Rémy Ngamije: The Sage Of The Six Nigga Paths (or, The Life And Times Of the Five Os)

Niggathrond And The Path Of Youth And Foolishness

When we were younger there was nothing else for niggas in this Wild Wild Worst town to do but fight. Me, Rinzlo, Cicero, Lindo, and Franco―the Five Os. We were from the same side of town:  torn Millé and Hi-Tech sneakers unworthy of hot-stepping in, out-of-fashion t-shirts from the Pep store with girl-pulling gravity set to zero, and not even a coin between us to spend at the video game arcade. We’d pool our poverty at the mall on weekends waiting for rich kids from Olympia and Ludwigsdorf to give us shifty looks so we could corner them in the parking lot and pound on them.

Anything could set us off.

Some Jordan-wearing dude looking at our cheap kicks funny? Fight.

Rinzlo’s younger brother getting bullied? Fight.

Some random-ass nigga coughing into the west wind while we were coming up from the east?

“It’s so late for you, nigga! It’s Five O’clock!”

Kids in our neighbourhoods used to alert each other the Five Os were coming like we were Omar from The Wire.

“It’s a quarter to, my guy, we gotta go home.”

“Five-Oh! Five-Oh!”

I guess if there was an urban park with green grass and walking trails like Central or Hyde Park we’d have gone there for picnics, concerts, and tai chi classes, or just to watch white people walk their dogs or something. We didn’t have that. All we had was the waste of water in the city centre called Zoo Park which had grass patchier than the Masai Mara in the dry season. In the park’s early days there was a gushing fountain with koi fish in it. But hood niggas got hungry and fished them out. Then the drought came and the municipality cut the water. After the swings were broken and never repaired we went back to kicking ass. It’s what we’d been doing best since we were nine or ten.

We didn’t have Sega Saturns or Playstation Ones. Lindo’s 9999-in-1 cartridges never worked and even when they did there was only so much Battle Tanks we could play before we realised the other 9998 games were variations. We made our own entertainment: turning our neighbourhood into Vietnam for any pigeon within range of our ketties or BB guns.

When we weren’t beating down on niggas who disrespected us we snuck into cinemas to watch Wesley Snipes skop, skiet, en donner vampires into dust. We slyly opened Hustler magazines in the CNA in town to gloat at college girls and spread eagles before the security guard chased us out. We always managed to escape with a few comic books hidden beneath our oversized t-shirts. Lindo―God bless the useless Robin Hood―used to steal the most boring ones.

“Nigga,” Franco asked, “why’d you get this issue of Green Lantern? We’ve read this shit already!”

“It was the closest one, bra,” Lindo replied, ashamed.

“Nigga, fuck, look before you jack some shit, man.” Cicero shook his head.

“What’d you get?” Rinzlo asked.

“Uncanny X-Men,” I replied proudly.

“Number twenty? Nigga, we haven’t read the previous nineteen issues.”

“Yeah, well, just use your imagination.”

Franco, our captain, was what we called a Starring, the big action hero whose name was displayed first in the Die Hard and Universal Soldier VHS cassettes we rotated amongst ourselves. He was a year older than us and had the most shit for us to do at his house. There was a paved yard with a rusty hoop at one end that was good for some close quarters two-on-two and stacks of Jean Claude Van Damme videos to watch. Rinzlo lived three houses down from me with his mom, younger brothers, and his older cousin who always had a revolving door of girlfriends for us to crush on. Dark- and light-skinned girls of all shapes and sizes with boobs, booty, blind loyalty and trust galore. Rinzlo was the poorest of us which meant he lied the most, inventing stories like a minstrel trying to earn an evening meal. Every Monday he’d come to school and tell us about the mad weekend he had. No one ever had the heart to point out there was no way he’d managed to kiss one of his cousin’s girlfriends and also score mad hoops at a b-ball game in Eros because he’d spent the majority of the weekend bored with us. Rinzlo also had the fastest mouth, provoking fights like it was a CV-able skill. Lindo was the muscle. He was this agile, beefy black dude who would’ve had a promising career in South African rugby if he’d had the good fortune to be born across the border. He wasn’t, though, so he had to settle for being our enforcer. Cicero was all heart, all loyalty, zero defence, and no attacking abilities―we always had to fight with our spirit power doubled and tripled to make up for his weakness. He was our medic because his mother was a nurse with a never-ending supply of bandages and bandaids she stole from the clinic where she worked.

Me? I was the Doer of Homework and the Decider of Disputes, second-in-line for the throne after Franco, the quiet foreign kid who could throw down when required. You can find one in every crew. They’re always the ones called Pope or Priest or Monk. I avoided those lame nicknames by silently KO-ing dudes when shit popped off. They never saw or heard me coming. Everyone always gunned for Rinzlo first (because he’d started the shit), then Cicero (who was the smallest target), then Franco (eventually everyone comes for the king), or Lindo (because everyone thought they could be a giant-killer) after the first salvo of trash-talking concluded the rules of engagement―“Don’t say it with your mouth, nigga! Say it with your chest!”―and in the melee I’d shoulder-tap a nigga on the left and kidney-punch him on the right. I was the only one without an o in my name so for branding purposes, and because of my overabundance of stealth, I was called Rambo.

At the height of our boredom, at the Catholic private school our parents hoped would provide the springboard into Windhoek’s thin middle and upper-middle class crusts, Franco suggested we start a fight club. Word eventually leaked we were giving white kids black eyes behind the boys’ toilets. Our parents were hauled into a principal’s meeting. Either we straightened out after five weeks of detention, community service, and regular confession or we’d be kicked out. We Our Fathered our way through our purgatorial sentence and went back to beating German kids who put that frustrating Beckenbauer defence on us in football tournaments in Academia, or getting into scrapes after basketball matches with public schools from the kasi.

We were a walking, rumbling, tumbling Punnet square of super nigga genes.

We called ourselves The Five Negroes at first.

After some focus groups that involved ingesting copious amounts of Wu-Tang Clan and too many B-grade westerns we settled on The Five Os: Franco Five-Fists, Rollin’ Rinzlo, Lion Lindo, Doc Cicero, and Rambo the Sage.

The Five Os fighting together forever.

We grew out of fighting.

I was the first to put childish things away.

In the middle of our teens a rival crew called the Romans―there were three kids in it called Roman, one Julius, a Titus, a Titus-Julius, and a Maximus amongst others (I shit you not!)―gave us a gladiatorial beatdown after a b-ball match that made me cross the Rubicon into semi-mature young adulthood.

The Romans had tried to foul Franco, our best player, the entire game and the referee penalised us with bullshit calls. Nonetheless, Franco dodged elbows and uppercuts like Piccolo fielding too-slow punches from a trainee Gohan. Whenever Franco fadeaway jay’d a basket over a Roman he’d yell “Render unto Caesar, nigga!” as the ball broke through the net’s chain hymen.

Swoosh―chuuk! Swoosh―chuuk!

Franco singlehandedly Iversoned and watched over the demise of their basketball empire. When the final whistle blew I knew the barbarians would be at the gate. The Romans found us waiting for Rinzlo’s cousin to pick us up, sprinting towards us, thumbs-down, shouting, “Ave, niggas! Ave!”

From the first jab to the last suplex we were pounded like yam, beaten like thieves in a Nairobi market. It felt like we were in a One Piece episode with Monkey D. Luffy’s Jet Gatling Gun pummelling us from all sides. When Rinzlo’s cousin finally showed up, we were too sore to even swear at him as he laughed at us. The rest of the ride home he told us to leave fighting behind and take up girls as a pastime instead. “What you gents need is pussy. You niggas need to be fucked calm,” he said. He’d arrived late to fetch us because he’d been busy finessing one of his many girlfriends.

“Yoh! They fucked us up,” Cicero whimpered as he climbed out of the car. “My mother’s gonna have to take a look at me.” He tenderly massaged his ribs.

“Yeah, but we’re gonna get them back!” Franco, whose head had more knobs on it than a Lego Duplo block was riding shotgun, beating his left fist into the palm of his right hand.

“No,” I said. He turned in his seat. I looked at him with Michael Corleone coolness and said I was tired of fighting. If he was going to continue he’d have to do it without me. He laughed and said I was too chickenshit to throw some hands. I told him I was no moffie but I was tired of Ryu-ing my life away in a never-ending game of Street Fighter. “Every week there’s a new set of bigger and badder niggas inserting coins and pressing the player-two button, man.” I chucked the deuces. I was getting out for real, for real.

I had other reasons for stopping the cockfighting though.

My mother had recently given me the Immigrant Speech, the one where the precariousness of “our position in this country” was laid out to me, the one where a black boy is given expectations, bonded to his responsibilities, while being given the rundown on life. There was no land for me to inherit. We had money but it wasn’t skip-a-generation kind of money. There was no going back to the village. The fear of regression was stamped into my soul.

“All you have,” my mother said, “is that big brain of yours. If you lose that, we’ve lost it all.”

That shit weighed heavily on me.

The pounding headache from the recent niggadämmerung from the Romans made my mother’s words thump around my skull much harder. I told the other Os not to holler at me if shit went down. I was going to save my brain cells for Chemistry and the soporific History classes that only became interesting during the First World War section when white people were killing each other. I said there was a massive literature project from our English teacher who was lost in bardolatry that we needed to do―correction, that I needed to do for all of us. (“What the fuck’s bardolatry?” Rinzlo asked.) Since my mother had sat me down and learned me some immigrant truths I’d looked around this town filled with Tupac-drunk and Biggie-high dudes obsessed with choosing sides, who wanted nothing more than a fight story to talk about on a Monday morning at school, and decided I wanted out. I didn’t want to graduate to impregnating girls and then carrying my own third trimester beer belly.

“My niggas,” I said, “this can’t be our life.” The other Os looked at me in disbelief and joked amongst themselves that I was joking.

It took them being victims of more four-on-ten pavement poundings and 23-hit unstoppable combos for them to realise I was serious about putting up my gloves.

One Sunday, after they got jumped, Franco called me at home and asked where the fuck I’d been the previous day.

“At the library,” I said. “We have the literature project to work on.”

“The Dolam Boys are pissing on the Five O reputation and you’re at the library? Yo, Rambo―”

“That’s not my name.”

“Err, okay, I see you. Fuck you, nigga.”

“Fuck you too, nigga. And don’t copy my work anymore.”

They didn’t call me for fights anymore but occasionally I’d take pity on the Os and let them sneak peeks at my homework in the morning during register period.

The Windhoek Public Library, the homework haven for niggas who didn’t have Microsoft’s interactive Encarta Encyclopaedia at home, welcomed me with its generous street-postal-address-telephone-number-spell-your-surname-please-okay-just-write-it-for-me arms. My first library card astounded me with its easy access and acceptance. It was a citizenship which took in all colours, classes, and creeds. For the first time since my family had moved to this dry-ass country from the Small Country I felt like I’d found a place I could belong.

Okay, okay―a nigga has to be honest: I was hanging out at the library because of a girl, but, hey, that was as good a reason as any other.

The Girl―let’s just call her that for now so that happy homes in Avis aren’t destroyed by women trying to rekindle unrequited teenage crushes―was wispy, with straight black tresses hanging down to the middle of her back, the kind of simple, low-wattage Michelle Branch prettiness niggas from my part of town secretly aspired to date or marry so they could talk bad about the sisters. We were in the same class. She had these dimples you wanted to put your tongue in whenever she smiled. By leaning back in my chair further than a Terror Squad chorus, I overheard her telling one of her girlfriends she was doing research for the literature project at the library. Taking a hiatus from high jinks was enough for me to choose hoes over Os. Anyway, I knew in a couple of days Franco, Rinzlo, Lindo, Cicero, and I would be boys again. They’d need homework and we’d nigga-need each other to survive high school.

I’d see The Girl writing her notes in the bookish hush of the library and I’d try to figure out how the heck I’d approach her. Having been in the same class for two years never seemed to be a good enough opener. She wafted in and out of my library hours. I was always aware of where she was and where she wasn’t the same way a Chinese kung-fu master can sense attackers sneaking on the roof as he pours his tea, ready to throat-punch niggas into the end credits of their life.

One day I decided I was going to say hello to her. She’d just turned into 707.1―707.9. I focused my centre before turning right to follow her. I found her kissing some pasty boy with angry pimples on his face. His hands were fumbling beneath her tank top. They saw me and I pretended to look for a book to my immediate left and let out an Archimedean “Hah!” when I pulled Bird Species of Southern Africa off the shelf. I carefully pretended to consult it when I sat back down in my nook in case they were watching me. I learned about African hoopoes while hope headed south from the winter in my heart. Despite The Girl moving on from the library later―maybe her parents finally inherited some white privilege and got her a computer―I kept coming to this hidden kingdom of books.

Niggathrond, I called it, built by some High Libralendi Elf of the First Nigga Age to hide bookish mofos away from their worst foes: other bored niggas.

Even the building’s entrance, recessed from the squalor of the street and shaded by tall trees, gave it the quality of being a well-kept secret. The subdued voices and rustling paper made it seem like all inside were hiding from an evil peril just waiting for them outside.

I loved it. The library was cheaper than the cinema and closer than the basketball courts. Library niggas were also polite. Never starting nothing whenever I bumped into them in the aisles by accident (or on purpose) and borrowed and returned shit on time―especially the Asterix and Obelix and Tintin comics, hot property back then. In the poorly lit crannies I didn’t have to put on the chafing nigga armour I had to wear outside―the Watch Where I’m Walking, Nigga™ breastplate, and the What’re You Looking At Nigga™ visor, and the You Stepped On My White All-Stars, Nigga™ shoes that Hermes-flapped you into a fight quicker than you could say sorry.

In Niggathrond, I found there were other ways of being. George, James, Charlie, and, Danny―I envied all the Dahl boys and their antics. Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals transported me beyond the edge of my limited nigga map. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Alexandre Dumas―a nigga was in them like a high school teen pregnancy statistic. I dreamed about being a woodcutter’s son with hidden royal lineage or being the underdog pilot of a starship cruiser. I raided the fantasy fiction shelves often and without mercy. My brain caught a fire, scorching through all the Dorling-Kindersley reference books like a terrible spark in an Alexandrian library a long, long time ago. One day, I dreamed, I’d write poetry in the halls of the Alhambra or read high literature on a cold English beach, with seagulls wheeling overhead.

Boy, a nigga could dream.

The demure assistant librarian even started recommending and keeping books aside for me. Once, she asked me where I was from and when I told her she replied with a long “Aaaah.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. I think what she wanted to say was: “Because local niggas don’t read.”

The assistant librarian is the reason I discovered Terry Pratchett. From him I developed the annoying habit of subtly offending people.

And from her I learned the layout of the labia.

The library was closing, a bell tinkled the minutes down. Thirty, fifteen, ten, and then five―I desperately tried to finish The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy so I could borrow something else. I didn’t want to waste my library card on thirty pages. She came around to my cubicle and said it was time to go. I asked for more time. She smiled and said I could finish up while she did her rounds ensuring windows were closed. I found her sitting on one of the reading couches near the checkout counter. She asked to see which books I was taking out. She approved of Le Guin and Atwood. She scoffed at Hickman and Weiss.

“They’re cool,” I said. “Maybe a bit formulaic, but they write decent filler fantasy when you need a fix.”

All she was said was “Hmm” with a strange smile on her face.

She told me to sit down on the floor in front of her. (“Err, okay.”) She asked if I liked coming to the library and I said if it was open on a Sunday I’d skip church and come through. She asked about my school, about my family, and about girls. “What? No girl? A boy like you?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Books are easier to read than girls.”

The assistant librarian laughed, light, lilting, a sound that vanished into the stacked and vigilant shelves. Then she told me to sit still. “Stay absolutely still no matter what happens next.”

“Sure.”

She hiked up her skirt and slid off her grey cotton briefs. (Franco: “No ways!”). I was startled. She told me to stay still. She spread her legs. (Rinzlo: “Get the fuck outta here!”). Then she pressed (Cicero: “Nigga!”), pulled (Lindo: “Niiiiiiiigga!”), and prodded her way to pleasure. (Franco: “And you just sat there?”) I just sat there, breathing hard, a little scared, but also amazed.

So that’s what it looked like.

I’d seen it in magazines before. And I’d lied to the Os I’d seen one in real life from some girl down my street. Now, up close, I was fascinated by the rippling wrinkles, the variegated colours of skin, the wisps of hair, and the tendrils of moisture. It had a lot of personality.

I stared at the spot of recently sated curiosity while she toyed with herself a little and asked me what I thought. (“Interesting? That’s all you could say, nigga?” Franco asked. “What the fuck’s the point of being a well-read nigga if all you can say when cooch is in your face is interesting?”) She asked for my hand and placed it in the moisture. It felt as though my body’s power was diverted towards my fingertips. I recall it feeling a delicious kind of warm, the way a small puppy felt when you picked it up, warm and hungry to live. She rubbed my hand up and down a bit, gently, looking at me all the time. She took my hand and licked my fingers, one at a time. (“NIGGA!” Rinzlo nearly passed out.) Then she stood up, pulled up her underwear, and took my books to the counter, stamped them―(“Nigga, just like that?” Lindo looked like he was about to burst a vessel)― and let me out of Niggathrond so I could take a taxi home. Before she closed the door she said, “Thank you.”

Too afraid to show my greed for another show I avoided the library for three weeks. When I went back, she took my books, asked for the overdue fine, and went about her business like she and I hadn’t made a pact stronger than the shit Enid Blyton wrote about. No pricks of blood to seal boyhood friendship, I had my fingers in the jelly roll juice which made us husband and wife forever. I loitered around at closing time again, pretending to read some Bradbury, but she came and told me it was time to go home. I lingered by the door hoping for a recall. None came. Not in any day, week, or month of that year.

Why, you might wonder, wouldn’t she do it again?

I mean, sexual assault at a young age is a common theme for creatives and I was being given some A-grade material for a memoir: “…in the library with the demure assistant librarian I had come to trust because she seemed invested in my literary development…”

A second incident would’ve cemented permanent tenure on Oprah’s Book Club reading list.

There was no follow-through peep show because for that to happen there’d have to have been a first, and there simply wasn’t. There was no sexy alluring assistant librarian who left the Tolkien black guy in the library with a basic instinct for lust and literature. This was Windhoek for fuck’s sake, not a tired interracial trope on Pornhub.

I needed a story to get back in with the Os and if there’s one thing that could bring us together I knew it was the joint pursuit of pussy. You should see niggas when they smell blood in the water. They sign peace treaties and work on bilateral disarmament agreements. Even in Braveheart it wasn’t Scottish freedom that really got Wallace and his clan ticked off. It was the English king declaring prima nocta and impounding every newly married fud. I swear the Cold War could’ve ended much sooner if American and Soviet women had the wherewithal to ration the pizda.

The day after I told the other Os about the librarian the library’s membership swelled by four and the streets were shy a few soldiers.

The Five Os were reunited by the false lie there’d be opening of opuses and thumbing of tomes come closing time in the library. The assistant librarian quizzically looked at the Os enthusiastically borrowing Watership Down and Brian Jacques books over and over again. (“I thought the rabbits were suitable and subtle subtext,” Rinzlo said when I asked him about it many years later. “Plus, that Martin of Redwall mouse-nigga was cold as fuck.”)

Even after my deceit was discovered the other Os didn’t cuss or cast me out. By then they were too invested in the The Wheel Of Time series. I wished they’d read something that wasn’t “Book Two of the [Insert dragon, elf, dwarf, sorcerer, sword name here] Cycle” so we could have something else to talk about besides dark lords and evil mages but I was just happy we weren’t out fighting anymore.

“That was some real sage shit,” Franco said one day when we were at his place, laughing about our young warthog days. “You straight finessed the streets out of niggas.”

 

The Reluctant Teacher And The Path Of Wrath

If I’d been one of the High Elves of Middle-Earth my temper could’ve smithed a sword capable of Swiss-cheesing balrogs without ever blunting.

Wrath and folly are a nigga’s second path.

The year I spent without work after screaming at my boss doused my furious spark real good. I was doing my second tour in advertising, having washed up back home after four carefree years pursuing literature, skirts, and the creative label moniker that was all the rage in Cape Town back then. After my English Honours year I was devastated when I found out I hadn’t made it into the MFA program. Maybe my writing samples had too much blam-blam-pow, pew-pew-die, and motherfucker this and motherfucker that. Perhaps I should’ve written something in keeping with the times to show off my writing chops, like some postcolonial narrative rich in rape and dispossession, or that weird, remixed African mythology everyone is calling speculative fiction these days.

Naturally, after eating some sour rejection grapes for an age and a day I wound up writing copy at a startup advertising agency, pretending I was at the cutting edge of creativity. When my work permit expired it wasn’t renewed so I moved back home, lying to myself I’d be closer to my family and friends. The other Os had gone on ahead for advanced recon (translation: bursaries summoned them back home) and the intel coming through the chat messages was that the Oh-Six-One was booming, bursting with bitches, and Falstaffian with favours for anyone who could organise joint partnerships with Chinese construction companies swallowing up housing tenders. Sadly, when I moved back it was the same one-horse town with the same old town road. All it had was more money and that’s the most cliché thing to have anywhere.

I fell back into advertising like a dependent ex, lying to myself it would get better, that I’d make it work. I kept telling myself that sooner or later I’d be able to find purpose in selling loans and credit cards. At least, thought I, I could rustle up some Cannes Lions en route to the big time.

My boss, though, said my copywriting was average. It was.

I said the clients were subpar. They were.

I was told I needed to deliver simple concepts that satisfied the briefs. The boss said highbrow humour was my harmatia. I tried to follow his instructions for a while, but I got bored once I figured out even being good enough in the industry was exceeding expectations. People just wanted “win-a-bakkie competitions and lucky fucking draws.”

The boss said if I wasn’t happy at the agency the door was open. I threw my advertising career out of the window.

I was a writer, goddammit! Slogan-pushing, Facebook likes, and Twitter mentions were below me.

I was King Author. He Who Pulleth Quill From Stone.

I was born to tattoo paperbacks and hardcovers.

“That job was the fucking pits,” I told the Os. “It’s time to get this writing thing going. I might as well get started now, sooner rather than later.”

The first three weeks were a breeze: I woke up late, scribbled bits and pieces, binge-watched Tarantino, and reread the Discworld series in preparation for penning the great nigga comedy for the black African youth.

For niggas, both met and unmet―that’s what the dedication would say, written by the Homie, not Homer.

After four months of zero-point-zero-zero-zero manuscript being produced the only truth I knew for certain was that later comes sooner than one thinks.

I was staying with my parents then, I had to because there was no money coming in. I played video games and helped my mother with her gardening. I avoided the Os as much as possible, not eating out, not clubbing, trying to avoid anything which needed money. Cicero got married. Lindo got a promotion at his IT company and cruised the Mediterranean. Rinzlo got a column in the local newspaper writing about politics and pop culture. Franco fell into some of the shady tender-preneur money floating around Windhoek. I watched BBC Earth and Ken Burns documentaries by the Blu-Ray disc-load. My parents kept nagging me for a game plan.

I sent out short short stories. I pitched nigga-centric ideas to magazines at home and abroad telling them there was a market of very smart brothers who wanted to read something that actually represented them. Like how there were four oh-nigga-shits in the world―one for beef popping off (“Oh nigga shit!”); one for drama unravelling in front of you (“Oooh nigga shit!”); one for your boy showing up with new kicks (“Oh niiiiiga shit!”); and one for when a girl backed that ass up onto your meat slowly, like a learner driver reverse-parking for their licence (“Ooooooooh! Niiiiiiigga! Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!” Franco said when he read A Girl’s Guide to Deciphering Black Men’s Sex Moans: Part 1.)

Guess what I got for trying to pioneer niggarology: niks en fokol.

The advertising agency called and said they’d take me back but I knew I couldn’t return to that life. Also, cocaine was becoming a thing amongst the art directors and copywriters and I needed my nose to keep me out of trouble, not get me into it. So I joined the segment of society who said they were between gigs, always bubbling with false enthusiasm about finding something soon.

It was like I’d forgotten I lived in a desert: drought is the default, rain is the luxury. It’s not like people were stuck in their jobs for shits and giggles. There was nowhere else for them to go. Up was blocked by the struggle veterans, Squealers and Napoleons who weren’t struggling anymore. Down was clogged with the poor. Everyone in the middle was digging employment trenches and preparing to wait out the job satisfaction, pay rises, and promises made to them by boomer babies, capitalism, university, and national independence. Everyone had a vat-en-sit mentality.

I hoped for a reply of some sort from any editor. My mother said something would come along. She said God had a plan and I said God’s plan sucked. She sighed and shook her head.

Lindo’s the one who got me into teaching. His sister had just left her position at the School For Rich Kids Who Didn’t Get Into The School For Really Smart Children. They needed someone to English-sit the ninth graders for a term. “It’ll be easy,” he said. “What teenager wouldn’t like your cynical outlook on life? Just swear every once in a while and they’ll think you’re cool.”

I walked into class on my first day, jittery as shit, shaking from the PTSD of unemployment. I remember the line that let the class know we could get along: “Niggas, please, please, please don’t be yourselves.”

It took time for me to relax, to trust the faith my colleagues and parents put in me, to believe in the laughter my students gave my humour, and to not doubt I was doing a good job.

After the first month I’d learned to turn my failures into lesson plans and motivating nigga speeches.

My wrath had been knocked out of me.

 

Nigga Lust And The Third Path

For my lust credits I took the fuck-boy elective. It was not a necessary course but because I was a nigga trying to make it onto the Dean’s List I did all the prescribed fucking and unprescribed fucking around.

What’s there to be said about a nigga’s lust that hasn’t been testified to by single parent  households with a son destined to be the first-round draft pick in the NBA or NFL? It’s well-known single moms make future hall-of-famers and daddy issues are the foundations of a five-film superhero franchise. Come on, even Star Wars is about one family with an absent father fucking up a whole galaxy―far, far away, yes, but also close to home.

In the mixtape that’s a nigga’s life before he becomes a fully-fledged album, lust is the interlude and hook for creeps to Crip-walk to that’s put on three-peat.

All I can say without shame is I carelessly tossed myself into vaginas like coins down a wishing well. I have entire Google Calendar notifications telling me who I was supposed to be meeting up with, where, when, and noting relevant details about them so I wouldn’t fumble foreplay. If only I’d diverted all of my scheming, lying, and impeccable time management productively I could’ve been a Fortune 500 CEO. At the very least I would’ve been a millionaire motivational speaker or an American preacher with a megachurch.

One time, while I was stroking away at this girl like a Cambridge oarsman with Oxford half a length in front, my cox veered a little to the left and we made eye contact mid-orgasm. My chest tightened. I looked at her eyes and thought about how lovely they were, about how I wanted to make them light up over and over again. She was moderately funny and managed to not ask annoying questions when we watched Akira and Princess Mononoke on my laptop. Looking at her then, something inside me shifted ever so slightly. Whatever it was, it made me cry. (Franco: “Nigga, you did what?”) While we were lying in her bed I told her I liked her. (Rinzlo: “Nigga, what the actual fuck is wrong with you? You never tell a girl you like her after coitus. Yes―I just said coitus!”) The Os would’ve stabbed me if I’d told them I’d actually told her I loved her. She looked sideways at me and went to the bathroom. I could hear her tinkle into the pot. She came out and asked if I wanted something to drink. I said tea. When she let me out of her apartment I said I’d give her a call. She said “Sure” but she didn’t answer when I did.

Eventually, and inevitably, if a nigga can’t eenie-meenie-miney-mo-catch-a-bad-bitch-by-his-strokes he’s going to wind up lonely. In the great game of love, lust is last place, and the consolation prize for participation is loneliness. There’s only so much disconnected sleeping around a nigga can do before catching an umbilical or the worst of STDs: feelings.

“Love,” Cicero said on his wedding day, as I adjusted his bow-tie, “is the worst thing that could happen to a nigga’s sex life.” He tried to sound like he didn’t want to get married, but his machismo was always weak. I’d never seen him happier than when he put his wife above the Os, a new hierarchy that took some getting used to.

What Cicero had I wanted for myself. I grew tired of scanning restaurants and clubs to see if there was any drama waiting for me. I became fatigued by having my name dragged through the streets and being shunned from the sheets. I remember telling Lindo I was tired of the lying, the acting, laying siege to women’s emotions for days, and leaving Trojan horses filled with empty promises and endearing insecurities to coax them from behind their walls.

“Why, Lindo,” I asked him, “why can’t I just have a Vanessa Carlton kinda girl?”

“Vanessa Carlton, nigga?”

“Don’t even play. VC is mad pretty―the original ride-or-die-walk-a-thousand-miles bad bitch.”

“Okay, nigga.” We were quiet for a bit and then he asked me why I just couldn’t stop with the girls.

I sighed. “Because, nigga,” I said. I picked up my keys so I could head home to my apartment, eager to fill it with fleeting company. “Just because.”

 

Grief, The Fourth Path

When my mother passed on I gave up church but not church girls. Not that I’d been going to church anyway, but I decided pretending to be a believer was too much effort in the face of such deific duplicity. God had given Noah the peace sign and promised there’d never be another flood, instead he sent the fire to fetch my mother.

Somehow my father, my brother, and I were supposed to make it through the hundred fears of solitude with just the three of us for family. When my mother was alive we talked to each other through her. She mediated peace talks. Home, to me, was wherever she was. But when she went to a place none of us could follow we unravelled like a knitted scarf with string snagged on a nail.

The early days were the easiest, the grief glued us together. Then the grief passed but the loss remained, humming at barely audible levels. Those months were the worst, when the calendar became a Minesweeper game, with any day or date hiding a detonator which could be triggered by the smallest thing, even the weight of a memory, and blow up the whole week, month, or year to noxious and depressing smithereens.

Our new reality would have to be confronted somehow, with each of us dealing with our separate lonelinesses in some way: my father went back to work, my brother moved back home to keep my father company, and I tried to bury it ten-inches deep in women on the Third Path.

(Franco’s editorial note: Keep lying to yourself about them inches, nigga!)

Once in the pitch black of night my brother phoned me and I sat the fuck up straight in bed (Fuck! Not this again!) preparing for more bad news. “Which hospital?” I shouted as soon as I accepted his call. Not my father, too, I thought.

“I just wanted to talk,” he said.

“Nigga,” I said, “it’s three in the morning. My heart was still beating like a village war drum.

He said he knew. But it was about Mamma and he just, you know, wanted to talk for a bit. I didn’t want to talk about her, about her to him, about her to him there and then. But I was learning the ways of kindness so I said, yeah, we could talk.

He asked if I ever thought about her. He asked if there were times I felt like somehow I’d done something which had invited calamity upon her. He said maybe he’d aged her too much when he was younger. He could’ve had her summoned to school less, maybe reduced the number of detentions. Maybe that would’ve kept her alive longer.

“Nah, dude,”I said gently, “that’s not how it works.”

I listened patiently as he talked about her, about her last days when she was up and about, as alive as a live person could be. She had plans for her garden, was plotting to finally finish her knitting challenges, and she would reread her favourite books. I remembered the way she vibrated when she spoke about the next day, how she angled towards it regardless of whether it was sunny or heralded a storm.

“You know you’re like her,” my brother said. “Both of you were always too much for this place. Maybe that’s why she left.” A strangled sound escaped my throat. “But Dad and I are happy we still have you.”

I was glad he couldn’t see me and my wet eyes. He said he needed to get to bed. I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice. “Stay strong, dude,” he said. “We’re all waiting to read about your life and times.”

When I lay down my girlfriend propped herself up in bed and asked if everything was okay. I said it was fine and rolled over but I could feel her staring at my back for a long time.

 

The Exquisite And Solo Path Of Loneliness

Yeah, niggas. I had a girlfriend.

By the time I met her I’d spent a while wearing so-called equanimity for cologne. I was the Black Buddha who’d successfully survived my youth, quelled my wrath, and singlehandedly―I lie, there were many, many hands involved―fucked my way through lust, and almost love. I had reduced my grief to an occasional conversation seasoner, using it to deep-spice my shallow self into something tastier.

Reincarnation was calling.

Nigga 2.0―Nigg’varna―was downloaded and installed.

The sugar weakness had been booted. I hadn’t eaten fast food in two years and a bit. Once, I made a butternut smoothie which nearly made the Os repent their sinful ways. Ultimately nobody made the leap of faith to lower cholesterol levels and attain single-digit body fat percentages. My early morning walks were another kind of meditation and when I told the Os they crinkled their noses.

I told the Os my mental health was worth all the gay words in the world. If anything, it seemed to me as though sanity was the only true possession a nigga could own and even it was under attack every day from whitewashed glossy magazine covers, Denzel winning the Oscar for playing a crooked cop, and war documentaries which didn’t bother to blur out the burnt black bodies.

“Trust me,” I said, “real niggas are a dying and precious breed. I’m just trying to be on the endangered species list past the age of 45.”

They all laughed.

But some of the laughter was brittle.

Lindo and Cicero seemed as though they wanted to know more. Lord knows the Os desperately needed to hear the message. But they were too scared to take those first tentative steps out of their shells. Masculinity is like MS-13―“You have to kill someone’s to get in and you have to kill yours to get out,” I said at a a braai once. “The exit price is too steep for some niggas to pay.” There was a smattering of agreement.

She was at the braai―my future girlfriend.

By then I was one of those guys who knew how to say all the right things in the right company. I’d spent the greater part of my evening talking about The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Niggas―what I hoped to be part one of my nigga thesis. I regurgitated by-the-way knowledge and then segued into gender equality to distract my audience from my part in past shenanigans. I said it was time equality trickled down to women.

She asked why it had to trickle. “Why couldn’t it be shared equally?”

I said, “Exactly.”

Some dude said that as a father they wouldn’t want their daughter to be harassed in the streets and I agreed. She asked why he had to be a father before he could be a decent human being?

Someone started a side discussion about the way the races treated each other. I said white men were the worst thing that ever happened to black people. She said I was wrong: “White men are the worst thing that can happen to black men. Men are the worst thing that can happen to black women. But at least with the white man you expect it―history remembers―but black men, your own people, they’re the worst.”

She looked at me. Daring me to challenge her. I kept quiet.

When it was time to eat everyone waited to see where she’d sit so they could choose seats as far from her as possible. I was in the bathroom at the time and when I came out I realised, fuck, the only seat left was next to her.

I recovered quickly. I smiled as I sat down and tried to engage her in conversation. I wanted things kept in the world of nigga consciousness where I was comfortable and infinitely quotable. I put on my best peacock feathers, wowing, hoping to flatter, to appease. But there’s this saying people from the Small Country have: the chameleon fools everyone but the branch.

And she snapped it underneath me.

“That’s the problem with feminism, isn’t it?” she said at some point. “It demands more than just treating your mother or sister or daughter with common decency.”

I blew on that retreat horn so hard the Charge of the Lie Brigade was never written.

She is, to date, the only woman I never tried to run my game on. She told me, simply, I had nothing to offer her. She had nothing to give me, nothing I hadn’t already had somewhere else, nothing I couldn’t have anywhere else if I felt like it. She said she wouldn’t be my nigga genesis, one of those I-once-knew-a-woman crucibles where I’d reforge myself, alloying myself with the best parts of her, leaving the residue of her sanity and soul behind, charred and useless.

That we wound up dating is one of the universe’s unexplained mysteries.

Around her I didn’t have to put on the mask that gave me my nigga superpowers. She saw me and I was seen. And because I was seen I could look at my reflection in her words, her counsel, and her disappointment. Sometimes I wonder whether I was a project, something for her rehabilitation resumé, just another nigga horse to bring to the water. But then I remember how thirsty I was from running the machismo marathon, how her and I didn’t have to bruise each other’s egos or psyches for chuckles. Our talk was full of vulnerabilities and wading through real shit, and somehow coming out on the other side calmer and happier. At least it was until I realised niggas are forever icebergs into which women are doomed to crash time and time again.

I sat with Cicero, the only one of the Os who’d had any stable relationship of any kind, who seemed happy and content in his marriage, and asked him how a nigga knew he was ready for marriage.

“You decide,” he said simply.

“Yes, but how?”

“You just do.”

I changed my angle of approach. “What if it doesn’t work out?”

“You decide that too, my nigga.”

I decided her and I were forever.

That’s how I became lonely.

I remember the day I cried in my apartment when I picked up my phone, scrolling through my text messages. My fingers stumbled across the message thread from my mother, the one that chilled at the bottom of the screen, never deleted. I hesitated for a moment before I clicked on it and read the words she wrote to me in the week before she passed. We were talking about teaching, about how I was going to start a radical after-school writing and drama club where we read pirated manga and acted out Windhoek-adapted scenes from The Return of the King (“For Froddo, niggas,” Aragorn whispered before charging towards the Black Gate) and Romeo and Juliet (“Nigga, do you bite your thumb at us?”―“I don’t bite my thumb at you, nigga, but I bite my thumb!”). She said she was proud of me. She even managed to drop all of the relevant emojis after sending all the wrong ones.

My last reply: Wow! Mamma, you’re so lame.

I cried.

I knew then I wasn’t fine. I hadn’t been fine in a long time. I’d dealt with my mother’s passing by doing surface shit. Sitting in silence for a few hours a day, eating all the recommended minerals and vitamins, drinking that white woman’s gallon of water a day. But my mother’s death was a tectonic event. The cracks went all the way to my core, turning it onto a void, imperceptible to the naked eye, only glimpsed sideways through silent lulls in conversations, or painful and distancing stutters in my affections.

I was alone.

When my girlfriend finally peeled back the layers she had the grim look field medics have when they turn over a wounded soldier and look at the auxiliary ventilation holes blown clean through them. I think that day when she came home and found me sitting on the couch in the dark, eyes gummed by teary sleep, she knew I was beyond her care. Only when we talked about my mother’s passing later, with me swearing and screaming at every atom in creation did she know I was a terminal case.

But she was dating me voetstoets―you take a nigga as you find him―so she helped me fill up my crowdfund for courage to see someone about the shit. She was the only one I talked to about it. The Os could understand many things but there are worlds so far out of niggas’ intellectual solar systems they might as well not even exist. We were iron men with iron hearts and steel sharpens steel. Even my girlfriend had to pinball between my dulled emotional bumpers for a while before I realised sooner or later she’d accidentally ricochet into a terminal gully where she’d roll past my frantically flapping flippers.

I told her I’d go to therapy for her. I even tried to use it as a means to score bonus points, like I was being a super special boyfriend. Like the time I went to yoga with her.

My girlfriend was too slick. “Nah, nah, nigga. You have to do it for yourself.”

She said something to that effect.

 

Black Buddha And The Sixth Path To Redemption

When I finally walked into the therapist’s office I doubted the sessions would help. Therapy was for white people. Niggas know progress is the best way to get over shit. Get a promotion, make more money, buy something, take a holiday somewhere―that’s how it’s done. This whole therapy thing, I thought, was a scam with a good hourly rate.

I quit after a week.

My girlfriend cooed me back to the couch.

It took me a couple of sessions to open up, to talk about everything, but the breakthrough came.

I finally said it:

“My mother died on my birthday. Every single year I feel shit about getting older while she gets colder. I’m afraid my existence is the one that took her life even though the autopsy said it wasn’t. Every three-hundred-and-sixty-five days feel like a lap in the Blame Olympics.”

The therapist remained quiet. She didn’t write any notes.

I continued:

“More than once as I’ve blown out the candles, with my brother and my father crying and croaking out the birthday tune she used to sing so well, and wished for the finish line once and for all, for all of it to end. But, but―”

“But what?” the therapist asked.

“But I can’t just quit. I can’t take a day off.”

“Why?”

“My family needs me.”

“They can make a plan if they have to.”

“My friends―”

“The Os, yeah? Sounds like they’ll be just fine too. So why can’t you slow down?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because I’m the Sage Nigga!”

“The what?”

So I explained to her about never climbing high enough for the water to stop lapping my feet; about having to be three times as good as the local niggas who were twice as good as the average white nigga just to get less than half as far at the best of times; about Niggathrond; about the paths and how they all criss-crossed; how some ended only to reappear years later but in different guises; about how some never came to an end; and how I was The One Nigga who had to make sense of it all for every nigga in the whole wide world even though it didn’t make sense to me half the time.

“Interesting,” the therapist said. “And what path do you think you’re on now?”

“I―I―I don’t fucking know. And it’s so fucking scary.”

I thought I’d cried before, but, my god.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”

“Okay.”

A nigga let out that cathartic cinematic sniffle which lets the audience know every little thing’s gonna be alright.

“Let’s start with forgiveness.”

Ah, the hard part then.

―Forgive yourself.

―Forgive her.

―She did not leave you.

At the therapist’s urging I got my pens and notebooks out, writing from the brightest day into the blackest night. I was hesitant about mining my being for writing material until I figured all creators put themselves in their work. Even God made people in his own image, not so?

Is so, nigga!

I wrote and wrote, and then I read and read.

I learned when to argue with my old man and when to let him be, which was all of the time.

I learned when to be kind to my brother, which was always.

I didn’t see much of the Os during that time. I spent more time with my girlfriend. We had our best days together then, when I was discovering new parts of myself, adding more and more puzzle pieces to the majestic picture that was our love.

Then, for some reason, I figured, hey, I’d gone and come far enough. Surely the rest of it was just more of the same shit, right? Cry a little, write a little, and then everything would become better after a while.

The nigga logic took over.

I forgot the footsteps make the path.

I slid back into the darkness.

It was eerily comfortable, how easy it all came back, how the compass needle found Lethe without even trying, how quickly that dreaded cup filled itself.

Back in the therapist chair I asked her when the hell everything made sense, when everything was just better. She asked me if I knew how to cook a guinea fowl. She told me how. I laughed a little.

The only good thing I learned from that Second Darkness was that I had to cut my girlfriend loose. I wished there was some other way for it all to end. I hoped that we’d find each other after many years and we’d reprise the romance.

But that was foolishness.

In the real world a nigga has to make choices based on available information and when faced with disappointment there’re only two ways to deal: deceit or honesty. I’d had enough of the former to fill out 007’s current vacancy if they were looking for nigga to put a new spin on James Bond. So I made a break for the latter. I sat my girlfriend down and told her our love had become a neglected thing. I told her the end of the road had passed us by. I said some shit about the hero’s journey and having to learn how to be alone before I could be with someone else.

She Scotty-beamed out of my life.

Man, I’d hoped we were forever as I watched her go.

But a Sage Nigga knows forever is never as long as one thinks it is.

The other night, I was driving Franco home from the police station after having bailed him out for drunken driving. If I hadn’t been up reading he would’ve slept in jail until Monday morning. The warrant officer was determined to keep him in lockup. “He was endangering lives,” he said. “This man deserves to face justice.” After I slipped him a couple of hundreds he said a man deserves to sleep in his bed on a Friday night and called out for another officer to fetch Franco.

Franco turned to me in the passenger seat, eyes still saturated with drink, and asked why niggas kept doing dumb shit.

“Like driving drunk?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Franco said, “like driving drunk.” His blinks were so slow I wondered why he just didn’t close his eyes. “Or you leaving your girlfriend.”

I inhaled sharply. “What the fuck, Franco?”

“Out of all of us, I would’ve expected you to know a good thing when it came around but―” He yawned and kept quiet.

I cut through a red light. I needed to get my nigga home and get to bed. We fell quiet for a while as we drove.

“When do we outgrow this shit?” Franco turned to me. He seemed alert, like the the need for a sincere answer had sobered him.

“Do you know you cook a guinea fowl?”

“Nigga, what?”

“You take the guinea fowl,” I said, angling the car towards his house, “and soak it in a pot of water for three days with spices and herbs―parsley, basil, rosemary, tarragon, thyme―whatever you have available, to add some depth and flavour. Then you toss in a rock and bring the pot to the boil.” I parked the car outside his gate. “When the rock is soft, the guinea fowl is ready.”