It’s a Sunday morning. I wake up feeling groggy, so I stay in bed until around 9.

At 10:45, I’m walking out of my room. I don’t really feel like going to the mall, but I have to!

It’s Mo’s birthday this coming Friday and I want to get him something nice…

That’s what good friends do, isn’t it?

***

I’ve never been good at this business of choosing presents.

What do I get for Mo?

He knows a little bit of chess, so, maybe, a chessboard will do?

Or a book?

Or a tie?

This business of buying presents is a very tricky one. I don’t even know Mo that well to be getting him a present. Sure, we are classmates and we live in the same block of flats, but, still, I don’t know him that well.

What will he make of my kind gesture? Will he think I’m just being a good friend? Or will he think I’m reciprocating his advances? I can’t decide!

So, I spend the next two hours walking from shop to shop trying to decide whether buying a present was a bright idea or not.

***

By the time I decide on what to buy, I’ve already spent three hours at the mall.

I’m standing at a queue, waiting to pay for the t-shirt I’m buying him. He’s a big Orlando Pirates fan – surely there’s no going wrong if I buy him his favourite team’s t-shirt. I’m standing at the queue, trying to block any second thoughts and doubts from penetrating my mind. The line is moving slow. I attribute this to the fact that it’s a Sunday and there are only two tellers serving the customers.

“Motho omontsho!” the lady behind me exclaims, bitterness and anger in her voice. I look up from my phone.

“Look at her,” she nods towards the tellers.

I look.

A teller is chatting to her colleague while serving a customer who’s buying a pair of running shoes.

“She’s chatting away. As if there are no customers in the line,” she’s talking to me in seSotho.

I don’t respond. My seSotho is not good enough to hold a conversation, even if it was, I wouldn’t know what to say. So, I say nothing!

“Black people!” she says again. I don’t look at her this time.

“There isn’t a place where a black person will succeed,” she says dismissively.

I laugh. I don’t know what I’m laughing at. Am I laughing at the fact that she’s black and saying these horrible things about black people? Or am I laughing because I’m embarrassed and don’t know what to say.

“And then you – the youth – get angry when we say these things,” she is speaking to me directly. My mind runs to its archives, retrieving there a review I read recently. Lerato Tshabala’s forthcoming book “The Way I See It: The Musings of a Black Woman in the Rainbow Nation” caused a stir on social media recently. In an extract published by Sunday Time titled “Why I hire blue eyes before black guys” Tshabalala writes “…sadly, the majority of our people [i.e. black people] are chancers and don’t give a damn about customer service.” The excerpt further elaborates and justifies why she thinks white people render efficient services than black people. When I read that review, little did I know that I’d be standing next to a someone who shares Tshabalala’s sentiments.

I want to respond and explain to her why she can’t cast all black people under one blanket because of one person. But I don’t.

I don’t laugh either. I wait my turn, pay and leave the shop wondering when and how one black person became a representative of a whole group.

ZZ xx