Giving pinkies the finger

Sometimes I think I’m no more than that species I despise so: the slightly pink liberal standing on the street corner doing the un-Zulu finger-pointing of “Zuma must go, Zuma must go” – thanks for the vision, Trevor Noah.

But I have a Martin Luther King dream.

Admittedly a pink dream because it’s not mine. It’s a condescending dream for a lady who is ever so slightly illiterate (read: no ways will she finish a bewildering course on finance and housing) and all she’s ever wanted was a house. Her house. I’ve seen it over the six years since Diketso came into my life: my age; still scrubbing floors; still
dreaming about Her Place that she hopes to leave to her daughter’s Aids baby, now going into matric.

Yes, she gets the promising phone calls at election time; she applied for an RDP house just after ’94 – and last year, she got it.

“But it’s outside Vereeniging, not where I work. Far…” She was right to turn it down. But, like me, time is running out
for Diketso – so I started dreaming. We have a “bad” building (read: a policeman who died alone and
the city took over his house) on the main road hardly a block from where Diketso lives in squalor.

The pink community, ever vigilant and ever unforgiving, earmarked it a risky property with “drug dealings; criminals hiding”.

But I dreamt: I asked council if they will give Diketso a lease on the property they pay R2 000 a month for just for security (to keep the pinkies happy), although it is stripped bare. They listened. A form landed in my inbox asking me to present “a plan”.

And a plan I have: prime property on a main road with public transport opposite a park – a dream for city’s vision of densification around green areas and blending low-cost housing into the “more affluent suburbs”.

I’m costing, planning, promising myself the container city on that property won’t be more than three storeys because of the neighbours. I know they will complain, the pinkies who “really care for the underprivileged – but my view is gone, you know”.

And that’s the problem: pink liberals always make the right noises, but their racism is thinly veiled as elitism. But I dare to dream.