When your birth certificate stops looking like a document and starts looking like evidence, you don’t get quiet, dignified gratitude.
You conduct an audit. Tomorrow, when this column hits the newsstand, I will be one year older.
One year wiser. And, disappointingly for the lighting department, still the same shade of stale-coffee black that has defined my existence.
James 1:2 offers famous advice: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.”
Saint James was writing about spiritual endurance.
I am convinced he was secretly writing about 1990s Eswatini, because if navigating life with a complexion so light absorbing that solar panels dim in your presence isn’t a test of faith, nothing is.
So, to celebrate surviving another year, I decided to take James literally and count the trials.
Trial 1: The educational system
My formal education in suffering began in Grade 2A at Ngwane Park Primary.
School teachers are supposed to be nurturing guardians. Mine was a practitioner of psychological warfare. She took one look at my pitch-black skin, smiled warmly and nicknamed me ‘Mr White’.
I was so dark that if I stood in front of the blackboard, the blackboard became the lighter object.
Forty children collapsed in laughter. I sat there, dark as the bottom of a burnt pot, carrying a name that belonged to a 19th-century British magistrate.
Two years later, in Grade 4A, I strutted into class with a sharp mohawk. My teacher kept an absolute poker face.
She asked: “Have you been sick over the weekend? Did the hospital insert a drip into the side of your head?” My cool haircut died on the spot. ‘The Drip’ became my legal name in the schoolyard. I was collecting nicknames like government departments collect excuses.
Trial 2: The religious pipeline
Sunday school offered no sanctuary.
Mine was run by an amateur casting director with an aggressive reliance on racial profiling. Whenever we rehearsed the Genesis play and reached “And there was darkness over the face of the deep,” the teacher didn’t order stage lights. She just pointed at me and said: “Get up there, ‘Mr White’. Go dim the stage with your face.” When the script needed a Lucifer, they didn’t audit talent.
They audited tone. Put me on stage and switch off half the electricity. I was playing the Prince of Darkness before I had even memorised the 10 Commandments.
Hell had apparently started recruiting early.
Trial 3: Probable cause
By senior primary, my complexion came with an implicit criminal record. If an eraser went missing, I was brought in for questioning. If a classroom window broke, nobody looked for a ball. They looked for my mugshot. In 90s Eswatini, the legal system for children was simple: Dark child plus missing object equals investigation.
I spent my entire youth on conditional parole for crimes I hadn’t yet thought of committing. The Punchline Research Unit has confirmed: Innocence is overrated when everybody already has a suspect.
Trial 4: The romance tax
High school brought the bureaucratic extortion of romance. I courted a girl from a neighbouring school who was naturally stunning and possessed an appetite for structural financing.
Every afternoon, she’d look at me with tender eyes and ask me to buy her a pie. I would scrape my allowance together. Hand over the pastry. Watch her eat it down to the last flake.
Then listen to her casually drop the performance review: “You’re really sweet, but honestly, you’re just way too dark for me.”
Think about that level of commercial coldness. I was paying a daily pie-tax to finance my own rejection. From a girl wearing school shoes with no socks. Love may be blind. But high school girls have excellent colour vision.
Trial 5: The market correction
By the time I reached the University of Swaziland, I realised I had to pivot my portfolio. If you are stale-coffee black, you cannot rely on silent brooding. You must become hilarious. I weaponised self-deprecation.
If someone was going to make a joke about my skin, I made a better one first.
Suddenly, a market correction occurred. A breathtakingly beautiful woman fell for me. Hard. I realised my skin had never been a defective product. I had simply spent my youth marketing a luxury item in a market with terrible taste.
Trial 6: Grade 2A gets a payslip
Entering adulthood doesn’t mean leaving the playground behind; the workplace has higher stakes, formal minutes and lovely people.
Colleagues are lovely and very lovely. We fight a lot though, as we are passionate about what we do.
The ultimate punchline
Through all this madness, God was holding onto His biggest reversal.
He eventually blessed me with a son who arrived looking like someone turned up the exposure before taking the photograph. Put him next to me and it looks like the family album experienced a power failure. His grandfather, Uncle Titus, christened him Dumokazipheli — “The fame that never ends.”
Looking at my son, I realise he got the legacy without having to pay the pie-tax.
He won’t be recruited by Sunday school as Satan’s understudy.
Nor interrogated over a missing eraser. Somebody in this family finally negotiated a better contract. James told us to count the trials. I counted six major ones. He forgot to mention the interest that accumulates along the way.
Every insult was a setup.
Every rumour was an edit.
Every rejection was just fuel for the column.
So, as I blow out my candles today, I’m counting it all as joy. Turns out I had enough trials to build a life.
And more than enough bruises to write The Punchline. Happy birthday to me. Now, somebody pass me the cake before another woman charges me for it.
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