Sorry, I’m getting side-tracked; going off at a tangent. It happens to me sometimes. I start talking about one thing. And next thing I know, I am talking about something different. My Pa was always complaining that I never concentrated.

So, I was explaining about my Dr Martin Luther King poster, right?

I typed part of his speech underneath his photo. His dream-speech from 1963:

I have a dream that my children one day will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

Powerful stuff, right?

And my third poster was the one and only, late Michael Jackson. With words from one of his songs that I typed out in Bold Italics, 18-point:

If you wanna be my brother, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.

I just love that line.

So there I sat at my desk beneath my posters, waiting for Attie to stop going on and on about sky-diving. He finished at last. And then he noticed my posters.

“Hey, cool!” he said. He was reading the words too. I could see his lips moving.

So I was hopeful. Surely my plan would work? Surely Attie would get the message that racism was wrong? Especially when the message came from such famous, important people? And not just me with my bad Matric results.

“Hey, Dennis, these posters are great! I think I must do some too for my wall. Maybe some sky-diving photos. I’ll ask my sister to make some captions too. Like: ‘Get high without drugs’. Yeah, that will be cool.”

And then – as if he hadn’t just read the words of Mr Mandela and Dr King and Michael Jackson – Attie launched into one of his racist jokes.

“This is a good one, I promise you, Dennis. See, Sipho and Vusi are walking down the road in Soweto, right. So Sipho says–”

I put my fingers in my ears. “Stop it, Attie!”

He pulled my hands away from my ears. “Lighten up! Jokes are good for you. They relieve stress.”

That was when I realised: I needed a way, way better plan. A much more powerful plan than my posters. Next weekend I would have to sit and think extra hard and extra long. Getting Attie to change his bigoted ways would need a stunning, brilliant plan for sure. I would have to use every brain-cell in my head. Even though my Pa always said I don’t have two brain-cells to rub together.

Mr Naidoo came in just then and said I must take the posters down.

“Sorry, Dennis. I can’t set a precedent. Next thing, everyone will be putting up posters. And then we’ll have mayhem. We don’t want mayhem, right?”

As I took the posters down, a thought suddenly struck me: Deeds not words!

That was our school motto: ‘Deeds not words’. And yes, I thought, my next plan must be about deeds. About actions. Since words didn’t seem to have much effect on my friend Attie.

***

Tell us: What do you think about ‘politically incorrect’ jokes? Is a joke always ‘just a joke’?