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Sugar, Sweet and Colourless

When you’re a child, there’s nothing as satisfying as getting so blissfully dirty you have to wash off the worst with the garden hose before daring to cross the threshold of your family home where your mother is waiting to scrub your skin off while expounding on the realities of ringworm.

Though you know what’s waiting for you, it doesn’t tame the hours in which you are utterly and completely motherless. Where you let go, forget the consequences and just revel in what you’re doing because you have this idea that sometimes your parents aren’t right.

That being happy and free is worth it and that these moments are as precious as diamonds… which kind of remind you of big, expensive grains of sugar.

The 4 000 people who attended Sugar King Namibia’s ‘Wild On Colour Party’ last Saturday went out looking for this feeling.

They wanted to do unspeakable things to their white clothing.

They wanted to turn the mischievous mud of their childhood into buoying bursts of red, pink, green and blue and have no one to answer to but themselves.

But it became more than that.

Like sugar stirred into a cup of bitter tea, the event became sweeter and sent people flocking to Pep and Mr Price in want of white clothing because there was this unspoken but feverish feeling that this was going to be special.

That missing it would be like staying home from a revolution of your soul while everyone else graduated to a feeling of glee and acceptance.

This is why the multi-racial youth abandoned their regular Saturday night spots and made their way towards the Windhoek Showgrounds.

All a little doubtful but determined to attend an event that billed everything from kwaito to electro and which didn’t claim to be primarily for white or black or coloured people in its line-up, venue or distance from a taxi rank.

Unlike the racial majorities one can find at Garlic and Flowers, Dylan’s, Kippies, London and Vibe, no one knew whether they would fit in, whether they would see their usual crowd inside or if they’d be enough of “our music” to hold their attention and detract from the reality of dry cleaning and the grievous harm befalling weaves.

And then it happened.

Walking in dressed in lily white clothes invisibly stained with the things we may or may not feel about what plenty of our parents have told us about black people and white people and the ideas we have about where we should go and what we should drink while we’re there, we grew hopeful to see every shape, size and hue of human drenched in colour and we alighted on the notion that the life stains on our pristine clothing didn’t matter.

Because that day we would forge our own world.

We’d act the way we never did at unrestricted though inherently racially specific events where our parents who lived in a different world and thought different things about different people weren’t watching.

Of course we brought our own baggage but with no tables to sit at and be separate with our cliques and with only enough space to experience endless elbows and faces and hands invading our precious personal space, we began to melt into each other.

Some white as house sugar, others brown as baking sweetener and still more as dark as molasses.

At first we started out throwing paint at the people we came with.

There was something forbidding about throwing paint in the faces of strangers but when our friends were coloured and new arrivals sauntered by still as white as snow, we began to make it our mission to turn everyone the same mix of colour.

Looking around to see white boys dancing to kwaito, Wambuseun on stage speaking Afrikaans, Ees perpetually borderline black man, German girls singing along to the dirtiest rap and black people jumping higher than Masai warriors to Cypress Hill, we got even more fevered about colouring each other the same with large cans of Windhoek Larger held up in a spontaneous new nation-building salute as colour bursts exploded over our heads like bright bombs in a war against what was waiting outside.

In the end it didn’t matter about the music.

Everyone danced to everything next to anyone and there was nothing to tell us that someone somewhere was better than we are in Namibia. Because there were no international acts, no international brands and there wasn’t an inch in which to feel inferior.

Later we’d leave and feel dazed and drenched in something bittersweet and we’d feel weighted by the knowledge that there is a better Namibia. One in which there are tons of fun, fierce and loving people living and laughing beyond our colour bar. And we can get along.

Though it was just supposed to be a party, Sunday morning saw everyone posting their pictures in jubilant yells that essentially said “I was there!”

Like it was some big, mythical thing. Like it was a rally for revolution. Like we don’t come from homes still smarting from a time when the whole world was about colour.

And tastes like Sugar King.

– Tweet me on marth__vader or mail me on martha@namibian.com.na

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