My friends call me Khanda (head). This is just one variation on many monikers I've been given due to the boulder perched atop my neck. I've shared before that I've been called Potimende (suitcase), Nguzunga (boulder) and so on.
I was reminded of this the other day during a conversation with my wife. She was trying to share an encounter she'd had with a certain woman at a function we'd both attended. I was struggling to figure out who she was talking about. This is especially because the woman has a really generic name. Let's call her Thato. Finally, in exasperation, my wife goes "Come on now, you know Thato with the ..." (using her hands to draw a square jaw).
I immediately knew who it was. We giggled nervously. With more than a bit of shame. We'd just shamelessly body-shamed this poor woman, which is unfair because what's she going to do about the fact that she's got bone-crushing mandibles in the mould of the Incredible Hulk's?
A few months ago, I posted a Facebook status update that read, "If you have a generic, popular name such as Sbu, Tebogo or Ndumiso, are you aware that folks use descriptors to distinguish you from others with the same name?" I was quickly accused of encouraging body shaming. It was a fair observation, I thought. But then again, was it? Is all mention of someone's physical features body shaming? Are all body shaming incidents equal or are some more equal than others? Let me give you an example.
I once worked with two Stefans from the same department. During a conversation I say something about one of them. The person I am talking to responds, "Which Stefan?" Both their surnames leave my brain. I blurt, "'Oh, big Stefan", using my hands to indicate a wide girth, and my colleague nods in understanding.
Is that the same as the time a few of us went away to Loskop in Mpumalanga for the weekend. During a drunken Truth or Dare session, a colleague was asked to declare if she'd ever had "sexual relations" with a certain fellow and her response was "Yes", while wiggling her pinky finger. We all know what that means. For the rest of the time, every time someone referred to him they would go "Bongani" while wiggling their little finger. We were being extremely ugly, I concede.
Are these two incidents the same?
It's a bit tricky, innit? In that first example, I insist that it was an honest attempt at differentiating between large Stefan and dentally well-endowed Stefan. But I doubt that large Stefan would have taken too kindly to that description. It's not as if the man was not aware of the number of Nando's full chicken meals he wolfed down or the fact that he hadn't done any exercise since leaving the army when Balthazar Vorster was still prime minister. He sure as hell didn't need Khanda to point this out.
This reminds me of a column penned by former editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makhanya, about a decade ago, at the height of the Jackie Selebi debacle. In the column, which was dripping with a delicious, satirical slant, Makhanya told a story about Selebi's hunt for "a man who may or may not be missing a tooth", who is a prominent figure in football circles.
In the column, Makhanya never once named "the man who may or may not be missing a tooth" but everyone who read the article knew exactly who he was referring to. By the third time he wrote "the man who may or may not be missing a tooth", I was in stitches.
I would have paid a year's supply of Gentleman Jack to be a fly on that wall if the man had confronted Makhanya about the column. What would he say? "Everybody knows that I am the only man in football who may or may not have a missing tooth!"?
Speaking of Makhanya, his great buddy and author of the acclaimed novel Dancing the Death Drill, Fred Khumalo, has an interesting story from the KwaZulu-Natal legislature.
Apparently, during a debate, the late former premier Dr Lionel Mtshali was attempting to forcefully make a point in his famously belligerent manner. Late ANC bigwig Dumisani Makhaye, seated near the press gallery, kept heckling him by asking "What's this one on about?", punctuating "this" by making a ball with his fingers in front of his forehead. For years, Mtshali had a huge signature bump on his forehead the size of a golf ball, you see.
We're living through a particularly politically correct era, with ultra-sensitivity on steroids, especially on Twitter, where I recently referred to the US president as "that tangerine with T-Rex hands" and got a lashing. But I bet that individual would immediately understand who I was talking about if I wrote a column in which I referred to "the former president who may or may not have a double skull"...