Do I Look Like A Racist, Or What?

 

I am accustomed to the way things are in this fucked up country, and now that I’m in my sixties I wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else, even if I could. But that’s not to say that I am resigned, or that my exasperation never turns to anger. On the contrary, my seething emotions frequently drive me towards confrontation of the dangerously violent kind. Like the other day when I was walking with the dog and enjoying the warm sun on my back and the sea air in my face.

It was in Crest Road, on the way to the beach. A man of about my age was unloading tools from the back of a Toyota bakkie. He was a short man with a small to medium-sized potbelly, and there was a white bandage wrapped around the forefinger of his left hand. I assumed that he had inflicted the injury to himself using a hammer, and when I recognised him as Snyman of Twist Street, I hoped that it wouldn’t be long before he delivered another blow to that finger. We had exchanged words on only one occasion, and that was when he falsely accused my dog of shitting on his pavement.

It would have been boorish to ignore him, and I try not to act like a boor, because I despise crassness and insensitivity in others, so I nodded a greeting as I passed.

“Did they also break in by you?” he said, lifting a stepladder over the tailgate.

“No?”

“They’re breaking in all over,” he said, and explained that he was doing repairs to yet another house that had been burgled. This was the tenth in less than two weeks.

“Must be linked to the high unemployment,” I said.

He looked at me for a bit and then commenced his racist tirade, the like of which I have not heard in twenty years, and thought I would never be subjected to again.

“Nothing to do with unemployment,” he said. “The kaffers will steal from the white man anytime they can. The fokken kaffer is an ‘it.’ “It” is not human. It is half human and half baboon. The fokken kaffer is a halfmens. Look what they did to that farmer and his wife in the Free State. A human being doesn’t do that.”

“Atrocities are being committed all over the world all the time,” I said. “Look at how the Nazis behaved in the Second World War.”

“No,” he said. “”It’s just a pity the Germans were defeated. Adolf Hitler was right. If he had won the war there would be no fokken kaffers anywhere now.”

“I can’t believe this!” I was spluttering and had to wipe the spittle from my lips. “So you’re not only a racist but a neo-Nazi as well?”

He laughed and took it as a compliment.

“You know,” he said, “I was talking to a doctor and he explained to me that it has been proved that the fokken kaffer is not human like us. He is still half a baboon, and that’s why he behaves like a fokken kaffer. This is the missing link between real humans and baboons.”

“When was your doctor struck off the roll?” I said. “Was it before or after he talked this shit to you? You know about DNA testing? If they analysed your DNA they’d find black blood in you and all the other Afrikaners. That makes you a halfmens as well.”

“Yes, but the forefathers only frootled with the kleurling meide. Not the kaffer meide.”

“Ah, fuck man!” I said, and struck my forehead with the palm of my hand.

“You just got to look at the shape of the fokken kaffer’s head. Take Zuma. See how big the back of his head is? That’s because the front of his brain is at the back. And Mandela too. I’ve got a screen saver on my computer that changes from baboon to Mandela, and back to baboon, and you can see it is true.”

And there was more of this shit. It followed me as I walked away, and I could still hear it as I turned into Marine Road. Maybe if I had been carrying a firearm I would have shot him dead. Who knows?

And then, just three days later, I was again on my walk when Jack Prinsloo stopped his car. This is the Jack Prinsloo from Ridge Road.  The man who flies the old flag and whose eyebrows encroach on his hairline. He leaned out the window.

“Yissus, but that’s a mooi hond!” he said. “Yissus, but he’s going to be big! Has he already bitten a kaffer? You must let him bite a kaffer so he can get the taste. Ha, ha, ha!”

I did a quick about-turn, hurried home, and poured myself a brandy and Coke that was more like a Coke and brandy, it was so biased on the side of brandy.

Yissus, I thought to myself, am I being targeted by these halfmense? Why are they attacking me like this? Do they think that I am one of their kind, just because I happen to be white? No, I said to myself, there’s no hope for these people. They are incapable of change, and the sooner their generation, my generation, dies out, the better.

I then fell into a mood of deep melancholy. It was no good trying to fool myself that the problem lay with the dinosaurs, and once they were extinct this kind of bigotry would also disappear. Hadn’t I been to the shop yesterday and overheard a conversation between a woman of no more than 25 and the tannie behind the till that disproved such feeble-minded optimism?

“I don’t like these new banknotes,” said the tannie.

“Yes,” agreed the young woman. “And now we’ve got to look at that face every time.”

I nearly dropped the sachet of low fat milk I was holding, I was so stunned. An abyss of disappointment had opened up in front of me and I was about to fall into it, just like that poor guy who was swallowed up by a sink ole. She had acquired the virus and no amount of reason would cure her. Nelson Mandela, for Christ’s sake!

Maybe it is just Afrikaners, I thought, clutching at straws. But on reflection I had to admit English speakers of my acquaintance are just as racist, even if the disease is a little harder to detect. The sneering remarks about ‘those people’ and the dismissive way they talk about ‘the government’ is evidence of their contempt. Not to mention the endless anecdotes about corruption, inefficiency, stupidity and incompetence. And the blatant prejudice exhibited by small-minded contributors on social media platforms like news24.

It would have been better if us whites had been butchered, or driven into the sea, back then in 1994, I thought in despair. Nearly 20 years down the line I go for a walk or buy a loaf of bread at the shop, and these horrible people who insist on giving expression to their naked racism confront me. But, I realise with deepening despair, there is something even worse than this harassment by the white racists. It is the hostility shown towards me by ordinary black folk. When I greet them in the street they avert their eyes and try to ignore me. Their demeanour is surly and resentful, and it is clear they regard me as one of those good old boys from the apartheid era. Both black and white take one look at me and assume that I am a racist. We are all racists. There is no way to alter this reality, and all we can do is drink more brandy and Coke and try to come to terms with our condition.

Varieties Of Sexual Experience

The editors at news24 rejected this piece. A pity, because I had hoped to provoke a response from the community there, which is largely white, racist, Christian and homophobic.

When I say, ‘homosexuals are harmless,’ what I really mean is there is no need to fear or loathe homosexuality. But it doesn’t mean that all homosexuals are nice people. Hell, no. Chances are that one day you’ll be attacked in your home by some vicious thug who first sodomizes you before slitting your throat and walking off with your worldly goods.

When I was an adolescent I worried a lot about developing into a ‘homo,’ as gays were referred to in those days. Even in my late teens I sometimes construed my awkwardness and lack of success with girls as an indication that I was a latent pansy. It took several experiences before I really got a taste for female flesh and stopped fretting about my orientation.

It bothered me that although I had never detested homosexuals, I had dreaded becoming one of them. Why? Well, I suppose it was largely due to social conditioning and the stigma attached to ‘unnatural’ behaviour. But what was ‘natural,’ I asked myself. In order to find out, I began to make a study of sexual practices.

My older brother pointed me in the direction of the Bible, saying, “Leviticus. There’s some good stuff in Leviticus.”

When I went to Leviticus I did indeed find a list of prohibitions that was informative. Look, you don’t prohibit folks from doing something unless they are inclined to do it whenever they get the opportunity. Leviticus was telling me that men were having sex not just with other men, but also with their mothers, sisters and daughters. And furthermore, the dirty bastards were at the livestock! My studies revealed that from time immemorial men have been forcing themselves on just about every domesticated animal in the farmyard. And women haven’t been averse to getting down on all fours for dogs, goats, pigs, apes … you name it.

The more I studied the subject, the more astonished I became. It was vast and it was bizarre, and I soon realised that our excessive preoccupation with sex was the result of our ability to imagine and to be turned on by images and associations. It was the faculty of imagination that could cause a housewife to suddenly blush as she cleaned a handsome cucumber under the running tap. Or for a man to find himself busy in a make-believe bedroom not three seconds after his secretary had bent down to open the bottom draw of the filing cabinet.

“My ex used to get me to stand on the table and urinate into a bucket on the floor when he blew a whistle,” one woman told me as I tethered her to some heavy furniture. “That’s what really sent him into orbit.”

What my ongoing research, as well as personal experience over the years has revealed is that much of what used to be regarded as deviant, aberrant, or a perversion, is nothing of the sort, but quite normal, and an acceptable step on the way to achieving gratification.

Take oral sex, for example. Fellatio and cunnilingus are now considered standard practice and no more of an abomination than eating ice cream off a cone. And what’s wrong with anal sex, if it’s a comfortable fit?

Then there’s proxy sex, which ranges from various forms of masturbation to intercourse with a life-size doll, all three orifices accessible. For thousands of years men have been thrusting their members into narrow openings of every conceivable kind. Ever tried a fridge door? Cool. And women haven’t been shy to insert anything that could serve as a dildo, from candles, carrots and cucumbers to bottles, bones and bananas. Anything that vaguely resembles a protrusion. As a youth, I once called upon the help of a paw-paw to ravish Playmate of the Year for 1968. She was hanging on the back of the toilet door. The fruit was somewhat ripe, however, and all too soon turned to pulp, which resulted in coitus interruptis. Dann frustrating.

Then there’s all that role-playing stuff that usually involves some aspect of BDSM. BDSM is a combination of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Ropes and whips and chains and handcuffs and blindfolds and masks and leather boots and straps, and military regalia and black underwear. People strut about and bark instructions, or whine and plead for mercy, and assume undignified positions. It’s all rather ridiculous but if it gives the participants an added thrill to their sex lives, what’s wrong with it? As long as it’s SSC (safe, sane and consensual)?

When I got to necrophilia I kind of drew a line and lost interest, though. Man, if you can get intimate with a corpse, nothing is safe from you, animate or inanimate. Those chemicals that get pumped into your brain are going to make you raving mad and the only way to get you right is castration.

But let’s get back to homosexuality. It seems to me, now that I have acquainted myself with many varieties of sexual experience, that the desire for sexual intimacy with one of your own gender is entirely normal and no more immoral than, say, a woman giving her boyfriend a blowjob. In fact, I suspect that most people would be bi-sexual if the present social prejudices were to disappear. And that’s not to deny there would still be significant numbers who preferred to be strictly hetero or homo.

If I am right about this, then it means that the majority of us are being forced to repress part of our sexuality. I, personally, have been deprived of a whole lot of sensual pleasure by a conservative section of society that still has the power to decide what is moral and natural. I resent the influence these people continue to exert, and would urge other 'deviants' and 'perverts' to follow their preferences and flaunt their difference in the faces of the moral zealots, who are more often than not religious fundamentalists to boot.