By Gershwin Wanneburg

I hope you are at peace now that I am gone. I hope you are a better man. 

Do you really feel that you have won? When you twist yourself in that unseemly way. Or is that naturally who you are, at that odd angle? Obtuse is, I think, the mathematical term. 

By the time you apologised to me, I had already decided that we should not be friends. I was convinced this was the wise approach to take. And I was right. Time and time again you proved that. The alternative might have led us down an even messier path.

Every time I find myself about to forgive you, to pick up the phone to call you, every time, I run up against some offence that I can’t overlook; the things you said about my body, which forever changed how I look at myself; I hear your voice mimicking my accent; worst of all, those words after I had excused myself to attend a funeral: “Sorry to hear about your loss. In future, please let your colleagues know when you are going to be out of the office.”

Such skillful, pointed disdain.

Forgiving you would mean abandoning everything I have been taught, letting down my pride, letting down everyone who has ever loved me, my whole community, and people like me, the downtrodden, the excluded. It would mean saying, “It’s okay to treat people like us like this.” Above all, it would mean that my friend’s grief is not worthy of consideration. She had just lost her mother and her brother, within weeks of each other. My virtual presence on a lifeless app was all I could offer her, not an embrace or a hand or a shoulder, when funerals could only happen under strict restrictions, something so against our DNA. Don’t you know how sacred funerals are to us? They used to be our rallying points. That’s where we fired ourselves up to continue the hopeless fight but we had no time for mourning. We only really had each other; in the best way, in the worst way. We only had each other. In the best way. In the worst way. I have never felt further from home.

At least now I don’t have to worry about that. I am surrounded by my loved ones every day and they remind me of what I was missing all that time I was away from them. So, thank you for that gift.

I saw this coming.

I remember saying to a friend before you landed at the bank, “I have a feeling this guy is going to change the dynamics of our team.” Little did I know the extent to which that was true, and how it would impact me personally.

Another friend told me I shouldn’t be surprised that you were the way you were. “Typical UCT,” she said. Apparently (and this was news to me) but black folks who go to UCT don’t dig us too much. White friends, yes, but not coloureds. I’m sure there’s a whole sociopsychology to be unravelled there but that’s between you all and your therapists.

As for my premonition about you, I think it was based on the way you heralded yourself in your resume: an award-winning writer from Sierra Leone who has travelled the world and even obtained a degree in my home city, at one of the elite universities on the continent, an education I myself couldn’t afford.

On the day of the apology, you were wearing that navy-blue blazer again, the same one you wore on your first day of work, the day we met. It made you look so serious, dapper, even.

The late afternoon light was too beautiful for that moment; out of place in the dreariness of that corner of Abidjan, tucked away among the drab offices of the business district. It reminded me of summer nights in Cape Town when the sun is so seductive you can’t bear the thought of going indoors. You want to be out on a wide terrace with sweeping views and large, cool drinks with ice and umbrellas and cherries, a punch or a cocktail, something refreshing with mint or lime. 

You want to be on the arm of a handsome, well-dressed man with a friendly waitress lavishing you with constant attention. She’s a student, majoring in botany or anthropology or an actress who specialises in medieval theatre and fusses over ancient Latin, something interesting and curious and rare. 

You are giddy and free and beautiful and weightless in this light, the way it hits the ocean and glances off it, a thousand jewels shimmering, a crowd of ten thousand applauding you as you enter the scene. 

In Abidjan, the sky is not as generous, and the water offers no such adulation. The lagoon that traps the city is the tepid, watery brown of instant hot chocolate, and the only glamour it shares is when the moon comes out at night and strokes the water.

You do not belong in this light.

I was already off-guard even before you spoke. You came prepared, had a lovely speech all worked out. Told me you felt the need to apologise because it seemed we had got off on the wrong foot. Perhaps your personality was too abrupt.

With each word, I felt more and more disheartened. The fact that we were alone behind closed doors in a tiny office accentuated the choking feeling. You were so there, of the place and of the moment, you had clearly been rehearsing for conversations such as this for your whole life.

With each mea culpa, you entrenched my out-of-placeness. I could never be this chic and officious where emotions are involved. And I don’t think I want to be. I could never be a public relations version of myself. My heart is too close to the skin. Where it should be.

I said nothing as you concluded and said, “Is there anything else I need to apologise for? Are you sure?”

You were opening a door I refused to enter. I chose the smart – difficult – option.

“No,” I said. “Thank you. I accept your apology.”

Here are the things I wish I could have said in that room. 

I know.

I know how it feels to be a broken boy. 

I thought you of all people would understand. But I suppose it makes sense that you wouldn’t acknowledge it, even if you did. Because to do so would mean conceding all sorts of things about yourself. Such as that I am your equal, and so are all people like me, and that would mean giving up all the notions of privilege that you have accrued from the day you were born.

You have enjoyed every single advantage over me – economic, social, educational, even a two-parent household – yet that still isn’t enough for you.

I left South Africa to get away from men like you. I was so naïve, I thought your species was confined to those borders. You were the last thing I expected to find on the other side of the continent.

So, yes, there were plenty more things you could have apologised for, but I chose to keep quiet instead. For one thing, I didn’t think you’d earned the privilege of gaining access to my most private thoughts. Secondly, when you apologised, you didn’t owe me anything, I felt. To have acknowledged any debt between us would also have been to allow an awkward intimacy.

Finally, I remained silent because I was ashamed. Because you saw straight into my childhood, me as a boy, the boy I was and still am under my second or third layer of skin. You saw straight into our overcrowded house in a no-go zone people from other townships were afraid of. You saw the cockroaches in our kitchen that embarrassed us when visitors came. You saw straight into my solitary room, where my bed is empty, where my fears mock me. You saw my drunkard father – brilliant and absent – and my bitter and longing mother. You saw my illiterate aunts and uncles who befuddled me as a child; the ones who told me I looked nothing like anyone in the family, and bullied me when my mother wasn’t around to protect her holy child. You saw the schoolyard teasing, the name calling, the lunch times with no playmates. You saw the nights I fell asleep to one set of men fucking beside me and the mornings I woke up to another. You saw nothing of the love, how I was loved so bright, so glorified, that I sometimes forgot that I was a sissy for days on end. So much so that I believed, for much of my life, that my left arm was blessed and my right highly favoured. These are not givens where I come from. These are miracles. They are forged and nurtured and prayed over by fastidious grandmothers who wait by the gate for their sons if they are five minutes too late from work because they know anything can happen to them when the army is on the prowl in the townships. If they don’t get him, maybe some skollie will rob him if it’s Friday night, pay day, and if his mouth is too big, the thug might stab him. Anything can happen and she has seen it all, having lived through two World Wars, the great depression, apartheid, prosperity and poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, being a widow and single mother of six children, three girls and three boys, each aged two years apart. So she prays while she waits. 

You don’t see any of this. You see only the assumptions you’ve made of me, a collation of stereotypes you find amusing and self-affirming. Everything that’s wrong with my world is a slap on the back to you. I suspected it from the beginning, but then it was confirmed when I read a book you recommended. 

The book, Thirteen Cents, is beautiful. I can understand why you like it. But it’s clear you got some of your ideas about coloured people from the protagonist. They are either gangsters, evil, bitches or “Wherever there’s laughter and mischief…” In other words, they are either villains or idiots. In one scene the protagonist echoes what you said to me once, something like, “I suppose your people go to Muizenberg beach every Christmas.”

The first thing you said to me after, “Hello, nice to meet you,” was, “I like to tease you.” So self-satisfied. Your whole history was in that get-away-with-murder-smile. That-son-of-a-diplomat, Swiss-boarding-school, multiple-passport smile. It had a carefreeness and a shamelessness that said: My father can pick up the phone to get me into the right school, the right job, the right club. It said: I have a taste for the unsavoury and you are freshwater fish. Just like your favourite protagonist might say.

My history has its own expression: that of the conquered but fighting, convinced of my humanity, which was under constant attack among you elites from the moment I arrived at the bank. Where I’m from, respect is our trust fund. Without it, you can lose your life, and offences range from adultery to cursing someone’s mother.

Even though I refuse to forgive, I am no longer angry. That place is all yours.

The cowboys without swagger. All yours. The con artists so lacking in charm. All yours. The macho men devoid of any thrill, the talentless brats. Feel free.

That place is designed to keep you and your kind in a subsidised lifestyle that is passed on to your children and theirs and theirs and theirs and on and on. People like me, we are destined to be beneficiaries, recipients of grants; not equals; not active participants in your maze.

Here’s the thing. You can’t apologise for what you are, it’s part of you like language, like speech, like your own spit.

Thank goodness I chose enmity.

Defining your enemies is as good as defining your friends and values.

In the end, it was fitting that you were the reason I was fired. I have no regrets, though. You’ll never hear me say that I wish I could’ve kept my mouth shut.

I don’t even blame you for lying. You had to save yourself. After all, you’re a fifty-year-old man with diminishing prospects.

In any case, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame.

What would I have done with justice, anyway? That’s your world. Those are your people. I’d rather write about you than be one of you.

Gershwin Wanneburg is a South African writer and editor, whose career credentials include Reuters news agency and the African Development Bank. See more of his work on Substack, on his website, his blog purpletolavender, and on Instagram at gershwinwanneburg.