LONDON MAR 2006 - MY BIG SILVA ROVA

I worked with Mike on my last night in London. At six on a cold, dark January morning, while drizzle floated down through the yellow light of the streetlamps outside our guard-house, we drank a final cup of coffee together. Mike had just wandered in from the conference room. His face was so puffy with sleep his eyes had an oriental slant to them. He hunched broodingly over his cup of coffee on his side of the office. Rivulets of water running down the window cast flickering shadows on his bald troll's head. Then he cleared his throat and looked at me. We had worked well together during the last month, foiling every attempt the Pakistani made to catch us sleeping, so a final friendly chat seemed in order.

   'Are South African gals fit?' Mike asked, falling back on a tried and trusted topic. His words came out in such a slurred mash I had to wait a few seconds for their meaning to become clear. I often had to ask him to repeat a sentence a few times before I understood him.
   'Not as fit as Nigerian girls, but they're ok,' I said. 
   'Will you find some nice gals in South Africa?' Mike asked, lifting one eyebrow and smiling a bit shyly. It was this shyness that redeemed Mike for me. He'd told me his favourite place for finding women was on the university campus in Lagos, where he cruised about in his 'Big silva Rova, six silindas. Those young gals love my silva Rova!'
   I said, 'Durban girls are ok. On the beach they shower naked sometimes.'
  'Black gals?' Mike asked. I nodded. 

  'Do you fook black gals?'
  This was a delicate topic. How could I tell Mike that when I was at the old black beaches in Durban and I saw the girls showering naked I usually looked away. If I saw an eighteen year old with firm joggling breasts and an upright bum I might feel a stirring, but I kept it well repressed. If she was white, or coloured, or Indian, with that figure ... but because she was a raw African, fresh off a Putco bus from some kraal in the Natal Midlands, yelling gleefully in the showers while soap suds flew and her Pep store panties hung over the shower wall - it just wasn't on. I knew that it happened, obviously, and that history was full of stories involving white farmers sneaking off to the black girls' quarters at night. I wondered how long would it take me, if I was locked in a room with that firm bodied eighteen year old, to overcome my conditioning. 
   'Would you fook a Nigerian gal?' Mike asked, curling one side of his mouth up in a smile again. I felt cornered and I wondered, not for the first time, what blacks from other parts of Africa see when they speak to white South Africans. What had Lokie said? 'But Nigerians is different to our kaffers!' It was true. Nigerians didn't know how to be spoken down to. They didn't have servility as a national characteristic in a country where to be proud and outspoken might get your head stamped on. Lokie would yell at Mike, 'Jussie, Mike, you're a funny oke man! I like to fook! Mike would just grin lazily, and say nothing. 

   I thought about the black girls I'd seen around London, with their rock hard bottoms and graceful necks. 'Yes,' I said to Mike, 'I would.' 

and I said to Mike, 'Yes.' 

   'Ha!' Mike's eyes flared appreciatively in the gloom.  'All white men like to fook black girls, but they don't want to say it.'

   'Not all black girls wand to fuck white men though.'

   'Ha!' Mike said again, less appreciatively this time. 'You mustn't worry about that. If you speak nicely to them they'll fook you.' 

   Behind him two blurry, dazzling disks of light grew larger in the scurrying rain.   A red and white Bud truck rumbled slowly up to his widow. It was the last Bud truck I would see. 

   Mike creaked out of his chair, clipboard in hand, and grinned at me. 'You must just go home and have a good time. And if you find a black woman you must just fook her. Then you will see! And maybe one day I will come to South Africa and I will fook some nice white gals. '

   The thought of Mike crouched like a troll over a white South African woman filled me with distaste. But then I thought of some of the prissier Durban North girls I'd known, and I grinned back at him and said, 'Right!'