Kwasong
A call out the blue with the words; I would really like to talk to you has brought Heba and I together for a coffee and catch-up. She’s geared down from her previous business suited look and could easily be mistaken for one of the students that mill about this bohemian village. We take a table on the side street away from the main drag. We shuffle our phones out of sight to save the lurking phone-snatchers the trouble of stealing them. She laughs at my suggestion that our precautions are saving people from committing a sin.
We order coffee from (and made by) people who drink what wannabe posh folk call builders tea. Heba is keen on a (very) late breakfast. Luckily it’s an all too rare ‘all day breakfast’ place and I say a silent prayer for the owners that know how to manage a kitchen. I’m also relieved that Heba wants to eat — it suggests she might have less to talk about than I had feared. Or worse, that she might ask me the dreaded; why?
We observe street life while we settle in and wait for drinks. The taxis (aka e-hailing service cars) making ridiculous five-point turns in the narrow streets, the plethora of car-guards, the ladies of leisure funny-parking their giant-ass mummy wagons and the toddlers left in the care of their nannies. Despite it being mid-month and mid-week, there’s a fair amount of people about having coffee, holding meetings and generally living their best lives in one of the last open air high-streets in the city if not the country.
Having grown up in a city with regular street life (even if that street life was strictly separated by race), it feels like going home every time I visit here. I share as much with Heba and we get to talking about being born, growing up and living an entire life from childhood to retirement in shopping malls and gated estates with all movement happening by car. She laughs at this and admits, ‘that’s me right there. It is what it is’ she says. Her honey eyes bright and sincere. Then she suddenly changes tack and with a much more serious face adds; ‘it was a wild time for me, I probably did not pay much attention to you or even getting to know you then’.
Thankfully my coffee cup is halfway to my mouth and I use the opportunity to hide myself behind it for just a bit longer. ‘The coffee is getting better’ I remark almost absentmindedly but very intentionally. Her honey eyes catch and hold mine for a moment longer than normal and she returns to her late breakfast. ‘This is good — better than I expected’. I’m thrilled to hear her review of breakfast and share this with her. It’s a brave (and likely foolish) person who opens a bakery across the street from a bakery that’s been going for fifty years. Long may the new kids on the block keep going and keep on winning, I end.
Being a stranger to normal life, Heba asks about the neighbouring bakery. I give her a summary and the highlights over the past twenty something years I’ve been witness to its changing fortunes. She laughs out loud at my suggestion that it now chugs along, patronised by people who care less for what a kwasong should be like and more for the pricing and the access it gives them to the bohemian village. ‘Kwasong?’ — she asks very much with a question mark, eyebrows raised. I stay silent and in a moment it hits her and she laughs again.
I add; ‘kwasong is not mine, I came across it on Twitter.’ We spend some time on our favourite recent Twitter moments and then out of the blue: ‘I’m reminded why I was curious enough to try to fit you into what was already an overfull time in my life’, she says, her honey eyes sparkling. With my coffee cup now firmly on the table, I am defenceless and it shows. Maybe that’s just in my head. Heba kindly leaves it there and cuddles a passing mutt. Still Heba’s disarming if not outright charming change of demeanour is at worst, pleasant company in which to while away an hour or so. A day later I’m still processing Heba’s words and my frozen non-responses to her. On the bright side, my non-responses were not enough to faze her and we parted with her suggestion to; ‘let’s do this again?.’.
Allegedly a croissant is “Kwasong” in seTswana — idk go ask Portia Moemedi
© Jesh Baker for Oppi Stoep 2024, All Rights Reserved
