by Rémy Ngamije
“Just like that?”
“Not just like that. You know this is Cape Town. When something is making people uncomfortable they give it over to someone else to deal with. What is that thing called when one person gives over responsibility to someone else? Like I send someone instead of me going myself?”
“Delegation,” Richard volunteered.
“Yes, that is it. So the white man, eh, he gives over delegation to the manager and he walks to me cloaked in authority, like he is sent by the Lord God Most High, but I fear no evil for I am anointed, gifted, and blessed—” everyone in Le Bel Homme applauded—“the manager, he comes over to me. You know how polite white people get when they are about to ask for something foolish. Eh, you know I am right. Look at your friend turning red, Séra. This manager, he asks me if I mind that they change the channel. I look at him and say I am minding very much. If you change the channel to Home Affairs I will not pay for my meal. He is in shock like he has been given a slap. Now he has a big-big problem because I have ordered food and drinks, not small-small things, you see. The manager he says, okay, enjoy the meal, sir. He leaves me alone and we all sit and we watch the match.”
Le Bel Homme vibrated in mirth. Séraphin sensed the storyteller holding back the kicker. “How did Chelsea do?” he asked.
“Lost three-zero,” said Maxime, paying careful attention to the hair he was cutting. “Home Affairs beat the All Blacks.” The barbershop gurgled with laughter like a pot of chips with the top on. Séraphin decided to lift the lid.
“Where was this restaurant, Maxime?”
“Newlands.”
Now the barbershop’s business came to standstill because the laughter was too much. The probability of Maxime, a Congolese immigrant who lied to refugee status determination officers about throwing a stone at the president’s motorcade during a protest, and subsequently being pursued by the military police from Kinshasa to Lumbubashi before escaping to Zambia, commuting by bus and truck to Cape Town, holding an entire rugby-mad Newlands restaurant hostage on the day the Springboks played the All Blacks was as ludicrous as one ant threatening to storm and take Table Mountain.
The opposite was probably true.
Most likely the channel was changed to the rugby just as Drogba prepared to launch the ball into the back of the net. Most likely Maxime exclaimed loudly. Most likely he asked for the channel to be changed back. Most likely it was not. Most likely Maxime ate the rest of his meal in resentful silence and paid for his meal in full. Even more likely, Maxime was never in any such restaurant.
Still, the story was a good one, and its principles were sound and true. Supporting or watching Home Affairs and its teams was not permitted in foreigner circles.
“What are you going to have today?” Maxime asked Séraphin, settling him in the barber’s chair. Séraphin said the usual: faded and framed at the sides, thin at the top. As the blades harvested through Séraphin’s hair Maxime said, “So when will you finish? This year, no? Then where are you going?”
“Back home. Maybe.”
“Rwanda?”
“No. Namibia.”
“So that is home now?”
“Sort of.”
“You are Namibian now, no?”
“No, still Rwandan.”
“You must get your papers. Even if it is just Namibia. Otherwise Home Affairs will be after you. Visa this, permit that, certified copy of this, proof of that.” He brushed Séraphin’s head with a brush filled with hairs of nationalities and ethnicities unknown. “So you will do law in Namibia?”
“Maybe.”
“Listen to this boy.” Maxime raised his voice and looked around the shop. “He thinks he has a choice about what to do after he finishes his studies. Maybe he will do law, he says. Or what instead? You will become a rapper or a football star? My friend, you will become a lawyer so you can help your family – and us when Home Affairs comes for us.” Séraphin remained quiet and watched more of his hair flee his head in front of Maxime’s clippers. “Eh-ba! Why are you not South African yet? How long have you been here? I would have your degrees and a wife by now; a South African wife and papers too. Were there no girls at that fancy university of yours?”
“There were girls,” Godwin piped from the couch.
“Too many,” James said.
“So what is the problem?” asked Maxime. “You could not find one or what? You should have got one of them pregnant, then married her and gotten papers.” Séraphin shifted in his seat. Maxime told him to stay still so he could work on the fade. “By now,” Maxime continued, “you should even have had a white one. Everyone knows fancy universities are the only places white girls will like guys like you. It is called experimenting. You should have told me. Maxime, today I need a style for the white girls and I would have delivered for you.”
“I don’t think that was the problem,” Adewale said, chuckling. “He was in white girls like a green salad.”
“Eh-ba! So what was the issue? You should have got yourself a nice white one, not a black one. You want a white wife because then you have different problems.” He raised his voice an octave. “Where do you want to go for the holidays, Mozambique or Mauritius, Paris or London?”
“I don’t think it works like that, Maxime,” Séraphin said.
“Foolish boy! You know what it is like to date a black woman? It is nothing but complaints every day. White women they do not complain. It is because they do the yoga and the pilates. They do the fitness. The black women they do the fatness.”
“Yoh!” exclaimed Yasseen and Richard together.
“You think I am lying, eh?” asked Maxime. “I am telling you. Things on white women stay where they are for a long time. But on black women they move around. You remove the bra and you find the breasts are swinging low and swinging chariot.” Le Bel Homme hooted with laughter. “If I am lying I will be struck down by the Lord God Most High. The white women, they are good for the papers and the black women are good for the children. And for being cheated on. They are used to it. I tell you, black women will stay by your side no matter what. White women will replace you. With Coloured women you are only renting her for a while. She is not really yours. Always she will go back to her people. Eh-ba! Trust me, I know. Or you must be worried for when she upgrades to a white man.”
“Séraphin, do you have something to add to Maxime’s point?” asked Godwin. Séraphin threw him a withering look.
“I can see he has seen the truth,” said Maxime. “But even with white women you must also look out for your fellow black man. They take that as a sign she wants all of them. The only girl you do not want is an Indian woman. Big-big trouble those ones.” The murmurs of agreement in the room supplemented the buzzing clippers and hair-spraying. “At least a white woman will look at you and maybe be curious, and a Coloured woman will look at you and potentially love, and a black woman will look at you, compromise, and settle, but an Indian will look at you like you are here to clean and serve them. Some of them are darker than me even. Black-black-black.”
While the rest of the barbershop agreed with Maxime, Séraphin felt a gnawing discomfort about the subject matter and was about to say something and decided against it. When masculinity waded in its own pool of ignorance like a hippopotamus enjoying its stretch of river the safest thing to do was become a limp fish and go with the flow.
As Maxime clipped the top of Séraphin’s hair he said, softly, “My friend, you must get serious. Seven years and you do not know what to do next? There are people taking buses from Congo to South Africa who know what they are going to do next every day for the next thirty years. They come with nothing and then they make a life. They make it all work. You, you come with everything, you can do everything with your degrees. But you don’t know what do. You must make a plan.”
The two made eye contact in the mirror. Séraphin nodded slightly before Maxime averted his eyes and went back to lining up the front of Séraphin’s hair. He raised his voice once more: “You know,
the other day I was in one of the trains coming here and I was wearing my Black Stars shirt. Some white guy asked me if I was Ghanaian because he had just visited Accra. I told him no. Then he asks me if everyone in Africa supports Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire because those are the only shirts he ever sees. I tell this white guy they are the only teams which do anything in football. Then he says what about Egypt? I tell him, my friend, Africa ends at Mali. I tell him those Arab countries are only for Arabs. In Africa we only support teams with black people. In the Olympic Games we are for Kenya and Ethiopia when the running is on. In soccer we are for Cameroon or Ghana or Nigeria or Côte d’Ivoire. All black teams. Not this milk-skin Arab countries who are African only when Cup of Nations is on. By this time everyone on the train is listening, eh, and I sense that there could be big-big trouble—”
Le Bel Homme settled back into a familiar routine.
A new story, a new impossible ending, and a new impossibly heroic ending for Maxime the illegal immigrant.
When he finished cutting Séraphin’s hair and Maxime had graciously received his payment, Séraphin made his way back to the sofa and waited for the others to take their turn in the chair. Richard was not cutting his. He wanted to grow it out a little more. Maxime teased him about bringing such long hair to a barbershop and not letting it be cut. “You are becoming like a white woman, eh, dangling the meat but not letting us taste,” he said.
When all the haircuts were done they flagged a minibus taxi back to Remms. In the passenger seat, Séraphin looked at the fez on the high-browed head of the driver and guessed at Somalian nationality. He wondered whether the driver, pressed and squeezed by paperwork, by immigration hassles, and the perennial fear of being attacked in his neighbourhood had known what he was getting himself into when he moved to Cape Town, whether he had each day planned out, making one move towards progress, each week a step closer to the signed document or the stamped paper that would bring his family peace and belonging. Séraphin observed him quietly, as he angled the taxi between traffic, ignoring the hooting and screeching tyres behind him. His knuckles were knobbly on the steering wheel and the veins on his forearms rose beneath the skin. He kept his eyes on the road, stopping the taxi whenever a flicking hand by the roadside signalled for him to stop.
“Where to, my boss?” asked the gaatjie from behind.
“That’s a very good question,” said a Séraphin behind him.
“Town,” said Séraphin as he fished the group’s fare from his pocket.
“One to town,” said the gaatjie. “Here’s your change, brada.”
“Not town,” said the Séraphin. “Big-big trouble.”
“Why?” asked Séraphin.
“It’s already May.”
XXVI
As soon as someone gets what they want they find out what they need, and the words which start the romance are usually the ones that end it too.
It is winter in Cape Town. The city is besieged by cloudy skies. For days and weeks the falling rain and bone-deep chill bring out the trademark Capetonian surprise that winter could actually be cold.
At Remms, the upcoming June examinations send everyone scrambling for the warmth and huddled stress of the libraries. The High Lords are scattered as they are wont to be at this time of the year. The long lunches and late nights of the first half of the year are put aside. Everyone keeps to themselves. It is a lonely time of hot chocolate mugs and coffee-makers worked overtime, showers forgotten and facial hair grown in studious isolation. Pyjamas become all-day couture.
This is the perfect time to be in a situationship.
For the past two weeks, Séraphin has been secretly seeing Nike. Neither has said what it is or what it is not. Things have progressed to the stage where Séraphin and Nike are too comfortable without reason. This is the hallmark of a situationship, endowed with all of the features of a relationship minus the assurance of crying poetically into pillows, beating one’s chest and tearing off shirts in the rain, lamenting the loss of love when the pain inevitably comes home to roost.
Some background first.
Séraphin and Nike floated around each other in law school separated by a couple of rows in lecture theatres. They passed each with the hesitancy of people who know they should greet each other but look away quickly because they should have been doing that since the first year. It is now their fourth year in the faculty and the near end of things brings with it an acute embarrassment of missed courtesies.
In addition to this, Nike was always cocooned by a circle of wooden earrings, dreadlocks, and earthy colours who made a habit of pointing out the flaws of patriarchy in family law and the absence of feminist thought in leading constitutional cases. Of the lot, Séraphin thought Nike to be the most attractive. She had a smooth forehead, shapely eyebrows, and eyes slanted at their ends. When she laughed at something her lips exposed a brilliant flash of white. Her hair was thickly braided, and from having accompanied his mother to a braiding session back home in Katutura he could tell she would have long, soft hair that would stand up like the rays of a black sun when the braids were undone. She and her posse of friends were older than the rest of the students in law school. In the library, when they were talking about the nuances of some case in whispers loud enough to be heard on helicopters, they would petrify anyone with the gall to shush them with venomous looks. Individually Nike and her friends would be approachable. But together, in their pride of headscarves, bright prints, pierced noses and crackling feminism, they were intimidating.
Since Nike and Séraphin never interacted, or had reason to, it was left to a photocopy machine in the law library, at the commencement of the two-week study period, to arrange their meeting.
“You have to press the yellow button to pause it, open the paper tray, and remove the stuck paper before pressing the green button to continue printing,” Séraphin said. He stood behind her, listening to the sound of crunching paper in the machine and her exasperation. “Here, let me help you.”
“Thank you,” Nike said when her printing resumed. He glanced at the papers coming out onto the printing tray.
“Is this for administrative law?” he asked. “You’re wasting the Amazon printing this case. There’s only one important section in this whole thing. The rest of the judgment is academic masturbation. I have summaries of this case. If you give me your email address I’ll email them to you.”
They went from four years of relative obscurity to the possible exchange of email addresses. Nike was surprised. She had seen Séraphin around the faculty, always in the company of the Coloured girl and boy. He sat next to the three white girls, who exchanged the top position in law school between them. She could tell where he was sitting because the number of black faces had dwindled with each passing year in the faculty. He was always slumped in his seat, or had his head lying in the crook of his arms, asleep in class. His default setting, to her, always seemed to be perpetual boredom. Standing in front of her he was taller than she expected and despite the scruffy look which all the law students sported while on study retreat he looked put together. After four years in the law faculty she came to assume coldness was de facto between student groups which seemed organised according to high school cliques and class delineations. Still, she accepted his offer, paused her printing, and accepted his cellphone as he handed it over. “It is saved under Nike,” she said when she passed it back to him.
“Nee-keh,” he said. “I had a feeling it wasn’t pronounced the way it was written. I’ll send the summaries when I get home.”
The printer, its job done, hummed on in industry-leading performance for the rest of the day.
Later that evening, an email popped into her inbox.
Hi Nike
As promised: the summary for that pesky admin law case. Also I have attached the notes and summaries for everything else we’ve done so far. Remember the golden rule: if it’s not highlighted or underlined, then it’s not the law.
Séraphin
Nike
opened the attached documents, astounded by their conciseness and detail. Opening the administrative law notes she laughed at the annotations Séraphin pinned to relevant parts of case law or important principles. When she found the case, she saw a comment attached to its headnote: Fuck this case and its general irrelevance to the world. All you need to know is that white people win. As usual. She looked at the case as well as the annotations, amused by the righteous anger displayed in them. She completed her notes in less than half the time it would have taken her to read the case. She replied to Séraphin’s message.
Hello Séraphin
Thank you for the notes. They made me laugh. Do you mind if I send them to my friends? We’re all struggling with this section and these notes are really helpful. But only with your permission. Let me know how I can repay you for this.
Nike
The response came immediately despite the late hour.
Forward the notes to as many people as you wish. On the thanks side, no sane man has ever said no to food and I’m quite sane. Most of the time.
“Not your best,” said the first Séraphin. “But it’ll have to do. Brain’s tired from all this studying anyway.”
“I’m not trying to impress,” said Séraphin.
“You could’ve just told her it was all good and left it at that,” said the second. “You wrote all of that instead. You’re trying to drag out this conversation.”