country of latent tribalism and where being too dark or having the “wrong” accent can soon visit hostile epithets or trouble upon you, he was the sort of guy inclined to keep a low profile. In his early 20’s and single, his routine was that of a dour old man who’d done and seen it all and was open – maybe even eager – to quietly hole himself up in his rented backroom. Work. Sleep. Repeat. Seven days a week.
Also, I discovered that amongst immigrants, there often exists an unwritten code not to make too many overtures, whether platonic or otherwise because you never know how the locals might perceive you. Perception, a telling word in this case, and nobody knows this than the outsider who is sometimes encumbered with all sorts of mean-spirited stereotypes. From being greedy to smelling bad, there’s no restraint to the imaginations of the hostile. Yet all these notwithstanding, I would find in Lino the sort of friend many might die still searching for.
Because my mother wanted her house up quickly, I was made to cook for Lino’s crew so as to spare them the trouble of going to the nearby shops on their breaks. Being a former kitchenhand, I’d learnt a thing or two around pots and pans. I went all out: Kingklip on the grill, slow-cooked oxtail, even basted sheep’s tails (a layman’s delicacy down here). A week of this and there was Lino, shyly slipping a crumpled R100 note into my palm. Unemployed, I was tempted to pocket the gratuity but, I said No, this is not how things are done here. He responded in what sounded a little like Zulu: “but this is how they are done back home.” Despite his insistence, I stood my ground but his big heart would not let up.
That evening he came knocking on my door, a few beers in hand. With the lagers in our system and through an incoherent patois of Zulu and his native Shangaan, we still didn’t really understand each other. But what did it matter, we were laughing and maybe at that moment we’d become friends. In the two years since I have seen the reclusive immigrant evolve into something that goes beyond friendship.
I’ve found myself checking in on his belongings when he briefly landed in jail because of his immigration papers. I know that his mother back home enjoys the music of Fela Kuti. Lino has fixed my laptop, we’ve braaid under the starry Karoo sky. I’ve seen him grimace when he took his first sip of brandy and probably most heartbreaking: when my mother died this January, Lino was amongst the first to personally pay his condolences. He looked genuinely sadder than them all, even me.