NDUMISO NGCOBO | Kavorka’s a joke – until you’re staring at a Glock

In the early noughties, when I was working at Unilever, a bunch of us were gathered at a colleague’s house in Boksburg for a Saturday evening braai. The booze was flowing freely and one of our number launched into a hilarious stand-up comedy performance. The lady of the house and her friends, suffering from FOMO, edged closer to the braai area to enjoy the impromptu Chris Rock routine up close.

About 20 minutes into it, the music — the wildly popular 50 Cent smash hit of the time, In Da Club — stops rather abruptly. The collective groan of “No man, who switched the music off?” is rudely interrupted by the owner of the house emerging from the house à la Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Brandishing a cocked Glock 9mm pistol, he yells at the top of his voice: “Ay’hlanze indlu! Fusegani kwami, zinja!” (“My house, vomit everyone out! Bugger off from my house, you dogs!”)

I remember two things about that hasty departure. One, I reversed my VW Golf out of the driveway with two doors wide open. Two, there was no opportunity to grab my half-full bottle of Tennessee’s finest cheap bourbon by the grill.

In any case, the emesis from the house regrouped at a nearby filling station and held a post-mortem into our undignified ejection from the braai while we tore pieces from the bloody Texan steak one of the fellows escaped with, still attached to a pair of braai tongs. The mystery is quickly solved; the host was apparently greatly annoyed by the sight of his madam, head thrown back in laughter, enthralled by the comedic timing of our fake Chris Rock.

I recently had to repeat this story to one of my two boys at uni. He was sharing how one of his mates had stopped talking to him after an evening out, when the latter’s girlfriend had apparently lapped up every one of his witty one-liners. For context, this particular fruit of my loins has been a one-liner machine since he was in his diapers.

The average grown man is really nothing more than a giant five-year-old boy with whiskers and pubes

He’s the same child I once ran into in the passage when he was around eight years old and asked where his brother was. Without missing a beat, he pointed at a closed bedroom: “He’s in there doing something that probably needs grown-up supervision.” And he was right too. The sibling was, at that very moment, busy with attempted arson, lighter fluid and matches in hand. Now, fast forward to a karaoke bar with university mates and he’s got someone’s girlfriend giving him Olive Oyl staring at Popeye eyes.

So I decided to give him The Talk. You’re carrying my genes, I told him, our Qadi clan DNA. That means you exude potent sex appeal. Like your father, I emphasised. We Qadi males possess kavorka, “the allure of the animal”. Never mind that it’s a word invented by Seinfeld scriptwriters.

With great power, I cautioned him, comes great responsibility. So when you are in the presence of your mates’ significant others, you have to keep that Qadi charm in check.

The average grown man is really nothing more than a giant five-year-old boy with whiskers and pubes. My radical feminist friends have chastised me for making this point. Apparently, it gives men a free pass to be as problematic as they want because, “Hey, boys will be boys.” But whenever I spend a few hours with a group of friends averaging about 50, I find myself thinking: “Nee man, all that’s missing are water pistols, plastic Zoro swords and black masks, and these blokes are back in kindergarten.”

As a 10-year-old, I collected clay from a stream near my home in my Hammarsdale and moulded the most beautiful clay rhinoceros. And when all the Standard 4B girls marvelled at how realistic its horn looked, an “accident” ensued — a fellow called Surprise crushed the rhino by standing on it “while he was not looking”.

The moral of all these tales is pretty simple. If you are part of the hairy-faced half of the human species with dangly bits, please curb your enthusiasm around your fellow primates’ love interests. The one-liner king returns to campus today. Before he leaves, I intend to remind him: “Son, please tame your inner allure of the animal.”