I would rather be myself than a pretentious Model C dude

MAYBE I am irritable and jealous because I did not go to a Model C school. In my time, they had not invented "multi-racialism" yet.

Blacks went to their "own" schools where they were taught religious education, gardening, sewing, singing, and wood work - with the latter surviving to haunt Juju in later years. There was also a smattering of serious subjects, which included grossly distorted history.

To some, like me, it looked normal.

A boy (yours truly) who grows up in a township with pit toilets, communal water taps, gravel roads and no electricity can be forgiven for thinking the white people he sees once every while he goes to town are superior. They live in massive houses, drive beautiful cars and have electric lights even in the streets. Above all, they speak English - even the young ones.

You think: God made it that way on purpose. That is why my church's bishop is white. When he is due to visit, the whole congregation gets the June-July (trembles). The church gets a spring-cleaning inside and out, and ma, pa and the kids wear their very best clothes.

Pictures of a white Jesus nailed to the cross validated the thought that there was something holy about being white.

There was also a hymn, still sung all over today, that talks of ba etsa dibe ba batsho (black sinners) who would not be allowed on the throne ... until they were white and forgiven. Or words to that effect.

Our mothers and sisters were falling all over themselves applying skin lightening creams that in later years left them charred and blacker than they had been originally.

Let it be said that today they have gone all the hog: You can't tell Dieketseng from Foefie Fourie, looking at their heads from behind.

A friend says I reminisce too much in this column, but I can't resist it one more time.

My grandmother worked for a white family in Orange Grove, Johannesburg. From time to time I went to visit and slept on the floor next to the bed in grandma's back room, which can't have been larger than an RDP house kitchen.

Grandma and I ate and drank out of steel plates and mugs. And much as the family had two kids about my age, I was never allowed inside the main house.

I was never told outright what was out of bounds, but like a well-trained puppy, I knew my limits. I would play with the family kids in the garden, and when they went inside the house, I would spontaneously stop at the kitchen door and peek in with envy at such lavish a lifestyle - electric stove, sink and breakable china.

Still, I loved the (white) family. I thought they loved me too and wished I could claim them as my relatives. They occasionally gave grandma some remnants of toasted bread smeared with jam to bring home, and I would gorge myself to my proud father's embarrassment.

The wake-up call came one day when the madam sent me an old hand-me-down jersey from one of her girls, and I wrote a letter to thank her.

Being a good boy with manners, I wrote: "Thank you for the gift I received from thee ."

Fast forward: My father tore up the letter while I trembled in front of him fighting back tears. That was my first political lesson.

And rewind: I might not be Model C alumni, and I am definitely not white. I am grateful to be a normal black South African who has and will never say: "I was like; hey dude; whazzup, man?"

Can't we just be black - or whatever - and love it?