Societal Lame'os

I come from an ultra cool and luscious suburb called Westville. It's just outside of Durban and it stretches between two townships, Claremont and Chesterville. Comrades runners race through it on the M13 every year for the Marathon. Mostly this is known as a wealthy suburb, where the wealthy have massive green lawns with picketed fencing and dogs running freely. Imagine a Durex advert. 

However, I grew up there purely by chance as a domestic workers daughter. There were plenty of us who grew up in the back parts of this luscious lawns in the sections called servants courters and we all were close and tight growing up. But from there I learned a lot about being a part of 2 worlds. See I was being raided by a rural Zulu mother in a western setting and I had to identify with both worlds and understand where I fitted in whilst trying to just be a kid. Identity had always been a thing for me. I was never cool enough for the kids I went to school with (either wasn’t rich enough or I wasn’t ghetto enough). I then went to rural areas and I wasn’t rural enough, so my grandmother and aunt used to place me under the tree as they attended to the fields in the harsh sun. Or when they went to the river I got the smallest bucket to collect water. I’m not sure if I can handle a bucket on my head these days, I haven’t done it in forever. So there were plenty no no’s for me. But I always knew my time will come when I was going to become my own person. 

Today I sat with a team of creatives at a digital agency that I won’t mention. After the formalities, I started relaying my family history and how I got to be where I am now. I told a story about my mother and I realised that we can’t fail our stories, not now. The only time we fail our life stories is when we think we need to tell people a lie, or we need to distort the story. We learned this from marketers who said we are not allowed to be excited about all the different homes we come from instead we need to focus on a particular income bracket, and what they have to offer versus who we truly are. Recognising the journey and where you come from will be the biggest rise of man. We will flip the script on them and show them that we are not one cut or type of people all aspiring to look like carbon copies of something.

As Africans, we are capable of sharing all sorts of stories without having any shame attached to our narratives. Let us arrive at a point where we dictate how we want to be spoken to. My business partner and I were discussing that we are so often afraid and embarrassed to endorse our own African brands because we deem them not cool enough. We shouldn't be. When we boycott 'Dove' because of their racists advertising lets really unite. When we support Black Panther Marvel Movies film let us be all in. Let's debunk the notion of being selective or biased toward the very things that were designed to divide us. When there is a ‘shisanyama’ brand wanting to enter into your upmarket mall in a suburb let us be there and hopefully may those brands respect us by giving us great service so that we are not stigmatised or stereotyped because we haven’t dotted all our tees. 

If we are building a proper society that we are proud to hand over to our children than we needed to learn to share not just the success stories of the stories of how our parents used to beat us up. We need to share how we never thought we would reach the goals we’ve reached and share without thinking we are not worthy as black people. Let's become proud owners of the narrative we each own.