Don’t touch me on my PE-ness: My beef with Jannie & Baksteen

PE-ness is as much a state of mind as a physical characteristic that can be pointed out. If you’re lucky enough to have spent some time in PE, and there is a little PE-ness on you, you should be proud.

Algoa Bay, off the South African city of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape province, is home to just under half the global population of African penguins. AFP/MARCO LONGARI

It’s hard to make any kind of a mark as a writer, but sometimes, by luck or by design, we come up with something that captures the popular mood. I’ve come close to this kind of public acclaim on a couple of occasions, but seldom more so than with one particular turn of phrase. It’s interesting that you can write a bunch of books, blogs, screenplays, articles beyond the counting, but the writing that people remember boils down to only a couple of words. They are a disputed couple of words, because there is some uncertainty around who came up…

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It’s hard to make any kind of a mark as a writer, but sometimes, by luck or by design, we come up with something that captures the popular mood.

I’ve come close to this kind of public acclaim on a couple of occasions, but seldom more so than with one particular turn of phrase. It’s interesting that you can write a bunch of books, blogs, screenplays, articles beyond the counting, but the writing that people remember boils down to only a couple of words.

They are a disputed couple of words, because there is some uncertainty around who came up with them. The main contenders for having invented those words are me, and a comedy music duo from Port Elizabeth known as Jannie & Baksteen.

The phrase in question is about Port Elizabeth too. It goes like this: “Show off your PE-ness.”

You get it, right? Port Elizabeth, or PE, is an oft-disrespected coastal city with a bit of an insecurity complex. I’m from PE, and I spent the first several years of my writing career typing up stories set in the city and its surrounds.

“Show off your PE-ness,” with its gentle sexual innuendo, is a call to self-love and civic pride. Sure, PE is not as attractive, as vibey, as big or as important as Cape Town. It doesn’t have the tropical climate of Durban. It doesn’t have the economy of Joburg, but hell it’s still a friendly, relaxed and fun place to live, and we should celebrate that!

This was my thinking, when I used the phrase about showing off your PE-ness on the back blurb of the first book I published in, 1997. It was a book of surfing stories, and the sentence was something along the lines of “Hagen Engler shows off his PE-ness in all its surf-starved glory”.

The book received some minor acknowledgement at the time, but soon faded from mainstream view.

Fast-forward 10 years.

Jannie & Baksteen, a pair of PE folk musos otherwise known as Joe van der Linden and Yawn Allen, record a song called Living in PE. It is a hilarious piece of local satire, recommending: “If you from Cape Town, show off you Cape Town-ness. If you from Wilderness, show off your Wilderness-ness. If you from PE, show off your PE-ness!”

Perhaps feeling a bit insecure about who came up with it first, I soon wrote a newspaper article about the Bay, as it’s known, and titled it: “Feel my PE-ness!”

By this stage, talking about your PE-ness had become pretty hip, and I was dismayed to see that Jannie & Baksteen had become known for it. Slightly put out, I tried to assert my PE-ness primacy. These guys had touched me on my PE-ness.

“I was the first to show off my PE-ness!” I ranted on Facebook. But few were really interested in the great PE-ness wars.

I eventually reached out to Jannie & Baksteen. No one wanted to get into a PE-ness measuring contest. The term had entered the mainstream and we both had a lot to be proud of. Some detective work revealed that PE photographer Tim Hopwood and told them about PE-ness.

Where Tim got the idea, one can’t be sure. But at the same time, I also cannot be sure where I got my idea back in the day. Had my PE-ness sprung up, spontaneous and fully-formed? Or had I got PE-ness from someone else? Perhaps even subconsciously!

Is any idea really original? Perhaps what I thought of as my PE-ness was someone else’s PE-ness all along!

Perhaps PE-ness has come down to us from decades past, and we are each simply PE-ness custodians, who get to share the pride and joy of PE-ness with others. Handing it down, as it were.

These days I’ve got over my PE-ness envy. Whether they invented it or not, Jannie & Baksteen certainly made PE-ness famous, and for that, they should be acknowledged.

I’ve also developed a far more accepting attitude to the matter. PE-ness doesn’t really belong to anybody. Whether you have PE-ness or not, it is something you are endowed with, not something you invented yourself. You are merely a temporary curator of your PE-ness.

PE-ness is as much a state of mind as a physical characteristic that can be pointed out. If you’re lucky enough to have spent some time in PE, and there is a little PE-ness on you, you should be proud.

Not overly proud, mind you. There’s no need to wave it in someone’s face. But there is a certain quiet confidence that comes from PE-ness. Sometimes, just knowing it’s there is enough.