LUSITHI MALI

Its Friday, the streets are full of smiles, people are glowing and the bottle stores have long been opened, Madanana, who has mastered the art of drinking all day and every day, is vividly drunk, speaking in tongues of vulgarity topped with slang-like American, “Ey come, but don’t come and fuck around here ” …he says as he sees me passing, I’m wearing my fast pace walk as if rushing to heaven but slowly scouting my environment as I don’t know who might feel merry and organise me a bottle…. he doesn’t look jolly although drunk and from a distance I could see that there was a quarrel about some bottles that were not adding up, and this meant “someone is fucking around” and I was going to drink in place of that someone, street justice, they’ll let you watch them drink. Usually, he would call me if there’s something to drink, approach me if sober and persuade me into going with him to his sister: “masiyoshaya-shaya edladleni, u-my sister won’t mind, in fact she will be enchanted that I came with you “Ntwana yaseRhodes, Where Leaders Learn To Drink” and afterwards he would burst into an infinitely finite laughter that made me love to hate the association of the ‘ivory tower’ and me. I went towards him and told him I was good for only a few glasses, “I have an exam on Monday and its numbers, so only three glasses will do” although I had no problem with drinking and driving, just that I needed some flowers first from a florist on campus and I was in a feel to meet up with some intellectual tsotsis on campus for a “good” talk about propaganda, thriving ideologies, modernity and its downfalls, the system, the illusions we have come to think of as reality, enjoyment and desire, the desire to desire, happiness and its false hopes, success and failure, education from all angles, individualism and communalism, the dictatorship within democracy, order and law, the universe, mathematical laws that govern nature, stars and mars, erroneous beliefs and misconceptions about the African way of life, the term “Embo” was a reference to this life and it was the notion of this Embo that made us wander in endless rhetoric filled with pompous and bombastic words, words I had thought of unnecessary and not significant to the “African Cause.” Ours was quite a gathering, “each one is drawn to one of their own,” I had thought of this saying plenty times and to see it fitting exactly to the situation of these fellows I happen to meet and live with side by side for as long the paper was not acquired…Here were my brothers in arms, in disobedience, in education, in reality and in all that jazz you can think of. I got my herbs now, bottles of beer in my gut, talk going….but there’s something mystical about all this…I keep having flashbacks from The Bottom of the Bottle (Can Themba) and how it fits in our situation, I’m thinking of Gil Scott Heron in his tune The Bottle where he talks of people living and trapped in bottles. Bottles aren’t just bottles, though, there are words you can’t say unless you have yourself go down to the bottom of the bottle in order to retrieve them, there are explanations that you cannot offer without before visiting a bottle……..If we are to live freely let’s not have bottled emotions and feelings…..Let’s live free and prosper in this land of our forebears.