‘Did you hear the one about the blonde?’ they good-naturedly shouted back. ‘As a matter of fact I did,’ Emil said. But before he could get to the punchline, he was distracted again, this time by some exploit of Sixpence and Lobengula. ‘Which reminds me of something that one of the boys said to me this morning,’ Emil said. As soon as he said ‘the boys’ the crowd started laughing and applauding.

The ‘blonde bit’ was Tom’s favourite skit because he felt that it perfectly captured the essence of Emil Coetzee. For their part, the audience appreciated it well enough and were generous enough not to let the joke ever grow stale, but their favourite skits were the ones that contained Sixpence and Lobengula. The highly popular act, called ‘Emil and the Boys’, played on Emil Coetzee’s reputation as a man who ‘knows the African’. In the performance, Emil would regale the audience with tales of his adventures with the two Africans in his employ: Sixpence, the garden boy, and Lobengula, the houseboy. Emil would tell the tale as an example of how he understood the African’s state of mind, but what the tale would inevitably reveal was how much Sixpence and Lobengula played on the sympathy of their baas, and always got the better of him.

Sixpence and Lobengula were perennially lazy and would do anything to escape an honest day of hard work. Humorously believing themselves to be equal to their baas, they refused to speak to him in Chilapalapa, or ‘Kitchen Kaffir’, as Tom made a point of calling it on stage, and opted instead to hybridise it with a broken English delivered in a plodding way that revealed how extremely slow their brains were at formulating thought. Chilapalapa consisted mainly of command words, accusatory phrases, and very few words that helped explain things. The language had borrowed insufficient words from English, Afrikaans and various local African languages, and although it was the lingua franca of baas–boy relations, beyond that context it was utter gibberish. Tom’s audience ate up the act and loved every minute of it; it did not help matters that Sixpence and Lobengula spoke their irreparably broken English with the stage presence of great Shakespearean actors.

Now on stage, Emil had just caught Sixpence, for the umpteenth time, taking his afternoon nap. ‘Baas, mina, I’m making garden nice-nice for you, baas … I’m making everything nice and pretty like woman you are always looking at, baas. But this one, fanakalo, he is making kitchen pigsty, baas,’ Sixpence complained to Emil about Lobengula. ‘He is doing such bad job, baas, that mina, I’m having to do job kayena as well, baas. So I’m getting very tire, baas … No, no, not lazy, baas, mina never lazy! Mina working job of two boys, kamina and kayena. So not lazy, baas. No, not sleeping, baas, never sleeping. Just watching my eyelids, baas.’