Adam Kok’s first lesson about women

This is not the first time I have had to apologise for my late friend and comrade Adam Kok’s excesses.
I have already made it quite clear, I hope, that I disapprove of Adam’s philosophy, but that, mistaken as it may be, I think it is educational.
To understand Adam’s philosophy, all you need to remember are two things.
The first is that Adam was besotted with women – women of all kinds, in all walks of life and in all respects – let us just say “women”in general.

Secondly, Adam believed that human happiness was the most important thing in life, which means he was a sort of Benthamite. If something made people happy without causing any problems for anybody else, Adam was all for it – forget culture, forget morality, forget religion. For Adam there were no taboos.

And that is why he advised the young man who was sleeping with both his mother-in-law and his wife to go for a solution which made them all happy.

Those of us who take culture, morality and religion seriously are quite justifiably horrified by such advice. To this Adam would have said: “But it is quite natural, comrade. Animals do it all the time and what are we but animals?

“Besides, don’t think that there are no mothers out there who sleep with their daughters’ husbands or their daughter’s boyfriends.”
Adam’s words jogged my memory. O, yes, I thought, wasn’t there a story like this about a famous singer’s girlfriend doing the rounds a few years back, it even got into the newspapers? As usual, one had to concede that Adam had a point.

“And don’t think,” Adam continued, “that there are not men who sleep with their mothers-in-law – especially if they are still young and pretty.”

Shocking! But then Adam’s tales were a little like the ceremony called jakwara, which the excellent Sekai Nzenza wrote about in The Herald a few weeks back. As Sekai described it, the jakwara ceremony took place in the dry season and, after plentiful guzzling of beer, those present – only adults as children are forbidden to attend- “spoke openly of adultery, infertility and other taboo subjects that were disrupting village peace, including serious cases of murder, witchcraft, incest and rape”.

The only difference is that at the jakwara, these things are accepted to be culturally taboo whereas Adam would go further and say that some of them are natural and they happen all the time, and who are we to put a stop to them if they make those concerned happy?

Well, so much for that. But what about a tale? I thought this week I should wrack the filing cabinet of my memory for a Kok Tale that will not provoke too much indignation – though I am afraid virtually everything Adam ever said and did was likely to make someone indignant. The story I came up with is one he told me once about his days at university in South Africa.  Adam Kok was, in the eyes of the South African boers, a “coloured” and so he was not allowed to go to the University of Cape Town. Instead he went to the University of the Western Cape.

And there he was a brilliant rugby player. The story is about his very first real love. She was called Charmaine.
He met her on a rugby tour to Natal. The moment he saw her on Cape Town Station, he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. But let’s hear Adam himself tell us all about it.

“Comrade, she was like an angel – not the angels they draw in these white Bible books. She was a dark angel – with long black hair, hazel eyes and a complexion like copper when it has been shone up nicely with some Brasso and a yellow duster. “Well, of course, although I was still very new to the game – in fact I was a complete beginner – I summoned up the courage to go up to her and her friend and more or less tell them that the one who turned out to be Charmaine was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and that she was a much more beautiful angel than those wishy-washy ones you get in Bible books.

“Man, I tell you, comrade, I nearly shot myself in the foot. It turned out that Charmaine was completely apolitical and a devout Christian and she had never questioned why all the pictures of prophets and angels in the Bible are wishy-washy.

“So I had to tell her to forget about what I said about wishy-washy angels and just concentrate on the fact that to me she is as beautiful as an angel. That was much better and after that she and I went steady for a year. But now this is when something happened that taught me my first lesson about women. The day before, I had been playing in the biggest match of the year. I was just chilling at Charmaine’s place and she was called to the phone.

“I tell you she was on that phone for an hour. Then her kid brother came and spilt the beans. She was chaffing with a guy called Joe Coetzee!
“I tell you, comrade. That rugby match was the biggest event in the varsity year. The whole university was out to cheer us on. There was my copper-coloured angel in the stands shouting her pretty head off for her hero – me. And this jerk by the name of Joe Coetzee – he was quite a famous pole-vaulter, all brawn and no brain – saw for himself what I saw at Cape Town Station. Charmaine was looking extra beautiful because she was shouting for her man – and so this Coetzee guy comes and chats her up. Then he asks for her telephone number and she gives it to him! In my moment of glory my girl gives her telephone number to another ou! I just couldn’t believe it.

“Then she like falls in love with this guy. So there’s me and there’s him. When she’s with me on campus and she sees him, she goes all hot and shivery. For about six months, it was like this until eventually I won out. And you know what happened? As soon as I won, I lost interest and that was the end of Charmaine for me – so Coetzee got her in the end.

“But the lesson I never forgot is no matter how much you think your woman loves you, if some other guy comes along and he’s got the chemistry – she’ll sell you down the river, man.”

“That’s pretty rich,” I said to Adam. “Though you love Rudo, don’t you sell her down the river with Nesta and all the others? If you can do it, why are you so surprised that a woman can do it?”

“Comrade, don’t be a mampara! I’m a man!”
I was hoping that in this tale Adam wouldn’t say things like this. But he did.

So let me end as I began, apologising for my late friend and comrade, Adam Kok, for whom gender equity was a closed book.

If you want to read back stories of Kok’s Tales, please visit www.rmshengukavanagh.wordpress.com