When We Were Kings

When We Were Kings

When we were Kings we had Nannies, Maids and Servants. We had Molos, Darkies, Kaffirs and Natives. Blacks did the washing. They made our beds and cleaned our homes. They trimmed our gardens and walked us back from school. When we were Kings they cooked our food and wiped our arses. Even though they were only ever nice to us, and did all the shitty jobs we didn’t want to, we still called them names. They called us Kleinbaas and Chief, Madam and Master. We made them eat off special tin plates and drink their sugary coffee from matching mugs. The special cutlery was always in pastel blues and greens and pinks. Kept under the kitchen sink.

Rosy/Beauty/Precious/Patience was good enough to wash out dishes but never good enough to use them. Imagine! When we were Kings we built ‘outside toilets’ for them. They were never tiled and always had terrible plumbing. They made perfect terrifying dungeons to lock up our siblings.

When we were Kings ‘our girl’ had knees that shone like patent-leather from scrubbing our floors on all fours each day. Her body was thick from a diet almost entirely of starch. Her immense weight cracked her flat black feet. We never saw her hair – it was always hidden under a doek. She’d disappear when our parents got home. Hiding in her little room at the back of the house – the servant’s quarters – which smelled like kaya – with a springy bed on top of bricks so the Tokoloshe couldn’t get her. Because our blacks only had an outside toilet there was always a brick of Sunlight soap next to a plastic bucket they used to bath. When we were Kings our blacks were not like other blacks – ours was a ‘good one’. Not miced p in anything. Never talked back. Did what they were told. You could leave valuables out. You could leave the doors open. Garden-boys smelled like Simba chips.They smoked BB tobacco in pages torn from the Bible. Always drunk or goefed.

When we were Kings we’d tell beggars to ‘Go ask Mandela’. When we were Kings we used to go ‘kaffir-bashing’. (One time someone’s older brother saw a drunk black outside of his house, and killed him. He was put under house arrest until he finished Matric. But the guy he killed wasn’t drunk – he was retarded). When we were Kings we’d settle disputes by saying ‘eerie, meenie, minie, mo, catch a niggar by his toe’.

When we were Kings we’d stick our head out of the car window and shout, ‘Why you so black – you sick?’ at black people walking down the street. When we were Kings our dogs only bit at blacks. We named them things like Voetsek because we thought it would be hilarious if a black was telling the dog to go away and was actually calling it. Getting it even more excited!

When we were Kings the only blacks at our school were the ground staff. The time we’d see them was then they picked up the sandwich crusts we tossed on the rugby fireld at break time. When we were Kings we told our teacher Muss Hauptfliesch, that Paulo – a Porra from Angola – had coloured in his Photostat Jesus black. She gave Paulo another Photostat printout of Jesus and told him to use the appropriate ‘flesh’ crayon.

When we were Kings our parents acquired beachfront property in the Transkei by giving the chief of the village a bottle of brandy and a fishing rod. When we were Kings our Nanny wasn’t allowed onto the beach so we used to bring her back two litter Coke bottles filled with seawater.

When we were Kings Noddy was friends with Golliwog, and Dina Doll, and the National Party censors banned Black Beauty because they thought that it was porn.

Things have changed though – we’re no longer royalty. We’re now a nervous previously advantaged minority living in the new South Africa. you see, Siener van Rensburg (South Africa’s very own Nostradamus), once said that after Mandela dies the whites would be driven from the land. The rivers, Siener saw, would run red. Genocide is quite possible when you consider how our president Jacob Zuma once saying Umshini Wami (Zulu for ‘Bring Me My Machine Gun’) at every opportunity.

When we were Kings we used to say that our blacks were ‘getting white’ whenever they forgot their place. Now we can only hope that they don’t decide to show us just how white they can get.

Written by: Dylan Muhlenberg. Image by: Peet Pienaar. Page 15, from Mahala 1 (December 2010).