Living in SA is the ultimate extreme sport

I honestly don't know what's going on with black people right now. All I know is that I don't wanna be a part of it any more.

Just the other day I was filling in some forms and I got to those five boxes: "White", "Black African", "Coloured", "Asian" and "Other" (for purely statistical purposes, naturally). My pen hovered over "Other" for about five seconds before ticking "Black African".

Back in the good ole days, when Dr Koornhof called us "the Bantu", you could sommer saunter into your local Bantu Affairs office and apply to change your "population group" to anything you wanted, really, as long as it wasn't "White" (unless you were a really fair-skinned "Coloured" who'd practised hard for the pencil test. Oh, how I wish I was making this up.)

But I digress. Black people are really starting to bug me. It's the little things. When did we have this National Black People Imbizo where it was decided that we were going to be participating in extreme sports now, hmm? Why wasn't I invited so that I could register my violent protest? Is this what the struggle was for? Is this what that rebel without a clear cause, Golden Miles Bhudu, walked around in heavy chains muttering unintelligible gibberish for?

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Since when are we inviting each other to birthday parties so that we can tie ropes around our ankles and leap off those Soweto towers for thrills? Why am I getting invitations to go bungee jumping at Moses Mabhida? And this next question is directed specifically at my black readers: "Who ARE you people?!"

Scuba diving? Is this even a real sport, or is this just another one of those "sports" that white people invented to avoid being embarrassed by Usain Bolt?

From where I sit, scuba diving is not a sport as much as it is an endeavour whose entire point is to not drown. That's it. If you don't drown, you're a master scuba diver.

A week after Freedom Day, it seems to me that my people have forgotten where we come from. The reason we've traditionally not participated in extreme sports is actually quite simple. Surviving to the age of 21 as a black person in South Africa is the ultimate extreme sport. Oh, shut up and stop rolling your eyes at my "race card". I kid you not. I'm not embellishing when I tell you that the only reason I have never been shot is because the dozen or so people who have tried to separate my body from my soul were rotten shots. That's correct: people have attempted to blow my head off using 9mm Parabellums and even an AK47 on one occasion. My crime? Mostly that I was there when they got the urge to shoot.

I'm not joking. The first time I almost got shot, my friends Sabelo Faku and Mapito Ndawo and I were minding our own business walking to KwaMagaba shopping centre to buy amagwinya (vetkoeks) and polony when a chap accosted us in the bushes below the Mpumalanga College of Education in my Hammarsdale neighbourhood. We must have been between the ages of 12 and 14.

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Are you IFP or UDF, he inquired. Mapito, the smartass, responded, "We're neither. We're Roman Catholic." As we dove into the bushes with bullets whizzing past our ears I cursed Mapito for watching too many Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns and hallucinating that you can chirp a random chap with an advanced case of lazy eye.

If you think we immediately went to the Mpumalanga SAP (that's the SAPS before they added the "S") to report this case of attempted murder, you obviously grew up in a sheltered suburb. For starters, the SAP officers were kept busy with much more serious cases, such as the severed heads that kept popping up in the Mnqandodo River. I bet if we'd reported the case, the officer would have said, "No one was shot? So why are you here?"

I know that this experience is not unique to me and my Mpumalanga township, Hammarsdale, folks. Anyone who grew up in Emdeni in Soweto or KwaMashu in Durban can identify: walking outside of your designated street and neighbourhood was an extreme sport .

The journey from my Unit 1 hood to church was either 4km or 3km, depending on the route. The problem is that the 3km route meant walking on the infamous "Five Rand" road that Fred Khumalo wrote about so eloquently in his brilliant book Touch My Blood. Historically, one had to pay a R5 "toll fee" just to cross the street. In later years, one had to pay in yardage because some thug wielding an okapi knife would chase you for 500m attempting to tear you a new hole. Your crime? Walking on his turf.

So skydiving? Bungee jumping? Snowboarding? What are you on about? Wasn't growing up in Tembisa or Gugulethu extreme enough for you? Why do you need to be dangling from a rope in the middle of Moses Mabhida while suffering from cardiac arrest, with a brown river of shame cascading up your back, in front of strangers?

Find Ngcobo on twitter @NdumisoNgcobo, or e-mail ngcobon@sundaytimes.co.za