So Soet Soos ‘n Moeder se Liefde

Customers never cease to puzzle ‘ Haasbek’ Vusi, the street vendor who sells his fruit at the corner of van der Walt and Proes streets. He has been selling all sorts of wares, ranging from vegetables to newspapers since he was nine years old, at that intersection. He has never been to school.

Take for instance this old magrizana in a battered Volkswagen which was even older than her. She stops the jalopy at the intersection and Vusi proffers her an open box with large, mouth-watering, sweet, crimson grapes. She plucks a plump grape from a bunch, pops it into her mouth and gives Vusi a big smile.

“Tho thoet thooth ah moeder the liefthde. Nê Medem?” Vusi lisps through the gap in his front teeth. A fine spray of saliva covers the grapes as he leans forward to praise and recommend them to the magrizana. Her smile fades and she roughly pushes the box away from the window of her car.

“Nee jong, loop. Loop. Ek is nie meer lus vir jou druiwe nie.” She says as she drives off.

Vusi goes to the pavement and puts down the box of grapes, scratches his head and then puts his hands on his hips. It must be something I said that made her change her mind. Vusi says to himself. Maybe it is that sales pitch of mine. Maybe I should go back to describing my wares simply as lekker, nice, and do away with that fancy phrase I learned from that farmer at the market. Let me go back to the tried and tested term ‘lekka’ which I used successfully in the past to recommend whatever I was selling, whether it was peanuts, vegetables or newspapers.

But customers never cease to amaze him. His thoughts went back to the eighties. He was nine years old and selling newspapers at this very same intersection.

“ Lekka lekka nyoes, lekka nyoes basie ”. he said to a burly man in a pale blue safari suit passing by, waving the newspaper in front of him. The man gave him a moerse taai klap that sent him reeling back and the bunch of newspapers under his arms flying. Vusi turned to run away. The man came after him and for good measure gave him a kick in his pants that sent him falling flat on his face on pavement, smashing his two upper front teeth.

This was the day after the Pretoria city centre bomb blast when the ANC started intensifying its fight against the apartheid regime and bombing buildings with people in them instead of electric pylons, like before. This was in retaliation to the pre-emptive cross border strikes by the SA army into neighbouring states in which many civilians were killed. This was front page news in all newspapers countrywide.

Hardly lekker nuus, one could say, for supporters of the evil regime or the bereaved.

And that is how Vusi lost his front teeth and changed his sales pitch.