If someone were to offer you a million bucks - what would you do? Where would you go, and what would you change?
It’s not a question I like to ask often, a hypothetical question to which there’s no real answer. But I asked it anyway as I was interested. The panic over the economic crisis and what might happen should an endless vault of money no longer be just another credit card away had left me confused. I’d seen friends disintegrate in panic and anguish over the possibility of impending unemployment, I’d seen others jump at redundancy packages and disappear off over the horizon never to return. Something was missing. Sitting there, face to face with my friend Thomas, sharing a coffee outside of Masiphumelele, Cape Town, the township that is his home, I wanted to ask him as I knew the answer might teach me a thing or two. So I did.
At 27 we are the same age but I feel younger. To look at Thomas now you would not see his past. His gentle eyes and friendly smile are warm and welcoming. His voice is soft, his speech languid and rolling. To the kids he is ‘coooach’ , the guy who always has time to take them to football practice every afternoon. On Sundays he goes to church, in his spare time he mixes house music – his shack constantly reverberates with bass and you always know when he’s home. We often go for breakfast and discuss plans for his football coaching, he always dresses smartly and orders the largest thing on the menu. He talks openly and honestly, about his upbringing and his regrets, his hopes and his dreams. We are very different but he is a valued friend.
Thomas was born in the Transkei but came to Cape Town when he was still young, making the big move west with his mother, brother, nieces and nephews. His father had long since disappeared by the time they came to Masi, and he helped build the small shack which their mother still owns today. With no father figure, Thomas was raised in dishonour and was cast out of his tight-knit Xhosa community, his shame compounded as he took the most ignoble job; collecting wood to sell by the side of the road so he might earn a few rand to supplement the meagre earnings his mother brought home from her job at the local supermarket. Thomas attended school but left early, he started smoking ‘daga’ (pot), frequenting the ‘shabines’ (bars) and soon fell in with a local gang from which he still carries a couple of faded self-styled tattoos. He stole and, in his own words, bought shame on his family.
But he found strength in his local church community and redemption through football; coaching the kids and in so doing becoming a role model, giving him more reason not to go back to his old ways. These days he carries a lot of respect and you can tell it means a lot to him.
We’d been talking for a while and he’d told me of his girlfriend, talking with big wide eyes of the girl he’d seen at church, how he’d watched her each morning for the past few weeks but hadn’t mustered the bravery to approach her, fearful he would not be able to live up to her expectations should she agree to come home and meet his family. He wished he could do up his shack so he could approach her with confidence and give her the life she deserved, this girl he’d never spoken to, but he couldn’t find the cash. And with that I asked him as I wanted to know: “If tomorrow you were given all the money in the world, what would you do with it?”
Looking at his empty plate and the cosy and comfortable surrounds of the café, Thomas appeared almost embarrassed for an instant before taking a minute or so to mull over what I’d asked. He replied that he would do three things.
The first would be to do up his house so he could ask his girl to marry him. He could never expect her to live in his shack with its leaking corrugated iron roof and separate out-house latrine. He would do this for her.
The second was to buy more equipment for his boys so he could get them registered in the Cape Town football leagues, to give them a future and keep them from the temptations of the street that cost him his adolescence.
The third was to buy a large truck, one of those huge American style things with the large flat bed at the back. He would drive around South Africa and buy up all the wood from all the men and boys who stand, rain or shine, just trying to make a living for whatever they can. He would buy this wood, not because he needed it, but so that they would never be as poor or suffer as much as he had done, so they would never feel the shame he had and would not make the same mistakes. And for the look in his eyes, I knew he meant it. I never saw that answer coming and pondering what he’d just said, I didn’t have the strength to reply.
To look back on the conversation I know I wouldn’t have been so selfless. I’d like to think I would have been, hypothetically of course, but in reality I know that for all my good intentions, there is still a part of me that would look to satisfy my own material needs first. Bigger this, better that, upgrade, renew, renovate – product of the country I grew up in, where money used to be easy to come by if you played the right game and joined the race.
But maybe we are on the brink of something new, a sea change in thinking. It’s plain to see that we can’t leave our hopes in the hands of someone else, we can no longer sideline our childhood dreams while we earn a quick buck. It’s no longer that easy and maybe that’s a good thing. The economy had become a progress trap; so seemingly flawless was the model, so easily accessible was the financial carrot, that it robbed us not of ambition but of imagination and creativity. If out of this great collapse comes a change in thought, a re-evaluation of what we are doing and why and a redirection and redoubling of our ambitions towards something more positive and passionate, then maybe better times lie ahead.
Maybe, hopefully, we’ll see
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